Jainism and Art
Religion has played an important part in the creation of art since the beginning of time - i.e. several thousand years BCE Egyptian women carved small fertility statues devoted to the gods and of course, there are thousands of famous paintings and sculptures devoted to every theologic entity from Greek gods and goddesses, to Confucious, to Jesus and beyond. However, it is always interesting to learn about new ways art and religion are intertwined.
In the Western World, little is known about Jainism and Jain art - probably because most Jain art is mistakenly identified as Buddhist and because the last major American survey of Jain art was at the LACMA in 1994.

A Jain Sculpture on view at the Rubin Museum of Art in NYC
However, two shows will be on display in New York through early 2010, giving art enthusiasts a unique look at the art of a religion whose followers number nearly five million in India. Together “Victorious Ones: Jain Images of Perfection” at the Rubin Museum of Art and “Peaceful Conquerors: Jain Manuscript Painting” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art provide a detailed examination of the great tradition of Jain art.
As a recent article from the NY Times discusses,
For all its clear-cut ethical thinking, Jainism has a highly contradictory view of the world. On the one hand, it envisions the cosmos as a precision machine, with balanced realms of heaven and hell sandwiching a thin slice of earth, and time measured out in regular and recurrent epochs of bloom and decay.
Yet creatures living in those epochs experience tremendous uncertainty. This is particularly true in periods of disintegration, one of which, by Jain reckoning, we are in now, with no end yet in sight. Violence will continue to grow. Beast will turn on beast. Hell will outweigh heaven. Is there any sound reality to rely on?…
…The story these works tell begins with a prenatal mix-up: the future jina, though expected to be of royal birth, has been conceived by a nonroyal Brahman couple. The error is soon finessed by the miraculous transfer of the fetus to the womb of a Jain queen, an event depicted with wide-eyed, almost comical verve in a tiny 15th-century manuscript painting from western India, long a Jain stronghold.
In other illustrations we see the infant Mahavira born, bathed and coddled. Then, in a flash forward, he’s a bejeweled young sovereign being carried in procession to the edge of a forest. There he strips off his princely gear, plucks out his hair by the roots and, naked or near naked, sets out on a final earthly journey. In a culminating image he stands on the moon, a kind of superman, preaching truth to the cosmos.
To read more about Jainism click here.
To read the entire NY Times article about the Jain exhibitions click here.
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