Dr. Paride Stortini: The Allure of the Past

Scholarship on religion and visual culture often posits that the birth of modern museums and art historical approaches brought to a secularization and aestheticization of religious art. This might also explain why many scholars of art have explored the intellectual and artistic networks created in the early 20 th century between Japan and India and centering on the encounter between the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore and the Japanese art historian Okakura Kakuzō, but they have not considered the importance of Buddhism in this transnational flow of visual culture. This presentation will trace recent scholarship on modern Buddhism that is shedding light on the role of Buddhist priests and intellectuals in the circulation of visual culture between Japan and South Asia, and will focus on the work of one specific Japanese artist, Nousu Kōsetsu, and on the way his art has been redeployed in modern spaces of Buddhist religious practice in a transnational context.