Abstract
Portuguese Studies vol. 32 no. 2 (2016), 262–69© Modern Humanities Research Association 2016 Reviews Alexandra Curvelo, Nanban Folding Screen Masterpieces: Japan-Portugal XVIIth Century (Paris: Chandeigne, 2015). 175 pages, numerous colour illustrations. Print. Also available in Portuguese and French translations. Reviewed by Jeremy Roe (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas — Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Centro de História d’Aquém e d’Além-Mar / Portuguese Centre for Global History (CHAM)) Nanban Folding Screen Masterpieces provides a concise and lavishly illustrated introduction to a corpus of artworks that offers a visual testimony to Portugal’s trading and missionary activity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ninety-one folding screens, each measuring around a metre and a half in height and over three in length, depicting the Portuguese or nanban-jin [barbarians from the south], have been catalogued by Japanese researchers, although another screen appeared on the art market in 2015. Curvelo comments that this ‘is an impressive number denoting the importance and popularity of this pictorial theme’ (p. 7), and her book focuses on thirteen screens to chart the development of this subject matter succinctly. The book opens with an introduction to the artistic, social and political context that shaped the representation of the nanban-jin as subject matter for these screens. Curvelo addresses the unification of early modern Japan before turning to discuss the development of the Kanō school of painting, whose painters are considered to have produced the most significant nanban folding screens. She explains how the Kanō school grew thanks to their ties with a succession of powerful patrons. Evidently, both the artists and their patrons developed a taste for what could be termed scenes of everyday life, and the arrival of Portuguese traders and missionaries provided a stimulus for a new facet of this subject matter. Detailed discussion of the function and reception of these paintings goes beyond the scope of Curvelo’s introduction, which instead concludes with a reflection on how to read these artworks, but throughout her text she alerts the reader to the critical issues and concerns that remain to be addressed by scholars. Curvelo continues by setting out a series of issues to be considered when studying these images, such as the superimposition of Japanese symbolism of the ship as bearer of good fortune onto the depiction of Portuguese caravels, a central motif. Trade is a key theme of these images and in relation to this Curvelo discusses how these screens are also testimony to the ‘hybridity’ of the Reviews 263 Luso-Asian encounter and later she examines a number that depict the world beyond Japan. In the first of three groups of nanban screens discussed by Curvelo the arrival and unloading of the Nau do trato, or black ship, appears on the lefthand screen, and, on the right-hand screen, the elaborate parade of Portuguese traders bearing clearly identifiable commodities amongst Japanese buildings and people. Curvelo’s painstaking selection of details enables close study of these complex images. It is clear how the rigging of the Portuguese ships fascinated the artists, with their eye for intricate depiction of detail, yet such alien elements were incorporated into their concern to hone the decorative potential of all the visual elements from natural phenomena, such as sea and trees, to the human figures and their garments. Curvelo traces the development of this first group of screens and comments on their many protagonists, along with their place in the social hierarchy of this rich cultural encounter. The depiction of the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries is an intriguing component as they are shown integrated into Japanese society, with their religious houses and rites. Given that the missionaries would be expelled from Japan in 1614 it is all the more striking that such scenes of integration became decorative motifs. In the second group of screens the left-hand screen shows the black ship being loaded and setting sail from a foreign land, while the right-hand screen shows its arrival in Japan and its cargo being unloaded. In this second group of paintings, with their contrasting depiction of both Japan and the barbarian world, there is a still richer wealth of details, including the...