The intersection of art, science, and diplomacy at Kyoto and Nagasaki in the time of Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch cultural and mercantile interaction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with attention to the entangled political relations linking the shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Philip II of Spain, Jesuit missionaries such as Alessandro Valignano, and the Christian daimyō of Kyushu and the Inland Sea. Focus on Japanese castle architecture, nanban screens, world maps, arte sacra, and tea ceremony practices as related to the importation of European arte sacra, prints and drawings, scientific instruments, and world atlases such as Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Includes inquiry into back-formations such as “baroque” and “global” to describe and/or interpret sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cultural productions.
