On loan to The Met The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Bodhisattva Padmapani from cave 1 at Ajanta monastery in central India
Photograph by Benoy Behl
Not on view
This extraordinary mural painting survives from early medieval India, preserved in the interior of the rock-cut Buddhist monastery of Ajanta. It provides the earliest visual evidence of elaborate crowns being worn as signifiers of both princely and divine status. The crowns depicted are the antecedents of those used in Buddhist ritual today by the Vajracharya priests in Nepal.
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