A Global Eye: the perception of place in a pair of Tokugawa world map screens / Mia M. Mochizuki.

Extract from Japan Review 29 (2016): 69 – 119.

A pair of screens depicting a World Map with Cityscapes and Rulers in the Museum of the Imperial Collections, Tokyo, has long complicated the notion of place in cultural interpretation between East and West. Painted in the Jesuit workshop in Japan (c. 1583–1614), and in a customary Japanese format, this pair of screens has been considered primarily in relation to Japanese art, despite being produced by Western and Western-trained artists, using Western materials and pictorial sources, and guided by Western aspirations. This article moves beyond the identification of sources to offer an analysis of the Western, Jesuit intentions for these screens as part of an attempt to reconsider early modern European art within its original global context. It draws upon an early-twentieth-century epistolary parallel to sixteenth-century cross-cultural exchange—the correspondence between two scholars who steered the course of the discipline of art history in East and West, Yashiro Yukio (1890–1975) and Bernard Berenson (1865–1959). The present study applies Yashiro’s use of the determinative detail to examine the Western framework for the production of these screens using four historical registers of place: the place of desire, the composition of place, the contempt for the world, and the index of place. An interdisciplinary approach to cultural contact, via early modern European geography, theology, philosophy, and anthropology demonstrates how one object’s response to shifting notions of what constituted the world highlights some of the same contradictions that have hindered the construction of a truly global art history beyond national stakes alone.

Keywords: art (Renaissance and Baroque), global art history, Bernard Berenson, Yashiro Yukio 矢代幸雄, cartography, world maps, Portuguese eastern trade routes, Edo. Also: Bankoku ezu byōbu 万国絵図屏風, Japanese screens, Namban byōbu 南蛮屏風, Jesuit maps in Japan.

Link to JSTOR via BC Libraries (for Japan Review)

Local access dig.pdf. [Mochizuki-Global eye.pdf] 

Namban byōbu 南蛮屏風 / Ōoka Makoto 大岡信.
Note: One central figure in this painting is reputed to be Alessandro Valignano. Cover title.
Shōwa 昭和48.

Namban screens are a well-known Japanese art form that was produced between the end of the 16th century and throughout the 17th century. More than 90 of these screens survive today. They possess substantial historical value because they display scenes of the first European activities in Japan. Among the subjects depicted on Namban screens, some of the most intriguing are ships: the European ships of the Age of Discovery. Namban screens were created by skillful Japanese traditional painters who had the utmost respect for detail, and yet the European ships they depicted are often anachronistic and strangely. On maps of the Age of Discovery, the author discovered representations of ships that are remarkably similar to the ships represented on the Namban screens. Considering the hypothesis that ships of some of the Namban screens are copies of ships represented on contemporary European cartography, the author realized that one particular historical event connecting Europe and Japan may be the source of these representations. This was the first visit of the Japanese Christian embassy, the Tensho Embassy, to Rome, in 1582. Its journey to Europe and its following visit to the Taiko, or first effective leader of Japan, Hideyoshi Toyotomi, may have been a trigger for the production of one of the most well-known Japanese artworks, the Namban screens.

Online at OAK Trust.
Local access dig. pdf. [Yamafune-Namban ships.pdf]