Chola workshops produced the processional bronzes that are now among the most widely reproduced religious images in the world. They were cast by the lost wax method, made to be carried, dressed and taken out of the temple in procession on festival days, and they were never intended to be seen in a gallery on a plinth.
The Nataraja, Shiva dancing within a ring of flame on the figure of a dwarf, is the best known of them. Its iconography is read as a compressed statement of creation, preservation, destruction, concealment and grace, and Indira Viswanathan Peterson's work on the Tamil Shaiva hymns shows the devotional literature that the images accompanied and that pilgrims sang along the processional route.
The Cholas also carried religious forms outward. Naval expeditions reached Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, and Chola contact is part of the wider transmission of South Indian temple architecture, ritual and iconography across the Bay of Bengal. The atlas notes the expeditions as conquest as well as transmission, since the campaigns against Sri Lanka involved the sack of Anuradhapura and the removal of images, and a religious influence carried by a fleet is not the same thing as a religious influence carried by preachers.