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The helmet's role as a sign of authority was backed up by other samurai artifacts: body armor, which turned its wearer into a bizarrely plated red lobster, and, of course, the weapons, the long sword known as a katana and the shorter wakizashi, together with their elaborate hilts, scabbards and other fittings, to which a large body of lore and connoisseurship attached. The figure who most vividly expressed the relation between culture and the samurai ethos remained a legend long after his death. He was Miyamoto Musashi (1584-1645), who wrote a famous text on swordplay (A Book of Five Rings) and reputedly killed 60 swordsmen before his 30th birthday; he then gave up killing in favor of painting and calligraphy. One of his ink paintings is in the show, a swiftly brushed image of a shrike balanced on a branch above a caterpillar that is crawling upward, presumably to its doom. It is a graphic masterpiece. You feel the tension in the body of the bird as it balances before striking, and every flick of the brush bespeaks alertness.
It may be that no civilization, East or West, attained a greater refinement in the decorative arts than Edo Japan. Ceramics, lacquer and textiles were brought to an extraordinary pitch of aesthetic concentration by a large body of artisans whose collective skills have never been surpassed, in Japan or anywhere else. And skill was key. Edo artists and patrons loved virtuosity within a given medium, but they didn't have a hierarchy of art and craft. To them, the work of the lacquerer or the papermaker was no less worthy than that of the screen painter, and in any case so many media could converge in a single work that art hierarchy became meaningless.
Which is not to say that the Edo period lacked individual artists who were seen, then and now, as stars. Its core achievement, in painting, was the allusive and delicate work of the so-called Rimpa artists: Tawaraya Sotatsu and Hon'ami Koetsu in the 17th century, and later the brothers Ogata Korin and Ogata Kenzan, Sakai Hoitsu and others. The show abounds in their work, especially the large folding screens that were Japan's closest equivalent to Western murals. Hoitsu (1761-1828) is represented by one of his finest screens, Flowers and Grasses of Summer and Autumn, in which you can almost feel the wind bending the rhythmical pattern of stems and leaves against their silver ground.
Some works of art celebrated others. There was a whole category, for instance, known as tagasode ("whose sleeves?") or sometimes kosode (small sleeves): screen paintings that depicted women's robes draped casually over a hanging frame, their emptiness carrying a light but distinct erotic flavor. Sometimes their elaborate designs were replicated in paint, but in one screen in this show the fragments of the robes themselves were glued to the gold-leaf surface in a supremely elegant, early form of collage.