Takeuchi Seihō, RyoumaYuki (Historic Spots of Rome), 1903. Left, a pair of six-panel folded screens, each 1.45 x 3.74 m. Umi-Mori Art Museum, Hiroshima.
Takeuchi Seihō, RyoumaYuki (Historic Spots of Rome), 1903. Right, A pair of six-panel folded screens, each 1.45 x 3.74 m. Umi-Mori Art Museum, Hiroshima.
The intrinsic properties of ruins associated with Western ideology—their insistence on the acknowledgment of the passage of time, their commemorative assertions revivifying historical events within collective memory, their inspiration of stylistic eclecticism and synthesis—does not cohere with what typically comes to mind when one considers Japanese culture before 1868; and yet, Roman ruins begin to crop up in the Japanese visual imaginaire during the Meiji period, portrayed in a manner of sentiment that approximates Romantic aesthetic within Japanese syntax. The most astonishing instance is a pair of six-paneled screens, Historic Spot of Rome (Ryouma Yuki), painted in 1903 by the famed Kyoto nihonga artist Takeuchi Seihō. In the attempt to parse the origins of this iconography in Japan and how it could function in a socio-cultural milieu with which, at first blush, the ideological impact seems wholly incompatible, the narrative of bilateral stylistic influence alone can only get us so far. A case study of Seihō’s screens as the progenitors of this trend reveals how the iconography of the ruin could translate into something recognizable to Japanese audiences: its Western ethos spoke to cultural phenomena—some preexisting, others specific to this time—so much so as to assert iconological bearing there, further illuminating the complexities of the cultural interchange that defines the Meiji era.