JAPAN
There are objects generally excluded by their nature from the catalogue of art productions, but nevertheless often showing in Japan many fine features of decorative sculpture. These are nail-hiders[1] (kagi-kakushi), screen-mounts, door-pulls, drawer-handles, and wardrobe hinges. When the Taikō built the Palace of Pleasure at Fushimi and the Castle of Ōsaka, the celebrated dilettante Kobori Masakazu undertook to make designs for these objects, and Kacho, an expert worker in metals, reproduced the drawings in silver, gold, bronze, iron, shakudo and shibuichi. Considering the great skill that had already been attained by sculptors of sword-furniture, it is not wonderful that a metal-worker at the close of the sixteenth century should have been able to chisel nail-hiders in the form of daffodils with leaves of silver and blossoms of gold, or door-pulls in the shape of crustacea, cherry-petals, junk-rudders, and such things. But Kacho's productions, judged by specimens preserved in the Kyōtō Detached Palace, were of a type that has seldom been surpassed by any of the innumerable sculptors subsequently employed in the decoration of Japanese interiors. He was followed by a long line of skilled metal-workers down to the present day, but their productions do not lend themselves to any special analysis. Kacho is the first artist whose name has been transmitted to posterity in connection with work of this class, but there are relics which show that the skill of the metal-chiseller was employed for the architectural decoration of interiors as early as the beginning of the twelfth century. Notable examples are the gilt-bronze ornaments of the ventilating panels at the temple
- ↑ See Appendix, note 51.
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