Page 372 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

fering was widespread; attempts to locate its The screens are housed within Taima-dera, ing are joined with didactic and talismanic features
meaning within a larger cosmological explanation, the Nara temple that gave its name to the icon of religious iconography in a slightly awkward
and fascination with its accurate and imaginative depicted in the left-hand screen. The original but pleasing manner. The religious mode is a
visual rendering led to the production of a wide tapestry Taima Mandara was likely a product subordinate element in the overall depiction.
range of Rokudo images. of eighth-century China, imported to Japan; j.u.
Although hell and heaven begin and end these a twelfth-century Japanese text offers 763 as its
horizontally read screens, the fulcrum, the date of arrival. By the Kamakura period the image
dominant and linking space of the total screen was in grave disrepair, and remnants of the textile
composition, is reserved for depiction of the were appended to a newly painted version. It 214
human realm. Human suffering is acknowledged was from this period that numerous copies were
in the form of a graphically represented battle commissioned. PORTRAIT OF ASHIKAGA YOSHIMASA
scene in the fourth and fifth panels of the right- In addition to the vision of paradise occupying (1436-1490)
hand screen, but far more space is given to the the mandala's center, border registers depict the
productive, pleasurable, and optimistic activities legend of the Indian queen Vaidehi, who was late i$th century
of humankind. Vignettes of commerce, planting instructed by the compassionate Sakyamuni in the Japanese leaf on silk
hanging scroll; ink, color, and gold
and harvest, and a variety of recreational pursuits sixteen stages of contemplation leading to rebirth. 3
present a world rather at ease with itself. The The final three stages of contemplation, each 44.2 x 56 (iy /s x 22)
Washington 1988-1989, 60, 61
reference:
religious visions of ultimate suffering and paradi- subdivided into three grades, represent the nine
siacal reward are rendered in markedly archaistic grades of Amida's Paradise, in which (according Tokyo National Museum
fashion, which vitiates their intensity. to one's virtue) one might be reborn. Prominent
Discrete episodes within the overall work are copies of the Taima Mandara include the version This modest portrait catches something of the
generally enclosed by hillocks and mountains housed at Zenrin-ji, Kyoto, dated to the fifth shogun's predominating aestheticism, and seems
or by cloud bands rendered in the "spearhead" year of Kempo (1217), popularly designated the to hint at his attenuated authority, but it is almost
(suyari) style. Gold and silver cut foil and Kempo-bon, and a much later version, the Bunki- more engrossing for what it does not show.
sprinkled metallic powder elaborately embellish bon, named for its presumed creation in the An intelligent and versatile man, Yoshimasa
the painting. Pairs of poetry sheets (shikishi) in Bunki reign-era (1501-1504). This latter version as shogun was nevertheless helpless against
each of the screen panels are also an archaizing was commissioned by the emperor Go-Kashiwa- accelerating economic, social, and political disinte-
gesture. These bear quotations from Genshin's bara and was kept at Taima-dera. Stylistic simi- gration. In 1473, while his capital city of Kyoto
Ojo Yoshu and from several of the prominent larities between the Bunki version and the was being devastated by the Onin War (1467-
imperial poetry anthologies compiled in the rendering of the mandala in these screen paint- 1477), he resigned his office and retired to his
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. All of these ings lend some support to an early fifteenth- estate below the Eastern Hills (Higashiyama) in
devices create a decorative effect quite at odds century dating for the screens. northeastern Kyoto. Thenceforth he exercised
with the implacable concept of the Ten Realms of Several diverse intentions and styles seem to only enough authority to control his estate and to
Reincarnation, which is the ostensible theme of meet in these screens. The figure painting is finance his aesthetic pursuits: forming a distin-
the screens. skilled. The celebratory qualities of genre paint- guished collection of Chinese paintings, lacquers,

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