Page 314 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

About 1492 the Kano school, official painters
to the shoguns, was being established by Kano
Masanobu (1434-1530) and his son Motonobu
(1476-1559). The distinctive Kano style and
repertoire mingled Zen themes and Chinese ink
monochrome techniques with decorative
yamato-e styles in works that appealed strongly
to warriors as well as courtiers (cat. 222, 223,
236). At the same time painters of the Tosa
school, especially Mitsunobu (act. 1469-1521)
and Hirochika (i5th century), were reviving
Japanese style painting (yamato-e) and finding
patrons in the imperial and shogunal courts and
the upper ranks of warrior society. 20
For any visitor to Japan in 1492 one of the
most striking cultural phenomena would surely
have been the passion for Tea Ceremony (Cha
no yu) and the aesthetic refinement surround-
ing it. This was a critical period in the develop-
ment of Cha no yu. Merchants from Kyoto,
Sakai, and Nara were replacing Zen monks as
the arbiters of Tea taste, the tea room was
changing from a large audience chamber
(kaisho) to a small hut, Japanese ceramics from
kilns like Bizen and Shigaraki were becoming at
least as popular as Chinese utensils, and the
aesthetic of refined austerity known as wabi,
which would be fully articulated by Sen no
Rikyu in the late sixteenth century, was already
being formulated. The great Tea master of the
age was Murata Shuko (or Juko, d. 1502), a Nara
merchant who is reputed to have studied with
Ikkyu. Shuko was a transitional figure in the
development of Cha no yu. He is believed to
have favored the use of the small four-and-a-
half mat tea room as the proper setting for Tea
and to have deepened the aesthetic by drawing
more heavily on Zen ideas of emptiness,
restraint, and austerity (wabi).
fig. 3. View of the garden of the Daisen-in, Daitoku- ji, Kyoto A receptive Western visitor to Japan in 1492,
then, would have found much to interest him,
and much to compare with the Europe he knew.
Though disappointed of the royal palace roofed
following the lead of his father Kan'ami, trans- scale. Kyogen pieces, farcical or satirical, served and floored with gold, as promised by Marco
formed No from a strolling entertainment into as foils to the elevated, lyrical No, and were Polo, he would have seen other wonders. Even
a refined dramatic art whose beauty consisted in often presented as interludes in a sequence of without gold the castles and palaces of the
"depth and mystery" (yugen) coupled with No plays. shogun, emperor, and powerful feudal lords
"rusticity" (sabi, implying a solitude tinged Fifteenth-century painting saw several were impressively grand, and held works of art
with desolation or deprivation). important developments. Ink monochrome in which gold was used as elegantly as any-
Zeami enjoyed the patronage of Ashikaga painting (suibokuga), stimulated by acquain- where in Europe. The visitor could have told of
Yoshimitsu but fell from favor under the tance with Chinese monochrome landscape earthquakes and volcanoes, of verdant, heavily
shogun Yoshinori. His work was continued and painting, was carried to a high level of strength wooded islands producing an abundance of rice,
enlarged on by his son-in-law Komparu Zen- and subtlety. silk, and other crops. Europeans would have
chiku (b. c. 1405), who knew Ikkyu and Ikkyu's Although admitting a debt to the Chinese been impressed by reports of the markets and of
successor Sogen and added new depths to No masters, Sesshu (1420-1506) developed his own vigorous domestic and foreign trade, and by the
drama by a further infusion of Buddhist ideas of powerful individual styles and a wide range of diligence of farmers who made the most of their
emptiness and the Buddha-nature of all things. subject matter. He was a master of "splashed small fields.
Kyogen (mad words), which developed along ink" (hatsuboku), monochrome landscape, bird- A truthful observer would surely have
with No, was an earthier dramatic form, paro- and-flower painting, and Zen style portraiture reported that although Japan was politically
dying human foibles all up and down the social and thematic painting. fragmented, it would not be an easy country to

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