Mahakala

This painting depicts the wrathful deity Mahakala with a corpulent body rendered in thin black outlines and subtly modeled in deep blue. Mahakala’s dynamic pose preserves the stance of a hero associated with wrathful deities, but his figure differs from typical Kashmiri- inspired representations in its proportions. Still his flame-like hairstyle is a reference to both an eighth-century Kashmiri convention of wrathful deities’ hair and an eleventh-century Western Himalayan appropriation of that convention. His adornments include simply patterned textiles and teardrop-shaped elements of his crown and armlets. Its striking palette of deep blues and reds is distinctive for western Tibetan paintings of the time.