Page 278 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

Edo artists began seriously to render the effects of weather (Hiroshige, cats. 149,184), clouds (Hokusai,
cat. 171), sky (Kôkan, cat. 186), time of day (Hiroshige, cats. 179,181; Hokusai, cat. 176), the play of light
across form (Naotake, cats. 187,188), and even fleeting visual phenomena like fireworks (Hiroshige,
cat. 147). It was as if they began seriously to use their own eyes for the first time. Thus Naotake's Shino-
bazu Pond (cat. 188), with its bizarre oversized flowers modeled in light and shade, becomes less dis-
turbing when we realize that the subject of the picture is not so much Shinobazu Pond itself as the
superiority of the gaze that takes in the fall of light and records it. Even traditional schema such as
Watanabe Shikô's Flowers and Trees of the Four Seasons (cat. 162) are given new immediacy as a result of
this emphasis on mimesis, based on seeing, understanding, and transcribing form. The real is even put

to the service of the visionary (the surreal), as in Nagasawa Rosetsu's Mount Fuji and Cranes (cat. 158). 277
Naotake's Shinobazu Pond may not resemble Taiga's Wondrous Scenery o/Mutsu and True View of
Kojima Bay (cats. 164,166), but the two artists, along with many others, share the endeavor to create
the effects of light playing on form. Maruyama Ôshin and Maruyama Okyo (cats. 189,190) are engaged
with resolving the tension between the character of the East Asian brush — an instrument designed
first and foremost to deliver line, which they augmented with the use of a nontraditional flat brush
(hake) — and the modeling of form, which is undercut by outline. Here is the classic case of Heinrich
Wolfflin's "linear" versus "painterly."
It is no coincidence that during the Edo period numerous optical devices — telescopes, micro-
scopes, zograscopes, peep shows, and eyeglasses — became the rage. By the late Edo period western
46
photography was known in Japan. These instruments, too, fueled the revolution, not only in seeing,
but in the radical shift of episteme to which it was linked. As one Edo-period thinker mused, "The
microscope exceeds even the Buddha's eyes." 47
An immediate legacy of these transformers of the action of looking (and the concomitant
redefinition of humanity's place in the universe) is the new emphasis on the panorama, the endeavor
to convey the limitlessness of physical space within a finite picture space. Infinity is nowhere so