Asian Art
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The Book Arts Treasures of the Chester Beatty Library
The Chester Beatty Library is a museum of book arts in Dublin, Ireland. It has one of the most spectacular collections I have ever seen anywhere!
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A Guide to Islamic Art
Discover the fascinating group of styles we call Islamic art. It’s a wide-ranging area, not a closed group with a set of singular characteristics.
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Art That Inspires Me: Japanese Buddhist Deity
This installment of Art That Inspires Me features a Japanese Buddhist statue that appeared on a poster sent to me by the Yale University Art Gallery.
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Gargoyles and Grotesques: Onigawara
Relief-carved demon faces on the ends of ridge beams in traditional Japanese architecture, onigawara are fantastic examples of grotesques outside medieval Europe.
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Gargoyles and Grotesques of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai
The Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus is a railway station in Mumbai, India. Formerly called the Victoria Terminus, it was designed by Frederick William Stevens and constructed between 1878 and 1888, during British colonial rule of India.(1) The building is Victorian Gothic in style but also clearly reflects some characteristics of native Indian architectural traditions. According to UNESCO’s website…
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Gargoyles and Grotesques of Borobudur Temple, Java
Borobudur Temple is a massive Buddhist temple in Java, Indonesia. Built in the ninth century, Borobudur has a complex, tiered design and is richly decorated with hundreds of Buddha statues and thousands of relief-carved scenes depicting important Buddhist stories. It also has stupas and other sculpted imagery including gargoyles. Finding gargoyles, particularly functional gargoyles as these seem to be (rather than purely-decorative grotesques),…
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Gargoyles and Grotesques of the Forbidden City, Beijing
I bet you didn’t see this one coming! We tend to associate gargoyles with the Gothic architecture of medieval Europe, but the idea of carving functional drain-spouts into the shapes of real or imagined creatures is not unique to Europe, Christianity, or the Middle Ages. Beijing’s Forbidden City, a treasure-trove of animal statuary in all…
