The Penn Museum has achieved significant progress in preserving and revitalizing the cultural heritage of two Buddhist murals.
Credit: Sanjana JuvvadiPenn Museum has made strides in conserving and renewing the artistic and cultural legacies of two Buddhist murals, both of which were initially taken off display in the spring of 2016.
Located in the Rotunda Gallery, which houses Chinese and Japanese art, the murals were taken down in part due to fears that construction from the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania would harm their mud plasters. In 2018, these concerns also caused Penn Museum to close its Africa, Mexico, and Central America galleries.
“The murals were painted onto mud plaster, … which would've been put up in several layers in a temple, also likely constructed from earthen materials,” project conservator Morgan Burgess said to Penn Today.
She described the work as an old shellac coating that, over a century, had discolored and obscured the vibrancy of the original pigments.
The two murals, which depict the Buddha's Bhaisajyaguru and Tejaprabha, are constructed from 23 and 28 panels, respectively.
"It is an interesting conservation opportunity when you have a project this large," Burgess said. "It kind of offers you this opportunity to do a real deep dive into a particular material, so [I] get to spend a lot of time doing, you know, literature research [and] material experimentation."
Structured as gable-end murals that were located in monastery halls, they demonstrate the influence of translated Indian literature on China’s then-zeitgeist.
"It's a particular style of mural that's popular in a particular era at a particular time, so from the 13th and then into the 14th century is when this style of murals was being produced," associate curator and keeper Adam Smith said.
As a result, according to Smith, the murals "flesh out our ability" to present the spread of Buddhism as a religion in East Asia for that period.
In the 1920s, archeological efforts began in China, which included the publication, excavation, and photography of many sites. However, this also provided opportunities for exploitation and looting.
"They were also the period of the extremely widespread commodification of works of art," Smith said. "It was that process that brought the murals initially to Paris and then subsequently to her, to Philadelphia, where the museum purchased them."
Although Penn Museum no longer engages in these types of illegal art market purchases, there remains a large sense of responsibility to looted works, such as these murals.
"They were removed from one country in circumstances the museum wouldn't dream of countenancing in the last 50 years," Smith said.
As such, these conservation efforts serve as a continuation of Penn’s commitment to increasing community engagement with art and campus galleries.
"We can learn so much from history," Burgess said. "But really, the materials that we're working on, this is the physical evidence of history and culture, and it's important for people to be able to learn from those things and have access to those things."
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