My paper begins with a remarkable moment in the history of medicine in Tibet. In 1687, the painter Lhodrak Tenzin Norbu went where no Tibetan artist had ever gone before: the surgeon’s dissection table. There, he carefully observed and sketched the liver, heart, and spleen of a recently dissected corpse. Before his work as an artist-anatomist, however, Norbu had earned widespread recognition as a master of Buddhist iconometry, the system of divine proportions foundational to sacred art in Tibet. Where you or I might see a fearsome three-eyed protectress, fangs bared and ready to bite, Norbu saw a poetry of lines: a grid as textured as a loose-woven linen, the pupil of the third eye perfectly aligned with the menacing curl of the tongue, every feature of that terrifying face perceived in relation to the whole. At the dissection table, he approached the cadaver with the same precision and geometric reasoning that defined his representations of the Buddhist pantheon. The result was a body of work unlike anything seen before in Tibetan art, earning him recognition by later historians as “Tibet’s first realist painter.”
The images in question were part of a larger set of medical paintings illustrating the Four Tantras, the root texts of Tibetan medicine. Tenzin Norbu’s illustrations of corpses appear on Plate 49 of the set, illustrating Chapter 85 of the Instructional Tantra on “the treatment of wounds to the torso” (byang khog rma’i skyen mtshon). The inscription to the right of the image reads: “the front of the body based on Lhodrak Tenzin Norbu’s observation of several corpses.” For what it is worth, this curly-haired cadaver does not appear very corpse-like. He sits upright, eyes open and bright, the corners of his lips hinting at a smile. From the neck to the waist, his body is completely transparent. Here, we find peach-pink lungs (glo ba) that frame the heart (snying) like a lopsided wig, a red sweep of the liver (mchin pa), a stomach (pho ba) shaped like a teardrop turned on its side, the gallbladder (mkhris pa) an island in a sea of spiraling intestine (rgyu ma), and finally the bladder (lgang ma), a non-descript beige blob at the base of the pelvis. Forget the flayed corpses of Vesalius’s On the Fabric of the Human Body (1543) or the decapitated criminals in Yamawaki Tōyö’s Record of the Viscera (Zōshi, 1759), Tenzin Norbu delivers a bloodless depiction of the body’s interior, not unlike an x-ray view—no knives required.
Another visual feature that sets Lhodrak Tenzin Norbu’s drawings apart from other premodern anatomical illustrations is the presence of the grid. Indeed, grids are ubiquitous throughout the medical paintings of the Four Tantras, where they are cast over faces, limbs, groins, and guts–you name it. But the grids on Plate 49 are special. According to the painting’s inscription, the grids that map the anatomy of the torso derive specifically from Buddhist iconometry, which is to say the same tradition that informed Tenzin Norbu’s illustrations of the Buddhist pantheon. Yet if the purpose of the iconometric grid is to ensure the proper proportions of the deity, and thus the sacrality of the image as a whole, what is it doing in Plate 49? What, if anything, does Buddhist iconometry have to do with surgery and dissection?
The goal of this paper is to elucidate the significance of Buddhist iconometry in the history of scientific visualization in Tibet. I argue that to understand Plate 49, we must first reckon with the central role of divine proportions in both the production and reception of images in the seventeenth-century. As I show, iconometry provided a precise system for anatomical mapping. It was this system that Tenzin Norbu enlisted to probe the mysteries of the body’s interior.
The story of Plate 49 challenges the prevailing scholarly definition of Tibetan iconometry as a “canon of religious symbolism.” I argue iconometry is more aptly defined as a technology of scientific visualization that carried with it a particular artisanal ethics rooted in Buddhist soteriology: the systems of divine proportion promised both an accurate image and a good rebirth. Whether to pinpoint the location of the spleen or to ensure the proper width of the Buddha’s nostril, iconometry was central to how artists and physicians saw bodies in the seventeenth century. During this period, iconometry answered more than just the question, “How should the Buddha be represented?” It also addressed a new and pressing challenge: “How do we visualize human anatomy?”
Norbu’s foray into anatomical illustration was just the beginning of a longer transformation of Tibetan visual culture unfolding at the close of the seventeenth century. At the direction of the Tibetan government, artists who had spent their careers painting buddhas and bodhisattvas turned their attention to illustrating the Four Tantras, the fundamental root text of Tibetan medicine. This was not just a shift in focus, but a complete reimagining of the very function of images–how they conveyed knowledge, structured perception, and bridged domains of expertise. My paper is part of a larger project that traces the epistemological exchanges between physicians and Buddhist artists that brought this remarkable body of medical imagery into being. I argue that, even as religious themes once dominant in Tibetan art gave way to new topics–such as botany, anatomy, embryology, and uroscopy–the techniques of Buddhist image-making continued to shape the emerging medical visual culture.
In this paper, I explore the role of Buddhist iconometry in the production of new anatomical knowledge in early-modern Tibet. In 1687, the painter Lhodrak Tenzin Norbu went where no Tibetan artist had ever gone before: the surgeon’s dissection table. There, he carefully observed and sketched the liver, heart, and spleen of a recently dissected corpse. Before his work as an artist-anatomist, Norbu earned widespread recognition as a master of Buddhist iconometry, the tradition of divine proportions foundational to sacred art in Tibet. I argue that Norbu adapted iconometry into a technology of scientific visualization that provided a precise system for anatomical mapping. As I show, at the end of the seventeenth century, iconometry answered more than just the question, “How should the Buddha be represented?” It also addressed a new and pressing challenge: “How do we visualize human anatomy?”