Mughal Yoga Vasishta Art Handmade Indian Miniature Hindu Shiva Yogi Painting

Regular price $196.00

The Sage Bhringisha and Shiva

  • Subject: Yoga Miniature Art
  • Paint Material: Opaque Watercolors
  • Base Material: Paper (unframed)
  • Size: 11.5 in. wide and 14.75 in. tall (29 cms X 37.5 cms)
  • Age: Modern Handmade Art
  • Country of origin: India
  • Free Shipping Worldwide & No hassle return

Presenting for your personal collection a beautiful miniature Yoga art.

This rare painting invites wonder at India’s extraordinary artistic heritage and with it you will feel the magic and spiritual enlightenment of Yoga. The art of Yoga constitutes a visual archive that attempts to capture one or several of its attributes, as a philosophical school, a Hindu tradition, a spiritual science and an exercise regimen.

The Yoga Vasishta (Teachings of the Sage Vasishta) is an important and highly popular philosophical work composed in India between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. The Yoga Vasishta’s great attraction lies in the fact that it presents its highly abstruse philosophical positions through engrossing stories involving kings, mysterious yogis, and a host of other colorful characters.

The featured art is a modern reproduction of one of the luxurious manuscripts from The Yoga Vasishta that was first illustrated in 1602 at the court of the Mughal Prince Salim (the future Emperor Jahangir, reigned 1605–27). It includes a delicately colored painting showing Shiva revealing to Bhringisha, an accomplished renouncer, the means for attaining embodied liberation. It represents an encounter between a Tantric yogi and a gaunt and aged renouncer. 

Representing the naturalistic style favored by the Mughals, the artist has made the pair of Shiva and Bhringisha palpably three-dimensional and emphasized the intensity of their mutual gaze. Bhringisha’s sunken belly and attenuated limbs recall the earliest images of ascetics. 

In his representation of Shiva, the artist tellingly accentuates the characteristics— bluish, ash-smeared body; topknot of dreadlocks (jatamukuta); and tiger-skin wrap—that the god shares with mortal yogis. He also minimizes the god’s divine qualities: Shiva has two arms; his lightly drawn third eye looks like a sectarian forehead mark; and the snakes that writhe around his shoulders and the garland of skulls hanging from his neck seem to be plausibly real, if exotic, ornaments.

Add this mesmerizing Mughal inspired Shiva yoga painting to your collection. Buy it now.