workshops of Buddhist temples; Buddhist imagery is similarly very precise, suggesting that the author of the scrolls was also familiar with the religious world. Thus, the work can be attributed to a professional court painter as well as to a Buddhist painter, without it being possible to distinguish between the two worlds. This difficulty of attribution is not surprising insofar as, at the end of the Heian period, the activity of court and temple painters largely overlapped. As for the sponsor, also unknown, a working hypothesis considers him to have belonged to the learned circles of the court, for example the Fujiwara clan or the Emperor Go-Shirakawa, because of the diversity of the motifs represented. The goal of the sponsor was perhaps to promote the worship of as well as the monastic lifestyle of the Nara era as practiced by , amid religious controversy between several rival Buddhist schools towards the end of the 12th century. Style and composition The pictorial style of the falls within the movement, which predominated in Japanese painting in the Heian and Kamakura periods (1185–1333). More precisely, the style is part of a sub-genre of called (lit. "painting of a man"). The style is characterised by the depiction of the life of the people outside the palace and the staging of historical and epic events, as opposed to the intimate and romanticised about life in the palace. of the genre emphasize dynamic images rather than text. Thus, the composition of the (known as continuous composition) is based on long paintings, in which several scenes follow one another without a clear break, creating an impression of dynamism. The transitions between scenes are cleverly integrated into the composition, and allow variation of the rhythm, in particular thanks to close-ups, or the insertion of calm landscapes and mists. Often, the painters of are led to distort the time span of the story, due to constraints linked to the format of the scrolls, which impose the progressive discovery of paintings limited in height. First, the painter can spread a single narrative moment over several scenes of the scroll, to create suspense, an epic story or simply the passing of time. For example, the arrival of at the palace in the second scroll of the is represented by a long painting providing an effect of suspense as to the rest of the story, while the long landscapes flown over by