Description
Book SynopsisHalle O’Neal unpacks jeweled pagoda mandala paintings and their revolutionary entwining of word and image to reveal crucial dynamics underlying Japanese Buddhist art—including invisibility, performative viewing, and the spectacular visualizations of embodiment.
Trade ReviewO’Neal’s new book untangles these mandalas’ visual and performative complexity. Impressively researched and broadly conceived, the five chapters of this study investigate the key aspects of the jeweled pagoda mandalas’ composition, their textual and visual content, and the historical and cross-cultural contexts of their production…The feast of visual material investigated in O’Neal’s book is so rich. -- Anna Andreeva * Journal of Japanese Studies *
Lively, provocative, and ambitious…Stands out as a very impressive, well-researched, satisfying, and nearly exhaustive study of relatively undocumented paintings and their historical circumstances…Serves in many ways as a model for scholarship on premodern Japanese Buddhist icons. -- Cynthea J. Bogel * Monumenta Nipponica *
