ns 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 piece’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 wrathf