Wrathful Offerings

This painting of wrathful offerings scattered in a charnel ground excels in its free execution, with outlines only partially filled with color. The silk background’s earthen color actually resembles the clay walls that would more often be used as a ground for this subject. A sense of perspective is found only in the lower section, where human parts are spread across the charnel ground. There is no notion of space, and relative proportions are upset by the large skulls in the upper portion of the painting.Wrathful offerings are an extremely rare subject for portable paintings but a common theme in the protector chapels of Tibetan monasteries. Such paintings communicate the horrors of life in an astonishingly humorous manner. At the top of this work are three offering bowls, the central one containing an offering of the five senses, each represented by its corresponding organ. The animals underneath—horses, yaks, sheep, and dogs—are the main domestic animals of the Tibetan Plateau, here shown in a hierarchy with the most valuable on top. The corpses at the bottom, and the human body parts between them, remind us that the scenery represented is a charnel ground.