Body and Spirit: Tibetan Medical Paintings May 5, 2011

'Body and Spirit: Tibetan Medical Paintings,' an exhibition of 64 Tibetan medical paintings (also known as "tangkas") from the American Museum of Natural History's collection, will be on display in the Museum's fourth-floor Audubon Gallery. On view for the first time in a museum exhibition, these hand-painted reproductions of traditional scroll paintings provide a unique and rich illustrated history of early medical knowledge and procedures in Tibet, and are believed to be among only a handful of such sets in existence. Each of the 64 medical paintings on display in 'Body and Spirit' was painstakingly reproduced by hand in the late 1990s by Romio Shrestha, a Nepalese artist, and his students, who followed the Tibetan tradition of copying older paintings, basing their work on two published sets of medical tangkas likely painted in the early 1900s that were copies of the original set. The originals were created in the late 1600s to illustrate the 'Blue Beryl,' an important commentary on the classic Tibetan medical text, 'The Four Tantras.'