Kasuga Shrine Mandala (early 1300s): Art, History and Details

Kasuga Shrine Mandala (early 1300s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

A golden path beginning at the bottom of this painting leads up to four red-and-white buildings to the left, then to a fifth building on the right. These are the five shrine halls of Kasuga Taisha in Nara. Above and beyond the buildings is a sacred mountain range––with Mount Mikasa at center, Mount Wakakusa in gold to the left, and the sun or moon rising up behind the mountains. Sacred deer appear here and there. Five figures representing the original Buddhist forms of the five kami of the shrine complex stand on clouds above the mountains.

Object facts

• Title: Kasuga Shrine Mandala
• Date: early 1300s
• Culture: Japan, Kamakura period (1185–1333)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Hanging scroll; ink, color, and gold on silk
• Dimensions: Overall: 193.6 x 58.8 cm (76 1/4 x 23 1/8 in.); Painting only: 110 x 40.9 cm (43 5/16 x 16 1/8 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2015.137

A detail from the museum

Sacred deer, the vehicles of the Kasuga deities, move about the shrine compound.

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art. Museum Masters: 2016-17 Companion Guide. [Cleveland, Ohio]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2016.
• Vilbar, Sinéad. “Acquisitions 2015: Japanese Art.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 56, no. 2 (March/April 2016): 34–35.
• 編集・発行奈良国立博物館., and hakkō Nara Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan henshū. 春日信仰を中心とした南都における神祇信仰の展開とその遺品に関する総合的研究. Edited by 奈良国立博物館 and Nara Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan. Nara-shi Noboriōji-chō: 奈良国立博物館, 2017.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.