Nanban Screens: Imagining the Foreign

I

What the Painters Saw

Sometime in the 1590s, the exact date is uncertain, because art history is less obliging than military history in providing precise chronologies, a painter of the Kanō school sat down before a set of six-panel folding screens, each roughly a metre and a half tall and nearly four metres wide, and began to paint the most exotic thing he had ever seen.

He had almost certainly never been to Nagasaki. The Kanō painters were based in Kyoto and worked under the patronage of the military elite, the warlords and generals who were, at that moment, consolidating the fractured archipelago into a single state. What the painter knew of the Portuguese he knew from reports, from sketches, from the occasional European curiosity that found its way into the collections of the powerful. He may have seen a European in person. He may not have. It scarcely mattered, because the commission was not for documentary realism. It was for spectacle.

What he produced, what dozens of Kanō painters would produce over the following four decades, was one of the most remarkable visual records of cross-cultural encounter in the early modern world: the Nanban byōbu, the Southern Barbarian screens. Roughly ninety pairs survive today, scattered across museums from Kobe to Lisbon to Chicago. They show how one civilisation saw another, and on the revealing distortions that occur when the answer is filtered through artistic tradition that has its own rules about what counts as real.

II

Gold, Paper, and Seven Metres of Narrative

The byōbu, literally “protection against the wind”, was not a picture frame. It was a piece of furniture, a room divider. A portable wall that could be repositioned to reshape interior spaces, to block drafts in the vast, dim halls of Japanese castles, and to provide a surface for paintings that would catch the flicker of candlelight and throw it back into rooms that had few windows and no electric light.

The Nanban screens were produced as pairs, each consisting of six panels joined by paper hinges, strips of washi woven horizontally from the front of one panel to the back of the next, creating a seamless surface across which a painter could lay a single, uninterrupted panoramic composition. Together, the two screens spanned over seven metres of continuous narrative space. They were enormous, lavish, and built to impress.

The defining material was gold leaf. The kinpeki style, gold-leaf painting, was the signature aesthetic of the Azuchi-Momoyama period, the era of castle-builders and military strongmen whose tastes ran to the monumental and the resplendent. Kanō artists applied gold using haku-oshi, a technique in which hand-pounded foil was adhered to the paper surface with a sizing solution of animal glue and alum. For atmospheric effects, mist, clouds, the luminous haze that Japanese painting uses to separate scenes and compress time, they scattered fine gold flakes through bamboo sieves (sunago) or layered foil over raised gesso patterns (moriage) to create surfaces that shimmered with three-dimensional texture.

The gold was not merely decorative. In the dim interiors of Momoyama-era castles, it was functional, a reflective surface that amplified available light, turning candlelit rooms into glowing chambers. The Nanban screens were designed to be seen in these conditions: the Portuguese ships emerging from golden clouds, the processions moving through streets paved with gold, the entire spectacle of the European arrival bathed in a warm, metallic luminescence that made the foreign look both magnificent and otherworldly.

III

The Story the Screens Tell

The narrative programme was remarkably consistent across the surviving examples, suggesting that a standard compositional template circulated among the workshops. The two screens told a single story: departure and arrival.

The left screen depicted the foreign port, a stylised rendering of Goa, Macau, or some imagined hybrid of the two. The massive Portuguese carrack dominates the harbour, its hull dark against the water, its masts towering above an architectural skyline that is neither European nor Japanese but a fantasy somewhere between the two. The buildings have arches and balconies that gesture toward Iberian models, but they are drawn with the flat, bold outlines of Japanese architectural painting. Occasionally, European women appear in these harbour scenes, figures the painters had almost certainly never observed in person. They are dressed in flowing robes that look suspiciously Chinese, a detail that says everything about the limits of the painters' visual vocabulary and nothing about European fashion.

The right screen showed the arrival. The carrack has crossed the sea and entered a Japanese harbour, Nagasaki, unmistakably, though rendered with the same artistic licence that governed the departure port. The ship's rigging is alive with sailors performing acrobatic feats in the yards and shrouds, a motif that appears on nearly every surviving screen, suggesting that the agility of the foreign seamen genuinely astonished Japanese observers. On the shore, the cargo is being unloaded: bales of silk, crates of goods, exotic animals led on ropes.

And then the procession. The central motif of almost every Nanban screen is a grand parade moving through the streets of the port town, led by the capitão-mor, the captain-major of the Great Ship, shielded by a large parasol carried by a servant. Behind him march Portuguese merchants in their extraordinary clothing, Jesuit priests in black cassocks, servants carrying chests of goods, and a menagerie of animals that signalled the staggering geographical reach of the Portuguese maritime network: elephants with men riding in litters on their backs, caged tigers, Arabian horses, peacocks, camels, greyhounds on leashes, monkeys perched on shoulders, falcons on gloved wrists.

The procession winds toward a church, a Nanban-dera, rendered as a building that looks essentially like a Japanese temple with a cross on the roof, because the painters had no visual model for European ecclesiastical architecture. At the church, Jesuit priests in their distinctive black robes wait to receive the arriving merchants, or are shown presiding over religious services.

The historical event that crystallised this compositional template was almost certainly the grand procession of 1593, when Valignano, the returning Tenshō ambassadors, and a retinue of Portuguese merchants staged an elaborately choreographed entry into Kyoto to impress Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The spectacle was designed to demonstrate Portuguese wealth, cosmopolitanism, and power. It succeeded, not only with Hideyoshi, who was duly impressed, but with the painters who would spend the next four decades reproducing the scene in gold and mineral pigment.

IV

The Eye of the Kanō

The Kanō school was the dominant painting tradition in Japan from the late fifteenth century through the Edo period. Founded by Kanō Masanobu, the school had built its reputation on a distinctive synthesis: the ink-and-brush techniques of Chinese scholarly painting merged with the bright colours, decorative patterns, and narrative sensibility of indigenous Yamato-e, Japanese painting. By the Momoyama period, the Kanō painters were the official artists of the military elite, producing vast decorative programmes for the castles and palaces of Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and eventually the Tokugawa shoguns.

When these painters turned their attention to European subjects, they did not adopt European methods. There is no linear perspective in the Nanban screens. There is no chiaroscuro, no modelling of form through light and shadow, no cast shadows, no atmospheric recession. The Portuguese figures do not occupy three-dimensional space the way they would in a contemporary European painting. They exist on a flat, gold-leaf surface, rendered with the same crisp outlines and bold colour areas that the Kanō school applied to every subject.

This was not ignorance. By the 1590s, the Jesuits had established painting seminaries in Japan, notably the school directed by the Italian painter Giovanni Niccolò in Arima and later Nagasaki, where Japanese students were taught European techniques including oil painting, perspective, and shading. The Kanō painters were aware that the Europeans represented space differently. They chose not to follow. The decision to render European subjects through Japanese visual conventions was aesthetic, not informational. It tells us that the Kanō school understood its own tradition as sufficient, that the Portuguese did not require a new way of seeing but could be absorbed into existing Japanese art.

The result is a visual tension that gives the screens their peculiar power. The Portuguese are recognisably foreign, their height, their noses, their clothing, their animals are rendered with genuine observational attention, but they inhabit a Japanese pictorial universe. They are foreign bodies processed through a domestic lens, exotic subjects contained within a native frame. The screens do not show us the Portuguese as the Portuguese saw themselves. They show us the Portuguese as Japan imagined them.

V

The Foreigners, Observed

The Japanese painters studied the nanban-jin with a forensic curiosity that borders, at times, on caricature.

The Portuguese are tall, exaggeratedly so, towering over the Japanese figures in the same composition. Their noses are long, sharp, and prominent, a feature that Japanese observers consistently noted and that the painters rendered with an emphasis that makes it clear the noses were considered both remarkable and faintly absurd. Their facial hair, small pointed beards, moustaches, is carefully depicted, a detail that fascinated painters from a culture where facial hair was uncommon among the upper classes.

The clothing receives extraordinary attention. The painters were captivated by the sheer strangeness of European fashion: the bombachas, voluminous, balloon-like pantaloons that ballooned from the waist to just below the knee, where they were gathered into tight cuffs, are painted with an almost obsessive precision. Stiff ruffled collars, wide-brimmed hats, heavy capes with elaborate patterns, gold necklaces, frilly white handkerchiefs, every element is documented with the care of a naturalist cataloguing a new species. The Portuguese are, visually, as exotic as the elephants and tigers they bring with them.

The Jesuit priests, by contrast, are rendered with a sobriety that may reflect their actual demeanour or may simply reflect the fact that black cassocks are less interesting to paint than balloon trousers. They move through the compositions quietly, their presence noted but not emphasised, background figures in a spectacle dominated by merchants, sailors, and animals.

The African and South Asian crew members aboard the ships and in the processions are a consistent presence on the screens. The Portuguese maritime network employed people from across its empire, Africans, Indians, Malays, Southeast Asians, and the Nanban painters recorded this multiethnic reality with evident interest. Dark-skinned sailors are shown climbing the rigging, carrying cargo, walking in the processions. Their presence is matter-of-fact rather than sensationalised, suggesting that Japanese observers understood the Portuguese not as a single nationality but as the visible agents of a global system that drew labour from three continents.

VI

Five Painters, One Vision

The screens were overwhelmingly a Kanō school production, and a handful of named painters dominate the surviving corpus.

Kanō Naizen, active between 1570 and 1616, an official painter to the Toyotomi clan, is the most celebrated. His paired screens at the Kobe City Museum, designated an Important Cultural Property, are among the finest surviving examples: densely detailed, compositionally assured, their Portuguese figures rendered with a combination of precision and theatrical flair that suggests Naizen had genuine access to observational material, whether from sketches, verbal descriptions, or direct encounters. A second pair attributed to Naizen is held at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon, a pleasing circularity, Portuguese subjects painted by a Japanese master returning to Portugal four centuries later.

Kanō Mitsunobu, eldest son and successor of the great Kanō Eitoku, is credited with the earliest known Nanban screen, produced in the 1590s. His twelve-panel composition at the Nanban Bunkakan in Osaka is unique in the genre for its detailed depiction of turbulent ocean waves and for its close-up rendering of the interior of a Jesuit residence, suggesting that Mitsunobu had access to information, or possibly direct observation, that went beyond the standard processional template.

Kanō Sanraku, an adopted son of Eitoku, is attributed with the Western Kings on Horseback screens at the Suntory Museum of Art, a composition that departs from the standard arrival-and-departure narrative to depict European rulers in a format that suggests the influence of European equestrian portraiture filtered through Japanese decorative conventions.

Kanō Takanobu, Eitoku's second biological son, produced the Chinese Junk and Nanban Ship screens now at the Kyushu National Museum, notable for replacing the standard Portuguese departure port with a Chinese harbour on the left screen, reflecting the reality that the Nau do Trato's voyage to Japan began not in Lisbon or Goa but in Macau.

And then there is Kanō Domi, active around 1600, affiliated with Kanō workshops in Kyoto, and attributed with a highly regarded pair at the MNAA in Lisbon. Historical documents suggest he may have been a Christian convert who also went by the name Pedro Cano.

VII

Maps, Battles, and the World Centred on Japan

Not all Nanban screens depicted the processional narrative. A significant subset focused on cartography, world maps rendered in the byōbu format that served as both decorative objects and political instruments.

The key influence was Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit missionary in China who, in 1602, collaborated with Chinese scholars to produce a world map, the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu, that placed China at the centre of the composition rather than Europe. This was a deliberate act of cultural diplomacy: Ricci understood that a map centred on the Atlantic would be meaningless to an Asian audience. When his maps reached Japan, Kanō painters eagerly adopted and extended the principle, producing map screens that placed the Pacific Ocean, and, by implication, the Japanese archipelago, at the centre of the world.

For the Tokugawa shogunate, which was in the process of consolidating absolute domestic authority and articulating Japan's position within the East Asian geopolitical order, these centred maps were powerfully useful. They were not merely representations of geographical reality. They were arguments, visual claims to centrality, legitimacy, and global significance. A world map with Japan at its heart, painted on gold-leaf screens and displayed in the halls of the shogunal palace, was a political statement as much as an artistic one.

The most remarkable surviving map screen, held in the Imperial collection at the Sannomaru Shōzōkan in Tokyo, combines a world map with depictions of twenty-eight cities, including views of Lisbon, Rome, and Constantinople alongside Asian capitals. It may have been a diplomatic gift to the Tokugawa, and its encyclopaedic scope suggests an ambition to present the entire known world as a subject of Japanese contemplation and, implicitly, Japanese command.

VIII

After the Screens

The production of Nanban screens effectively ended with the sakoku edicts of the late 1630s. The Portuguese were expelled. The Jesuits were killed or driven underground. The churches were demolished. The Christian daimyō who had commissioned some of the screens were dead, exiled, or apostatised. Many Christian-themed artworks were destroyed in the persecutions.

What survived did so largely by accident, screens that had passed into the collections of non-Christian patrons who valued them as exotic curiosities rather than religious documents, or that had been sent abroad before the closure. The roughly ninety surviving pairs represent an unknown fraction of the total production. Scholars estimate that the genre's peak output occurred between the late 1590s and about 1615, barely two decades of concentrated production.

Their survival is itself a kind of commentary on what the screens meant to the people who owned them. Unlike the hidden crosses and clandestine prayer books of the kakure Kirishitan, the Nanban screens were not devotional objects. They were luxury goods, expensive, prestigious, and fundamentally secular in their appeal.