Page 43 - Designing_Nature_The_Rinpa_Aesthetic_in_Japanese_Art Metropolitan Museum PUB

The emergence of the Rinpa aesthetic in early seventeenth-
century Japan was inspired in part by a renewed encounter with ancient romances
and poetry created more than seven centuries earlier, during the Heian period

(794 – 1185). The elite of Kyoto society had always looked back fondly on the era of
the Heian court as a golden age of peace and refined culture. By the dawn of the
Edo period (1615 – 1868), as residents of the capital began to breathe more easily

after a century of civil war, economic struggle, and social turmoil, there was wide-
spread fascination with traditional Japanese literary arts among not only the courtier
class but nouveau riche merchants and the military elite as well. What we now
recognize as Rinpa sensibilities budded and flourished amid this atmosphere of
nostalgia for an idealized past.

Manuscript copies of the most famous courtly tales, including lavish illus-
trated versions, had been passed down within wealthy courtier or warrior fami-
lies for generations. As such they remained the preserve of the privileged elite, as

they had been when they were first created. This changed during the early Edo
period with the emergence in Kyoto of the newly wealthy merchant class (machishū),
TALES who aspired to trappings of culture previously out of reach. At the outset of the

seventeenth century, accordingly, there was an attempt to publish the classics in

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