Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/135

RV 111 art, but also as the final era of vigorous originality in religious sculpture. The greatest masters of the time are generally said to have been Kwaikei and his pupil Unkei, but undoubtedly the finest surviving specimen of sculpture in wood is from the chisel of Jokaku, a pupil of Unkei, and among all Japanese sacred effigies in bronze, the noblest and most majestic is the Dai-Butsu of Kamakura, modelled and cast by Ono Goroyemon in the year 1252. When Kwaikei and Unkei began to work, the samurai had become the nation's type of admirable manhood, the bushido was regarded as comprising all the canons of chivalrous morality, and the doctrines of the Zen sect of Buddhism had been accepted by the educated classes as the philosophy of irreproachable life. These facts are illustrated by the works of the era. The round, sleek shapes of the Jōchō school are replaced by nervous, energetic forms instinct with strong, martial vitality. The sculptor, knowing nothing more worthy of imitation than a stalwart soldier, goes to human life for inspiration, and models the muscles and contours of his statues with unprecedented anatomical fidelity. Every stroke of the chisel bites deep and direct. The drapery is simple. The attitudes are carefully studied. The faces are profoundly expressive. For the first time strict rules are elaborated, and are so carefully followed in determining proportions that this feature alone suffices to differentiate the school from all its predecessors.

It is only within recent times that exhaustive researches and intelligent criticism have accomplished a clear classification of many great sculptures which for centuries stood comparatively neglected at Nara and elsewhere. As a striking illustration of the confu-