Footnotes

江孜 西藏 十五世紀初 綠度母唐卡

This painting from Tibet's classical period is replete with depictions of deities and practices that promote longevity, protection, and success for the practitioner. At the painting's center is Green Tara, a female bodhisattva who has the miraculous power to deliver her devotees from all forms of danger. These dangers are grouped into eight categories (disease, invasion, banditry, wild animals, etc.), from which Green Tara can be seen saving tiny devotees in the register immediately below her throne, with Amitayus, the buddha of long life, in the middle. Down the sides of the painting are two groups of Buddha images: the Buddhas of the Ten Directions on the right, and the Eight Medicine Buddhas on the left. The painting's original donor is seated before an altar at the bottom center of the painting, flanked by other bodhisattvas and deities such as Vajrapani, Jambhala, and Vasudhara, who in their assemblage grant a holistic array of boons and protection.

The auspicious composition shares stylistic features with the murals of various temples in the town of Gyantse, Shigatse province, which were painted between c.1370-1450. This period is known as the Golden Age of Gyantse, when the town became the political and cultural center of the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism. Distinctive elements of the Gyantse style shown in the present thangka include the shape, heavy black outline, and placement of the two green clouds over an indigo background flanking the shoulders of the central figure's rainbow aureole. Her pleated silk garments, crown type, and the petals of her lotus pedestal are also classic features of this style. A Gyantse mural of Green Tara with these characteristics was painted between 1427-36 in a dedicated chapel of the Gyantse Kumbum, the town's crowning monument (Laird, Murals of Tibet, Taschen, 2018, pp.325-31). However, in contrast to the Kumbum mural, the present painting elides landscape features, and does not frame subsidiary figures within floating roundels, two classic features of the mature Gyantse style. The present painting instead follows a format characteristic of earlier Sakya painting between the 13th and 14th centuries, which generally incorporates few (if any) landscape elements and seats its subsidiary figures before petal-shaped aureoles stacked in geometric registers (cf. Jackson, The Nepalese Legacy in Tibetan Painting, New York, 2010, pp.67-79). This thangka's combination of mature Gyantse and earlier features suggest an earlier attribution to the turn of the 15th century.

Provenance
Carlo Cristi Arte Orientale Tessili, Italy, 2010
Private Australian Collection