Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/102

JAPAN in a generally decorative sense. Yet when the history of all technical progress in Japan is examined, the student finds that the motive impulse, though its inception may not be plainly due to aristocratic or official patronage, certainly derives its lasting strength from that source, and it is impossible to doubt that the same principle applied to art in the Military epoch. The great academicians of Tosa, Sesshiu, and Kano; the grand carvers of the later Nara; the Jingoro schools; the Goto and the Myōchin masters who chiselled in metal as men paint on canvas; the potters of Seto, Bizen, Imari, and Kyōtō; the lacquerers who, from the middle of the fifteenth century, began to make the departure that ultimately led to such incomparable results, would never have risen to fame had not the nation's political and military leaders taken them by the hand. To Oda Nobunaga, indeed, is commonly attributed the first employment of decorative woodcarving in religious edifices. He is said to have caused figures of dragons to be chiselled on the pillars of a Buddhist pagoda within the precincts of a magnificent mansion erected by him at Azuchi in Omi, and from that time annalists are wont to date the beginning of this application of glyptic art to the ornamentation of interiors. But though there is no reason to doubt that to the patronage of Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Iyeyasu, must be attributed such a development and employment of wood-carving as enriched Japan with 78