The dissertation focuses on Ikh Khuree, a quintessential Mongolian monastery, from its early beginnings in 1639 until the death of the last Jebtsundamba ruler in 1924. The monastery was a moveable site that changed its location nearly thirty times before 1855, all the while expanding its architecture and maintaining a significant object and image production. A portable monastery that was astonishingly coherent throughout the three hundred years of its history, Ikh Khuree has scarcely been studied as a prolific art center. Its art and architecture challenge a simple stylistic analysis and demonstrate the responsive character of the society that created the monastery and its objects. The ultimate goal of this dissertation is to understand the function, use, and even necessity for "art" in a monastery that was frequently on the move and yet did not cease its active engagement in artistic production. Ikh Khuree was completely destroyed in the 1930s by the socialist regime. Considering surviving art works as the primary material of this no-longer extant monastery, this dissertation discusses the site in light of images made of and in Ikh Khuree. The interdisciplinary approach adopted here aims to understand the causes and intentions, the conceptual and even psychological approaches in object production that were embedded in a historical, political and social nexus of patrons, artists and audience, and which largely determined their iconographic and stylistic appearance. If the "body [of the Buddha]" stands for "art" in Tibet, as Donald Lopez has commented, this dissertation examines what a Mongolian understanding of this notion was in Ikh Khuree and how it was visible in Ikh Khuree images. The dissertation centers on a close analysis of never-studied Ikh Khuree maps, architecture, city planning, portraits of the Jebtsundamba rulers, sculptures and vernacular interpretations of Buddhist essentials. It highlights the role of images as instrumental in crafting the Jebtsundamba rulers' complex identities to substantiate and to build a centralized and sacralized Buddhist nation, and to negotiate between politically diverse groups, as well as between Ikh Khuree's communities. As the first comprehensive study of later Mongolian Buddhist art, this dissertation utilizes modern and medieval Mongolian primary texts, which have never been published in the West.