Widows, monks, magistrates, and concubines: Social dimensions of sixth-century Buddhist art patronage

This study focuses on the human figures depicted as worshippers or venerators on Buddhist votive sculptures produced in the Henan-Hebei-Shanxi region of China in the later Northern Dynasties period (495--577 CE). These worshipping images are an important source for the study of both the devotional practices of contemporary Buddhism and the social significance of Buddhist art patronage in the Northern Dynasties. This was a period in which the conquest of Northern China by non-Chinese regimes led to the destabilization of some traditional Chinese social structures and the introduction of non-Chinese customs and practices. Because of this, various forms of social identity such as class, ethnicity, family status, and gender were renegotiated in Northern China during this period of political division. This series of case studies of individual Buddhist art patrons focuses on the ways in which the patrons' identity is represented in worshipper figures as compared to other biographical sources of the time, in order to understand the ways in which the patrons represented themselves in a public religious context.; Lady Yuchi, the wife of a Xianbei elder statesman, used the images of herself and her husband and son in a niche she dedicated in 495 to give herself primacy within a nuclear family of sorts, despite the fact that she was actually subordinate in status to her husband's primary wife. The cave temple of Gaomiaoshan functioned as a representation of the collective fortunes of its patrons, the Chen family, during the Eastern Wei, and of the complex relationships of seniority within the extended family. Zhang Yuanfei, the patron of the Shuiyusi cave temple, chose to appear as a nearly anonymous member of a group of patrons in one context and as an individual patron in another context within the same site. And the imperial patron of the Binyang Central Cave chose to be represented in the cave not by his own image, but by the image of his father, in whose honor the cave was dedicated.