Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/164

 in the casting of pedestal lamps (tōrō) that greatest progress was made. Here much beauty of form is found with elaborate decoration, both incised and in relief. The pedestal lamp had long been an essential article of temple paraphernalia, and from a celebrated octagonal lantern preserved at the temple Tōdai-ji it is learned that, already in the twelfth century, Japanese artists had conceived, or received, the idea of castings à jour with high-relief decoration suspended in the network. But the splendid series of tōrō (pedestal lamp) cast from the beginning to the end of the Yedo era show a remarkable development of artistic and technical skill, every variety of decoration being used successfully for their ornamentation—decoration in sunken panels, decoration in high, low, and medium relief, and decoration incised. It is commonly asserted that this kind of work was suggested by Korean examples. Certainly there is a broad difference between the methods of the Chinese and the Korean metal-caster: the former confined himself entirely to scrolls and arabesques in low relief; the latter preferred high-relief effects and modelling in accordance with natural forms. But it is impossible to accept the theory that bronzes brought from Korea to Japan by the Taikō's forces at the close of the sixteenth century were the first specimens of that nature ever seen by Japanese artists, for in the temple Hokke-ji there are preserved two bronzes of the year 1325, copied accurately from a well-known form of Chinese céladon vase having peony scrolls in relief. These make it clear that although the fashion of bronze-casting in Japan may have derived a marked impulse from contact with examples of Korean workmanship in the time of the Taikō, an entirely new style was not suggested by that