Introduction

Abstract

Step into a Burmese temple from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries and you are surrounded by a riot of color and imagery. The interior walls and ceilings are completely covered with paintings. You see bright reds and greens if you are in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and reds and a brilliant turquoise from the late eighteenth and into the early nineteenth century. The imagery ranges from guardian figures, protective diagrams, and scenes of hell to textile patterns and representations of Buddhist biography. Large-scale deities and ogres, numerous registers filled with figures, landscape scenery, and buildings, and floral-geometric patterning occupy the space around a Buddha image or images that face east or are set around a central pillar....