Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon the corpus of the Jesuit Giovanni Niccolo, S.J.’s workshop in Japan, this paper traces how the conscious manipulation of mimetic translation techniques for religious art changed a tool for conversion into an instrument for expulsion in the post-Tridentine context of encounter.

Paper long abstract:

Press, pressing, pressure. Religious art, and indeed the printing press, have long relied upon mimetic imitation, and nowhere was this more true than in the forum of global encounter, where the ability to reproduce exact likeness in multiples begun in the object was intended to reach completion in the converted person. Even books and folio prints carried over the high seas by Portuguese merchant and Jesuit missionary simply followed this tried and true model of religious copying begun in acheiropoeitoi objects and fostered by workshop practice. The first results of Brother Giovanni Niccolo, S.J.'s workshop in Japan inverted the standard order of print after painting to produce eloquent devotional art after Netherlandish prints brought to Japan — Madonna and Childs, Salvator Mundis, portraits of Saints, idyllic landscapes and monumental map screens. Soon enough, however, mimetic imitation's initial positive connotations were quickly recalibrated in the face of the politics of religious encounter as Christianity came under duress. Prints and plates began to be appropriated as fumi-e, or bronze reliefs cast for inquisition and apostasy on pain of life. The brief, but high-quality output of the Jesuit workshop in Japan suggests that notions of change, chance and failure hold the promise of rethinking strategies of early modern encounter, just as considering the trials and tribulations of mimetic imitation on a global stage adds an important overlooked chapter to the role of copying in European religious art.