Buddhist Sculpture in China; Chinese Sculpture in Six Dynasties; Buddhist Iconography; Handan China Temples; Antiquities of Anyang, China; Howard, Angela F.
摘要
The writer discusses the Buddhist cave sculpture of the Northern Qi dynasty. She considers the art of the cave temples in the Hebei and Henan provinces, as well as the art of the Anyang caves. She analyzes the style，architecture，and iconography of these arts, noting two novel trends in committing the sacred texts to stone in order to preserve them and emphatically using the stupa as a symbol to mitigate if not impede the impending catastrophe of the end of Buddhism. She also observes a novel formal language whereby the extreme stylization and acute geometrization of the late Northern Wei style were supplanted by rounder and smoother images. These carved images, she adds, depicted an incipient naturalism that would develop at a later stage into the Tang dynasty's realistic and worldly sculpture.
