Welcome to the Penn Museum blog. First launched in January 2009, the Museum blog now has over 800 posts covering a range of topics in the categories of Museum, Collection, Exhibitions, Research, and By Location. Here you’ll hear directly from our staff and Penn students about their work, research, experiences, and discoveries. To explore the Museum's other digital content, visit The Digital Penn Museum.
Identifying the Celestial Beings
By: Stephen Lang
In my previous post I explained how we identified the Buddha in our Tejaprabha mural. But what about the other figures? If we take a close look at the mural we notice that many of the figures have different attributes. For instance, they may be holding something in their hand or have a mark in […]
Identifying the Tejaprabha Mural
By: Stephen Lang
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the mural depicting Tejaprabha Buddha originally came into the museum and was published with the central figure identified as Sakyamuni Buddha. However a few years later someone noticed that one of the figures on the left was holding a small book with an inscription on it. It was […]
Getting the Murals to the Museum
By: Stephen Lang
It’s important to understand how an object actually comes into the museum. The Buddhist murals in the Rotunda are comprised of many different sized panels which entered the museum in stages. The mural depicting Tejaprabha Buddha came into the museum incomplete in 1926. You can see the panels are actually framed in large wooden borders […]