In one of his many backpacking trips to Europe in the early 1980s, Nara frequented museums with art historical masterpieces but was also struck by early devotional sculptures, such as the twelfth-century Mother and Child from the Church of Santa Maria de Covet at Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona. Drawn to the Romanesque style in which accentuated facial features reflect strong devotion, he saw an affinity with Buddhist sculptures, where strength of devotion is proportional to the amount of stylistic deformation and presence. These traditions would have a direct impact on the figuration in some of Nara’s first sculptures and paintings, characterized by disproportionately small arms and rounded or tapered feet as in Pray (1991).