Mandala of the Three Shrines at Kumano (1300s): Art, History and Details

Mandala of the Three Shrines at Kumano (1300s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This painting depicts the three shrines of Kumano from a bird’s-eye perspective, with the Buddhist counterparts of the kami of each shrine hall shown in discs directly above the halls. It also features figures, both pilgrims and deities, along the pilgrimage route and at the shrines. It is the only surviving work illustrating architectural representations of all three shrines in the same painting. They are compressed into a stacked composition, with the Nachi shrine at the top, the Shingū in the middle, and the Hongū at the bottom.

Object facts

• Title: Mandala of the Three Shrines at Kumano
• Date: 1300s
• Culture: Japan, Kamakura period (1185–1333) to Nanbokuchō period (1336–92)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink and color on silk
• Dimensions: Image: 134 x 62 cm (52 3/4 x 24 7/16 in.); Overall: 217.2 x 80 cm (85 1/2 x 31 1/2 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1953.16

A detail from the museum

The sacred waterfall at the top right of the painting is called Nachi.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “Kumano Mandala.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 41, no. 6 (June 1954): 116–119.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• Lee, Sherman E. Japanese Decorative Style. [Cleveland]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1961.

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.