JAPANESE PICTORIAL ART
a picture often assumed this dual character with admirable success, but the abuses of the conception were sometimes shocking. They grew more marked as the school advanced in age, and ultimately the elements of a painting came to be disposed with such care for decorative effect that the coloured areas conveyed a suggestion of diapers or brocaded patterns. Such freaks, however, did not obtain vogue until the sixteenth century, and were confined chiefly to what may be called the book illustrations of the time; namely, paintings on interminably long scrolls inscribed with historical or biographical records.[1]
The Yamato artists are often said to have failed signally in their delineations of the human figure; to have followed traditional types, generally ungraceful and unnatural, and to have drawn faces, legs, and arms that seldom approximated to correctness. That criticism must not be accepted too implicitly. It is certainly true when applied to the work done by the rank and file of the school; but in the case of the masters close examination generally reveals that the outlines of their figures diverge, not from the standard of absolute correctness, but from the standard which the critic himself has been accustomed to regard as normal. They show lines which assuredly exist in nature, but which are not the lines that Europeans and Americans have taught themselves to consider salient.
The Yamato school is sometimes spoken of as the Kasuga, after its alleged founder Kasuga Motomitsu, and sometimes the Kasuga is regarded as a branch of the Yamato. From the middle of the thirteenth century the name was changed to Tosa-riu, the prin-
- ↑ See Appendix, note 6.
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