Page 16 - Designing_Nature_The_Rinpa_Aesthetic_in_Japanese_Art Metropolitan Museum PUB

is the serial repetition of patterned elements, from flowers poems: cherry blossoms can glisten beneath an autumn
and grasses to stylized animal motifs. Such repetitions verse; cranes can flock behind a requiem of love.
can often be discerned in the long handscroll format, and Kōetsu responded with obvious élan to the Sōtatsu

part of the enjoyment of such works is in observing how studio’s decorated handscrolls and shikishi he was pre-
such individual elements are reconstituted into different sented to write upon. His fluid strands of ink, set against
configurations. the sumptuous designs and commodious expanses of
Among the shikishi in the collection of the Metropolitan blank space, tease the viewer into a relaxed rhythm of

Museum believed to have been decorated by the Sōtatsu reading the written forms, while the minimalist graphs of
studio are those that feature individual poems by Hon’ami kana (Japanese phonetic characters) merge effortlessly with
Kōetsu (1558 – 1637) and Shōkadō Shōjō (1584? – 1639), two of more complex kanji (Chinese characters used semanti-
the most prominent calligraphers of the age (see cats. 10, 12, cally). In addition, the artful arrangement of both long and

13). other works thought to be from the Sōtatsu studio short columns offers one of the most successful displays of
include two examples of sections from longer handscrolls chirashi gaki, or “scattered writing” — a calligraphic tech-
(now remounted as hanging scrolls), one stenciled or hand- nique in which the characters in the lines of a poem are
stamped with designs of butterflies and grasses and the “scattered” across the page in columns of varying length that

other hand-painted with lotus leaves (cats. 75, 76). Although ignore prosodic structure — since the late Heian period.
no surviving document mentions any collaborative arrange- The desired effect of chirashigaki is to create an attractive
ment between Kōetsu and Sōtatsu, clearly the two artists composition that imposes a new pace and rhythm of read-
must have enjoyed a close rapport, and they would have ing the poem while allowing the calligrapher to accent par-

traveled in the same social circles. Indeed, Kōetsu’s success ticular characters. Sometimes the lines of a famous poem are
as a calligrapher was only furthered by Sōtatsu’s remark- even transcribed out of sequence, so that the reader has to
able decorated papers, many splashed with gold and silver puzzle over how to reconstruct its meaning (see, e.g., cat. 9).
in a joyful exuberance of wealth and artistic license.

Regrettably, many of the motifs originally printed in paintings for The Ise Stories
silver pigment on these works have oxidized to the extent Sōtatsu and his studio cooperated on pictorial shikishi
that they are now as dark as the superscribed text, making it compositions with numerous calligraphers, many of
hard to discern the calligraphy: neither a desired nor an whom, like Kōetsu and Shōkadō Shōjō, experimented in

anticipated effect when they were first created. It is diffi- chirashi gaki. Perhaps the most delightful surviving examples
cult, for example, to make out the poem on an early work are paintings made by the Sōtatsu studio to illustrate The
in the Metropolitan’s collection dated to the auspicious date Ise Stories (Ise monogatari), a tenth-century narrative tale
of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh recounting the travels and travails of an unnamed protago-

year of the Keichō era (1606) (cat. 10). It bears remember- nist (“this man”), whose fictional persona is based on the life designing nature
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ing, however, that the background motifs rarely have any and literary output of the courtier-poet Ariwara no narihira
semantic or symbolic connection to the content of the (825 – 880), scion of an imperial prince. The narrative is
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