Artworks

Sanmon, Tōfukuji

Artwork · Anonymous · 1384–1425 · building · Tōfuku-ji Temple

The earliest surviving sanmon, built over some forty years with the support of the shogunate: begun in 1384, roofed in 1405, the outer staircases added in 1425. Two bays deep and five long under a two-tiered hipped-gable roof, it keeps the sober exterior of Southern Song architecture, but its upper floor — with Shaka and the sixteen rakan — is painted in green, red, brown, black and gold in the Chinese manner of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 1 Mason 2005, pp. 214–215, figs. 247–248. ↩ Literatur Mason 2005: Penelope E. Mason, History of Japanese Art, 2nd, Pearson Education LTD. 2005.