Jottings from the Granite Studio

Bowdoin College has devised a interactive website that allows viewers to explore an illustrated scroll painting of “A Night Attack on the Sanjo Palace” from the Tale of the Heiji Rebellion (heiji monogatari emaki). Visitors to this site are taken on a tour of the scroll, revealing both its artistry and its historical significance. The site allows viewers to track the events as they unfold on the scroll temporally in “Reading the Scroll.” “Exploring the Images” shows the visitor the armor and arms of the warriors in close detail and reveals the techniques used to capture the essence of the battle.

From the Bowdoin site:

The Heiji scrolls date from the thirteenth century and represent a masterpiece of “Yamato” style painting. They can be documented as being treasured artifacts in the fifteenth century, when nobles mention viewing them, but they now only survive in fragmentary form. The scene appearing here, entitled “A Night Attack on the Sanjo Palace” is the property of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and provides a rare and valuable depiction of Japanese armor as it was worn during the early Kamakura era (1185-1333). By contrast, most surviving picture scrolls showing warriors date from the fourteenth century and show later styles of armor.

An earlier interactive site from Bowdoin gave viewers the opportunity to compare different scrolls depicting the Mongol invasions of Japan.

In our Chinese history classes, we often show students a copy of the famous qingming shanghe tu 清明上河图 (Along the River During the Qingming Festival) a Song dynasty scroll, later redone in the Qianlong period, showing the city of Kaifeng as it prepares for the annual Qingming Festival. The level of detail in the scroll allows students to pore over the painting and see the myriad occupations, people, and material culture of the Northern Song capital city on the eve of the Mongol invasions. An interactive version of the Qingming scroll–not quite as user friendly as the Bowdoin site–is also available online.

Via H-Asia