- 著者
-
谷 晃
- 雑誌
- 美術研究 = The bijutsu kenkiu : the journal of art studies
- 巻号頁・発行日
- no.362, pp.33-59, 1995-03-30
Chakaiki, diaries that record tea ceremony gatherings, are useful materials not only for the study of the ceremony (chanoyu), but also for cultural history, the history of ceramics, and the history of food. The abundant records in the tea ceremony diaries of which paintings were selected for display in tea gatherings make these records invaluable documents for the study of the history of painting also. Two major factors have made tea ceremony diaries difficult to research : (1) the fact that there are few which have been published, and (2) the fact that the location of many of these diaries is unknown. For the present study, however, I have collected as many extant tea ceremony diaries as possible, and for the benefit of research in the history of painting, have produced a chart listing cases in which paintings are mentioned in the diaries. From the roughly 120 tea ceremony diaries that I have collected, in addition to the records of tea gatherings gleaned from other personal diaries, I have entered the over 14,000 separate tea ceremonies into a computer database. Among these I have isolated the 6,500 gatherings that mention hanging scrolls (kakemono) of painting and calligraphy, excluding calligraphy and paintings that appear repeatedly leaving a total of 1200. The oldest tea ceremony diary is the Matsuya Hisamasa Chakaiki, which starts with a gathering at the Nara Shishō-bō on the twentieth day of the third month of Tembun 2 (1533). From 1533 on into the seventeenth century, the diary records many kara-e (Chinese paintings) hung in the tokonoma ornamental alcove. In due course, calligraphy by Japanese Zen monks and Japanese paintings replace Chinese paintings in number, with calligraphy by tea adepts eventually eclipsing others'. As a result, there appears to be a tendency to decline over time in the percentage of paintings hung in tokonoma. There are also many instances in the tea diaries of practitioners recording their impressions of paintings on view and even sketching them, providing explanations. Such records as these are extremely valuable for the study of extant paintings. There are two points to which the researcher should remain alert when using tea ceremony diaries as historical documents. First, not all tea ceremony diaries are reliable historical documents, as there are many diaries riddled with mistakes over generations of copying, and although there are few examples, there seem to be some cases in which the original document was altered with some particular intention in mind. Second, we can gather from other documents that already at the time of the tea diaries' writing, there were many spurious works of art circulating among tea aficionados. It is thus important to remember that not all of the paintings listed in the diaries were necessarily authentic works of art. If these basic guidelines are followed, the present study should prove useful to research in the history of painting.