Jane Casey: “Establishing Chronology in Tibetan Art: A Study of Taklung Paintings”

Abstract:

This lecture addresses chronology in early Tibetan art. Dr. Casey highlights over a decade of research on a group of approximately 100 paintings from Taklung and Riwoche monasteries in Tibet. The main purpose of the study has been to establish a reliable foundation for assigning dates to Taklung paintings. The Taklung painting corpus particularly lends itself to the task of building a chronology. Almost three quarters of the paintings bear inscriptions with chronological implications. Using visual lineages (the succession of teachers represented in the top, side, and, occasionally, the bottom registers of paintings), inscriptions, narrative scenes (in which principal structures in the Taklung Monastery compound may be linked to specific dates), and style analysis, Casey identifies fundamental parameters that help to create firm chronological designations for these c. 12th to mid-16th-century paintings. Tibetan textual historians and historians of Tibetan religion will appreciate the evidentiary underpinnings of the chronology put forth, and anyone interested in understanding the history of Tibetan Buddhist culture will appreciate the wealth of information contained in these remarkable, often very well preserved works of art. 

Bio: 

Jane Casey is an art historian specializing in Himalayan art. Educated in the History of Science (A.B.) and in Fine Arts (A.M. and Ph.D.) at Harvard University, since 1991 she has worked as an independent art historian, curating exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at Casa Asia, Barcelona. She is a Guest Professor at the Zhejiang University Center for Buddhist Art in Hangzhou, and a Research Fellow in Tibetan Art at the Palace Museum in Beijing. She resides in Marlborough, New Zealand.