Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/374

 ployed incrustation with gold foil, and some specimens dating from the Kamakura epoch show an affinity with the pictorial scrolls of the time, their decorative designs being chosen so as to illustrate verses of poetry traced in golden ideographs beside the picture. To the Kamakura era belongs also a new departure, namely, the application of vermilion lacquer to objects having their wooden surfaces carved in diapers or arabesques. This kind of work—called Kamakura-bori (Kamakura carving)—appears to have been suggested by the red lacquer of China which has designs cut in the lacquer itself. The Kamakura-bori belongs to a palpably inferior grade of work, but some interest attaches to it as it probably helped to suggest an important development with which the Ashikaga epoch is credited.

That development was the production of what is called taka-makiye (lacquer in relief). Hitherto artists had confined themselves to hira-makiye (flat lacquer), that is to say, lacquer having the decorative design in the same plane as the ground. The sole exception had been the Kamakura-bori, just spoken of, in which effects of relief were obtained by carving the wood to which the lacquer was applied. Now, however, experts undertook surface modelling in the lacquer itself. It is not possible to fix the exact date of this notable addition to the art, but it certainly reached a point of high development in the time of the Shōgun Yoshimasa (1449–1490). There has been frequent occasion to allude to Yoshimasa in these pages, and to the extraordinary impulse that all branches of art received from his establishment of the tea-clubs and from his munificent patronage. The taka-makiye, which from his era became famous, constitutes one of the distinc-