The invention of tradition

Buddhist paintings from Nanto, or the Southern Capital, as Nara came to be known during the Heian period (794-1185), have been characterized as being conservative. They have been seen as bearing a strong indebtedness to earlier icons, frequently to those that date to the eighth century, when Nara was the center of political and religious power in Japan. This thesis provides a reassessment of the Nanto pictorial tradition at the end of the Heian and the beginning of the Kamakura (1185-1333) periods. It focuses on works that were produced for the two most powerful temples in the city, Todai-ji and Kofuku-ji, and demonstrates that the paintings from this time, when Nara once again was at the forefront of religious discourse and artistic production, were not created by temple ateliers which merely perpetuated established iconography and styles. Rather the majority of the works were executed by artists from the Heian capital (modern-day Kyoto), who looked to Nara's past to invest their images with authority so that they could become the focus of new rituals required by the religious community in the ancient capital at a time when the Japanese were responding to the onset of the Age of the End of the Buddhist Law.