Portraits of Chogen: The Transformation of Buddhist Art in Early Medieval Japan

This volume, the first in Brill's Japanese Visual Culture series, vividly describes the efforts of the Japanese monk Shunjobo Chogen (1121-1206) to restore major buildings and works of art lost in a brutal civil conflict in 1180. Chogen is best known for his role in the recasting of the Great Buddha (Daibutsu) and the reconstructing of the South Great Gate (Nandaimon) of Todaiji in Nara and its huge, dramatic wooden guardian figures. This study concentrates on these and other replacement statues and buildings associated with Chogen and situates the visual arts of Japan into the spiritual and socio-political context of their times. Through meticulous study of dedicatory material, Rosenfield is able to place the splendid Buddhist statues made for Chogen in vivid new light. The volume also explores how Japan's rulers employed the visual arts as instruments of government policy - a tactic that recurs throughout the nation's history. This publication includes an annotated translation of Chogen's memoir, completed near the end of his life, in which he recounts his many achievements. In chapters on East Asian portraiture, Rosenfield claims that surviving statues of Chogen, carved with mordant realism, rank among the world's most eloquent portraits, and herald the great changes that were to permeate Japanese religious and secular arts in the centuries to come. While Chogen has been the subject of major art exhibitions and extensive research in Japan; this is the first book-length study to appear in the West.