Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/178

 painted not direct on the plaster but on its paper covering—and the sliding doors were decorated with figure subjects, landscapes, river-scenes, and birds. But there was no sculpture, whereas the State apartments of the great temple Nishi Hongwan-ji in Kyōtō, built at the close of the sixteenth century, show a stage of architectural decoration almost on a level with that reached by the designers of the mausolea at Nikkō and Shiba (Tōkyō), and show also that there devolved on the sculptor of that era duties scarcely less important than those of the painter. Each room is an independent study, all details subordinated to a general design. Thus in one chamber the sliding doors and the lower mural spaces are covered with paintings of peacocks and cherry-trees in bloom, while the upper mural spaces are occupied by massive wooden panels (ramma), boldly carved in open-work designs of phnixes and wild camellia, which stand out with realistic effect against the dimly transmitted light of adjoining chambers or corridors. In another room the pictorial decoration takes the form of Chinese landscapes on a gold ground, and the upper parts of the walls have panels carved in a design of wistaria. The fashion of the decoration may be sufficiently inferred from these descriptions—pictorial below, sculptured above. If to these details a coffered ceiling be added, each coffer enclosing a painted or carved panel, a general idea is obtained of the architectural decoration of the sixteenth century as applied to interiors.

Twenty-five years later, the mausoleum of Iyeyasu, the first Tokugawa Shōgun, was erected. There, in memory of this "Orient-illuminating Prince" (Toshō-gu), all the decorative and architectural resources of