Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/90

 become popular, a special room, or suite of rooms, was added for its uses. Large mansions had also a chamber with a stage for the mimetic dances called saru-gaku, in which every accomplished gentleman was supposed to be able to take a part, and for which stores of magnificent costumes were an essential part of aristocratic household furniture.

It was, however, in the matter of interior decoration that architecture made its chief advance at this period. From the twelfth century, a great school of decorative painters, known in art records as the Yamato Academy, began to attract national attention, and were merged, in the fourteenth century, into the Tosa Academy, whose members carried the art of pictorial decoration to an extraordinary degree of elaboration and splendour. Masters of colour harmonies, highly skilled in conventionalising natural forms, and unencumbered by any canons of cast shadows, these experts were now employed to decorate the sliding doors, walls, and ceilings of the various chambers, and, from the fifteenth century, they were assisted in the work by the Sesshiu and Kano academies, with their noble breadth of conception and tenderness of fancy, so that the decorative motives ranged from battle scenes, historical episodes, mythical legends, and even genre subjects, to landscapes, waterscapes, representations of bird and animal life, and floral designs of large variety.