Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/163

 founders ever rose above the grade of common artisans.

The Tokugawa era (1620-1850) is justly regarded as the golden period of the bronze-caster's art in Japan. It was marked, not by any specially conspicuous achievements like the founding of the colossal Buddhas at Nara and Kamakura, but rather by a long series of beautiful works executed for the mausolea of the Tokugawa in Yedo and Nikkō, and for other temples and shrines throughout the Empire. These works consisted of thupas, pedestal and hanging lamps, vases, pricket-candlesticks, censers, pagodas, reliquaries, gates, fonts, figures of mythological animals, images of deities and saints, pillar-caps and other objects of an architectural character. The thupas were never highly ornamented: they depended chiefly on chaste simplicity of outline and graces of form. The same remark applies in part to the vases, censers, and pricket-candlesticks placed before altars and tombs. These showed continual fidelity to traditional models. The vase had the familiar "beaker" shape of China, and its ornamentation consisted only of vertical bands scalloped in high relief and of medallions enclosing Paullownia leaves. The censers, too, had plain surfaces broken by two, or at most three, similar medallions, their lids surmounted by a Dog of Fo and their feet modelled to represent the head of that animal. The pricket-candlestick invariably took the form of a stork standing on a tortoise, or on a lotus calyx, supporting with its beak a leaf of lotus which formed the pricket-receptacle. These objects, though finely modelled and skilfully cast, lose much of their interest owing to their wearisome uniformity. It is