LITMIR.BIZ

      FIG. 33a Travelers with baggage climbing a slope.

      Although the technique of printing from woodblocks had been known in Japan since the eighth century, the first Japanese illustrated woodblock-printed book did not appear until the early years of the seventeenth century. By the eleventh century, as Buddhism from China took hold in Japan, Buddhist temples were producing their own woodblock-printed books of sutras, mandalas and other Buddhist scriptures and images. Temples also distributed images to pilgrims as votive prints, amulets or in exchange for monetary offerings. Buddhists believed that creating numerous images of the Buddha would help to prepare one’s path toward salvation. One way of doing this was to stamp hundreds of block-carved images. Sheets of stamped images were also used as offerings for the dead and, as we have seen in Chapter 1, printed sheets of sutras were placed inside religious icons or statues as a form of thanksgiving. For centuries, printing was the virtual monopoly of Buddhists as it was too expensive for mass production. Moreover, outside the religious sphere, it did not have a receptive, literate public.

      In about 1600, the first Japanese movable type, using some 100,000 wooden type pieces, was created under the direction of Tokugawa Ieyasu and was used to print a number of political and historical texts. But it soon became clear that the running script style of Japanese writings was more effectively reproduced using woodblocks and so these were again adopted and by the mid-1600s were used for nearly all printing. The images continued to be cut. The woodblock medium, although time-consuming and expensive, was far less so than the traditional method of copying books by hand. It rapidly gained popularity among artists and calligraphers and was used to produce small, cheap art prints as well as books. At a small studio in Saga, Honami Koetsu (1558–1637) and Suminokura Soan (1570–1632) created woodblocks of both the texts and images of several Japanese classics, among them the Ise monogatari (The Tales of Ise) in 1608, for a small circle of literary connoisseurs. Other printers in Kyoto quickly adapted the technique to producing cheaper books in large numbers for a wider, more general audience. These books included travel guides, novels, play scripts, art books and books on urban culture. Yet other publishers produced both books and single-sheet pictures. At the time, of course, the images in these books as well as the art prints were almost always monochrome, although occasionally colors were painted in by hand. The illustrations were often crude and subordinate to the text. There is also a general uniformity to the books and in almost all cases the identity of the artist is unknown. Soon, however, the illustrations became more and important and provided the masses with an affordable form of art. Even the illiterate, who wanted to be entertained although they could not read, bought books purely for the enjoyment of the pictures, including erotic picture books and fashion books of kimono patterns. Many of the illustrations in these books came to be contributed by well-known artists in contrast to the anonymous craftsmen of the past.

      As mentioned in the introduction to this book, the so-called “primitive” ukiyo-e printing period began with the bold black and white designs of Hishikawa Moronobu (1618–94), who turned out hundreds of prints for illustrated books (e-hon), many of which were later unbound and sold as individual pictures. For this reason, it is impossible to separate the illustrated book in Japanese woodblock printing from single-sheet pictures. The only major difference is the purpose of the art form. Thus, the subject matter of a book became the main determining factor in the artist’s approach to the pictures he created.

      In response to the demands of the merchant commoner class during the seventeenth century for images of contemporary urban life in a new style, ukiyo-e artists

Скачать книгу