Dr. Susan Huntington, Distinguished University Professor Emerita at The Ohio State University gave a lecture entitled “Early Buddhist Art and the Emperor’s New Clothes,” on Thursday, April 19, 2012 at 6 pm in SAB 119. This event was sponsored by the Mary Lanius Endowed Lecture Series which supports events on Asian Art in the School of Art and Art History.
Professor Huntington spoke about her ground-breaking research on early Buddhist Art. In early publications on this type of imagery, scholars assumed that images of the Bodhi Tree, Wheels, and Stupas conveyed symbolic representations of the Buddha’s presence. Instead, Dr. Huntington interprets these images as reflective of pilgrimages made by the laity to significant sites of early Buddhist worship. In her lecture, she exposed some of the Eurocentric preconceptions of early scholarship on Indian Art, and discussed the ways in which statues of the Buddha were imbued with reliquary power by the addition of scrolls and wooden backbones.
No comments:
Post a Comment