Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/159



T is evident from what has been written above that up to the middle of the sixteenth century the resources of applied art were employed almost entirely for religious purposes,—the modelling or casting of sacred images, the lacquering and inlaying of pillars and beams, the pictorial decoration of door panels or ceiling coffers, and the chiselling of ornamental metal mountings and temple accessories. But from the days of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi the services of applied art began to be enlisted for secular purposes even more largely than for sacred. The prime cause of this change was foreign intercourse. Contact with the Dutch and the Portuguese suggested the substitution of large solidly constructed castles for the flimsy wooden edifices that had previously served as military strongholds, and it soon became difficult to reconcile the simplicity of old-time domestic interiors with the lives of the lords of such massive structures. Hideyoshi's tastes greatly promoted this sequence of ideas. Though the scenes and struggles of his career were not at all calculated to develop artistic proclivities, he was found to be an impassioned lover of the beautiful and the refined when he rose to power, and he not only encouraged art effort in every