Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/332

 pieces of the early metal-carvers in much the same relation as the genre pictures (ukiyo-ye), which had their development contemporaneously with the work of these families, stand to the paintings of the classical school. In reviewing Japanese pictorial art it has been shown that the popular school of painters, the Ukiyo-ye artists, were a natural outcome of the social evolution of their era, and that they reflected the nation's passage from the comparatively austere canons of a military age to the voluptuous ease and refinement of the later Tokugawa epochs. Similar evidence of the changes of the times might be expected to present themselves in the field of glyptic art. They do present themselves. The formal designs and uniform methods of chiselling à jour practised up to the middle of the fifteenth century represent the pure Chinese style, or, at any rate, were suggested by the classical spirit which then permeated every branch of the national civilisation. By and by, when the immortal painters Kano Masanobu and Kano Motonobu raised their art into a new realm of national inspiration, a corresponding impulse was felt in the domain of metal carving, and the Goto masters, shaking themselves partially free from classical fetters, began to seek decorative motives in the pages of recent history or among the natural objects that surrounded them. The work of the early Goto experts cannot, however, be assigned purely to any one academy. In their representations of historical scenes, warriors, and animals they followed the Tosa school with almost slavish accuracy. In their carvings of flowers, birds, and incidents from the daily life of the people, they took the Kano artists for models. And in their chiselling of dragons, Dogs of Fo, Kylin, phnixes,