Review Essay

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Review Essay RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY, PLACE, AND THE SPATIAL ARTS: HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES FROM AROUND THE WORLD JOHN RENARD Saint Louis University Behl, Benoy K. The Ajanta Caves: Ancient Paintings of Buddhist India. Foreword Milo C. Beach. Notes Sangitika Nigam. Photographs Benoy K. Behl. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2005. Pp. 256 + 200 illustrations. $34.95 paper. Bunce, Fredrick W. Islamic Tombs in India: The Iconography and Genesis of Their Design. New Delhi, India: D. K. Printworld, 2004. Pp. xxxi + 335 + 362 illustrations. $62.50 cloth. Chung, Anita. Drawing Boundaries: Architectural Images in Qing China. Honolulu HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004. Pp. x + 211 + 74 illustrations. $45.00 cloth. Coe, Michael D. Angkor and the Khmer Civilization. Ancient Peoples and Places Series, ed. Glyn Daniel. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003. Pp. 240 + 130 illustrations. $22.50 paper. Coleman, David. Creating Christian Granada: Society and Religious Culture in an Old-World Frontier City, 1492–1600. Ithaca NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 252 + 6 illustrations + 3 maps. $39.95 cloth. Currim, Mumtaz, and George Michell. Dargahs: Abodes of the Saints. Photographs Karoki Lewis. Mumbai [Bombay]: Márg Publications, 2004. Pp. 152 + 144 illustrations + 1 map + 1 table. $66.00 cloth. Eastmond, Antony. Art and Identity in Thirteenth-Century Byzantium: Hagia Sophia and the Empire of Trebizond. Vol. 10 of Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Monographs, eds. Anthony Bryer and John Haldon. Aldershot and Birmingham, England and Burlington VT: Ashgate Publishing RELIGION and the ARTS 10:2 (2006): 271–290. © Brill Academic Publishers, Inc., Boston

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Company for the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman, and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, 2004. Pp. xx + 208 + 123 illustrations. $99.95 cloth. Fowler, Sherry D. Muròji: Rearranging Art and History at a Japanese Buddhist Temple. Honolulu HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 293 + 91 illustrations. $50.00 cloth. Geertz, Hildred. The Life of a Balinese Temple: Artistry, Imagination, and History in a Peasant Village. Illustrations Sandra Vitzthum. Honolulu HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004. Pp. xvi + 293 + 130 illustrations + maps. $55.00 cloth. Kerlogue, Fiona. Arts of Southeast Asia. World of Art Series. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004. Pp. 224 + 183 illustrations. $16.95 paper. Laing, Ellen Johnston, and Helen Hui-Ling Liu. Up in Flames: The Ephemeral Art of Pasted-Paper Sculpture in Taiwan. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. xxii + 207 + 148 illustrations + 1 map. $60.00 cloth. Nelson, Robert S. Hagia Sophia, 1850–1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. xx + 278 + 130 illustrations. $65.00 cloth. Qiang, Ning. Art, Religion, and Politics in Medieval China: The Dunhuang Cave of the Zhai Family. Honolulu HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004. Pp. xvi + 179 + 110 illustrations + 1 map. $39.00 cloth. Taylor, Philip. Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam. Honolulu HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004. Pp. xii + 332 + 14 illustrations + 1 map. $25.00 paper. Waghorne, Joanne Punzo. Diaspora of the Gods: Modern Hindu Temples in an Urban Middle-Class World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xviii + 292 + 60 illustrations. $74.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Watsky, Andrew M. Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan. Seattle WA and London: University of Washington Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 350 + unpaginated illustrations pp. + 159 illustrations. $45.00 cloth. Wong, Dorothy C. Chinese Steles: Pre-Buddhist and Buddhist Use of a Symbolic Form. Foreword John M. Rosenfield. Honolulu HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004. Pp. xx + 227 + 86 illustrations + 6 maps. $50.00 cloth.

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Yacobi, Haim, ed. Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse. Aldershot, England and Burlington VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2004. Pp. xiii + 356 + 46 illustrations + tables. $89.95 cloth. *

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eligious communities across the globe have always invented and propagated distinctive understandings of the “worlds” that are the contexts and products of their traditional beliefs. Each of those worldswithin-worlds includes both a greater cosmos (defined as the combined expanse of the realms of the divine and the earthly lands claimed by believers in the divine name) and a lesser cosmos (comprised of countless local representations of sacred place). Microcosmic architecture and visual arts typically re-create the macrocosm in regional styles and visual vocabularies. Here is a brief tour of some of the dozens of recent contributions to our knowledge of how and why religious communities identify and construct sacred space and place. We begin in China and move to Japan and parts of Southeast Asia. Where various types of works are available, I will deal first with studies that discuss the topic in terms of the larger arts of comprehensive spatial planning and architecture, and then with those that address the subject’s smaller dimensions as expressed in sculpture and the decorative arts. Our itinerary proceeds westward to India and into the Mediterranean, moving from medieval to early modern times. * The history of Chinese Buddhist religious spatial arts arguably begins with the west-central caves appropriated and expanded by Buddhist monks and devout families. Ning Qiang’s Art, Religion, and Politics in Medieval China: The Dunhuang Cave of the Zhai Family explores one of the classic Chinese Buddhist “spaces,” the extraordinary honeycomb of cliffcaves toward the eastern end of the Great Silk Road. No college course on Buddhist art can fail to include at least some consideration of how the Dunhuang (a.k.a. Mogao) Caves contribute to our knowledge of the faith’s spread and inculturation in China. No less than 150,000 square feet of paintings and over 2,400 sculptures created over half a millennium and several dynastic rules make the site an unsurpassed visual archive of Chinese Buddhism. Qiang explores a single seventh-century cave associated with the Zhai family. Cave 220 (of 230 similar large structures, over and above the 492 273

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smaller grottoes that perforate the cliffs) is already among the best documented and most frequently chosen to illustrate works on Buddhist art. In addition to expanding the supply of accessible documentation of Cave 220 further, Qiang’s study interprets the religious, social, and artistic values of the Zhai family with reference to a variety of neighboring spatial and visual creations. Appendices supply data for spelunkers with a taste for visual exegesis through comparative listings of relevant illustrations of two key Buddhist texts (the Bhaisajya-guru and Vimilakirti-nirdesa Sutras) and one visual theme (the Western Paradise, or Pure Land) found in major caves over several dynastic periods. Billed as a combination of the “historical study of pictures with the pictorial study of history,” Qiang’s volume is a fine addition to the University of Hawai‘i Press’s burgeoning library of serious contributions to the study of religion and the arts. Its scores of illustrations do as much justice to the exquisite painting and sculpture as small-scale photos can. The volume is a must for collections of all kinds on Buddhist art. Related spatially and functionally to the central columns of many of the Dunhuang caves (but not Cave 220, alas) are the remarkable stone steles long iconic of early Chinese Buddhist plastic arts. Virtually every American museum of medium size or larger has at least one of these imposing monoliths. At Dunhuang and several other important caveshrine sites in China, a number of the cave temples feature central supports left in place amid ambulatory spaces when the sculptors completed their excavation of the caves for ritual purposes. The axial pillars functioned much the way stupas carved in the apses of India’s early Buddhist caves did, as the focus of ritual circumambulation (more on painting in those Indian caves shortly). In Chinese Steles: Pre-Buddhist and Buddhist Use of a Symbolic Form, Dorothy Wong investigates the religious and artistic implications of a form that was in vogue for little more than a century (c. 480–600), beginning around the time of the earlier cave temples. These steles functioned religiously as perhaps the earliest visual summaries of Buddhist doctrine in the process of translating originally Indian concepts into Chinese idiom. Because the steles are of durable material, they have survived generally in better condition than many of the cave temples’ softer terra cotta sculptures. Originally based on an ancient Chinese form of commemorative tablet, many steles were set at crossroads or village gates, standing sentinel and marking the space as under the aegis of Buddhism. Wong has produced an overview of an essential feature of early Chinese Buddhist religious art that is both eminently readable and superbly researched. Beginning with the form’s context in ancient Chi-

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nese pre-Buddhist traditions, she traces its Buddhist appropriation from early experimental versions through its refinement both sculpturally and iconographically—with significant reference to the stele’s cave-temple counterparts. One of the study’s many strengths is its acknowledgement of the form’s potential contribution to comparative studies of Chinese religious traditions, from its pre-Buddhist origins to its appropriation by Daoist sculptors. Wong’s discussion of the stele’s role in distinctively Chinese elaborations of Mahayana Buddhology is also particularly instructive. Photographs are well produced and the chronology of early Chinese dynasties is very useful. Advanced university courses on Buddhism and its arts will make excellent use of the volume, and it belongs in every academic library collection orientated to the wider world of religion and art. On a reduced scale, and in another medium, early modern Chinese painters picked up the theme of the spatial arts. Drawing Boundaries: Architectural Images in Qing China, by Anita Chung, draws attention to a theme that represents one of the world’s most sophisticated traditions of spatial representation in two dimensions. Fans of Chinese landscape painting will have delighted in the unobtrusive symbols of human habitation tucked into the vastness of a “mountain-water” setting. Chung implicitly sets her subject in the context of the broad tradition of such imagery, but her focus is on a largely distinct genre—more precisely, a technique—of imagery called jiehua (“boundary-drawing”). It is an art that favors precision, perhaps even a kind of “realism,” over the allusiveness of landscape painting. That is not to say, however, that jiehua lacks symbolic content and was meant by its practicioners to be read literally. On the contrary, Chung notes, “Only by abandoning the assumption that architectural painting depicts the objective world may we fully realize its incorporation of symbolic dimensions” (5).1 Painters able to effect accurate architectural representations in medieval dynasties were said to know the “subtle principles” of the cosmos and could use “external forms to express internalized cultural values” (21). For her part, Chung analyzes in detail the historical background of the principles of spatial organization employed by painters prior to the Qing dynasty. Such concepts as faultless calculation and right proportion, structural clarity, and the ability to convey a proper sense of antiquity figured prominently in the evolution of the art. A chapter on patronage provides context by describing court tastes and protocols against the backdrop of Confucian orthodoxy, and discusses the significance of the influence of European pictorial techniques introduced by Catholic missionaries who gained access to the royal court,

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especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The use of linear perspective is high on the list of tools that had a particularly noticeable impact on architectural rendition. Chung’s four main chapters then examine in detail the formal and thematic features of a number of seventeenth and eighteenth-century masterpieces. Images of temples and palaces, cityscapes and sprawling ritual spaces conjure up a symbolic world in which the Son of Heaven enacted the ethical imperatives of Confucian tradition. The images organize an entire cosmos around exquisite structures in which the presence of groups of human figures transforms the architecture into the setting of a lively narrative of imperial festivities. One genre of painting depicts not idealized “historical” themes, but the “paradise on earth” symbolized by the realm of the Immortals, as in the “Garden of Perfect Brightness” and the “Deep Fragrance Pavilion.” In addition to offering extraordinary panoramic vantage points from which to revel in exquisite architectural compositions, the book’s well-produced images invite relaxed strolls through their imaginary spaces. Chung describes very successfully a unique tradition that gives breadth, height and depth to the expression “constructed meaning,” a tradition that melds history and myth most evocatively. Still on a small scale but in yet another medium, expendable paper architectural or cosmological (and other three-dimensional) constructions continue to play an important ritual role in various parts of East and Southeast Asia. Ellen Laing and Helen Liu’s Up in Flames: The Ephemeral Art of Pasted-Paper Sculpture in Taiwan explores an intriguing aspect of religion and the arts. Though their study embraces objects in a host of sculptural forms, I will focus here on the architectural and other spatial examples. Whatever the subject and shape of the construction, however, they nearly all serve the same funerary ritual function as reminders of the passing nature of human life and attachments. Most intriguing for present purposes are examples of miniaturized architecture and natural objects such as sacred mountains. These meant-to-burn objects provide a micro-setting for images of the deceased, their families, and their favorite possessions in life. In the end, it is not only the individual and his or her smaller delights that go up in smoke, but the very symbols of the built and natural environment as well. Up in Flames provides perhaps more of the technical and material aspects of these objects than most readers of this journal are looking for, but there is abundant detail on traditional Chinese and Buddhist belief and ritual as well. Descriptions of the various types of houses (including realistic replicas, exotic Japanese or Western style, temple-shaped, and “fantasy” houses) and cosmological symbols (such as “twenty-four 276

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paragons of filial piety mountain” and “Buddha mountains”) are particularly interesting. By far the majority of the artists who currently produce these objects are “lay” persons with little or no knowledge of the rituals for which they were meant. The tradition nonetheless persists that Daoist priests are uniquely talented in the art. The book is generously illustrated in both color and black and white, and rounded out with a full index. A short trip from Taiwan and a long trip back in time take us to our next destination, medieval Japan. Studies of Japan’s classic spatial arts open up still other dimensions of the three-dimensional symbolic function of architecture. Not far to the south of Nara, Japan’s first imperial capital, lies Mount Muro, one of Japan’s many sacred peaks. At the center of a cluster of inactive volcanoes, Muro itself consists of eight spikes traditionally interpreted as an eight-petalled lotus that symbolizes the heart of a cosmological mandala called the Womb World. Home of a powerful rain-controlling dragon, this mountain became agriculturally significant, and sometime in the late eighth century it became home also to an important temple. Sherry D. Fowler’s Muròji: Rearranging Art and History at a Japanese Buddhist Temple details that holy place’s evolution in the story of Japanese religious history and lore, a story that features the intertwining of imported Buddhism and indigenous Shinto. Until around 1600, Muròji was considered a sub-temple of Nara’s Kofukuji (Hosso sect Buddhism) and the ancient Kasuga shrine (Shinto), but was then taken over by representatives of the esoteric Buddhist lineage called Shingon (whose own principal sacred mountain is the nearby Mount Koya). Fowler moves from a discussion of how the presence of relics and the underlying spirit of the dragon (a serpent and, therefore, a water creature) set the tone of Muròji’s sacrality, to the complex history of the temple’s manifold religious affiliations, emphasizing the function of the mountain site in the esoteric cosmology of Shingon Buddhism.2 In her three most substantive chapters, Fowler analyzes in detail the architecture of the temple and the arts (sculpture in particular) that have adorned them through the centuries. These chapters are heavily “art historical,” but contain a wealth of information on the religious imagery Muròji’s icons embody. This is a demanding study, one that presupposes a fair running start in the history of religions and Japanese culture. Readers who bring an already developing interest in Buddhist arts will find the discussion fascinating. Well produced and meticulously researched, Muròji belongs in every library serious about the arts of Asia. Islands are arguably as important symbolically in Japanese myth and cosmology as mountains. Chikubushima (“bamboo grove island”) is located in Lake Biwa, just north of Kyoto ( Japan’s second imperial capital), 277

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now the site of a Shinto shrine that was once a celebrated Buddhist temple. From the top of Hiei-zan, the Tendai Buddhist sacred mountain counterpart to Shingon’s Koya-san, you can see the island on a clear day. Like Muròji, the temple represented an organic amalgam of Shinto and Buddhism. Four centuries ago, it was a retreat of one of Japan’s most powerful rulers. But it is perhaps better known as the thirtieth of thirty-three stations in an ancient circuit-pilgrimage associated with the Bodhisattva Kannon. Chikubushima is also a state of mind arising from the belief that “all sacred realms—both seen and unseen—were characterized by the utmost numinous beauty, a beauty that was described in the sutras and was represented in our world with splendid combinations of architecture and ornament” (24). The story that unfolds here is that of how Hideyoshi Toyotomi (1537–98) made the lovely island a focal point in his program of blending Shinto and Buddhism as central elements in a politico-religious ideology. In Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan, Andrew Watsky tells the tale of a remarkable place, royal, remote, and rich in religious art and imagery. The guiding principle is his description of the “sacred” as “an otherworldly reality that formed, with the mundane world, the single whole of human experience, in the here and now as well as the hereafter” (25). This is a story of how the struggle for political dominance affected ruling warrior-class patronage of religious institutions, especially in the funding of architecture and the decorative arts. Thanks to the Toyotomi family’s interest in preserving the earliest religious monuments, much of Japan’s medieval patrimony remains intact. Watsky argues that religious architecture assumed a renewed importance in the definition of public space in the capital, Kyoto, and a broader interest in the overall sacred topography of Japan extended that influence beyond the metropolis to sites of symbolic geographic significance. Chikubushima had long been regarded as a favored dwelling place of the divine (Buddhist) protectress Benzaiten, and in its solitary uniqueness it beckoned to a world apart. Japanese myth describes how the Shinto kami counterpart to Benzaiten, Azaihime no Mikoto, herself created the sacred island. Watsky describes in fascinating detail additional aspects of the mythic sacralization of the island and its evolving place within the larger network of Japanese sacred topography. During the Momoyama period (c. 1568–1615), the painting of the Kano school stood out in the creation of shògon, the art of announcing the divine presence. Watsky’s study therefore also works nicely as a miniintroduction to the legendary work of the Kano artists. Recounting the larger tale of Chikubushima prompts Watsky to reach back into Japan’s religio-political history, to the eighth-century founding of Todaiji in the 278

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early capital city, Nara. That temple’s role in amalgamating Buddhism with Shinto contributed to Hideyoshi’s motives in fashioning the symbolism of Chikubushima. Watsky effectively weaves into his narrative a wealth of contextual information about a host of other major religious institutions, linking Chikubushima especially with Hideyoshi’s revitalization of Kyoto—where a major element in the island’s sanctuary was originally built and later moved to Chikubushima. A notable strength of the work is its very readable analysis of decorative and architectural symbolism as evidence for a credible theory of how Hideyoshi “encoded” (and his successor Hideyori “enlisted”) the sacred. All of the scores of photos are well chosen and superbly reproduced. Four plan and two section drawings of the main hall are very useful. Addition of a site plan of the area in which the temple-shrine complex is located would, however, have allowed the reader to become better orientated to the wider setting (fig. 33, a sixteenth-century scroll painting of the site, fills the need in part). Similarly, the addition of a glossary of technical terms would have made the volume more manageable for readers newly interested in East Asian art and religion. Beautiful to behold and well written, this is easily one of the two or three best books I have read on Japanese religious arts and architecture. A small island’s impact on Japanese politico-religious spatial symbolism and imagination did not end with the Toyotomi regime. When the new Tokugawa dynasty established its capital at Edo (the modern Tokyo), the shògon designated a small pond there as the “new lake Biwa,” and constructed a “new Chikubushima” in its midst, complete with a temple for Benzaiten. All of this was located on the castle’s northeast side, where evil powers are most concentrated, even as the originals sat to the northeast of Kyoto. These developments introduce a new theme into this global review, namely, the phenomenon of efforts to clone the symbols of sacred space and transplant them and all they symbolize to new political and cultural contexts. To that theme we will return shortly. * From Japan we move to Southeast Asia, with brief stops in the adjacent nations of Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos, as well as the Indonesian island of Bali. With a volume evidently meant to fill the “affordable and classroom-friendly” market niche formerly targeted by Philip Rawson’s The Art of Southeast Asia (Praeger, 1967), Fiona Kerlogue has improved on its predecessor in nearly every respect. Arts of Southeast Asia lives up to its title and is therefore about much more than architecture and the smaller spatial arts. But so much of the text and visual data 279

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it provides offer insights into our topic that it’s just too good to pass up for this review, particularly given the relative scarcity of readable surveys of the region’s architecture. With the exception of the last chapter, the vast majority of the material is explicitly religious in theme or function. And unlike Rawson, Kerlogue has chosen to structure the volume largely around major religious traditions, devoting one each of the three largest chapters to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam respectively. Given that Indonesia is home to the single largest national population of Muslims in the world, the last of those chapters makes eminent sense. There is nary a mention of Islam in the Rawson book, perhaps a reminder of how dramatically perceptions of Islam as more than a Middle Eastern phenomenon have changed over forty years. All three of the central chapters feature significant input on visual conceptions of place and space. Cambodia’s originally Hindu temple-cities, which later served Buddhist sovereigns, as well as the Hindu and hybrid complexes of central and eastern Java, all reflect complex cosmological models. A high point in cosmologically symbolic architecture is surely the massive ninth-century Buddhist stupa of Borobudur in central Java. Cities virtually composed of scores of temples and stupas, such as Pagan and Mandalay—to be distinguished from temples that were so expansive that they were virtually cities unto themselves, as at Angkor Wat and environs—are a major feature of medieval Myanmar (Burma). A book like this needs at least one good map, and in that respect Rawson’s had the edge, two to nothing. More surprising, perhaps, is the total absence of architectural drawings in Kerlogue, whereas Rawson included a generous sample of plans. Kerlogue adds a welcome glossary and selected bibliography by chapter. Illustrations are of uniformly excellent technical quality and pedagogical utility, with well over half in color. Kerlogue’s volume will be very handy for survey courses on Asian art as well as for more specialized studies of Southeast Asia. Observance of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1975 fall of Saigon recently, and temporarily, piqued many Americans’ interest in Vietnam once again. Even bad publicity is still publicity, and provides in this instance a useful segue to Philip Taylor’s Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam, which explores a different dimension of traditional religious spatial symbolism at the northern fringe of Southeast Asia. While Geertz’s The Life of a Balinese Temple (reviewed below) zeroes in for an intensely detailed look at a largely localized sacred space, Goddess on the Rise analyzes wider ranging regional practices and related material culture from an ethnographic perspective. Though Taylor’s method is not primarily art-historical, I include it here because of the light it sheds on that quintessentially spatial religious practice, pilgrimage. 280

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One of Vietnam’s largest pilgrimages centers on the shrine of the “Lady of the Realm” near the Cambodian border. Like so many religiously significant sites of East and Southeast Asia, the shrine is associated with a sacred mountain. In addition to the shrine’s importance as a regional locus of goddess-centered spirituality, it is also intriguing for its recent and rather sudden rise to prominence. Philip Taylor’s thick ethnographic description of a phenomenon of note, especially since the 1990s, is particularly interesting in the present context for its insight into how pilgrimage creates a sense of political and cultural identity as well as religious space. It is no accident that the principal site in the study stands at the brink of a neighboring state. The illustrations are too few to render the volume useful for a religion and arts course, but the work is an excellent introduction to the religious cultures of Vietnam and Southeast Asia generally. If there is such a thing as a genuine religion-and-the-arts book, Michael Coe’s Angkor and the Khmer Civilization fits the bill. Few sites on the global religious landscape embody more evocatively the Southeast Asian history of both Hinduism and Buddhism than the sprawling, monumental complexes that comprise Cambodia’s “Angkor.” The royal designers of these architectural masterpieces, commissioned by Hindu and Buddhist rulers, realized some of the world’s grandest conceptions of ritual space—there are good reasons for calling one 500-acre complex “Angkor Wat,” “City-Temple.” But they were not merely masters of spatial organization; their architecture represents cosmological themes at the heart of Hindu theology (both Shaivite and Vaishnavite) and Mahayana Buddhist thought. Even now, many Cambodian Buddhists regard Hindu deities as essential guardians of Buddhism, much the way the Shinto kami were enlisted as protectors of early Japanese Buddhism. One of the book’s many strengths is the way it describes the almost seamless integration of historical and cultural traditions with the function of the various religious ideologies of power as interpreted by several dynasties of Khmer rulers. The creation of colossal likenesses of kings in the guise of meditative Buddhas or benevolent Bodhisattvas is only the most obvious evidence of the political appropriation of classic religious themes. Four chapters overlay successively the strata of history, geography, and cultural contexts of the Khmer world. Then Coe begins to explore the material and religious evidence of the early Cambodian chiefdoms and kingdoms before delving in still greater detail into the Khmer societies of late antiquity and early medieval times, centered as they were around “temple-mountains” increasingly sophisticated both spatially and decoratively. Multiple “peaks,” whole mountain ranges, set 281

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in or around “seas” recall the main ingredients of ancient cosmological structures. Refined and fluent visual imagery in high relief covers acres of interior and exterior stone wall-space, depicting figures and scenes from classical Buddhist and Hindu myth and epic. Coe does a superb job of deciphering the ancient codes and assisting the reader to develop the requisite iconographic vocabulary to read the monuments. Some readers may find Coe’s reconstruction of the daily life of the medieval Khmer a bit too detailed, but that detail ultimately serves a richer understanding of the culture that produced these extraordinary ritual spaces. Coe writes clearly and engagingly, and the designers have laid the volume out beautifully. They have managed a balance of maps and site plans, drawings, photos of the ancient sites as well as contemporary settings, charts, diagrams, and side-bars on Hindu and Buddhist concepts and other historical background. With the addition of a glossary of religious and cultural terms, it would have been near perfect pedagogically. As it is, it’s as good an entrée to Southeast Asian religion and art as you’re likely to find in English. Our last stop in Southeast Asia is Indonesia, where Hildred Geertz (yes, of that Geertz family) picks up the theme of the exotic island. In The Life of a Balinese Temple: Artistry, Imagination, and History in a Peasant Village, Geertz resumes where Kerlogue leaves off. Kerlogue makes a number of references to the exotic island, but generally in connection with the decorative arts. Anthropologist Geertz offers as intimate a portrait of the history and life of a single sacred place as any of the volumes reviewed here. Particularly insightful are Geertz’s observations about the melding of religious, cultural, social, and aesthetic dimensions of the expression of values in this largely Hindu island community, attached as it is to a nation with the world’s single largest Muslim population. Like a number of mainland Southeast Asian nations, Bali was Hinduized in medieval times; unlike those nations, Bali has maintained its unique blend of Hinduism and indigenous traditions. An extensive glossary and excellent architectural drawings and site plans are most helpful pedagogical aids; a map of Indonesia would have been a useful addition. * From Indonesia’s idiosyncratically Hindu island we move westward to predominantly Hindu India, with further connections to points west. In Diaspora of the Gods: Modern Hindu Temples in an Urban Middle-Class World, Joanne Punzo Waghorne explores the interactions of tradition, innovation, and socio-economic transformation in the early modern and contemporary history of making space for Hinduism. She begins with 282

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detailed examination of recent Hindu temples in the dense and everexpanding urban environment of Chennai (formerly known as Madras) and juxtaposes those developments with the appearance of Hindu temples in British and American urban settings. Chennai proves to be a particularly apposite setting in which to study the subject comparatively, for the city’s modern history is inextricably bound up with India’s British colonial past. Waghorne’s study of “new” Chennai temples turns up three types: the eclectic or generic, which made space for the “foreign” elements represented by the British; the community-only temple or caste temple, which arose from conflict between two major indigenous communities; and the duplicated temple, which functioned as a neighborhood “branch” of more celebrated temples that increasingly snarled urban life had rendered less accessible. The first and third types “represent two poles in the long dialogue with the ‘West’ and with each other that has absorbed Hindus for three and a half centuries in our common world system” (73). One pole represents a kind of cultural and cosmological inclusiveness, while the other emphasizes the need for continued exclusiveness. In the middle, the duplicated temple “recognizes displacement and universalism, but all under a kind of corporation that gives a new meaning to the old term . . . the domain of God” (73). As an index of social change in Chennai, Waghorne focuses on the city’s goddess temples and concludes that they have come to function as a vehicle for—or at least an expression of—gentrification and “rising bourgeois consciousness” in India’s burgeoning middle class. She then applies the data from the careful study of temple-formation patterns in Chennai to analogous developments in Hindu communities abroad, which she characterizes as giving expression to a “globalized localism.” Here the author takes devotion to the Shaivite deity Murugan as her principal source of specific examples. Waghorne is careful to distinguish this trend from the more politically loaded univeralism of the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad, World Hindu Federation). Waghorne’s subject is complex and her method sophisticated. Overall, the analysis of the social and religious dynamics played out on the stage of temple siting, design, and devotional focus is detailed, careful, and insightful. The numerous photographs (by her photographer-spouse) are very helpful, as is the glossary of relevant Sanskrit and Tamil Hindu terminology; but some of the older maps reproduced as site-plans are a bit faded and too detailed for their size to be very helpful. Readers already generally familiar with the Hindu tradition will find Diaspora of the Gods a worthwhile reflection on the relationship between place and the construction of sacred space. 283

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Among the oldest remnants of India’s spatial arts are, as in China, in caves associated with the Buddhist tradition. Benoy Behl’s The Ajanta Caves: Ancient Paintings of Buddhist India presents a rich collection of some of the finest visual documentation yet produced on this huge complex of rock-cut temples (chaityas) and monasteries (viharas). Within a few hundred miles of Mumbai, half a dozen clusters of remarkable laboriously hewn ritual and residential spaces document important developments in Buddhism and Hinduism. As the last books of the Hebrew Bible were being edited, the earliest Hinayana Buddhist cave-temples were taking shape in the river cliffs at Ajanta. While the likes of Augustine and Gregory the Great were making their mark on Latin Christianity, Mahayana Buddhist sculptors and painters were making a different kind of mark at Ajanta. This latter (c. 400–600), “second creative phase,” is Behl’s subject. More specifically, he focuses on the spectacular murals that grace the walls of these largest of all examples of monumental sculpture. A sixty-page introduction offers a fine entrée to Ajanta and the history of its cave sites. Behl’s illustrations include enough fine photos of the sculptural aspect of the “cave-tecture” to provide a sense of the nature of the spaces chosen for extensive decoration. But the bulk of the visual documentation, and its very readable commentary, retells the stories of more than a dozen Jataka tales—a treasury of lore about the previous incarnations of the Buddha-to-be or bodhisattva. Beautifully produced images from four of the most richly decorated caves recount the most popular narratives of ever-present compassion, and the reproductions are a significant improvement in both clarity and color over those of earlier works on Ajanta. Not many centuries after the last of these murals was finished, Buddhism had all but completed its own transition into diaspora from the land of its origin. As Ning Qiang’s work on Dunhuang (reviewed above) suggests, the memory of Ajanta went along for the journey. Every academic library paying attention to Buddhism and religious arts needs Behl’s volume. Even at a meager 12–14 percent of its total population, India’s principal “minority” faith community would be the clear majority almost any place else on earth. India’s Muslims belong to a millennium-long tradition of South Asian religious culture, and not the least of that tradition’s glories is its funerary architecture and associated devotional practices. Fredrick Bunce’s Islamic Tombs in India: The Iconography and Genesis of Their Design and Dargahs: Abodes of the Saints, edited by Mumtaz Currim and George Michel, explore an important theme in the Muslim religious architecture of India. Together these beautifully detailed volumes effect an auspicious conjunction, the first focusing almost exclusively on archi284

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tectural form, the second providing both visual and narrative introduction to the function of the most famous of India’s Muslim holy places. It is worth noting that though Bunce explores some three-dozen famous burial structures and Currim/Michel another dozen, there is no overlap in this fortuitously matched pair. This is because while the first volume deals almost exclusively with tombs of rulers or royal family members from various Indian Muslim dynasties, the second limits its scope to shrines of prominent medieval Friends of God, most of whom were associated with major Indian Sufi orders. Islamic Tombs in India is long on architectural description, both in text and illustrative materials. The hundreds of superbly reproduced plans, elevations, and sections comprise the bulk of the work. Commentary on the thirty-six burial complexes makes excellent sense of the architectural drawings, but the line drawings alone are a treasure, bringing together an extraordinary collection of formal detail. At the other end of the textual-visual spectrum, Dargahs is a feast of spectacular color photos by the score. Karoki Lewis’s exquisite images document in depth the feel of these intriguing places, while also providing more than ample architectural detail of the spaces that embrace their pilgrims and devotees. Both volumes offer a sufficient, but very manageable, measure of “theory” to illuminate the “practice” documented in their illustrations. Bunce’s introduction and first chapter set the formal and structural characteristics of the Muslim tombs within the larger context of classic polygonal and circular architectural forms from various traditions, including late antique European, medieval Middle Eastern and Central Asian, and classical Hindu Indian. One of the more instructive, and perhaps unexpected, arguments turns on Bunce’s appeal to pre-Muslim symbolism of the mandala as it informed the symbolic architectures of both Hinduism and Buddhism. Bunce hints at a connection enticingly throughout the book, overlaying mandala diagrams on plans of elevations of various tombs. By the author’s own admission, however, the link remains speculative. In the end, a truly convincing argument is not forthcoming, and further explanation as to the possible correspondences between mandala and architectural drawings is needed. Currim and Michel have gathered ten essays by specialists in IndoMuslim religious studies, each one offering details of the luxuriant ritual and social functions of one or two shrines (within the same larger complex in the latter case). The essays include background on the life and teachings of the enshrined Friend of God, along with general descriptions of their architectural complexes and of the generally royal patronage that made the embellishment of the tombs possible in the first place. Above all, the South Asia specialists fill the narrative of the places with fine 285

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detail on the ritual activities that have brought them to life for centuries, and the editors have included a calendar-table of major festivals at the larger shrines. Both Bunce and Currim/Michel belong on academic library shelves— the latter also, perhaps, on a coffee table or two. Bunce’s volume can function as a mini-reference work, including as it does glossary, bibliography, chronologies of Indian Muslim dynasties and major monuments, and a thorough index. Currim/Michel also includes a brief appendix on Sufi orders, a glossary, and an adequate index. Their volume’s highimpact photography is of the finest quality both technically and thematically, and offers readers/viewers exceptional insight into some of South Asia’s most magical religious venues. * Finally, spatial and architectural themes in several Mediterranean contexts suggest further connection among the Abrahamic faith traditions, picking up where we left off in India. We begin at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, in Israel, and move gradually westward, from ancient Byzantium to late-medieval/early-modern Spain. Haim Yacobi’s Constructing a Sense of Place gathers fourteen essays on a wide range of topics, all dealing in one way or another with the exigencies of a “settler society’s” cultural and religio-political stewardship over a “holy land” (3). Essayists approach the topic as exemplifying either a “return to a homeland” or a “colonization” in order to examine “critically the inherent nexus between ideology and the construction of a sense of place and to explore the role of architecture and planning as efficient yet polemic practices that serve the hegemonic agenda” (4). Here we have a variation on Waghorne’s diaspora theme. In general, the contributors do not address the role of religion specifically, but its strong current runs just beneath the dimensions of perceived, conceived, and lived space that together constitute a sense of place. One of the clearer instances of that religious undercurrent is Yael Padan’s “Re-Placing Memory,” which suggests that two memorials of the Holocaust function as pilgrim goals of a sort. Yacobi has produced an intriguing array of perspectives, well balanced in terms of critique and approbation of the various Zionist-inspired spatial agendas. Had the volume been written and assembled over the past couple of years, it would almost surely have considered forthrightly the “barrier” now being constructed between Israel and Palestine. Shelly Cohen’s epilogue hints ironically at this major space-changing phenomenon (presumably only in the planning stages at writing time) with her 286

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discussion of an exhibit called “Borderline Disorder.” She illustrates the work with a photo depicting visitors to the exhibition strolling by a massive wall emblazoned with its title superimposed across “an enlarged cartographic image of the Israeli-Palestinian terrain . . . in such a way that it brings to mind a military camouflage net” because of the splotches representing divergent territorial claims (346). From Israel we travel north to present-day Turkey. Most readers will be quite familiar with the premier architectural icon of the Byzantine Empire, Justinian’s sixth-century marvel, Hagia Sophia. Many likely assume that there is only one Hagia Sophia, but there are, in reality, at least three. The second is the thirteenth-century edifice that became the chief spatial symbol of the empire of Trebizond, a slender strip of land hugging the southeast coastline of the Black Sea. Trebizond proper was the capital city of one of the successor states to Byzantium that for a time yielded to the Latin Kingdom in the wake of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The third is the Hagia Sophia of mind and affection that became the inspiration for so many (mostly orthodox) churches throughout the world. In Art and Identity in Thirteenth-Century Byzantium: Hagia Sophia and the Empire of Trebizond, Antony Eastmond describes the second Hagia Sophia in rich historical and art historical detail. Robert S. Nelson explores the various reincarnations of the third in Hagia Sophia, 1850–1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument. Together these studies do for Byzantine Christian architecture something analogous to what Waghorne’s Diaspora of the Gods does for Indian Hindu architecture. The relatively short-lived Empire of Trebizond staked out its imperial prerogatives in part, at least, through an important architectural symbol. Overlooking the shore of the Black Sea, the second Hagia Sophia is both a humbler and a more ambitious undertaking than its predecessor and namesake. Architecturally, the thirteenth-century edifice is clearly a mere shadow of the archetype, but the symbolic freight it carries is every bit as hefty, even if less convincing: the Byzantine Empire lives on. Eastmond marshals visual material available on a much grander scale in Trebizond than in the several other successor states. He argues persuasively that an interpretative model of “appropriation” has a better chance of doing justice to the Church’s formal and decorative evidence than a model of “imitation.” While the latter tends to judge the work negatively because it compares less than favorably with its namesake, the former model lets the Church speak in its own voice. Eastmond richly contextualizes this Hagia Sophia from virtually every conceivable angle (form, function, iconography, siting, in comparison with other regional architectural evidence), all in service of interpreting the building’s ideological message. His formal analysis makes good use of 287

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scores of sharp illustrations, which in turn provide a useful backdrop for his analysis of liturgical/ceremonial function. Particularly illuminating is the author’s reconstruction of the broader ideological purpose communicated through the church’s iconographic programs. Perhaps the book’s most intriguing contribution is its exegesis of the relatively rare use of “monumental figural sculpture” on the exterior. An unusual wrap-around frieze stands out for its coherent narrative imagery, beginning with the creation of Eve and extending through the Fall, expulsion from Eden, and Cain’s murder of Abel. With help from inscriptions that function as super-titles, Eastmond links the typological (OT/NT) iconographic program to the Orthodox liturgical calendar and argues that the frieze’s “performative function” is that of allowing worshippers to “re-enter Paradise.” Using a technique of “reverse narrative,” the frieze depicts Adam and Eve clothed before, and naked after, the Fall. Eastmond discerns here an allusion to the Fall of Byzantium and a kind of redemption in the succession of Trebizond as heir to the empire, the diaspora regathered. Thorough annotation and indexing, plus a helpful chronological table of regional thirteenth-century rulers, round out a very worthwhile and balanced addition to university and Byzantinophile libraries. With Robert Nelson’s Hagia Sophia, 1850–1950, one enters a sort of enhanced Twilight Zone of the Mother Church (with apologies to both Nelson and Serling)—a dimension of sight (if not sound) as well as of mind. We are sure we have just stepped off of the Orient Express to Istanbul—or was it the Wisconsin local to Wauwatosa? Nelson’s “reception history” explores some of the many facets of Hagia Sophia’s survival in artistic imagination and architectural execution as an icon of far more than merely the imperial glories of Byzantium. A key to method here is the observation that “reception is not linear, and the creation of a cultural symbol is not a unified, coherent, or at the time, even conscious process. In order to be effective and to have general meaning, such a symbol must be embraced by diverse communities who put it to use for different purposes; hence the scattered pattern of evidence” (xvi). It is a question not of miscellaneous attempts to copy the archetype, but of the countless ways in which the Mother Church has remained present to diaspora communities. Nelson leads the reader on a revealing thematic tour through some of those diverse communities as he draws together the threads of that scattered pattern. In the century or so that saw Hagia Sophia itself morph from an active mosque to a treasury of rediscovered Byzantine mosaics to a museum liberated from urban encroachment and visible from all sides, the Mother Church mystically visited and replicated itself in count288

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less other locations and states of mind. To the millions of would-be pilgrims unable to catch the Orient Express, Hagia Sophia has traveled in photos and paintings that have inspired generations of artists and architects intent on recapturing its symbolism and many moods. Nelson describes evocatively how that symbolic and affective power has filtered down through a dozen major cultural contexts via the same kinds of literary and visual conduits that brought vestiges of Hinduism’s Mother Temples to the working-class back streets of Britain. Of all the works reviewed here, this one draws from a broader spectrum of literature (e.g., the poetry of Yeats) to tell its story. His illustrations, all sharp and well placed, include a fascinating range of hard-to-get materials readers are unlikely to find integrated like this anywhere else. Nelson has, in a word, succeeded in producing a fine example of reception history. Meanwhile, back in Istanbul, more than a few Muslims would like to see the fifteen-hundred year old Mother Church become a fully-functioning mosque—again. Last but not least, at the western end of the Mediterranean, the restoration of a different kind of diaspora to a different kind of paradise unfolded during the sixteenth century. David Coleman’s Creating Christian Granada: Society and Religious Culture in an Old-World Frontier City, 1492–1600 is the story of how the last major holdout against the centuries long Iberian “reconquest” was deliberately restructured as a post-Muslim Spanish Catholic space. In Granada, as in ancient Byzantium, one edifice had long been an icon of royal power. The Alhambra, made famous in Europe and America by imaginative mechanisms analogous to those that gave Hagia Sophia new lives,3 had already crowned the city’s acropolis for centuries before the final chapter in the Reconquista came to a close in 1492. There was, in fact, an epilogue to the story, in the 1569–70 expulsion of newly Christianized Muslim moriscos who had continued to populate Granada post-1492. Even as Christians, they represented a potential threat to the Catholic overlords because they had not fully assimilated. Growing Turkish dominance in the Mediterranean only exacerbated fears that the moriscos might find reasons and ways to fan into flame the still-smoldering embers of ancient cultural and religious loyalties. (Readers will surely be forgiven for discerning here a presaging of the contemporary failure of some European nations to incorporate fully their Muslim immigrant-citizens.) The Alhambra had been appropriated as a symbol of royal Christian power. In 1569, a rumored impending attack on the Alhambra by moriscos about to be sprung from the city jail led to the slaughter of 150 prisoners there. This arguably marked the beginning of the end for the Muslim convert community. 289

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Coleman argues persuasively that royal and regional administrative policy in Granada would go on to function as a kind of template for religio-political reform in Spain through the Tridentine era and beyond. Perhaps the most intriguing feature of Coleman’s investigation, in the present context, is the function of “discovered relics” on the site of what had once been Granada’s main mosque, coupled with the concept of “sacred mountain,” in transforming the Christian sense of place in a city that had been predominantly Muslim for centuries. In Granada, as in a dozen other major reconquered cities of Iberia, Christians had appropriated the sites of great mosques for their cathedrals. In 1588, the “discovery” of a box that purportedly contained a cache of early Christian relics (including a parchment on which John the Evangelist foretold the days of Muhammad and Martin Luther) spurred the evolution of a new regional myth of Granada’s Christian heritage. Seven years later, in 1595, treasure-hunters in search of legendary buried Visigothic gold on nearby Mount Valparaiso unearthed the first of a series of documents claiming to be of ancient Christian origin. Several of the texts, in Latin on lead plaques, told of Christians martyred on this mountain under the Emperor Nero. In an apparent Christological allusion, one text referred to the site as a “Sacred Mountain.” The story evolved and expanded over the coming years, and the mountain became known as the place on which Santiago ( James the disciple) had offered the very first European Mass upon his arrival in Iberia. Despite eventual official condemnation as a hoax, the story took root and the rest is something like history. Coleman does a fine job of keeping the reader in suspense, as this tale of mystery and intrigue plays out. Illustrations are few, but three images of moriscos as pictured by Christian sources are particularly evocative. A more detailed index would have been a welcome improvement. All in all, Coleman’s book presents yet another concrete example of the invention, claiming, and reclaiming of sacred places at the heart of so many religious communities. It will be especially interesting to students of late medieval/early modern European ecclesiastical history. NOTES 1 For reflections of a similar nature on two-dimensional religious architectural imagery, see John Renard, “Picturing Holy Places: On the Uses of Architectural Symbolism in Icon and Ornament,” Religion and the Arts 5 (2001): 399–428. 2 For reviews of books that illuminate the inner workings of Shingon Buddhism, see John Renard, “Across Asia in the Footsteps of the Buddha,” Religion and the Arts 7 (2003): 465–86. 3 Think, for example, of Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra.

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