Recent Research on the Azuchi Screens

folding screen paintings (bybu ) known today as the Azuchi Screens. 2 The screens had been commissioned and given to the Jesuits by the warlord Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), the first of the so-called three great unifiers of Japan. They depicted a panoramic, bird's-eye view of Azuchi Castle-Nobunaga's newly-constructed, palatial, mountain fortress homeas well as its surrounding town and adjacent ports. According to a compiled account of the day's events, Gregory XIII seems to have immediately recognized the importance of the gift. After receiving them, he "ordered that the paintings on which Azuchi was depicted were to be displayed in that well-adorned O n 4 April 1585 a remarkable exchange took place in Rome. 1 Having arrived in the city roughly two weeks earlier after a three-year journey from Japan, a group of four Japanese teenage boys, sent as emissaries by the Jesuit mission and retroactively named the Tensh Embassy, met with Pope Gregory XIII (1502-1585; r. 1572-1585) in his private quarters. This rare privilege of a private audience followed the boys' official public reception at a crowded papal consistory and was one of several meetings between the parties before the pope's death on 10 April. During this occasion, the boys presented several gifts brought from Japan, including a pair of large six-panel 1 The present article is based on three research reports authored by liane Roux in the context of the Azuchi Screens Research Network team project: The Humanist-Antiquarian Philips van Winghe (1560-1592) and Network, 2019; The Rome-Padua Network of Humanist -Antiquaries 'Ethnographers' and Far East (16-17th cent.), 2020; and The Donation of the Azuchi Folding Screens to Gregory XIII (1585)