Slade Lectures 2027
Slade Lectures 2027 | Core Concepts of Jaina Art: Visuality and the Jaina Tradition in India and the Diaspora
Image credit: Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Cosmic Complexity: The Jaina Religious Universe in Art and Architecture
Prof. Dr. Julia A.B. Hegewald
5pm Wednesday 3 February 2027
Auditorium, St John's College, University of Oxford
(Free Admission)
This lecture focuses on the highly complex nature of perceptions of the Jaina religious cosmos. As a correct understanding of the shape and disposition of the universe—and the way humans may be able to find a way out of it—is necessary to gain salvation, Jainas consider cosmology a soteriological issue. They venerate painted, sculptural and built representations of their universe in private shrines and public temple contexts. Jaina believers describe their cosmos as consisting of three levels: an underworld with superimposed layers of hells, an exceedingly complex middle world, in parts of which humans and animals live, and an upper section of different heavenly regions. In the middle world, for instance, we encounter countless ring-shaped island continents, cosmic oceans and sacred mountains as well as numerous duplicates of certain elements. By examining the enormous complexity of artistic depictions of Jaina cosmography, we start to see how important the issues of hierarchical structuring, symmetry, order and repetition are. An associated exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum on Jaina art shows examples of cosmic depictions.
Julia A.B. Hegewald is Professor of Oriental Art History and Head of the Department of Asian and Islamic Art History at the University of Bonn. She was a Research Fellow at University College Oxford (1998-2005), Head of an Emmy-Noether-Research Group (German Research Foundation, DFG, 2005-2014) and Reader in Non-Western Art History at Manchester University (2007-2010). Since taking up the Chair in Oriental Art History at Bonn in 2010, Julia Hegewald has been active in a number of international research initiatives. Amongst the most recent are the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS, 2018-2025, 2026-2032), the ERC Synergy Grant Mantrams and the ERC Consolidator Grant ID-Scapes. She has published widely on the art and architecture of the Jaina community in India, most notably Jaina Temple Architecture in India: The Development of a Distinct Language in Space and Ritual (2009, 2018, 2024). In recent years, she has engaged intensively with the Digambara Jaina tradition in the south Indian state of Karnataka, with a number of publications, including The Jaina Heritage: Distinction, Decline and Resilience (2011), Jaina Tradition of the Deccan: Shravanabelagola, Mudabidri, Karkala (2021), Jaina Culture in Medieval Karnataka: Dominance, Dependency and Endurance (2025) and Jainism under Threat: Extreme Forms of Dependency in Medieval Karnataka, South India (2026).
