古備前正恒
Ko-Bizen Masatsune
Aussi connu sous le nom de: Patriarch of the Bizen Tradition; Supreme Master of Ko-Bizen; Sword-Sage of the Heian Era
Description
Ko-Bizen Masatsune is among the greatest masters of the Ko-Bizen (ancient Bizen) school — the late Heian-period founding generation of what would become Japan's largest and most celebrated sword-making tradition. Working in the 11th and early 12th centuries, he produced tachi that already display the hallmarks of the Bizen aesthetic in highly refined form: bright, clearly mapped utsuri (the distinctive shadowing within the steel unique to Bizen blades), fine dense ko-itame surface with vivid nie, and bold chōji-midare hamon with great energy. His blades, forged as Japan's warrior class was first rising to political prominence, represent the earliest peak of what would eventually produce Mitsutada, Nagamitsu, Kagemitsu, Kanemitsu, and the entire Osafune lineage — he stands at the source of a thousand-year tradition. Many surviving blades were preserved through centuries of veneration in great shrines. National Treasures survive.
Légendes et récits
Masatsune forged his blades at the very dawn of Japan's warrior age — during the quiet decades before the great Genpei War (1180-85) when the Taira and Minamoto clans would tear the country apart. The curved tachi that warriors wore into those battles and into all the wars that followed for the next century were in the tradition he helped found. The 'utsuri' (shadowing within the steel) that appears in his surviving blades — a mysterious optical phenomenon still not fully explained by modern materials science — was already fully realized in his hands in the 11th century, the earliest evidence of what became the defining characteristic of the Bizen aesthetic. His blades survived through the most ancient form of cultural preservation: veneration in great shrines as sacred objects offered to the gods. The tachi that Masatsune made now rest in the same Tokyo National Museum where the later Bizen masters' works are displayed — the patriarch at the head of a thousand-year lineage, his blades showing that the Bizen tradition began not gradually but with an immediate, fully formed genius at its very source.