Room 2740
Buddhist Art
The Efflorescence of East Asian and Buddhist Art

Buddhist Cave Murals from Dunhuang

The Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, an oasis town located at an important juncture of the Silk Road in northwestern China’s Gansu province, boast a stunning array of brilliantly colored wall paintings and clay sculptures that reflect the confluence of Indian, Central Asian, Tibetan, and Chinese artistic traditions. Over a thousand-year period, from the fourth to the fourteenth century, nearly five hundred caves were carved into cliffs along a small stream by local monks and lay elites. The rough cave walls were plastered smooth with layers of unfired clay mixed with fibers and straw to provide an even surface for mural paintings, which depicted iconic deities and scenes from Buddhist scriptures, biographies, and histories. Although the murals are vivid and carefully wrought, the caves are generally too small and dark to have served as spaces for the regular performance of rituals; some scholars have speculated that creating the paintings inside the caves may itself have performed symbolic or virtual ritual work.

Dunhuang’s exceptionally dry climate has preserved the wall paintings and sculptures in nearly perfect condition. Most of the bright colors derive from mineral pigments and have faded little over time; the red lead used for flesh tones, however, has changed to brown over the centuries. Abandoned in the fourteenth century as centers of political and religious power shifted, the cave-temple complex and associated works of art were all but forgotten until the early twentieth century, when the site attracted the attention of Western explorers. Among these was Langdon Warner, a Harvard trained art historian who in 1924 brought back several sections from the cave murals, as well as the clay sculpture nearby, to provide examples of this art for exhibition and study in the Fogg Museum. These examples provide a glimpse of the splendor of the walls and sculptures of long-lost Buddhist temples throughout medieval China, all of which were elaborately painted.