Asuka and Nara Art

Asuka and Nara art

During the Asuka and Nara periods, so named because the seat of Japanese government was located in the Asuka Valley from 542 to 645 and in the city of Nara until 784, the first significant influx of continental Asian culture took place in Japan.

The transmission of Buddhism provided the initial impetus for contacts between China and Japan. The Japanese recognized the facets of Chinese culture that could profitably be incorporated into their own: a system for converting ideas and sounds into writing; historiography; complex theories of government, such as an effective bureaucracy; and, most important for the arts, new technologies, new building techniques, more advanced methods of casting in bronze, and new techniques and media for painting.

Throughout the 7th and 8th centuries, however, the major focus in contacts between Japan and the Asian continent was the development of Buddhism. Not all scholars agree on the significant dates and the appropriate names to apply to various time periods between 552, the official date of the introduction of Buddhism into Japan, and 784, when the Japanese capital was transferred from Nara. The most common designations are the Suiko period, 552645; the Hakuh period, 645-710, and the Tenpy period, 710-784.

The earliest Japanese sculptures of the Buddha are dated to the 6th and 7th century. They ultimately derive from the 1st- to 3rd-century AD Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara, characterized by flowing dress patterns and realistic rendering, on which Chinese artistic traits were superimposed. After the Chinese Northern Wei buddhist art had infiltrated a Korean peninsula, Buddhist icons were brought to Japan by Various immigrant groups. Particularly, the semi-seated Maitreya form was adapted into a highly developed Ancient Greek art style which was transmitted to Japan as evidenced by the Kry-ji Miroku Bosatsu and the Chg-ji Siddhartha statues. Many historians portray Korea as a mere transmitter of Buddhism. The Three Kingdoms, and particularly Baekje, were instrumental as active agents in the introduction and formation of a Buddhist tradition in Japan in 538 or 552. They illustrate the terminal point of the Silk Road transmission of art during the first few centuries of our era. Other examples can be found in the development of the iconography of the Japanese Fjin Wind God, the Ni guardians, and the near-Classical floral patterns in temple decorations.

The earliest Buddhist structures still extant in Japan, and the oldest wooden buildings in the Far East are found at the Hry-ji to the southwest of Nara. First built in the early 7th century as the private temple of Crown Prince Shtoku, it consists of 41 independent buildings. The most important ones, the main worship hall, or Kond (Golden Hall), and Goj-no-t (Five-story Pagoda), stand in the center of an open area surrounded by a roofed cloister. The Kond, in the style of Chinese worship halls, is a two-story structure of post-and-beam construction, capped by an irimoya, or hipped-gabled roof of ceramic tiles.

Inside the Kond, on a large rectangular platform, are some of the most important sculptures of the period. The central image is a Shaka Trinity (623), the historical Buddha flanked by two bodhisattvas, sculpture cast in bronze by the sculptor Tori Busshi (flourished early 7th century) in homage to the recently deceased Prince Shtoku. At the four corners of the platform are the Guardian Kings of the Four Directions, carved in wood around 650. Also housed at Hry-ji is the Tamamushi Shrine, a wooden replica of a Kond, which is set on a high wooden base that is decorated with figural paintings executed in a medium of mineral pigments mixed with lacquer.

Temple building in the 8th century was focused around the Tdai-ji in Nara. Constructed as the headquarters for a network of temples in each of the provinces, the Tdaiji is the most ambitious religious complex erected in the early centuries of Buddhist worship in Japan. Appropriately, the 16.2-m (53-ft) Buddha (completed 752) enshrined in the main Buddha hall, or Daibutsuden, is a Rushana Buddha, the figure that represents the essence of Buddhahood, just as the Tdaiji represented the center for Imperially sponsored Buddhism and its dissemination throughout Japan. Only a few fragments of the original statue survive, and the present hall and central Buddha are reconstructions from the Edo period.

Clustered around the Daibutsuden on a gently sloping hillside are a number of secondary halls: the Hokke-d (Lotus Sutra Hall), with its principal image, the Fukukenjaku Kannon (, the most popular bodhisattva), crafted of dry lacquer (cloth dipped in lacquer and shaped over a wooden armature); the Kaidanin (, Ordination Hall) with its magnificent clay statues of the Four Guardian Kings; and the storehouse, called the Shsin. This last structure is of great importance as an art-historical cache, because in it are stored the utensils that were used in the temple's dedication ceremony in 752, the eye-opening ritual for the Rushana image, as well as government documents and many secular objects owned by the Imperial family.

See also

• National Treasures of Japan
• List of National Treasures of Japan (crafts-others)
• Culture of Japan
  • Eastern art history
  • History of painting
  • Buddhist art
    • Buddhist art in Japan
  • Japanese architecture
  • Japanese garden
  • Japanese calligraphy
  • Japanese lacquerware
  • Japanese painting
  • Japanese pottery and porcelain
  • Japanese sculpture
  • Japanese theater
  • Woodblock printing in Japan
• List of collections of Japanese art
• Art Galleries
  • Japan
    • Tokyo National Museum, est. 1872
    • Kyoto National Museum, est. 1889
    • Nara National Museum, est. 1889
    • Kyushu National Museum, est. 2005
  • United States
    • Freer Gallery of Art, est. 1923
    • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Japanese artists category
• Musha-e

References

Sources

• This article was originally based on material from WebMuseum Paris - Famous Artworks exhibition [1].
• Japan - This article incorporatespublic domain material from the Library of Congress Country Studies website http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/.
• Boardman, John, "The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity", Princeton University Press, 1994, ISBN0-691-03680-2
• Earle, Joe (1999). Splendors of Meiji: treasures of imperial Japan: masterpieces from the Khalili Collection. St. Petersburg, Fla.: Broughton International Inc. ISBN1874780137. OCLC42476594.
• Impey, Oliver, in Battie, David, ed., Sotheby's Concise Encyclopedia of Porcelain, 71-74, 1990, Conran Octopus. ISBN1850292515
• Kaempfer, H. M. and W. O. G. Sickinghe The Fascinating World of the Japanese Artist. A Collection of Essays on Japanese Art by Members of the Society for Japanese Arts and Crafts, The Hague, Society for Japanese Arts and Crafts, 1971. ISBN0-87093-156-3
• Kapur, Nick (2018). Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN978-0674984424.
• "Alexander the Great: East-West Cultural contacts from Greece to Japan" (NHK and Tokyo National Museum, 2003)
• "De l'Indus l'Oxus, Archologie de l'Asie Centrale", Osmund Bopearachchi, Christine Sachs, ISBN2-9516679-2-2
• "The Crossroads of Asia, Transformation in image and symbols", 1992, ISBN0-9518399-1-8

Further reading

• Momoyama, Japanese art in the age of grandeur. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1975. ISBN9780870991257.
• Murase, Miyeko (2000). Bridge of dreams: the Mary Griggs Burke collection of Japanese art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN978-0870999413.
• (in Spanish and Japanese) Kato, Kauro [sic] ( Kat Kaoru) (Kanagawa University), translator: Saeko Yanagisawa. "Acercamiento a la influencia del movimiento muralista mexicano en el arte contemporneo de Japn." (, Archive) Crnicas. El Muralismo, Producto de la Revolucin Mexicana, en Amrica. National Autonomous University of Mexico. December 2008, No. 13, p.237264. Spanish: p.237255, Japanese: p.256264.

External links

• Five Thousand Years of Japanese Art Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, online version
• Japanese Prints by John Gould Fletcher
• e-Museum High definition images of national treasures and important cultural properties owned by four national museums in Japan
• Ukiyo-e in the "A World History of Art"
• Japan Cultural Profile - national cultural portal for Japan created by Visiting Arts/Japan Foundation
• Ruth and Sherman Lee Institute for Japanese Art Collection, online collection of images from the Online Archive of California/University of California Merced
• The Herbert Offen Research Collection of the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum
• The Art of Bonsai Project
• The Vision and Art of Shinjo Ito: Sculptures, calligraphy, photographs of a buddhist Great Master (Grand Acharya)
• "History of Japanese Art" Lecture at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts by Okakura Kakuzo (English Translation)
• Japanese Art of the Meiji Period (1868 1912) The Khalili Collections