Tibetan Buddhist Metal Sculpture

Tibetan Buddhist metal sculpture is the tradition of small cast bronze figures, and larger statues worked in copper alloy, that forms one of the main branches of surviving pre-modern Tibetan religious art, alongside thangka painting and wall painting. Commissioned by monasteries or pious individual patrons for use within the practice of Tibetan Buddhism, these images were manufactured in large workshops by monks and lay artists who are mostly unrecorded by name, and they depict buddhas, bodhisattvas, protector deities, and historical teachers of the Tibetan lineages, often finished with inlay of copper, silver or gold and gilding, and lavishly decorated in keeping with the wider Tibetan tradition of richly worked ritual and religious objects.