Page 45 - Designing_Nature_The_Rinpa_Aesthetic_in_Japanese_Art Metropolitan Museum PUB

deluxe, typeset printed versions, and by midcentury a veritable publishing revolu-
tion witnessed the classic stories and tales of Japanese literature becoming avail-
able for the first time in relatively affordable editions. As a result, familiarity with

the classics and the ability to compose poetry and brush calligraphy became de
rigueur among a much wider stratum of Japanese society. Well-educated artists and
their clientele would have been gene rally familiar with the plots and casts of charac-

ters from the more famous tales, and an iconography began to coalesce for certain
well-known episodes.
As favorite scenes from these stories became visual shorthand for entire chap-
ters, artists of various schools experimented with ways to overcome convention
and hackneyed expression. Among those taking traditional themes and forms and

reshaping them was Tawaraya Sōtatsu and his studio, who turned familiar scenes
into abstracted tableaux by mining and distilling narrative content. Although this
was also the modus operandi of the Tosa school — court artists, from the fifteenth

century on, who meticulously rendered palace interiors and elegant garments — by
the Momoyama period (1573 – 1615) the Tosa aesthetic had come to be seen as precious
and overly punctilious, reflecting the sensibilities of the school’s patrons. For
artists in the Rinpa lineage, the narrative story was never an end unto itself but,
rather, an excuse to reformulate landscape or garden settings, reflecting the Sōtatsu

studio’s preoccupation with the representation of natural forms. An awareness
of the narrative substrate to these works deepens our experience of them, but the
tales themselves were not the primary source of artistic motivation.

Two works of traditional literature in particular became grist for Rinpa artists
through the ages: The Ise Stories (Ise monogatari) and The Tale of Genji (Genji
monogatari). Unlike Genji, which employs a unified narrative, The Ise Stories is a
randomly connected series of prose vignettes interspersed with poems. The unnamed
protagonist is associated with the courtier-poet Ariwara no Narihira, whose sur-

viving corpus of poems dates from the mid- to late ninth century. The imagery of
each chapter of The Ise Stories became codified in the early seventeeth century
with the publication of the deluxe, privately printed editions known as Saga-bon,

which were created using a wooden type whose design — almost miraculously —
replicates the flowing effect of the calligrapher’s brush.
One of the greatest surviving works by Sōtatsu and his studio is a set of shikishi
(poem cards) decorated with scenes from The Ise Stories, each accompanied by
tales

44