On eight expeditions to Tibet between 1926 and 1948, Italian scholar and explorer Giuseppe Tucci (1894–1984) collected more than 200 portable paintings, or thangkas, from every part of the country and from every historical period between the 13th and 19th centuries. His collecting was informed by his background as a student of Eastern languages and religions, a growing familiarity with Tibetan culture, an interest in regional styles that were even then disappearing, and above all, a discerning eye and a taste for anomalous images.
Curated by the Asia Society’s Adriana Proser and guest curator Deborah Klimburg-Salter, professor emeritus for non-European art history at the University of Vienna, this exhibition brings together more than 50 of these works, all on loan from the Museum of Civilization-Museum of Oriental Art (MCMOA) in Rome. It not only presents a group of beautiful and unusual examples of Tibetan Buddhist art, but also a riveting account—told through archival photographs and a documentary film—of Tucci’s journeys.
The show opens with a spectacular 16th-century painting depicting a brilliant red Amitayus, one of the three long life deities in Tibetan Buddhism, ensconced in an edge-to-edge field of small copies of himself. Richly accoutered in rippling red, gold, and black robes and gold jewelry, Amitayus holds a bowl overflowing with the nectar of immortality, which spills into wine cups held by the 16th-century ruler King Jigten Wangchung, an important patron of the arts, and his son.
Tucci acquired this work, as he did every painting in these galleries, after it had been deemed too badly damaged—by water, by the soot and grease from offering lamps filled with animal fat, or simply by time—for use as a devotional object. In Tibetan Buddhism, such religious artifacts cannot be thrown away. Instead, they are stored or ceremonially buried; it is a testament to the trust that Tucci inspired in the lay and monastic communities he visited that he was allowed to buy or take them.
The painting and its companions owe their luminosity and legibility to a 30-year conservation effort mounted by the MCMOA, which still holds the bulk of Tucci’s collection. Still blurred, cracked, and faded in places, they brim with newly readable information. Rather than organize the works by style, religious tradition, or historical period, curator Klimburg-Salter has arranged them according to the two paths of Tibetan Buddhist devotional practice: the Sutrayana, in which enlightenment is achieved over many lifetimes and refuge is taken in the Buddha, dharma (teachings), and sangha (community), and the Vajrayana, or quick path, in which enlightenment can be reached in one lifetime through reliance on a lama, or guru; a yidam, or personal meditation deity; and beings known as protectors, who guard the dharma and the practitioner.
These images of the Buddhist cosmos and the activities of its saints, teachers, and deities tend toward great explicitness. In the section devoted to the Buddha, for instance, a 15th-century image of Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, in the bhadrakalpa—an age in which there are 1,000 buddhas—portrays in minute detail a harmonious realm filled with enlightened beings and their devotees. Executed in deep burgundy, dark green, white, and now-faded gold, the painting shows a Buddha in meditation surrounded by a stepped display of nine more buddhas and eight stupas, or dome structures on a shrine. This grouping appears to be emanating from a low-lying puja table, which is used in devotional practices, covered with offerings and presided over by a lama, while the whole scene floats in a shimmering field of miniature repetitions of the main figure.
The painting is significant artistically as well as historically; it originated from Tholing, in Western Tibet, and its style and iconography are nearly identical to wall murals found in Tholing’s monasteries. In the course of restoring the thangka, an inscription was found hidden under its silk frame that mentions this particular artistic school as well as the name of the pie