On View for the First Time: An Appliqué Thangka

A tantric Buddhist appliqué thangka is now on public display for the first time since it entered the Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection in 1918. It hangs in the CMA’s gallery 237, dedicated to the art of the Himalayas. A thangka (pronounced tän-kä) is a devotional painting on cloth that portrays sacred Buddhist imagery. This thangka depicts Yamantaka Vajrabhairava, a manifestation of the bodhisattva of wisdom (Manjushri), and his consort, Vajravetali. 

In tantric (Vajrayana) Buddhism, bodhisattvas can take on ferocious, intimidating forms that assist the practitioner in destroying obstacles to enlightenment. Yamantaka means “Destroyer of Yama,” who is the god of death. In this thangka, Yama appears beneath Yamantaka and is much smaller. He has a buffalo head and wields a skull-topped scepter as he judges which souls will be sent to hell.¹ In his lowered left hand, he holds a noose to ensnare them. Though Yamantaka is also blue and buffalo-headed, he is dominant and superior to Yama with 9 heads, 34 hands, and 16 legs, in contrast to Yama’s head and limbs that are equal to a human. Furthermore, Yamantaka has a proportionally multiplied number of adornments, including skulls, severed heads, and weapons. 

Thangkas function to help practitioners focus their meditation and use the power of visualization to overcome their obstacles to enlightenment.² In this case, viewers would be prompted to contemplate how to overcome fear of their own mortality. Exponents of Vajrayana Buddhism teach that wisdom, as embodied by Manjushri, has the power to overcome death itself. Those who have the wisdom to realize that the world lacks permanence can shed attachments and reach enlightenment. Enlightenment ensures that after death, the practitioner will enter the Buddhist goal of nirvana—a state of eternal bliss—and avoid the judgments of Yama and tortures of hell.

The Yamantaka thangka was made using an appliqué technique, which used precious silk to create the thangka’s imagery. Appliqué thangkas are durable works, involving the layering of individual pieces of silk over paper, with each section outlined by horsehair wrapped with silk thread.³

When the thangka came into the collection in 1918, the museum did not have an Asian art specialist on staff. It was accessioned into the CMA’s textile collection, and its imagery was misidentified as Embroidery: Yama and Consort. In early 2026, Sonya Rhie Mace, the George P. Bickford Curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art, noticed it when searching for works depicting Yama, to coordinate with the museum’s fall 2026 exhibition Ten Kings of Hell: The Afterlife in Medieval Korea. She was surprised to see it for the first time, since it was only recently photographed and uploaded to the CMA’s website––part of an ongoing project to digitize the entire collection. This discovery underscores the importance of digitizing all works in the collection and to constantly improve the accuracy of the database. Furthermore, there is a Korean connection, as it was acquired by Langdon Warner (1881–1955) in Korea for the Worcester R. Warner Collection. Dr. Mace then proposed that it be on display at the same time as Ten Kings of Hell.

The Worcester R. Warner Collection was developed as part of a dedicated project by the museum to accumulate works for the Asian art collections toward the founding of the museum itself and subsequent opening to the public. The CMA appointed Langdon Warner in 1915 as a field researcher, with the aim of sending him to Asia to collect East Asian works of art. This project was funded by Worcester R. Warner (1846–1929, no relation to Langdon), a Cleveland-based entrepreneur and inventor who was on the museum’s board of directors and had a particular interest in Asian art.⁴

Langdon Warner visited Korea in December 1916 to buy works of art with these funds and was especially interested in Goryeo celadon (greenware). In a letter to Frederic Allen Whiting (1873–1959), the CMA’s first director, Langdon explained the benefits of collecting “craft” objects, such as textiles and earthenware, rather than “fine art” like paintings and sculpture.⁵ Elsewhere, the museum emphasized in The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art that Buddhist paintings—especially those that were typical of their period—were rare. Langdon’s interest in craftworks and the museum’s investment in collecting Buddhist works of art was the rationale for acquiring a textile thangka.⁶

Tibetan language and Buddhism were admired in Korea as early as the Goryeo dynasty (935–1392 CE).⁷ During the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897 CE), however, when Buddhism was suppressed in favor of Confucianism, Seon Buddhism (Zen in Japanese) was still practiced in Korea. Esoteric, or tantric, Buddhism played an important role in Seon temples, particularly in the performance of secret rituals.⁸ Korean Buddhists may have imported a thangka like this to support their esoteric practices. 

Before the thangka could be placed on display this year, it required conservation treatment and mounting. Heather Hodge, associate conservator of textiles at the Cleveland Museum of Art, shared a bit about the conservation process on this thangka. As with most conservation projects, the end goal is to stabilize the work so that it does not incur further damage, rather than to make it look brand new. This is known as balancing evidence of use with preservation; because the thangka was actively used during its original devotional context, it should still appear to the museum visitor as a functional object. 

Much of the original damage to the Yamantaka thangka was accumulated from contact with soot from oil lamps, which provides evidence as to how it may have originally been displayed in the context of a temple or shrine. Other elements of damage to the surface, such as fiber disintegration, are simply due to age. 

Heather began her work by sending out fibers for dye analysis––to confirm that there are no modern dyes or pigments––and conducting analysis of the thangka’s paper underlayer to determine the kind of plant from which it was made. An independent conservation scientist, Xian Zhang, based in Beijing, conducted the dye analysis. The red silk dye sources are berberine (huangbo) and carthamin (safflower); the orange silk dye source is also carthamin (safflower); the green thread dye sources are berberine (huangbo), indigotin and infirubin (indigo), and a small amount of carthamin (safflower); and the blue yarn dye source is indigotin and indirubin (indigo). 

According to the report of the dye analysis, huangbo and safflower were historically used to produce bright red colors in Chinese textiles during the Qing dynasty (1636–1911).⁹ Similarly, the indigo dyes associated with the blue and green fibers were also commonly used at that time. Thus, the Yamantaka thangka was likely produced in China during the 1700s or 1800s. During this period, tantric Buddhist textile thangkas were made in southeast China and sent to the Qing imperial court, from where many were gifted to Tibetan religious and political allies.¹⁰

The silk top layer of the Yamantaka thangka underwent surface cleaning in the CMA’s textile conservation lab to help remove a significant amount of soot accumulation. The various colored silks of the appliqué deteriorated differently, with the peachy-orange silks showing more evidence of loss. Heather applied an overlay fabric protector known as bobbinet to secure these areas while still leaving the paper visible underneath. 

The paper layer of the thangka was secured by Pei-Ching Liu, the CMA’s conservator of Asian paintings. Thangkas, as composite objects, can pose unique concerns in terms of conservation. As many of the thangkas that enter Western museum collections are painted, they are typically handled by Asian paintings conservation labs. Though painted thangkas have a silk border, which is a textile component, Asian paintings conservators are trained to treat the entire construction of the thangka painting, with some element of collaboration with textile conservators. This time the collaboration worked in reverse, as the Yamantaka thangka is primarily a textile.

Now beautifully conserved, the Yamantaka thangka is on view until August 2027 in the Himalayan gallery. With its deep blue silk fabric shimmering alongside gilt bronzes, Kashmiri ivories, and Nepali jewelry bedecked with gemstones in nearby cases, the powerful thangka of Yamantaka Vajrabhairava and consort Vajravetali is a magisterial addition to the gallery.