In this January, 15, 2020, lecture, Talia Andrei, Assistant Professor or Art History and East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University, speaks on sankei mandara (pilgrimage mandalas), which are large-scale, boldly colored paintings that depict sacred places and the roads leading to them.
The genre appeared in late-medieval Japan and served as marketing material for temples and shrines in need of financial support after a century of civil wars left the imperial court and the shogunate no longer able to support them. Itinerant monks and nuns used the paintings in narrative recitation performances to encourage pilgrimage and donations to the represented site. These paintings were neither objective travel guides and roadmaps, nor static, generic representations of sacred sites. Instead, they were highly constructed, manipulated images, imbued with a cosmic, numinous view of the landscape. They were also very earthbound—charged with partisan views of the represented site, articulating historically specific institutional claims and perspectives. Through a close study of two versions of the Fuji sankei mandara, this talk examines how these seemingly incongruent features exist and intertwine in sankei mandara and by what art and artifice painters have achieved these effects.
Professor Andrei is a specialist in medieval and early modern Japanese painting. Her dissertation from Columbia University focused on sankei mandara. She is currently developing a book on this subject. Her publications include “Sankei Mandara: Layered Maps to Sacred Places,” which appeared in a special edition of Cross Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review.