1. Material of Art Research: Some Painted Pieces of Paper Brought from Turfan by the Otani Expedition
- Author
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Ueno, Aki
- Subjects
Painted Pieces of Paper from Turfan, Coll. Mr. Tachibana Zuicho, Aichi ,トルファン出土彩画紙片(愛知 橘瑞超氏蔵)大谷探検隊 - Abstract
Mr. TACHIBANA Zuichō, who was a member of the Ōtani Expedition dispatched three times to Central Asia at the beginning of this century, preserves many objects brought from the area. And among them seventeen pieces of painted paper excite our interest. They are cut into various shapes and we can group them into four by design and technique. 1) Three examples with a stripe pattern like roof tiles (fig. 1); 2) three examples with rainbow-shading on a white painted ground (Pl. VI a, b,' fig. 2); 3) six examples with such patterns as bird and flower on white painted ground (figs. 3~7); 4) five examples which have cloud-like patterns without ground paint (figs. 7, 8). Some of these have writing on the back, and the date and the official stamps of the middle eighth century are found in the inscriptions. It is known that pieces of paper of a documentary nature were employed as tomb decoration after they had outlived other uses. It seems to be that they were cut out after being painted. On the other hand, in Ryūkoku University in Kyoto, there is a huge amount of fragmentary manuscripts brought from Turfan by the Ōtani Expedition, and some of them have some connection with the writing on the back of the Tachibana Collection's fragments now in question. And, further, some pieces with exactly the same shapes as these are included. They were apparently used for the tomb decoration pasted together with the Tachibana Collection's painted pieces, though they were broken up for research after coming to Japan. In Turfan of the T'ang Period there were no tombs with wall paintings. And it is presumed that paper paintings and silk paintings ornamented the tombs by way of substitute. The panels with paintings of “Figures Beneath a Tree” preserved in Tokyo National Museum and the Atami Museum or paintings of “Fu-hsi and Ni-wa”, all from Turfan, would serve as examples. And the painted pieces of paper in question also seem to have been used for that purpose. At the end of the article in which the author thus introduced authentic examples of painted patterns of the middle eighth century, are introduced all the inscriptions on their reverse sides, which supplement the Ryūkoku University documents published in Vols. 2, 3 of Saiiki Bunka Kenkyū (Monumenta Serindica) edited by the Research Society of Central Asian Culture in 1959 and 1960.
- Published
- 1964