Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/97

RV 75 tool, and gave no earnest of the remarkable ability that Japanese artists were destined ultimately to display in this line. Reference must also be made to delicate cable-pattern gold chains with leaf-shaped pendants and pearl ornaments, objects of which the use has not been clearly divined, though the generally received idea is that they were suspended from the helmet. It is thus seen that, on the whole, the Japanese metal-worker of the fourth century was a handicraftsman of no mean skill, though the applications of his art had a narrow range.

The advent of Buddhism in the sixth century introduced a new standard of art conception, though commensurate attainment did not immediately follow. After the year 552 religious statues began to arrive from Korea in some numbers, and these, as well as the bronze images modelled in Japan during the next sixty or seventy years, show sculpture which has not yet fully emerged from its primitive stage. Not only are traces of the chisel shallow and uncertain, but the facial expression of the deities and their poses are mechanical and lifeless. It is easy to see that the tools available were rudimentary, the sculptor apparently being provided with nothing better than a straight chisel. The relationship of these statues to the rude stone-images of early and mediæval Japan is unmistakable. There is in both alike the same geometrically formal disposition of the drapery, offering no suggestion of the great skill subsequently acquired by Japanese sculptors in the representation of still life, and the method of construction is that practised by the metal-workers of all countries in the initial stage of their art, namely, casting or beating by the repoussé process into the required