100 scenes
I'm back! Properly! Sorry for the delay, I was going into business for myself. Hopefully this marks a return to regular posting. Here's what I have for you today: 100 Life Scenes in Classical Painting, a site created by picture scroll (emaki 絵巻) specialist X. Jie Yang 楊暁捷. To quote the site's introduction (in full):
Classical Japanese documents include a large number of visual materials such as picture scrolls. These treasured materials are abundant with rich information about these ancient periods in which recorded media was extremely limited. Here I have chosen vivid life scenes from those classical documents. All of the scenes are from titles which have been digitized and are publicly available online. Each scene has been retouched in a sketch style, and links to the original sources have been included.
Example: "Repairing, roof".
My kneejerk reaction was of course to frown at the "retouch[ing] in a sketch style" as unnecessary interference with the material, but it does lend a certain visual consistency to the site, and of course there's always the "links to the original sources" for those who prefer their art more beat-up and motheaten.
Yang's homepage also links to other interesting material, like his picture scroll blog Emaki zanmai 絵巻三昧 ("Absorbed in picture scrolls") and the journal article Emaki no bunpo josetsu 絵巻の文法序説 ("A Grammar of Medieval Picture Scrolls") (both in Japanese).
leoboiko:
This is wonderful. Accident, horse! The manga trope, peek! Playing with a monkey! Commit to flames� Meta picture!