look closer

The trunk fills three panels and the branches run off both ends. The viewer is standing much too close to something much too big.

Kanō Eitoku inherited a family workshop and a market that was about to explode. The men unifying Japan by force in the second half of the sixteenth century, Oda Nobunaga and then Toyotomi Hideyoshi, built castles as instruments of policy, and a castle needed interiors: sliding doors and folding screens covering hundreds of square metres, produced fast, legible from across a hall, and expensive-looking to visitors who were being impressed on purpose. Eitoku's answer was the style called the great manner. Enormous forms pushed right up against the picture plane, cropped by the edges, laid over backgrounds of solid gold leaf. The gold was not only display, though it was certainly that. Castle rooms were dim, lit by paper windows and lamps, and a gold ground throws whatever light there is back into the room, so the paintings functioned as lighting. It also compressed depth into flat plates of colour, which is why these screens still look modern. He painted the interiors of Nobunaga's Azuchi castle, the most spectacular building in Japan, and Hideyoshi's Osaka castle and Jurakudai palace. Almost none of it survives. Azuchi burned in 1582, days after Nobunaga was killed at Honnō-ji, and the rest went in the wars and fires that followed; what is left of the greatest decorative painter of the age is a handful of screens and a documented reputation. He is recorded working himself into the ground on deadline, and he died in 1590 at 47, in the middle of a commission. This eight-panel screen of a cypress is attributed to him and is a national treasure in Tokyo. The tree does not fit. Its trunk fills three panels and the branches leave the frame at both ends, so the viewer is standing far too close to something far too large, which was the effect the whole century wanted.