The hypothetical reader of Alexandra Green's Buddhist visual cultures, rhetoric, and narrative in late Burmese wall paintings should be knowledgeable about current thinking on the analysis of visual narratives and Buddhism. Green's book will mainly appeal to those who work on Southeast and South Asian Buddhism, art, and history, though it engages with general theory in art history so it can also be consulted with profit by those working on visual cultures in other parts of the world.
The oldest murals in Myanmar date from the Bagan period (eleventh–thirteenth centuries), followed by a hiatus from 1300 to 1600. The founding of Ava in 1635 coincided with a new wave of temple building, and economic and demographic growth. Temple murals are useful for the historian because they provide images of mainstream Myanmar society during this period: clothing, buildings, even hairstyles (p. 23), and their changes over 150 years. What did the paintings mean to the people of their time? How and with whom were they meant communicate, and what was their role in society and religion? It is difficult to determine who had the expertise to understand how the murals and carved reliefs in pre-twentieth century Myanmar, Java, or Cambodia were meant to be viewed and interpreted. The oldest record of someone actually looking at narrative art in Southeast Asia is a description in a fourteenth-century poem entitled Desawarnana of a Javanese king who visited a ruined temple where he derived great pleasure by ‘reading and rereading’ the reliefs which the poet compared to a great work of literature.
One of the main aims of the Myanmar murals seems to have been to remind the viewers of ways that people can earn merit by making donations and pilgrimages (possibly influenced by Sri Lankan tradition; pp. 134–5). There was definitely a correlation between the murals and inculcation of respect for kings, who were considered bodhisattvas, counterparts of Sakka (Indra), and cakkavatti (universal rulers). However, no specific kings are depicted. Surprisingly, most of the murals are in secondary centres, not capital cities (p. 25, n2). They were painted in small shrines which housed Buddha statues rather than in larger temples. The development of Pali examinations led monks to take texts more seriously; after passing the exams, they were sent to villages, which led to the spread of literacy to villages, during a period when more forms of literature appeared (p. 52). As time passed, court settings became increasingly apparent in the murals (p. 181), which would have served to introduce styles and mores of the court to the provinces.
One main subject of dispute among art historians concerns the characterisation of mural paintings as icons (self-contained images) versus narratives (images which combine with each other to tell stories in sequential fashion). Green cites the arguments of a wide range of authorities, adds her own opinion that icons and narratives cannot be viewed as mutually exclusive categories, and concludes that the mural paintings constitute ‘narrative and icon functioning together’ (p. 17).
The practice of white-washing old paintings indicates that painting was more important as an act of donation rather than the production of either icons or narratives. The murals may have paralleled the development of nissaya texts which translated Pali into Burmese (p. 167). The strip format of the 1400s to 1600s certainly resembles verbal storytelling. The author concludes that ‘Ultimately, many visual narrative features can be posited in relationship to Umberto Eco's theories on the role of the reader and the semiosis of texts’ (p. 192).
The author refers several times to the importance of the relationship of the murals to the architecture of the buildings in which they were painted. Part of this relationship is derived from the probability that visitors were meant to view the reliefs in a particular sequence, following the stories as they were told by the paintings, which would have resulted in the circumambulation of the Buddha image; in other words, visitors would have been led by the paintings to perform a ritual. Green refers frequently to the ‘envelopment’ of statues by the paintings which wound around all four sides of the main chamber.
Temples from the Bagan period through the eighteenth century were built according to a relatively narrow range of design elements. However, architects almost never duplicated the same exact design. The combination of different proportions, presence or absence of a central column, number of entrances, and so on, made it possible to create an infinite variety of combinations of architectural layouts and paintings. Images also evolved both stylistically and iconographically.
Numerous scholars have debated the relationship of the 1,350 reliefs on Borobudur, the Javanese temple constructed in the late eighth and first half of the ninth century, to the form of the building on which they are sculpted. The book under review describes the standard locations of specific themes in the paintings in different parts of the temples, but lacks graphic depictions of the relationship between the paintings and their position in the three-dimensional architectural layouts. Such a study could yield further insights into the intended meanings of the painted temples of Myanmar.
The 150-year period from the 1630s to the 1780s was marked by a high degree of standardisation in mural painting, sculpture, and architecture. The conquest of Ayutthaya in 1767 seems to have led to the introduction of new painting techniques by captive Thai artists. In the nineteenth century the old conventions gave way to a large range of new variations. One could say that the paintings of the Bagan through early Konbaung periods created a different world into which the viewers were transported, whereas in the twentieth century the temples of Myanmar connected Buddha to this world.
