Mogao Caves: Books
Books in the Spotlight
Performing the Visual by
Performing the Visual explores the practice of wall painting in China from a new perspective. Relying on rare, virtually unpublished drawings on Buddhist themes from a long-hidden medieval library in western China, the author analyzes the painters' pictorial strategies. She also examines the financial accounting of Buddhist temples, providing practical information that ninth- and tenth-century critics ignored: how artists were paid and when, the temple's role as mediator between patrons and artists, and the way painters functioned outside the monastic system, working in guilds and secular academies affiliated with local government. Based on the careful study of hundreds of inaccessible wall paintings at Dunhuang, arguably Asia's largest and most important Buddhist site, the author shows that although critics celebrated spontaneous feats with brush and ink, artists at Dunhuang were heavily dependent on concrete tools such as sketches in the preparation of wall painting.
Call Number: DS797.28.D864 W77 2023ISBN: 0804745331Publication Date: 2003-11-18
Life along the Silk Road by
In this long-awaited second edition, Susan Whitfield broadens her exploration of the Silk Road and expands her rich and varied portrait of life along the great pre-modern trade routes of Eurasia. This new edition is comprehensively updated to support further understanding of themes relevant to global and comparative history and remains the only history of the Silk Road to reconstruct the route through the personal experiences of travelers. In the first 1,000 years after Christ, merchants, missionaries, monks, mendicants, and military men traveled the vast network of Central Asian tracks that became known as the Silk Road. Whitfield recounts the lives of twelve individuals who lived at different times during this period, including two characters new to this edition: an African shipmaster and a Persian traveler and writer during the Arab caliphate. With these additional tales, Whitfield extends both geographical and chronological scope, bringing into view the maritime links across the Indian Ocean and depicting the network of north-south routes from the Baltic to the Gulf. Throughout the narrative, Whitfield conveys a strong sense of what life was like for ordinary men and women on the Silk Road, the individuals usually forgotten to history. A work of great scholarship, Life along the Silk Road continues to be both accessible and entertaining.
ISBN: 0520280598Publication Date: 2015-03-25
More Books on Dunhuang
- Drège, Jean Pierre. et al. Images de Dunhuang : dessins et peintures sur papier des fonds Pelliot et Stein. Paris: Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient, 1999. Brown Fine Arts - Art Stacks ; N7347 .T8 I43 1999
An edited volume containing chapters on the drawings in Dunhuang manuscripts from the Pelliot and Stein collections.
- Monnet, Nathalie. Chine, l’empire du trait : calligraphies et dessins du Ve au XIXe siècle. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2004. Brown Fine Arts - Art Stacks ; NK3634 .A15 P333 2004
Catalog of an exhibition held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, site François-Mitterand, Mar. 16-June 20, 2004.
- Wang, Eugene Yuejin. Shaping the Lotus Sutra : Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. Brown Fine Arts - Art Stacks ; ND2848 .W354 2005
Treating the images in the manuscripts of the Lotus Sutra. 20 plates of illustrations.
- Wang, Michelle C. Maṇḍalas in the Making : The Visual Culture of Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang. Leiden ; Brill, 2018. Brown Fine Arts - Art Stacks ; N8193.3 .B64 W36 2018
The first scholarly monograph on Buddhist maṇḍalas in China, this book examines the Maṇḍala of Eight Great Bodhisattvas.
- Whitfield, Roderick, and Seigo Otsuka. Dunhuang : caves of the singing sands : Buddhist art from the Silk Road. London : Textile & Art Publications. 1995. Brown Fine Arts - Art Stacks ; N8193 .C6 D86 1995
This new and revised edition has been adapted from a Japanese-language book, The art of Dunhuang, Tokyo: NHK Publishing, 1992
- Whitfield, Susan. Aurel Stein on the Silk Road. Chicago: Serindia Pub., 2004. Stacks ; DS327.5 .S75 W47 2004.
The biography of the notable early-20th century archaeologist responsible for discovering the Mogao Library Cave 17.
- Wu Hung. Spatial Dunhuang : Experiencing the Mogao Caves. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023. Stacks, DS797.28.D864 W77 2023
This book examines the caves from the perspective of space, treating them as physical and historical sites that can be approached, entered, and understood sensually.
- Zhao, Feng. Textiles from Dunhuang in French Collections / Editor in Chief Zhao Feng ; Deputy Editors Laure Feugere, Nathalie Monnet ; Assistant Editors Wang Le, Arnaud Bertrand Xu Zheng. 1st ed. Shanghai: Donghua University press, 2011. Brown Fine Arts - Art Stacks ; NK8883 .A3 D8513 2011
A catalogue of Dunhuang textiles held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and other French collections. Color illustrations.
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