The Virgin Mary of Glory, A 20th-Century Ethnically Japanese Madonna and Child

A friend of mine recently sent me a postcard from her holiday in Japan with a beautiful painting of a Madonna and Child, which is in Osaka Cathedral. It is a large mural painted by the Japanese artist Insho Domoto (1891-1975). I present the image here for your enjoyment.

And with some details:

This is painted in a traditional Japanese style, and I am told that, over time, the gold leaf will flake off, revealing the red bole beneath. It is deliberately created in this way.

I asked Lauren Spohn, who is one of Scala Foundation’s Artistic Fellows, and who gave me the postcard originally, about the secondary figures in the painting. She had just returned from Japan, where she made a film about Takayama Ukon (which will be released soon). Ukon is one of these figures. She told me:

“The one on the left is Bld Justo Takayama Ukon, the subject of our documentary, a 16th-century samurai warlord and one of the most influential converts to the faith during the Sengoku Era. He was exiled to Manlia for refusing to recant his faith after the Christians were persecuted at the beginning of the 17^th century. The second figure is Hosokawa Gracia, a noble Japanese lady whose husband studied the tea ceremony alongside Ukon. Gracia learned of Ukon through her husband and eventually converted to the faith. When the family castle fell under attack during the civil wars, she refused to commit ritual suicide. She was finally beheaded by an honour killing, making her a kind of (deeply Japanese!) martyr.

Their stories are detailed by a Jesuit Japanese historian here, if you'd like to read more: https://archive.org/details/twojapanesechris0000laur/mode/2up “

Several aspects stand out to me about how the artist has painted this. First, 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 would have looked like who lived in Israel 2,000 years ago.

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, the local ethnicity, wherever that may be, or that of a Middle Easterner. It is a myth propagated by contemporary and perochial Marxist ideologues from Western Europe and the USA, that says images of Christ in the tradition are predominantly 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 (on reflection, I will post this again on Substack next time as it probably bears repetition).