Epochs of Chinese & Japanese art Volume 1; an outline history of East Asiatic design - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1921 Excerpt: ...can be Han; that they are not pure Greek, though Greek-like in effect, seems clear. We find the grape-vine pattern used upon late Greek work, but with nowhere this degree of grace. These pieces, of which many large specimens are kept in the Shosoin storehouse at Nara, must for the present be ascribed by me to an inner decorative flowering of Chinese genius to perfect with Chinese shapes rude motives that may be derived from Ghandara. We shall speak of these once more under Shosoin. We have already explained why this specific Greco-Buddhist movement in China was cut away at the stem before it had absorbed sufficient vitality from the parent root to render it more than a sporadic form. Pure Chinese causes working from within, making nobler use of native elements, forgetting the pagan non-symbolic grapes and squirrels, and substituting more Chinese proportions and rich passages of brush delineation for tall and realistic Buddhist modelling, were about to follow the rapid rise of Tang poetry to the veritable splendour of an illumination. By the year 698, when the Emperor removed his capital far to the east, at Loyang, this momentary quickening had well-nigh ceased. It seems a tendency with some writers to claim all that followed for centuries in Chinese and Japanese art to the credit of the Greco-Buddhist movement; but this is to confuse classifications. In this work we aim to seize the peculiar creative impulse of each period, and thus explain the uniqueness of its art Judged by such aim the Khotan influence was brief, and the specific form only in part assimilated. It is doubtless true that a certain legacy of nobleness and grace was left to later ages by this brief passage, just as a certain naive solidity was deposited by Han--but little that is specificall...