A friend of mine recently sent me a postcard from her holiday in Japan with a beautiful painting of the Madonna and Child. This is a large mural painted in Osaka Cathedral by the Japanese artist Insho Domoto (1891-1975), which I present here for your enjoyment.
A number of things strike me about the way in which the artist has painted this. There are a couple of things that are consistent with the traditional Christian iconographic style, which, I presume, come from his training in the traditional Japanese style. First is the use of gold leaf for the background, and the second is his use of line, predominantly to describe form. This helps to imbue the image with an otherworldly quality, similar to iconography. It is interesting to note that this is the only painting of a Christian subject that I have been able to find painted by him. He has created numerous works for Buddhist temples, and here is another example of his figurative art, titled “Peasant Woman with Brushwood Bundle.” It seems that his natural style is inadvertently suited to Christian sacred art.
It is worth noting that the artist has portrayed the figures, including Our Lady and Our Lord, as ethnically Japanese. Every artist, when painting such a subject, faces a choice. He can portray them to look like most of the people who will see it, so that they identify with the subject; or he can try to portray them as Jewish people who lived in Israel 2,000 years ago would have looked.
The Christian tradition, ever since Christian art has been produced, has conformed to this principle, and Christ is always portrayed according to one of these ethnic groups - that is, of the local ethnicity, wherever that may be, or that of a Middle Easterner. It is a myth propagated by contemporary Marxist ideologues that says pictures of Christ are dominated by images of him as a northern European for reasons of patriarchal domination. Any review of the tradition will demonstrate that this is patently not true. I wrote about this at length here in my blog some years ago.
