This pair of oversize earrings for a Buddhist image were made by a Newar artist working in Central Tibet. Newar artists, members of the chief historical and cultural ethnicity in Nepal, were renowned for their exceptional metalworking, especially repoussé, filigree, and gemstone inlay (see M.85.279.6 and M.2011.157.3a-c).
The round top end of the earrings is in the form of a lotus with concentric bands of inlaid gemstones and gilt copper repoussé lotus petals radiating outward from the central clear gemstone with red foil-backing. Beneath this lotiform roundel, and surrounding it as a border, are scrolling vegetal designs in repoussé. Further down the central axis are a small triangular grouping of inlaid gemstones and a larger diamond-shaped inset arrangement.
The earrings would have been worn suspended from the distended earlobes of large images of the Buddha Shakyamuni and other Buddhist deities. The distended earlobes originally represented the Buddha’s renunciation of the princely world but later became an artistic and iconographic convention for South Asian and Himalayan Buddhist divinities.
Comparable oversize image earrings are illustrated in Jane Casey Singer, Gold Jewelry from Tibet and Nepal (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996), pp. 14-15, figs. 5-7; and John Clarke, Jewellery of Tibet and Himalayas (London: V&A Publications, 2004), p. 56, fig. 38.
