The Gamnodo is a Korean Buddhist painting genre which has been subjected to scrutiny exceptionally under different titles in modern scholarship. Since its introduction in the early 1920s, Korean and Japanese scholars have adopted either or both of historically derived and newly reconstructed titles that they purport to represent its iconographic content. The varying appellations thus accordingly guided manifold iconographical interpretations. This has in turn impeded a coherent understanding of the genre in its entirety. This paper addresses the very issue of the Gamnodo’s viable connection to multiple titles. Through a careful examination of the historiographical trajectory of scholarship on the Gamnodo, it sheds light on the modern reception of the genre and the unwonted specificity of its attributed titles. As the paper reveals discordances between each title and iconographical capacity of the Gamnodo, the collective distinctiveness of the varied titles is found exclusively linked with the functional quality of the ritual altar on which the genre was installed from the sixteenth century onward. The Gamnodo’s appellations are observed essentially anew in the contemporaneous liturgical framework of Joseon Buddhism.