Skirting the Bodhisattva: Fabricating Visionary Art

This essay explores the image-text relationship between the ca. 12-century monumental Maitreya bodhisattva sculpture within a narrow tower in the village of Mangyu and passages from the Gaṇḍavyūha Sūtra. Paintings on the dhotī of the sculpture resemble themes described within a kūtāgāra-tower in the text related to Maitreya, and also depict one of the prominent jātaka associated with the Buddha, the Starving Tigress, or Vyāghrī jātaka. The essay suggests the jātaka was deployed to demonstrate Maitreya’s recapitulation of the course of Śākyamuni’s path of self-sacrifice, and that the resemblance between text and image was intentional on the part of the 12th-century builders in Ladakh, on the far western reaches of cultural Tibet.Cet essai étudie la relation entre image et texte en se fondant sur la scuplture monumentale du bodhisattva Maitreya (xiie siècle) placée dans une étroite tour du village de Mangyu et des passages du Gaṇḍavyūha Sūtra. Des peintures sur le dhotī de la sculpture rappellent des thèmes décrits à l’intérieur d’une tour-kūtāgāra dans le texte concernant à Maitreya et dépeint également l’un des célèbres jātaka associé au Bouddha, celui de la tigresse affamée ou Vyāghrī jātaka. Cet article suggère que le jātaka a été mis en œuvre pour retracer le chemin qui a mené le Bouddha à l’auto-sacrifice et aussi que les artistesdu xiie siècle au Ladakh, à l’extrême ouest de l’aire culturelle tibétaine, ont intentionnellement souligné la ressemblance entre image et texte

Photography, painting, and prints in Ladakh and Zangskar. Intermediality and transmediality

The central thesis of this essay is that one of the most important aspects of the pioneering use of photographic portraits of teachers in the late 19th and early 20th century in Western Himalayan Buddhist contexts is its ongoing visual relationship to and with pre-photographic media, including sculpture, printing, and especially painting. Evidence shows that the most common compositions for early portrait photographs drew closely on earlier templates already well-established by painting and sculpture.Le propos central de cet article est que l’un des aspects les plus importants des utilisations avant-gardistes de la photographie de portraits de maîtres à la fin du xixe et au début du xxe siècles dans l’Himalaya occidental bouddhique est sa relation visuelle – toujours d’actualité – avec les médias pré-photographiques, notamment la sculpture, l’impression, et surtout la peinture. L’examen des données montre que les compositions les plus communes pour ces portraits photographiques s’inspiraient grandement des modèles établis plus tôt dans la peinture et la sculpture

Barbarians at the British Museum: Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

A critical historiographical overview of art historical approaches to early medieval material culture, with a focus on the British Museum collections and their connections to religion

Hidden in Plain Sight

Abstract This is a review article of Janet Gyatso's 2015 award-winning book, Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet. The art-historical aspects of the book—mainly confined to the first chapter, “Reading Paintings, Painting the Medical, Medicalizing the State” and based on a perceptive art-historical reading of a set of medical paintings and its copies—had yet to be reviewed by an academically-trained art historian. This review underscores the fine art-historical insights deserving the attention of art historians working in parallel contexts of the often tense relationship between religious and empirical epistemologies. At the same time, the evaluation of certain readings of the visual record lead to suggested revisions in the support they provide to Gyatso's primary argument. In addition, other precedents of depictions “from life” in Tibetan art history are offered to help contextualize claims of originality or uniqueness. Finally, an analysis is presented of less formal, freehand painting versus more formalized, iconometric execution, calibrated with vernacular subject matter versus iconographically predetermined themes. Both of the painting modes and subject types are combined in the painting set analyzed by Gyatso supporting her assessment of the innovation of the artists selected by the patron, Desi Sangyé Gyatso (1653–1705).</jats:p