We have investigated the wheel profiles of cow carriages described in old Japanese scrolls, which are elliptical in shape and abnormally big.
Taking up 67 carriges represented on the 11 scrolls in the 12th and 13th centuries available to us now, we have measured each of them in size and angle of the ellipses made approximate to the wheel profiles and also in dimensions of the carriages.
The results are as follows:
(1) Condidering varieties found in these pictures, we should not decide hastily that there was any particular, conventional pattern of expression for the scroll painters.
(2) With most of the cow carriages described, the dimension of the minor axis of the ellipse is extremly close to the lateral length of the body, l.
(3) The picture of a carriage seems to be a composition of two independent images of its body and wheel, the latter of which takes on an ellipse with the length of the minor axis of l.
(4) The facts mentioned above suggest that the diameter of the original wheel is equal to l. Thus, it can be interpreted that the major axis of an ellipse is larger than its diameter apparently, and so the size of an wheel becomes bigger vertically than the original.
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