Alexander Coburn Soper

Early Chinese Landscape Painting

However sensitive the Chinese spirit may have been, from immemorial antiquity, to the forces of Nature, it is certain that a landscape art made its appearance in the cultural history of China almost as late as in that of the Mediterranean world.

The “Dome of Heaven” in Asia

IN A recent contribution Dr. Karl Lehmann has summed up with impressive thoroughness the character and extent of celestial symbolism in Western architectural decoration from Roman times into the Christian Middle Ages.1 A study of this sort, created out of such encyclopedic learning and presented with so much balance and completeness, can hardly fail to suggest a kind of finality of its own. Something like an aesthetic compulsion, exercised perhaps against the authors will and in spite of warnings and disclaimers, half persuades even the alert reader that its elected limits are in fact actual frontiers of knowledge. In the problem of celestial symbolism, even as more narrowly defined by the practice of Mediterranean cultures, I am sure that Dr. Lehmann would be the first to protest against any such identification. The purpose of the present paper is to demonstrate the non-existence of at least one such apparent boundary, the geographical frontier to the east of the ancient and Christian worlds. I hope to ...

The Illustrative Method of the Tokugawa “Genji” Pictures

NO one who has sampled the twelfth century Japanese scroll paintings of The Tale of Genji, even in one or two black-and-white reproductions, can have failed to wonder at the extraordinary degree of...

Early Buddhist Attitudes toward the Art of Painting

To the best of my knowledge, no attempt has been made to assemble and render into any European language the passages dealing with painting that may be found scattered through the Chinese translations of early Buddhist literature. Students of Indian art have turned to Pāli, Sanskrit, or Tibetan texts with profit, but their contributions have necessarily been limited. The Pāli books, bound to the Hīnayāna, in general show a less lively interest in the possibilities of the representational arts than is proper to the Northern School. Sanskrit remains are late, or non-Buddhist; the Tibetan literature is still doubly inaccessible behind physical and language barriers. In contrast, the Chinese translations cover the whole of Buddhist writings with unique completeness. At the same time they offer the most readily available collection of texts from the area and the period when sculpture and painting were first being granted high importance as a religious instrument: i.e. North India in the first two or three centu...

The Rise of Yamato-E

The problems of cultural independence and borrowing find a peculiarly rich illustration in the history of Japan. Viewed in the light of that interest, the whole course of Japanese development becomes a series of great waves of foreign influence. The crest of each wave is a period of intense enthusiasm for alien forms, in which all the amazing skill and energy of the people seem absorbed in a passionate effort of assimilation. The trough beyond every crest is a period of reaction, equally determined in its concentration on native habits and preferences, and in its indifference to the outside world. In one age or another, heights and depths have varied; modern Japanese history is dramatic proof that the undulating graph is today as powerful a chronological pattern as ever.

The Buddhist Art of Gandhāra. The Story of the Early School, Its Birth, Growth and Decline, Memoirs of the Department of Archaeology in Pakistan, Vol. 1

About two thousand years ago, the land named Gandhara on the west banks of the Indus fell successively under the domination of the Greeks, the Sakas and the Parthians. This book gives an account of the school of art which formed itself under these widely divergent cultures. The early Gandhara school is chiefly notable in providing the earliest works of art in which the Buddha was represented in bodily form. Before this, he had always been shown symbolically; the characteristic and now familiar Buddha image was developed from the work of the early Gandhara sculptors. Sir John Marshall begins by analysing the formative influences of Gandharan art, its relationship to the early school of Central India and Hindustan, and the extent of its debt to the Greeks. he then traces the history of its development, in a remarkable and carefully chosen series of illustrations. The text is in the form of a commentary on these illustrations; the reader can thus share the authors extensive knowledge of the Gandhara school while observing for himself its growth and decline. Since it deals with the birth of their religious art as it exists today, this book must be of interest to a great many people in Buddhist countries. It will also be of value to oriental historians and those concerned with Eastern art in general.

Notes on Höryüji and the Sculpture of the “Suikö Period”

To ANYONE who had experienced the curiously flavored charm of the pre-war Horyuji, the near obliteration of the Kondo frescoes by fire in 1949 must have been felt first of all as a deep personal tragedy.1 In the face of so overwhelming a loss, the lover of Far Eastern art has only the human recourse of refastening his ties of affection and interest the more securely to what is left, the buildings and the works of sculpture. This paper is for the writer the result of such a return, a small tribute to a perennial source of delight.

The Italo-Gallic School of Early Christian Art

A generation ago, critical approach to the development of Early Christian art resolved itself into the simple opposition of two originating centers, Rome and the Near East. The antithesis was drawn with an attractive simplicity. For the west in general, orthodox scholarship recognized only one focus of importance, the capital, and saw in the art of the Latin provinces merely a tarnished reflection of the Roman. In contrast, the heterodox viewpoint of Strzygowski emphasized the cultural intimacy between the “Orient,” north Italy, and Gaul; but only to claim the latter regions as passive recipients of an art and architecture already formulated in the Hellenistic east.1

The Latin Style on Christian Sarcophagi of the Fourth Century

Within the past generation, no more important contribution has been made toward a full understanding of late antique art in the West than the studies of Marion Lawrence in the field of fourth century Christian sarcophagi.1 The basis of Miss Lawrences work is a recognition of the essential duality of Early Christian sculpture; she has shown it clearly for the first time not as a simple decadence of one style but as a complex interaction of two, the native Latin tradition and a second wholly alien in technique and design. Her studies of the latter current have indicated its strong affinities with the Greek East, notably with the earlier pagan sarcophagi of Asia Minor assembled and defined by Morey.2 In its Western form, this “Asiatic” style has been centered by Lawrence in Upper Italy and Provence, its influence being first felt in Rome at the mid-century. In detail the sculpture has been divided among several Northern ateliers and one or two clearly imitative in Rome. The largest subdivision, the columnar...