VII. METALS AND STATUES

Swords—Mirrors—The Trinity of Horiuji—Colossi—Religion and sculpture

The sword of the Samurai was stronger than his dwelling, for the metalworkers of Japan spent themselves on making blades superior to those of Damascus or Toledo,⁶¹ sharp enough to sever a man from shoulder to thigh at a blow, and ornamented with guards and handles so highly decorated, or so heavily inlaid with gems, that they were not always perfectly adapted to homicide. Other workers in metal made bronze mirrors so brilliant that legends arose to commemorate their perfection. So a peasant, having bought a mirror for the first time, thought that he recognized in it the face of his dead father; he hid it as a great treasure, but so often consulted it that his suspicious wife ferreted it out, and was horrified to find in it the picture of a woman about her own age, who was apparently her husband’s mistress.⁶² Still other artisans cast tremendous bells, like the forty-nine-ton monster at Nara (732 A.D.), and brought from them a sweeter tone than our clanging metal clappers elicit in the West, by striking a boss on the outer surface of the bell with a swinging beam of wood.

The sculptors used wood or metal rather than stone, since their soil was poor in granite and marble; and yet, despite all difficulties of material, they came to surpass their Chinese and Korean teachers in this most definitive of all the arts—for every other art secretly emulates sculpture’s patient removal of the inappropriate. Almost the earliest, and perhaps the greatest, masterpiece of sculpture in Japan is the bronze Trinity at Horiuji—a Buddha seated on a lotus bud between two Bodhisattwas, before a screen and halo of bronze only less beautiful than the stone lacery of Aurangzeb’s screen in the Taj Mahal. We do not know whose hands reared these temples and built this statuary; we may admit Korean teachers, Chinese examples, Indian motives, even Greek influences coming down from far Ionia across a thousand years; but we are sure that this Trinity is among the most signal accomplishments in the history of art.*

Possibly because their stature was short, and their bodies could hardly contain all the ambitions and capacities of their souls, the Japanese took pleasure in building colossi, and had better success in this questionable art than even the Egyptians. In the year 747, an epidemic of smallpox having broken out in Japan, the Emperor Shomu commissioned Kimimaro to cast a gigantic Buddha in propitiation of the gods. For this purpose Kimimaro used 437 tons of bronze, 288 pounds of gold, 165 pounds of mercury, seven tons of vegetable wax, and several tons of charcoal. Two years and seven attempts were required for the work. The head was cast in a single mould, but the body was formed of several metal plates soldered together and thickly covered with gold. More impressive to the foreign eye than this saturnine countenance at Nara is the Daibutsu of Kamakura, cast of bronze in 1252 by Ono Goroyemon; here, perhaps because the colossus sits on an elevation in the open air, within a pleasant entourage of trees, the size seems to accord with the purpose, and the artist has expressed with remarkable simplicity the spirit of Buddhist contemplation and peace. Once a temple housed the figure, as still is the case at Nara; but in 1495 a great tidal wave destroyed both the temple and the town, leaving the bronze philosopher serene amid widespread destruction, suffering and death. Hideyoshi too built a colossus at Kyoto; for five years fifty thousand men labored at this Buddha, and the great Taiko himself, clad in the garb of a common laborer, sometimes helped them conspicuously at their task. But hardly had it been erected when, in 1596, an earthquake threw it down, and scattered the wreckage of its sheltering sanctuary about its head. Hideyoshi, says Japanese story, shot an arrow at the fallen idol, saying, scornfully, “I placed you here at great expense, and you cannot even defend your own temple.”⁶⁵

From such colossi to dangling netsuke Japanese sculpture ran the range of every figure and every size. Sometimes its masters, like Takamura today, gave years of labor to figures hardly a foot tall, and took delight in representing gnarled octogenarians, jolly gourmands and philosophic friars. It was good that humor sustained them, for most of the gains that came from their toil went to their subtle employers rather than to themselves, and in their larger works they were much harassed by conventions of subject and treatment laid upon them by the priests. The priests wanted gods, not courtesans, from the sculptors; they wished to inspire the people to piety, or to fashion their virtues with fear, rather than to arouse in them the sense and ecstasy of beauty. Bound hand and soul to religion, sculpture decayed when faith lost its warmth and power; and, as in Egypt, the stiffness of conventions, when piety had fled, became the rigor of death.