Chinese Poems and Calligraphy 1779 Mitsui Shinna Mitsui Shinna—a celebrated late-eighteenth century Japanese calligrapher and master of seal-carving (tenkoku)—brushed this dynamic array of Chinese characters in various scripts on individual sheets that were then pasted across the expanse of a six-panel folding screen. Most arresting are the pairs of oversized characters in archaic seal script (tensho) on the right, in standard script (kaisho) in the middle, and in a variant form of seal script rendered in a mottled form, as if characters from an ink rubbing, on the left. Each pair of large characters comprises the beginning of a couplet of Chinese Tang-dynasty verse. The remaining eight characters of each couplet are inscribed in expert cursive script (ssho) on the adjacent panel. The first couplet is from a poem by Du Fu (712-770); the second and third couplets are from poems by Li Bai (701-762). Both poets have been highly esteemed in Japan from the Heian period (794-1185) thro