Kodai moyō chōchō (Birds and Butterflies: Patterns from the Past)

Kodai moyō chōchō (古代模様蝶鳥, Birds and Butterflies: Patterns from the Past) is a two-volume woodblock-printed design album published in Kyoto in 1906 by Yamada Unsōdō, designed by Furuya Kōrin (1875-1910). The Rijksmuseum's copy (RP-P-2005-580) is one of the principal Western institutional copies. Where Furuya's Shasei sōka moyō concentrated on flowering plants drawn from life and Kōrin moyō reworked Ogata Kōrin's painting vocabulary, Kodai moyō chōchō reaches back into the older repertoire of bird-and-butterfly motifs from Heian and early Edo decorative arts — courtly textile patterns, classical lacquer designs, and the bird-and-butterfly scrolls of yamato-e tradition. The plates distil this antiquarian source material into flat ornamental compositions suitable for transfer to kimono, lacquer, and metalwork, treated in Furuya's late-Meiji neo-Rinpa idiom and printed with the full technical apparatus of Kyoto colour printing: multi-block impression, metallic and mineral pigments, and embossed ([karazuri](/glossary/karazuri)) grounds. Like Furuya's other zuanchō, the album functioned simultaneously as a pattern library for the working trades clustered around Nishijin and Kyoto's craft districts and as a connoisseurial decorative-art object collected internationally.