Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/174

 painting door panels, ceiling coffers, and even walls, and to the lacquerer's hand for decorating pillars and beams with golden hues and glowing mother-of-pearl, did not at first excel the Shintō shrine in the matter of ornamentation so much as it was itself excelled by the temples and mausolea of the seventeenth century. In these a profuse wealth of architectural decoration gave almost boundless scope to the genius of the painter, the sculptor, the lacquerer, and the worker in metals. The middle of the sixteenth century is generally regarded as the approximate date of this new departure, and undoubtedly the taste for grandeur and magnificence fostered by Hideyoshi, the Taikō, was largely responsible. Japanese annalists, indeed, attribute to Nobunaga, Hideyoshi's captain, the first idea of employing sculpture for the architectural decoration of interiors, and are even so precise as to fix the very incident that marked the innovation, namely, Nobunaga's employment of two wood-carvers, Mataemon and Yuzayemon, to chisel dragons upon the pillars of a pagoda erected by him. But when it is considered that within a very few years of Nobunaga's death (1582), the magnificent ornamentation of the temple Nishi-Hongwanji in Kyōtō was completed, and that of the mausoleum of Iyeyasu at Nikkō was commenced, and when it is further considered that nothing in the whole range of Japanese decorative art reaches a higher level of beautiful and skilled elaboration than the pictorial and sculptured work of these buildings, strong doubts are suggested whether an idea which had its birth in the second half of the sixteenth century could have ripened to full maturity by the beginning of the seventeenth. It seems more reasonable to conclude that the great carver Hidari