Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/136

RV 112 sion previously prevailing, the case may be quoted of two magnificent life-size statues in wood preserved at the temple of Kofuku-ji. The subjects are Brama and Indra, the Deva Kings (Ni-ō). These deities are usually placed in niches flanking the outer gate of Buddhist temples which they are supposed to guard. The sculptor's constant aim is to give prominence to the fierce energy, implacable resolve, and superhuman strength which are the chief attributes of the demon-quelling guardians, and the success achieved in the Kofuku-ji figures is unequivocal. Time has almost completely obliterated the pigment that once covered them, and has produced other defacements, so that the images now present a battered and mutilated appearance. But nothing could destroy the grandeur of their proportions or impair the majesty and dignity of their pose. Their anatomy is perfect, and had they emerged from the ruins of some Grecian city, they would be known and admired by every Western student of art. These statues have hitherto been attributed to a nameless Korean immigrant sculptor at the beginning of the seventh century, and they are still so attributed by more than one standard author. If such an identification were admitted, hopeless confusion would be introduced into the whole history of Japanese sculpture. Work which is essentially Japanese and which unmistakably proclaims itself to be of the Unkei school in the thirteenth century, would become that of a Korean artist seven hundred years earlier, and it would be necessary to admit that, by some inexplicable freak of fate, a Korean visiting Japan at a time when sculpture in Korea, Japan, and China was still in its infancy, produced a master-