Research Note: The Colors of Memory: An Observation on the Depiction of Figural Genre Images in Pleasure Quarter Paintings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Hikone Castle Museum and the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, conducted an optical survey of the National Treasure-designated Hikone Screen in fiscal 2006-2007. The survey indicated that there was effective pigment differentiation based on careful compositional considerations, and that the figures' facial features, details, garments and furnishings were painted to an amazingly detailed fashion. The report of this survey was published and an international symposium, entitled Capturing the “Original”: Archives for Cultural Properties, was held in fiscal 2008 as a result. The study shed light on the relationship between the Hikone Screen and several other works in terms of specific points of resemblance, and it also raised important questions about the significance of the coloring and depictive methods of the Hikone Screen in the history of Japanese painting overall. Here the author explored the depiction of elements strikingly characteristic of the period such as the Nagoya-style obi, the purple leather tabi, the smoking equipment and samisen as found in the Hikone Screen and other early pre-modern genre scene paintings. The Nagoya-style obi and purple leather tabi were fashionable early in the 17th century and these elements were thus understood to have been painted in a limited and intentional fashion in these paintings. Ihara Saikaku's novel Five Women Who Loved Love, published in 1686, intentionally depicted purple leather tabi as a relic of a former age, thus confirming that leather tabi in fact had only been a passing fad. Further, the 1813 Kottôshû historical research book by Santô Kyoden indicated the Nagoya-style obi and purple leather tabi were fashionable around the Kan'ei era (1624-44), and also investigated the changes that took place in the shape and form of the samisen. It is thus known that these special characteristics accord almost entirely amongst early pre-modern genre paintings. It is clear that the Hikone Screen contains a number of old-fashioned motifs given that it dates from approximately the Kan'ei era. This feature is shared with two other works that share many points in common with the Hikone Screen, namely, Scene of a Card Game (Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University) and Genre Figures, which is said to depict the romance between Lady Senhime and her husband Honda Heihachirô (The Tokugawa Art Museum). Further, it is possible that the main characters who both died young in Scene of a Card Game and Genre Figures were depicted after their deaths. In the past, it was understood that early pre-modern genre paintings depicted figures in the style of their day, but these three works not only depict clothing fashions at the very end of their favor, but also seem to show a nostalgic trend. Future studies will require a detailed examination of the depictions in each individual work. Only a portion of the visual images obtained in the joint research project on the Hikone Screen were published in the report. Color images, near infrared imagery, 470 macro images of the entire work, and 394 examples of x-ray flourescence pigment materials analysis are currently being prepared for web browser availability, due to be finished during the current fiscal year. It is hoped that public availability of these materials will contribute to advances in scholarship.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".