ABSTRACT
In the sixteenth century, pictures and sculptures of the Virgin Mary arrived in China and Japan through European missionaries. There, the Virgin engaged in a dialogue with the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (the Chinese Guanyin, and the Japanese Kannon): a Buddhist deity with the capacity of mutating, not only within their own religious milieu, but also within a framework of sacred representations and devotional languages across different religions. As such an encounter is usually explored through Catholic historiography, the present study proposes a novel trajectory by focusing on Chinese iconotropic variances of Avalokiteśvara in relation to the Virgin Mary; sixteenth-century Italian dialogues with the Bodhisattva; and the Japanese mythological tradition as framework for the early-modern reception of the Virgin, especially after the ban of the Catholic religion. The final aim of this study is to discuss how the encounter of diverse iconographies and their devotions triggered processes of cultural adaptation, erasure, and translation.
