Abstract
As a royal temple, the Fengguo Temple has profound historical, artistic, scientific and social values. With a thousand-year history, it is one of the three existing temples of the Liao Dynasty in China. Now there remains the Main Hall with delicate wall paintings and vivid painted sculptures. The research subject of this paper is the painted Bodhisattva sculptures in the Main Hall. The study target is to reveal the craftsmanship and materials of the painted Bodhisattva sculptures. X-ray detection and the ground-penetrating radar were employed to explore the internal structure of the painted sculptures reasonably. Through microscope analysis, X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, X-ray diffractometer, scanning electron microscopy and infrared spectroscopic analysis, the chemical constituents and hierarchical structure of the pigment layer were detected and analyzed. The grain composition and chemical composition of the base layer were presented as well. The research results offer detailed documents for subsequent restoration and pave the way for preventive conservation. Finally, this paper summarized the craftsmanship and materials of painted sculpture works in different periods, so as to explore the development history of the painted sculptures culture.
Highlights
The Fengguo Temple is a Buddhist temple located in Yi County, Liaoning Province, northeast China
Through the in-situ operation, we found that the ground-penetrating radar can only draw preliminary conclusions on the basic composition of the skeleton structures
The analysis results showed that the base layer was directly attached to the wood skeleton (Fig. 4b)
Summary
The Fengguo Temple is a Buddhist temple located in Yi County, Liaoning Province, northeast China. The temple was first built in the ninth year of Kaitai period of the Liao Dynasty (AD 1020) as a royal temple. It grew quite larger during the subsequent centuries. Only two halls, two gates, and a decorative arch survive. The most important surviving building is the Main Hall, which is notable for its wooden structure and the sculptures in it. In 1961, it was declared by the State Council as among the first batch of state priority protected sites. In 2013, the Main Hall was placed on China’s tentative list
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