Focus on Manichaean Painting of the Buddha Jesus and explore the Analysis.
The painting was identified earlier by the Japanese art historian Takeo Izumi as a Yuan dynasty Christian work of art. Zsuzsanna Gulácsi notes that the highly sinicised character of this painting weakens this idea, "since Nestorian Christianity in China maintained a foreign identity and produced art with relatively small degree of integration compared to the arts of other originally foreign but later fully integrated religions, such as Buddhism and Manichaeism."
After studying and comparing the scroll with a number of Buddhist, Church of the East Christian and Manichaean works of art, Gulácsi concluded in her article A Manichaean Portrait of the Buddha Jesus: Identifying a Twelfth-Thirteenth-century Chinese Painting from the Collection of Seiun-ji Zen Temple, that the painting is a Manichaean work of art: Despite the fact that it features a figure seated on a lotus pedestal with a cross statuette in his left hand, this painting is neither a Buddhist nor a Christian work of art for three reasons: first, it can be linked with contemporaneous Chinese textual and visual sources that support its creation and used in a Manichaean context; second, it displays iconographic and compositional continuity with earlier Manichaean art; and third, it depicts a Manichaean subject (the prophet Jesus) with symbols that allude to two fundamental Manichaean teachings (Dualism and the Cross of Light) that are well documented throughout the history of this religion. Based on a contemporaneous inventory of paintings in the possession of a Manichaean temple in Wenzhou, this hanging scroll may be titled Yishu fo zhen (Silk Painting of the Buddha ["Prophet"] Jesus). Its attribution and identification help us to confirm that the Jesus subject had a long history in Manichaean devotional art, which now can be seen through two fragments from East Central Asia and a third, exquisitely well preserved, from southern China.
Buddhist Takeo Izumi Chinese East Central Asia Nestorian Christianity Christian Japanese Zsuzsanna Gulácsi Manichaean art Dualism Manichaeism hanging scroll left Church of the East sinicised Yuan dynasty Wenzhou