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4 results

  • Surrounding the Sacred Space: Two Painted Scrolls from the Collection of Namgyal Monastery in Mustang, Nepal

  • CHIARA BELLINI
  • Journal:
    Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society / Volume 30 / Issue 4 / October 2020
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    30 June 2020, pp. 635-678
    Print publication:
    October 2020

  • The Collection of Namgyal Monastery (Mustang, Nepal) preserves two long and narrow scrolls painted on both sides, of exquisite artistic quality. This article describes and investigates the iconographic and symbolic meaning of the paintings and the use of these objects. One of the scrolls shows the Eight Auspicious Symbols and deities that personify diverse group of offerings painted in an elegant Newari style. The other scroll features an intriguing representation of the Eight Charnel Grounds in a continuous landscape. Full of delicate and charming details, it illustrates the Mahasiddhas, Guardians, Nāgas and stupa of the respective directions. The back of both scrolls has a vajra chain at the bottom and flames represented above it. The scrolls must have been used to encircle specific mandalas. Such objects are rather rare, and it is interesting to reflect on their former use, even more so as no contemporaneous objects of that type are known. The stylistic features of the paintings reveal the broader relationships of the Mustang region to neighbouring areas. Relationships can also be established to objects preserved in the same collection, such as a collection of metal stupa of similar design and typical for the Mustang region and the western Himalayas.

  • 16 - Regional study: Confucianism and the state

  • from Part II - Trans-regional and regional perspectives
  • Edited by Craig Benjamin, Grand Valley State University, Michigan
  • Book:
    The Cambridge World History
    Published online:
    05 May 2015
    Print publication:
    16 April 2015, pp 435-456

  • Summary

    This chapter provides some hint of the richness and variety of the world's artistic traditions. Though art made in Europe since the Renaissance has had some distinctive features to make such recent and local developments an essential part of the definition would be ethnocentric and parochial. Royal art often functions as propaganda aimed at the people who pose the greatest threat to the king, those nearest him; it is his relatives and high nobles who must be made to feel the sanctity of his person. In Islamic art, writing occurs on all surfaces, from bowls to buildings, in a multiplicity of script variants, sometimes boldly legible, sometimes impenetrably patterned. Setting and audience matter because they are clues to the purposes that shaped a work, clues to the effect it was meant to have. The works of Buddhist art illustrates most of the functions on Seckel's list, and readers will probably have no difficulty supplying Christian counterparts for all of them.

  • 6 - Aristocratic culture

  • Edited by Donald H. Shively, University of California, Berkeley, William H. McCullough, University of California, Berkeley
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Japan
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    28 July 1999, pp 390-448

  • Summary

    In this chapter, aristocratic culture is used to mean a style of social and artistic expression characteristic of the Japanese court at Heian-kyō and limited primarily to its members. One of the conspicuous aspects of this culture is the preoccupation with beauty which influenced standards of judgment in the arts such as secular painting, calligraphy, Buddhist art, music including Chinese cosmopolitan music, and Heian poetry. It also impacted other aspects of ordinary life as may be seen by from a survey of upper-class domestic architecture and furnishings, textiles, dresses and costumes, dietary customs, and occupations and pastimes such as wrestling and falconry. From around 950 on, the typical aristocratic residence consisted of a group of buildings situated in a large urban estate, its stands of pine and maple trees, artificial hills and streams, and architecture of this type, the buildings were carefully designed to harmonize with the setting.