JAPANESE APPLIED ART
the domain of deities and demigods are exceedingly few, and the excellence of those that exist render this paucity the more regrettable.
Portrait statues, in the Roman sense of the term, do not seem to have suggested themselves to the Japanese sculptor. He chiselled a few likeness effigies of celebrated personages—founders of sects or temples, renowned warriors and great administrators—and some of this work shows the suggestiveness that distinguishes refined sculpture from mere accuracy of imitation. But the likeness effigy was not for the purpose of setting up in public. It was hidden away in a mausoleum or a shrine.[1]
From the fourteenth century a strong tendency to substitute elaboration for idealism made itself apparent. The sculptor, while preserving something of the serenity of the Jōchō school, lost the vigour, energy, and austerity of the Unkei ideal, and wasted his strength upon an infinity of ornamentation executed with the utmost delicacy. He reverted also to the graceless dumpiness of the early workers, and sought vainly to compensate this radical fault by such artifices as elongated drapery and innumerable pendants. A fourteenth-century statue of the Eleven-faced Kwannon preserved at a temple in Kyōtō illustrates this depraved style. From the fifteenth century commenced the custom of covering religious statues with lacquer carrying magnificent decoration in gold. Independently of the principal images perpetually exposed to public gaze in temples, there had always been preserved minor statuettes enclosed in shrines called zushi, or butsugan. These shrines and the images they enclosed now became objects of great
- ↑ See Appendix, note 15.
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