Global Japan Studies Seminar
Institute for Advanced Studies in Asia (IASA)
University of Tokyo (Hongo Campus)
Conference Room (3rd Floor)
Thursday, October 23, 2014
5:00-6:00 pm

Niccolò School, World Map, c. 1590-1614, one of two 8-panel screens, ink, color and gold leaf on paper, 177.0 x
483.0 cm each. Tokyo, Imperial Household Agency“Yashiro’s Details and the Problem of Place in Art History”
Brief Abstract
Like the writings of Yashiro Yukio (1890-1975), a monumental figure in Japanese art history whoseearliest work examined the Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli in Morellian detail (1925), a magnificent
set of Map screens, now in the collection of the Imperial Household Agency, have long complicated thenotion of place in cultural interpretation straddling East and West (Fig. 1). Painted in the Jesuit workshop
in Japan (c. 1583-1614) and in a customary Japanese format, these screens have primarily been
considered 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 under the aegis of theSociety of Jesus. This paper thus proposes to rectify this lacuna by looking at the western framework forthe production of this cross-cultural image via Yashiro’s methodology to see how the Map screens once
more offer a critical intervention into global studies by positing an index locorum of bodily experience as
analytic borderland for art historian and object alike.

1Prof. Mia M. Mochizuki
Associate Professor of the History of Art
New York University Abu Dhabi / Institute of Fine Arts, New York
Brief Biography
Professor Mochizuki’s interdisciplinary research has drawn upon art, architecture and other visual sources— from masterpieces to material culture — to address problems in early modern intellectual history, withspecial attention to Renaissance, Reformation and Baroque art, particularly those objects produced by thesixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese and Dutch trading networks that situate European art in a
broader world context. She is the author of The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566-1672.
Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age (Ashgate, 2008), which received the College Art Association
Publication Award and the ACE/Mercers’ International Book Award for Religious Art and Architecture,and editor of In His Milieu. Essays on Netherlandish Art in Memory of John Michael Montias(Amsterdam University Press, 2006) that highlights the archival and socio-economic study of art. Her
research has consistently been recognized, with awards from the J. William Fulbright Foundation /Netherland-America Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies (Charles A. RyskampFellowship) and the Association of Theological Schools (Henry Luce III Fellowship in Theology)

Before coming to NYU in 2013, she taught in the art history departments of the Graduate TheologicalUnion and University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago. Bornin Tokyo, she was educated at international Sacred Heart schools, Groton School, Vassar College, Leiden
University, and Yale University (Ph.D., Department of the History of Art, 2001).

This Fall she is a Visiting Research Scholar at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies(Nichibunken) to complete a book-length manuscript on the Jesuit Global Baroque and work on ananthology, The Global Republic of Things: The Circulation of Religious Art in the Early Modern World.

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Institute for Advanced Studies in Asia (IASA)(http://www.ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/eng/access/index.html)
Directions
From subway stations
Hongo-sanchome Sta. (Subway Ooedo Line) 5 min. walk
Hongo-sanchome Sta. (Subway Marunouchi Line) 6 min. walk
Yushima Sta. (Subway Chiyoda Line) 9 min. walkTodaimae Sta. (Subway Nanboku Line) 15 min. walk
From Ochanomizu Sta. (JR Chuo Line, Sobu Line)
Subway: Marunouchi Line for Ikebukuro and get off at Hongo-sanchome Sta. 6 min.
walk
Subway: Chiyoda Line for Toride and get off at Yushima Sta. or Nezu Sta. 9 min. walk
Bus: Toei 07 for Tokyo Univ. and get off at Todai (Tatsuokamon, Byoin-mae, or KonaiBus Stop)
Map3

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