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.

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Artes, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Artes, 2018. / Esta dissertação visa comparar obras de Alberto da Veiga Guignard e Tensho Shubun a partir da utilização da sombra, fenômeno recorrente em suas pinturas de paisagens, para verificar a existência de semelhanças que permitem estabelecer um diálogo entre os dois recortes. A pesquisa se baseia em um aporte teórico sobre a sombra na história da arte, na contextualização dos períodos em que os artistas viveram, e uma aproximação fenomenológica do objeto que visa enriquecer a análise formal e poética das obras. O encontro de configurações semelhantes das obras no corpus estudado corrobora a crítica sobre a aproximação de Guignard com um estilo específico de pintura japonesa, e por outro lado revela parte da construção, por parte da crítica brasileira, de uma sintaxe para se referir ao oriente, principalmente Japão e China. / This dissertation aims to compare works of art of Alberto da Veiga Guignard and Tensho Shubun from the use of shadows, recurrent phenomenon in their landscape paintings, in order to verify the existence of similarities that allow to establish some dialogue between the two parts. The research is based on a theoretical contribution on the shadows in the history of art, in the contextualization of the periods in which the artists lived, and a phenomenological approach of the object to enrich the formal and poetic analysis of the study. The encounter of similar configurations of the works in the studied corpus corroborates the criticism about the approximation of Guignard with a specific style of Japanese painting, and on the other hand reveals part of the construction, by the Brazilian art criticism, of a syntax to refer to the East, mainly Japan and China.