Lost Treasures

The most ancient wooden building in the world, the 1,300-year-old Golden Hall of Japan's Horyuji Monastery, is unheated and wretchedly uncomfortable in cold weather. So when government painters worked through the winter to copy the shrine's twelve famous murals of the Buddhas and their disciples, the foresighted brought along a few electric heating pads to sit on. One evening a fortnight ago, one of the artists forgot to flip the switch before he left. Next morning, a party of schoolchildren on their way to visit the shrine saw clouds of smoke billowing from the temple's gracefully curved old roof.

By the time the fire was out, eleven of the twelve murals, the works of an unknown artist of the 8th Century, had been baked to oblivion. The rich reds and greens of the originals, which the loving care of generations of monks (and recent injections of acrylic resin) had helped preserve, were gone; the delicately-draped Buddhas and elegant Bodhisattvas were only faint black outlines on the smoke-smirched plaster.

To Japanese, the Golden Hall with its Buddhas has been as important a national shrine as Mount Vernon to Americans. In Tokyo the Minister of Education, Yasumaro Shimojo, was so distressed (even though the hall itself could be restored) that he offered to resign. In Cambridge, Mass., where last week Fogg Museum officials hung twelve full-scale photographs of the murals to show the public what had been destroyed, Oriental art experts glumly compared the artistic loss to what the Western art world would lose in a fire in the Sistine Chapel.

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