The Place of Provenance: Regional Styles in Tibetan Painting

Historians of Tibetan painting struggle to establish such basic points as iconographical content, place of origin, age, religious affiliation, and painting school or style, especially when confronted by portable works that were removed from their original monasteries and scattered throughout the world. In this groundbreaking book, the authors locate paintings geographically using a method similar to that used for locating paintings in time. In both cases they identify the historical people connected with the painting by analyzing the portraits, inscriptions, and lineages that it contains. Then, by establishing where the key people involved in the painting lived and died, and with which monasteries and traditions they were most closely linked, they draw conclusions about the painting’s provenance and style, providing a bedrock of scholarship to support a new era in the field of Tibetan art history.