- Japan
- Wood with color
- Height of statue 50.9 cm
- Heian period, 12th century
- Kyushu National Museum
- C85
Before Buddhism was introduced to Japan, people on the archipelago did not engage in the practice of creating images of the gods they worshipped. It was only after being influenced by the influx of Buddhist statuary in the 8th century that they began doing so. In the late 9th century, they started to explore different ways of representing their gods. By the 11th century, the robe folds on these Japanese deity statues were simplified, and their bodies became flatter and smaller than before. These changes eventually solidified into a style unique to such statues by the 12th century.
The long yet flat torso, short thighs, and simple robe folds of this statue are typical of deity statuary created around the 12th century. A finishing method common to such statues is the layer of white clay that was directly applied on its wooden surface as coloring. His long face features bulging cheeks, gently arching brows extending to his temples, and long, thin eyes. A clearly-defined cleft joins his small nose to the slightly protruding upper lip of his large mouth.
This statue bears an uncanny likeness to a statue of a female deity (C63) also in Kyushu National Museum’s collection. Besides having similar facial features such as their long, thin eyes and protruding lips, when viewed from the side, they are relatively flat in proportion to their long torsos. The trunks of both statues comprise a single piece of Japanese cypress with different pieces of wood attached to either side. They also feature similar floral motifs made of white dots, as well as shallow carvings forming the folds of their robes. Whereas this male statue was carved from the outer surface of a tree trunk, the female statue (C63) seems to have come from the trunk’s inner parts. The almost identical widths of both statues’ core sections, as well as the highly similar widths of the tree rings as seen from their bases, point to the possibility that the two were carved from the same tree as part of a set. Furthermore, surface details such as their coloring indicate that they were kept in similar conditions, and the small holes identically positioned in their backs also suggest that they were enshrined as a set in the same location.
In 1940, the male deity statue was designated a National Treasure under the old system. The certificate from that time indicated that it belonged to one Maeyama Kōhei. The next year, it appeared in the Shinto Art Exhibition at the Okura Museum of Art in Tokyo. However, it was paired with a different female deity statue than the one in our collection. Now that this statue has been reunited with its presumed original partner, item C63, it has become a key artifact to bring us one step closer to re-creating how late-Heian period deity statues were worshipped.
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