Home > Journals > PAHA > Vol. 12 (2022) > Numbers 1 & 2
Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia
Abstract
The Catholic missionaries were the main actors in the introduction of Western art into Japan between as of 1549. A first flow of works of art can be observed from Europe to Japan. However, at the end of the sixteenth century, another flow sent artists and pictorial themes to Europe as well as to China and Latin America. A special place will be given to artworks that may have reached Japan through the Spanish route: first, French engravings from the very beginning of the seventeenth century that were in Japan before 1614; and second, paintings brought back by the Keichō mission, among them a painting made in Manila now kept in the Sendai City Museum. Museums, libraries, and archives in Japan as well as in Western countries keep works of art, either paintings or engravings, that are related to the school of art that the Jesuits founded in Nagasaki in 1590. Since the Portuguese padroado was the frame of the activities of the Jesuits in Japan, we may assume that most of the works of art that they imported from Europe and used as models for their school reached Japan through the Portuguese route. However, a second route came to be used after the Spaniards settled in the Philippines with the Legazpi expedition of 1565. From then on, the mendicant orders, which worked within the legal frame of the Spanish patronato, used the Philippines as a stepping-stone toward the muchcoveted Japanese missionary field. A few works of art that have escaped destruction during the persecutions of the Tokugawa régime can be traced back to the activities of the Franciscans and Dominicans in Japan.
Recommended Citation
Morishita, Sylvie
(2025)
"Iberian Trade Routes and the Circulation of Works of Art between Europe and Japan during the Christian Century,"
Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia: Vol. 12:
No.
1, Article 5.
Available at:
https://archium.ateneo.edu/paha/vol12/iss1/5
