Page 13 - Designing_Nature_The_Rinpa_Aesthetic_in_Japanese_Art Metropolitan Museum PUB

Fig. 1 attributed to tosa Mitsunobu (1434 – 1525). Bamboo in the Four Seasons, Creating a genealogy of rinpa Masters
Muromachi period (1392 – 1573), 16th century. pair of six-panel folding The Rinpa aesthetic, traditionally seen to have arisen in
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screens; ink and color on gilt paper, each screen 61 /16 in. ∞ 9 ft. 9 /4 in.
(157 ∞ 360 cm). the Metropolitan Museum of art, new york; the harry g. C. the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, should
packard Collection of asian art, gift of harry g. C. packard, and purchase, in fact be traced back much further, to the very roots of
fletcher, rogers, harris Brisbane dick, and Louis V. Bell funds, Joseph
pulitzer Bequest, and the annenberg fund inc. gift, 1975 (1975.268.44, .45) yamato-e (“Japanese-style painting” ) in the Heian period,
a broader category of art from which Rinpa, even in its
basis for a conscious revival or “renaissance,” as has often later manifestations, cannot be disentangled. The highly

been proposed. Instead, the literary themes borrowed from stylized representation of landscape in early medieval Japa-
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the Heian period, which proved so crucial to the origins of nese paintings, for instance, can be seen as anticipations of
the Rinpa aesthetic in the seventeenth century, became a Rinpa. The artificial rounding of hills, flattening of natural
foil for artists, who played off them — sometimes whim- forms, stylized bands of mist or clouds, and the extravagant

sically, sometimes paro di cally — but always with the application of gold, silver, and mineral pigments — not to
utmost refinement. Thus, although the poem or tale often mention the more obviously germane representations of
became an excuse for Rinpa artists to indulge in tour de flowering trees and plants in dreamlike settings — all under-
force brushwork, we discover that the flowers, trees, and lie what we refer to today as the “Rinpa aesthetic.”

other motifs they favored, even when stripped of all out- The Kyoto-based artist Tawaraya Sōtatsu (d. ca. 1640)
ward references to ancient Japanese literature, have a sense is now accorded a central place in the Rinpa canon, yet
of poetry at their core. Sōtatsu’s career as well as his oeuvre were basically
a history of rinpa

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