Birth of Buddha, sculpted in Bengal, India, from black chlorite in the 800s is featured in the Creation, Birth and Rebirth exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The exhibition is a collaboration between the museum and the medieval art program in the College of Art and Sciences. The sculpture is from the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art. | Photo by Cleveland Museum of Art

A College-Cleveland Museum of Art exhibition explores how artists across the globe visualized birth and other beginnings during the Middle Ages 

During the Middle Ages, artists and the patrons who commissioned their work grappled with fundamental questions about the universe, seeking to make sense of the world’s creation and the cycles of life in clay and in stone, and rendered on palm leaves, parchment and paper.

Virgin Nursing the Christ Child carved from limestone around 1370 in France and part of the collaborative exhibition. From the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art. | Photo by Cleveland Museum of Art

Separated by centuries, continents and cultures, they fashioned works evoking sacred narratives about the creation of the world and miraculous births central to Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Mesoamerican religions.

Starting last August, 17 such works from the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) have been exhibited in the Creation, Birth and Rebirth show, the result of a collaboration between the museum and the medieval art program in the College of Art and Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. Assembled in one gallery for the first time, the objects collectively raise intriguing questions about the shared and different perspectives on divine conception and creation, whether explored in sculptures of gods carved in India in the ninth century or in art depicting the infant Jesus in his mother’s arms and made in France 500 years later. 

“We wanted to show how interconnected—visually and conceptually—the medieval world was and explore the role of images in making sense of the universe,” said Elina Gertsman, PhD, a Distinguished University Professor and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities. 

Elina Gertsman, a Distinguished University Professor, co-led development of the Creation, Birth and Rebirth exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Gertsman co-led development of the exhibition with Gerhard Lutz, PhD, CMA’s Robert P. Bergman Curator of Medieval Art. 

The exhibition of art from India, China, Mexico and across Europe is the culmination of a yearslong partnership that grew as a result of the joint program between the college’s Department of Art History and Art and CMA. It was funded, in part, by the Mellon Foundation. The show continues through mid-July and also encourages visitors to explore related objects in other museum galleries.

Rebekkah Hart, a doctoral student in the College of Arts and Sciences, worked on the exhibition.

Creating the exhibition gave graduate students who took a seminar taught by Gertsman and Lutz the chance to interact with the medieval objects, develop scholarly understanding of several visual traditions, and write wall text, object labels and portions of the gallery booklet. In the process they became deeply immersed in several forms of creation: their own in helping develop the exhibition, that of the long-ago artists whose work endures, and the creation of the universe as it was understood across the Middle Ages.

“It was a powerful experience,” said doctoral student Rebekkah Hart.