Some Burmese Paintings of the Seventeenth Century and Later. Part II: The Return to Pagan

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Artibus Asiae Publishers is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Artibus Asiae.In the first essay of this series (Artibus Asiae, Vol. XXXVIII, 4, pp. 267-269), I invited attention to a group of wall-paintings of Jdtakas in the Tilawkaguru Cave near Sagaing, dating from about 1672. After a gap of some 400 years since the 13th-century wall-paintings of Pagan, these are, so far as known, the earliest in Burma that can be dated with reasonable assurance. Though their style, like those of their predecessors, stems ultimately from Indian art, it has achieved a greater degree of independence. And their compositional scheme, by constantly showing the successive incidents of a story in a continuous setting, makes the action easier to follow.,In the i8th century a number of wall-paintings were executed at Pagan under royal patronage from Ava and Amarapura.7 Like the majority of temples at Pagan, the buildings that contain them are made of stucco-covered brick; but in contrast to the gigantic size of many from the medieval period, most of them are small in scale, hardly larger than io metres square.The early i8th century at Pagdn.-Typical of this period are the wall-paintings in the Taungbi monastic library, built in 1704,3 and the Yatana Myitzu Pagoda. The latter (Fig. i), like many other pagodas of its time, is a cube-like structure with a three-tiered roof crowned by a stapa; and a small vestibule leads into the main hall, with its cult statue of the Buddha (Fig. 2). The I There was no set rule govering the composition of J~itaka paintings in medieval Pagin. Several different schemes were used . In the Nagay6n Temple, built in about lo9o A.D., in addition to a series of small panels illustrating over 284 of the shorter Jdtakas, there are large-scale illustrations of several of the longer ones, painted in a freehand manner (see Luce, Old Burma -Early Paga'n, Locust Valley, 1970, Vol.I, pp. 311 ff., 317-321, and Vol.III, Plates 203-20o6). The Abeyadana Temple, also built around Iogo, had paintings in small square panels illustrating the entire collection of Jdtaka tales (ibid., Vol.I, pp. 323, 324). In the Kubyauk-gyi at Myinkaba, built c. III3, some 496 Jitakas are illustrated in square panels (ibid., Vol.I, pp. 373-376). In the Lokahteikpan, built between I I 13 and I1125 (ibid., Vol. I, pp. 384-388), the first 21 books of the Jitaka collection are dismissed with one panel apiece (ibid., Vol. III, P1.385). The twenty-second book, the Mahdnipdta, which contains the ten lastand longeststories in the collection, is voluminously illustrated, with large and detailed paintings of the various episodes in each (ibid., III, P1. 356). The panels in the Lokahteikpan a...