Body and Spirit: Tibetan Medical Paintings

January 25, 2011 - July 17, 2011

Ticket Info

Free with admission

Body and Spirit: Tibetan Medical Paintings, an exhibition of 64 Tibetan medical paintings (also known as tangkas) from the American Museum of Natural History’s collection, opens Tuesday, January 25 in the Museum’s fourth-floor Audubon Gallery, and will run through July 17, 2011. On view for the first time in a museum exhibition, these hand-painted reproductions of traditional scroll paintings provide a unique and rich illustrated history of early medical knowledge and procedures in Tibet, and are believed to be among only a handful of such sets in existence.

"The Museum’s Tibetan collection, from which these paintings are taken, comprises nearly 2,800 objects, and is among the finest in the United States," said Ellen V. Futter, President of the American Museum of Natural History. "This new exhibition represents the continuation of a great artistic tradition and will offer visitors a unique and fascinating perspective on early Tibetan culture."



Each of the 64 medical paintings on display in Body and Spirit was painstakingly reproduced by hand in the late 1990s by Romio Shrestha, a Nepalese artist, and his students, who followed the Tibetan tradition of copying older paintings, basing their work on two published sets of medical tangkas likely painted in the early 1900s that were copies of the original set. The originals were created in the late 1600s to illustrate the Blue Beryl, an important commentary on the classic Tibetan medical text, The Four Tantras.

The Blue Beryl was written by Sangye Gyatso, regent to the Fifth Dalai Lama, who commissioned the original paintings for use as teaching aids in the medical school he founded in Lhasa, Tibet. The causes, diagnostic techniques, and treatments of illness, as well as human anatomy, are represented in nearly 8,000 extraordinarily detailed images painted on canvas using vegetable and mineral dyes. The fate of the original paintings is unknown; Shrestha based his work on published sources.

"Although the models for the medical paintings exhibited in this exhibition are old, these paintings were produced in the recent past by a living artist who painstakingly copied a set of old paintings that was, in turn, an exacting copy of a master’s set," said Laurel Kendall, curator and chair of the Museum’s Division of Anthropology. "Both the art of reproduction and the information on Tibetan medicine contained in the paintings represent conscious acts of transmission across time and space, the living work of culture."

"These paintings are a unique and unusually rich source for the history of medicine," said Laila Williamson, curator of Body and Spirit. "They illustrate centuries-old medical practices, some of which are still in use. Beyond the medical aspects, there are many intriguing, delightful scenes showing houses, landscapes, domestic life and dress in Tibet in the late 1600s."