Iconometry, or How to Draw the Buddha and Dissect a Corpse

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?”