■Topics 2018
2018-07-20 NichibunkenNews
Evening Seminar (July 5, 2018) “Illustrating Aesop: The Tales of Isopo Scrolls and Transformation of the Mediterranean World into the Chinese Visual Field”
“Illustrating Aesop: The Tales of Isopo Scrolls and Transformation of the Mediterranean World into the Chinese Visual Field,” Lawrence E. Marceau (senior lecturer in Japanese at the University of Auckland and visiting research scholar at Nichibunken)Lawrence E. Marceau’s presentation introduced the iconography of The Tales of Isopo Scrolls while comparing it with the iconography of printed editions in Europe. The first Japanese translation of the Aesop’s Fables came out in Amakusa in 1593 when Jesuit missionaries and their Japanese converts translated it into romanized Japanese, he said. Around 1610–20 the Japanese translation titled Isopo monogatari (Tales of Isopo) began appearing as printed books and kanazōshi in Kyoto, and in 1659 an illustrated woodblock-printed edition was published. Soon multiple sets of illustrated handscrolls were produced at professional studios. About three years ago, one of the sets, consisting of six scrolls—the whereabouts of which had not been known for a long time—was discovered in Kyushu.
In the seminar, Marceau showed the vivid illustrations of an edition of the Isopo monogatari emaki (The Tales of Isopo Scrolls) thought to have been produced around 1670, and introduced his detailed comparative analysis between them and the illustrations of both a book published in Seville, Spain in 1521 and another version published in Kyoto in 1659. How did the artwork of such familiar Aesop fables as “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” “The Mouse and the Frog,” and “The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs” change by country and by historical period? He provided an overview of detailed differences in depiction, specifically of people, animals, costumes, accoutrements, and architecture.
One interesting conclusion is that, while the 1659 Kyoto edition transferred the settings of Aesop’s Fables from ancient Mediterranean places such as Greece, Babylon, and Egypt to East Asian landscapes, the later scrolls provide a visual field identifiable as stereotypically “Chinese.” This gives a glimpse of the burgeoning popularity of Chinese culture among early Edo-period painters.
(Reported by Shiraishi Eri, assistant professor, Office of Digital Resources, Publications, and Public Information)
