context: painting > general comments

Narrative

This is a large and fascinating area. It starts with the Tamamushi portable shrine from the 7th Century, which depicts three sequential moments from one of Buddha's previous lives, against a single background image. But the main account has to be about the makimono, the handscroll, which is almost always a narrative form, and was from the beginning. Later on, landscapes were painted in this format, and these almost always moved through the seasons as you unrolled the painting - and it's also worth mentioning that the viewpoint moved in space too.

The story of the narrative handscroll starts in 753 with the E-ingakyo, which makes the point that they were always about narratives, always about combining images and text (which itself has two elements: the message and the medium, the story and the calligraphy) in chronological sequence, to be read (in most cases) in discrete units - many scrolls alternate pictures and text so the division is clear. Some are less distinct, and you might follow a character appearing multiple times in unfolding scenes with no obvious separation into multiple images. The most impressive version may be in one scene in the Shigisan Engi from the late 12th Century, where a very solidly drawn setting of a Buddhist temple also features half a dozen simple line drawings of a nun spending the night there. This looks like a multiple exposure photograph, with the nun laying down to sleep, kneeling in prayer, and so on, at different times of her night in the temple. Note that the Shigisan Engi is also noteworthy for being the first narrative scroll without a known text predecessor.

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