ce’s maker. While the lay and monastic creators of religious art in Tibet almost always worked anonymously, this inscription suggests that this artist, at least, took pride in his, and his compatriots’, work.
The sangha is represented in the show by an incomplete set of paintings from the 17th century of the 16 arhats, the Buddha’s original followers. The set was clearly produced by a number of artists, who, while following a basic color scheme and layout, each had a recognizably individual style. The impression is that of a fully realized world but viewed from slightly different perspectives. The individuality of the pieces is underscored by their careful notation of the arhats’ various attributes and quirks, including Abheda’s gem-spitting mongoose, Panthaka’s elephant, Ajita’s boldly patterned cloak, and Vanavasin’s slippers, which he has removed and hidden under his throne.
Three photographs of Tucci inspecting a trove of illustrated manuscripts—found buried in a cave high above Tholing Monastery by expedition photographer Eugenio Ghersi—stand in for the dharma in this exhibition. When Tucci arrived in Tibet nearly 100 years ago, he found a way of life already in danger of disappearing as a result of climate change and war. His extensive photographic record of Tibet’s artifacts, monuments, and people is in some cases the only surviving documentation of a cultural patrimony destroyed following the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950.
(The exhibition press materials fail to mention that from the 1920s until the dictator’s death, Tucci was a supporter of Benito Mussolini and used idealizing interpretations of Asian traditions to promote Fascist agendas. The collection, however, stands on its own.)
In the sections devoted to tantric practice, the lamas include Padmasambhava, the towering Tibetan figure said to have brought tantra to Tibet. He features in several paintings; a wonderful thangka from the 1800s shows him appearing several times in the same bucolic landscape, each time in the guise of a different wrathful deity. This work is joined by a rare and beautiful 18th-century Bhutanese lineage tree with its progression of historical masters—one of a number of paintings emphasizing the importance of transmitted knowledge in Tibet’s oral traditions—and a depiction from the 16th or 17th century of four teachers, each with a student. Around them, tiny mahasiddhas, or tantric practitioners, giddily levitate, dance with dakinis, fly through space, and otherwise enjoy the magical fruits of their attainment.
The yidams include Green Tara, a popular Tibetan deity. In a thangka from the 1500s, she is surrounded by eight more Green Taras addressing eight perils, including water, imprisonment, and robbers—real dangers that travelers of the time would have encountered, but also metaphors for obstacles encountered on the path to enlightenment. Elsewhere are several beautiful mandalas, aids to navigating the realms of specific deities, and a wonderful 15-century painting of Dorje Jigje, a wrathful, buffalo-headed manifestation of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom. With his eight right feet, he tramples demons, and with his left he crushes eight kinds of birds. One of them, a goose, can be seen reaching its neck around to nip at his big toe, exacting a small but no doubt painful revenge.
Sequestered in a separate gallery, the works in the show’s final, and most exciting, section depict the protectors of the dharma. These ravishing paintings, each a masterpiece, would make a knockout exhibition by themselves, and in a way, they do: they are separated from the rest of the show as they would have been separated from less esoteric images in a Tibetan temple. A 14th-century green-faced Vaisravana, the chief of the Four Heavenly Kings, in pale blue, wine, and lavender military garb and smart white boots sits flanked by eight representations of gardens, each occupied by a beautifully rendered cow. Garuda, a deity imported from pre-Buddhist Tibetan religions, appears twice: once in a finely detailed black and gold rendering from the 1700s,