Fig. 2.21 Tilopa as second guru in main Drigung lineage 1550s Now in Phyang Monastery, Ladakh (c) 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn Literature: Binczik and Fischer 2002, 160; and Jackson 2015, fig. 6.9
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others, he avoided dating them to the sixteenth century. He was impressed by the murals’ style, aptly commenting on the panels that depict the Sakya founders, near the inner sanctum: Accepted as dating to the 1460s, these two large compositions mark a substantial break with the Tibetan painting tradition of the 15th century. Instead of a conventional emblematic layout of different registers with niches and torana settings for figures and narratives, there is now a spatial environment
full of “realistic” landscape elements and three-dimensional motifs. . . . Distinctive Chinese influences such as trees and dragons, textiles and furniture, or rocky landscapes are no longer isolated “foreign” vocabularies, as in Gyantse (c. 1420/1440), but integrated elements of a new overall style that would become characteristic only in the 16th century. Instead, in the elegantly drawn and rather schematic faces of the monks a new sculptural and physical quality can be discerned. And while in some sections the color is gone due to whitewashing and recent cleaning, a few surprisingly “realistic” preparatory drawings of monk’s and men’s heads are visible. . . . Of the same highest artistic quality and originality are the magnificent siddhas at the top of these compositions.239 Regarding Khyentse’s paintings of the Avadānakalpalatā tales in another part of the monastery, Henss judged them to be ahead of their time and unlike any painting elsewhere in Tibet in the 1460s. He also characterized a third group of paintings—depicting the Twelve Great Deeds of the Buddha—as innovative, using the terms advanced and modernism loosely: In terms of stylistic chronology they are much more advanced and characterized by Chinese modernism, seen in landscape composition and scenographic architecture, and seem to indicate either another unorthodox “Khyentse idiom” or a different (later?) workshop.240 Henss considered the Hevajra Chapel, or Divine Palace, on the second floor to be a precious sanctuary. He described the style of its murals (which included Fig. 2.22; his no. 509), again