Ink, color, gold, gold leaf on paper were the media used for the famous Kanō Naizen's six-paneled painted screen. Source: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 

Context in source publication

Context 1

... depiction of the costumes was a motive for creation for many other forms of art and craftsmanship. According to Bergeron (2013), one of the many Japanese artists of that period who produced some of the most representative samples of Nanban art, drawing information from perhaps the most striking event of that period, was Kanō Naizen (1570-1616) 7 . His work, titled Southern Barbarians Come to Trade, is a large-scale six-paneled screen (Byōbu, 屏風) which was also made in a long time between 1570 and 1616 and depicts the first arrival of the Portuguese traders and Christian missionaries in Japan. The typical Japanese landscape, the grandiose ship, but above all the figures of the newly arrived foreigners with their fancy, peculiar costumes, wide belts and strange hats, constituted a new painting theme, unprecedented in the then limited Japanese painting, paving the way for a new thematic unity [ fig. 2]. However, it is particularly interesting that Naizen remained closely attached to the traditional Japanese painting techniques which supported the right rendering of the theme, by not diverging from the concepts of color brightness and flatness, the use of sharp outlines and the application of bold brushwork. That is, he emphatically overlooked the newly introduced rules of the Western, Renaissance painting such as the mathematical perspective in art and the use of other materials beyond the well- known and established ones (Okamoto, 1972: 97). The specialty of art of screens was also associated with the fact that it was a combined type of art at that time, because, although it was an ancient art with specific thematography, it also absorbed and interpreted this new cultural invasion in a miraculous way, singling out the clash of the two cultures, especially during the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1573-1600) (Costa, 2010: 6). Through this type of works which had utilitarian value as well as other purely artistic ones, it is easy to understand the importance of the objects, which, in direct connection with their functionality, were the focus of curiosity, admiration or wonder, but also a source of inspiration for the depiction of a number of works of historical significance, not only for their high value techniques, but also for the fact that they were important sources of scientific, historical record which now sheds light on what had been taking place in the country at that time, and especially on the Japanese customs and ...