Hanuman Bearing the Mountaintop with Medicinal Herbs

A painting in ink and opaque watercolor on cloth from Rajasthan, India, dated circa 1800, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, under accession number 57.70.6. It depicts the Ramayana episode in which Hanuman, sent to fetch a healing herb from a Himalayan mountain for the mortally wounded Lakshmana and unable to identify the single herb needed among the many growing there, instead grows to enormous size, tears the entire mountaintop from the earth, and carries it flying through the sky back to the battlefield in Lanka. The composition, Hanuman airborne with the mountain raised on his palm, is the standard iconographic type for this episode, repeated across Indian sculpture and painting from the medieval period onward.