What is Japanese Lacquer?So, what is Japanese lacquer? The first Europeans to visit Japan, in the sixteenth century, had the very same question. They were fascinated with lacquer, which was unknown in the West, and they tried to describe it for their compatriots back home. One particularly astute observer was the Portuguese Jesuit missionary, Joao Rodrigues, whose excellent explanation begins, "There is a universal art throughout the whole kingdom that has something in common with painting." Because there was no Portuguese word for it, he used the Japanese term, urushi. It is, he explains, made from the sap of a tree indigenous to Asia (related to-- and even more noxious than-- poison ivy), and the Japanese have mastered lacquer making to a degree unmatched elsewhere Rodrigues particularly admired how the Japanese used lacquer to make pictures: [Japanese lacquer] has a certain affinity to the art of painting in that some of these craftsmen gild in a special way the finest examples of this work in the discovered world. Using pure gold powder, they paint various objects in which they set flowers made of gold and silver leaf and mother-of-pearl. In other words, some lacquer work resembles painting in that it incorporates pictorial imagery; it differs from painting in depicting the images with precious materials. Rodrigues was describing a common lacquer technique in which metal particles, usually gold or silver, are sprinkled onto still damp lacquer to create an image or pattern; the lacquer acts as an adhesive to the metal particles, and when it has hardened, the two mediums together create a lustrous, adamantine picture. These lacquer pictures were used on all sorts of objects-- boxes to hold one's personal belongings, containers for sacred Buddhist sutras, even entire buildings-- and they made utilitarian things into precious objects.
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