Page 63 - JAPAN THE SHAPING OFDAIMYO CULTURE 1185-1868

priest. When Osen Keisan (1429-1493), a scholar-monk, visited Shigeyuki,
the aging warrior told the monk that he wished to show him a landscape
that he himself had painted on his recent trip to Kumano and other
scenic spots on the Kii peninsula. When the scroll was opened there was
nothing but a blank sheet of paper. The monk, struck by the emptiness
of the painting, offered these words of praise:
Your brush is as tall as the Mount Sumeru
[cosmic mountain in Buddhism]
Black ink large enough to exhaust the great earth;
The white paper as vast as the void that swallows up all illusions.

For a daimyo to outwit a Zen monk, as Hosokawa Shigeyuki did,
or to join a literary salon, as other Muromachi-period warriors did, was to
partake of a private experience. By the second half of the sixteenth
century, however, the artistic activities of warriors began to take on
public character. Especially when warrior patrons employed painters to
decorate their houses, the paintings were meant to be displayed in a large
room that had a social, public function. From the second half of the
sixteenth century through the early part of the seventeenth, professional
painters' ateliers emerged independent of establishments such as the
Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines; in order to meet effectively the
needs of different clients that included a growing number of warrior
families. Foremost among the ateliers was that of the Kano, who were
employed by military hegemons such as Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi
Hideyoshi to decorate the interiors of their mansions and castles, as well
as the Buddhist temples they patronized. This period, called the Momo -
yama, saw a turning point in Japanese history, away from the medieval to
the pre-modern age. The art of the Momoyama period eloquently illus-
trates this transition.
Throughout Japan, the second half of the sixteenth century was
marked by a great surge of construction, as warriors built fortified castles.
Few castles survive from the sixteenth century, known as the Age of the
Wars, and the interior paintings also were destroyed. Castles still extant
are mostly from the Edo period. Sliding door panels from Nijó Castle in
Kyoto (cat. 125) and from Nagoya Castle (cats. 126,127) are included in the
exhibition, but they are about a generation or two later than typical
Momoyama sliding doors.
Two important sixteenth-century castles that were destroyed
were Azuchi Castle on Lake Biwa, to the east of Kyoto, and Fushimi
Castle, to the southeast of Kyoto. Azuchi Castle was built in 1576 for Oda
Nobunaga, and Fushimi Castle in 1594 for Nobunaga's trusted vassal
Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598). The two men brought military leader-
ship and political unification to Japan during the second half of the
sixteenth century, and also were the major patrons of painting. In 1576,
Nobunaga ordered his vassal Akechi Mitsuhide (d. 1582), the man who
would kill Nobunaga six years later, to superintend the construction at
Azuchi. A detailed description of the building and decoration campaigns
was recorded by a chronicler who compiled Nobunaga's biography. The
lengthy description of the paintings distributed throughout the castle
includes mention, in the seven-story-high central structure, of numerous
paintings by Kano Eitoku (1543-1590), his son Mitsunobu (c. 1565-1608),
and their assistants.
Kano Eitoku was the fourth-generation head of the Kano family
of professional painters. Since the late fifteenth century the family had
served powerful patrons, including the Ashikaga shoguns. Masanobu,
(1434-1530) the founder, painted for Ashikaga Yoshimasa, and was em-
ployed in exclusive service by the shogunate. The Kano painters special-
ized in what their contemporaries called "Chinese mode" painting.
Motonobu, Eitoku's grandfather and the son of Masanobu, was the
champion of this tradition during the first half of the sixteenth century.

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