Philology Meets Art History

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Prof. Dr. Jörg Heimbel and Dr. Yannick Laurent represented the Cluster of Excellence – Cross-Cultural Philology at the Ninth International Conference on Tibetan Archaeology and Art (ICTAA9), held in Chengdu, China, from 31 August to 2 September 2026.

Their papers explored how philological approaches can contribute to the study of Tibetan and Himalayan art. Jörg Heimbel combined literary, epigraphical, and visual evidence to reconstruct a previously unknown painting set commissioned by Ame Zhap (1597–1659), the twenty-seventh throne-holder of Sakya Monastery, while Yannick Laurent drew on inscriptions, biographical sources, and art-historical analysis to trace the ritual lives of two portrait sculptures of the Fourth Panchen Lama (1567–1662) preserved in the Capital Museum, Beijing.

Together, the presentations demonstrated how philological research can bring texts, inscriptions, images, and material objects into dialogue to recover the historical, ritual, and cultural contexts of Buddhist artworks. They also highlighted the Cluster’s ongoing exchanges with colleagues working on Tibetan archaeology and art in China and internationally.