Screen Painting and the Kanō School
Pine trees on gold ground, a lion filling an entire sliding door. Turning the whole wall of a castle or temple into a painting was work one family, the Kanō school, carried for some four hundred years. It began with Kanō Masanobu, and the technique passed hand to hand, by blood and by apprenticeship, all the way to the end of the shogunate — a single school standing at the center of a nation's painting world for four centuries is rare anywhere. Kanō Eitoku, who painted the screens of Azuchi Castle and Jurakudai, made images that doubled as instruments for displaying the scale of power itself. His Scenes In and Around the Capital screens hold roughly 2,500 figures. The reason they held the centre for four hundred years was not talent but machinery. The Kanō had funpon: model drawings. Pupils were not allowed to start from their own ideas; they began by copying, exhaustively, a set of models that standardised Eitoku's manner. Technique handed on by copying. An individual dies and the manner continues, as long as the models survive. And in the same country at much the same time, this map holds the other method: Rinpa, which had no head of school, no classes and no models, and continued instead by shishuku — somebody a hundred years later admiring a predecessor and teaching themselves from the work. Passed on by an organisation, or leapt across by admiration. Two ways of handing on a craft, running side by side. Eitoku, incidentally, collapsed in 1590 while working on the ceiling of the lecture hall at Tōfuku-ji. His pupil Sanraku took over and finished it. Here too, the work outlived the person.