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Grief and Companionship

While convening with the Guild of Book Workers in Providence, RI, I took a side trip to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum. I wanted to set my gaze on old cultural artifacts that would remind me of other times and places. I’m not weighing in on Egyptian or Japanese socio-political structures that created the things. The recent re-election of the 45th U.S. President was shattering. 

Here’s where I turned my attention.

Buddha Mahavairocana (Dainichi Nyorai)

JAPANESE, Heian Period, 794-1185 CE
Buddha Mahavairocana (Dainichi Nyorai)
ca. 1150-1200
Cryptomeria wood
Museum Appropriation Fund 36.015

This sculpture was originally the main figure of worship in a temple, surrounded by other Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and guardian figures. Visitors would have come to pray or attend rituals and sutra readings performed by monks.

The RISD Museum acquired the statue in the 1930s. Records state it was the principal image of Rokuon-ji, a Shingon sub-temple in Hyogo Prefecture, along Japan’s Inland Sea. Legend has it that the temple was destroyed by fire hundreds of years ago but that the statue was stored in a nearby farmhouse until 1933, when it was brought to the U.S. by the Japanese art dealer Yamanaka.

The largest wooden Japanese sculpture in the United States, it was constructed from 11 hollowed and carved pieces of wood. Its simple surfaces and serene expression are representative of the late Heian Period.

Dainichi, or “great sun” in Japanese, is the generative force of all creation, from whom other Buddhas emanate. In a mandala or cosmic diagram, he is the central figure, surrounded by other Buddhas and attendants, identifiable by his high crown and dhyana mudra gesture, in which the tips of his thumbs touch.

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EGYPTIAN, New Kingdom, Dynasty 19-20
Paint Box, 1302-1070 BCE
Ceramic and pigment cakes
Helen M. Danforth Acquisition Fund 1997.82

Only a handful of paint boxes survive from ancient Egypt. This unusual ceramic example has a sliding lid with a grip in the form of a genet, an animal related to the mongoose. The stylized papyrus thickets represent the genet’s habitat of tall grasses and shrubs.

Featuring a hollow well for water and brush storage, the box contains seven pigment cakes of yellow ochre, Egyptian blue (a synthetic pigment composed of silica, copper, and calcium), calcium carbonate (white), hematite (dark red), hematite mixed with calcium carbonate (lighter red), and two charcoal blacks. Painters used these same pigments to decorate statuary and the walls of temples and tombs.