The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced the acquisition of two rare and acclaimed wooden sculptures from medieval Japan: an image of the compassionate Buddhist deity Jizo, among only three extant works by the thirteenth-century sculptor Intan, and a representation of a female deity associated with the Shinto faith. Intan’s sculpture of Jizō, a widely worshipped guide of suffering souls imagined as an itinerant monk, is currently on view in the exhibition Anxiety and Hope in…