Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/184

 cloud scroll in green, white, and red, and the centre of each is occupied by an elliptic medallion in purest cerulean blue, enclosing a golden dragon and having for border two narrow rings of white and chocolate-brown. This is little more than a mere catalogue of colours. It conveys not even a shadowy idea of the beauty and brilliancy of such a decorative masterpiece, glowing and palpitating with luxury of tint and profusion of detail from floor to architrave, until in the ceiling medallions the spectator seems to be gazing into the blue profundity of a sky where glittering monsters sweep through space. But the reader will gather even from such an imperfect description some notion of the profusion with which colours and sculpture were employed in the architectural decoration of interiors. It does not appear that the Japanese artist had any definitely formulated theories about the use of colours. He does not even seem to have explicitly recognised the differences of primary, secondary, or tertiary, or to have possessed any clear rules about chromatic equivalents. Yet it would be possible to deduce from his practice many of the principles that are now regarded as fundamental in the science of Occidental decorative art. Thus his idea of distribution was so just that, in using the primary colours, he limited the areas and quantities of their application by careful consideration of the total space to be decorated, in order that the requisite balance and support might be obtained by proportionately larger masses of secondary and tertiary tints. It may be objected that he neglected this principle in the exterior decoration of some of his sacred edifices, as the pagodas at Nikkō, for example, where a massive, towering structure is robed from base to summit in