| This study examines the ways in which visualizations of waka , the thirty-one-syllable Japanese court poetry, played a critical role in the propagation of the courtly aesthetic and the poetic worldview during the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries. Three case studies address distinct yet interrelated functions served by visualizations of poetry: promotion of a cultural legacy, transmission of knowledge, and display of cultivation and status. The pictorial lexicon Book of the Fan (ogi no soshi) communicates important concepts of waka poetry through its unique juxtaposition of poem and image. The illustrated late medieval narrative Forty-two Debates (Shijuni no monoarasoi) directly associates poetic knowledge and its courtly origins with the notion of a learned individual. Screens with poetry sheets (shikishi) utilize "old verse" (koka) as a trope, equating the ownership of material objects with the possession of cultivation. Each based on pictorial precedents rooted in the Heian imperial court---namely poem-picture (uta-e), immortal poet pictures (kasen-e), and folding screens adorned with poem squares (shikishigata)---the works discussed in this study powerfully infuse early pictorial traditions with new life, reinventing and redefining the significance of waka in the cultural context of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. |
