Sacred Mountains 2

An early plate in the Sacred Mountains series, dated to a period when Hiroshima was establishing the long-form cycle that he would still be extending more than a decade later. The numbering — second of what would become at least ten — suggests the series was conceived as an open-ended meditation on Japan's reijin rather than a fixed set, in keeping with the older meisho-e tradition of returning to the same peaks across many prints and many years. Worked in monochrome mezzotint, the image relies on the tonal vocabulary of the medium: a fully rocked plate rendered velvety black, then burnished back to recover the silhouettes of summit, tree line, and sky. Where the woodblock landscape print communicates through outline and flat color, Hiroshima's intaglio approach closes the distance between the mountain and atmospheric weight, the subject feeling embedded in rather than placed on the sheet.