JAPAN
must have occupied the hands of experts prior to the fifteenth century. Critics holding that view would place Yūjō at the apex of an art movement rather than regard him as its originator, and would derive his great reputation from his excellence rather than from his originality. It must be admitted that such a theory is not inconsistent with facts which confront the student in other developments of Japanese art. However, the sum of accessible knowledge seems to be that never until Yūjō began to work did the art of chiselling in relief become a really admirable accomplishment. Concerning the question whether Yūjō was a great expert, the answer given by many foreign connoisseurs is negative. While granting that he stood at the head of a school, they allege that it was the classical school; in other words, a school which did not conceive the possibility, or perhaps admit the propriety, of aiming at such qualities as softness, delicacy, and pictorial ideality in the decoration of metallic surfaces, especially when the object to be decorated formed part of a weapon of war. Some even go so far as to assert that the severe formality and narrow range of the early Goto experts are as far removed from the graceful tenderness and wide repertoire of the eighteenth-century artists—the Hamano and the Ishiguro, for example—as are the three chisels of Ichikawa Hirosuke from the three hundred of Kashiwaya Nagatsune.[1] Now it is quite true that Yūjō conceived the dragon and the Dog of Fo (shishi) to be the most appropriate objects for representation on arms and armour. The dragon pre-eminently occupied his attention. He devoted infinite care to the modelling of every
- ↑ See Appendix, note 36.
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