UKIYOE. Il Mondo Fluttuante. Visioni dal Giappone

The exhibition at the Museum of Rome Palazzo Braschi with the suggestive title Ukiyo-e. The floating world illustrates all the charm of Japanese art from the Edo era, presenting a selection of 150 masterpieces between the 17th and 19th centuries, including paintings, scrolls, fans and prints, and traditional objects, such as kimonos or musical instruments.

The exhibition also recounts the arrival in Japan and the passion for collecting of two great Italian travellers, Edoardo Chiossone (1833-1898) and Vincenzo Ragusa (1841-1927), both of whom lived in the Land of the Rising Sun in a period in which Japan was opening up to foreigners for the first time. With the installation of Emperor Mutsuhito in 1868, the renewal of Japan in the Meiji era (1868-1912) had begun, with which important political, cultural and structural reforms had been initiated: the country was rapidly modernising, especially from a technical and technological point of view, thanks to the arrival of Westerners.

Edoardo Chiossone, already a drawing and engraving teacher, was invited to Japan as an oyatoi gaikokujin (foreign employee) where he held the role of director of the Paper and Securities Office of the Japanese Ministry of Finance. He arrived in Tokyo in 1875 and remained there until 1891. In Japan he engraved more than 500 plates of postage stamps, banknotes, government bonds and monopoly stamps.

Vincenzo Ragusa, sculptor and artist, introduced bronze casting technologies and other European armored and modeled sculpture techniques to Japan, playing a leading role in the development of modern Japanese sculptural arts. He was also part of the first corps of teachers and the group of consultants chosen by the Meiji government for the foundation of the Tokyo Technical School of Fine Arts, also teaching at the Yokohama School of Industrial Arts. In 1878 he sculpted the bronze bust, portrait of the Tama Kiyohara - who later became his wife - the first Japanese person to pose for a European artist. That work was the first of several others depicting portraits of common people, actors and important personalities, which the artist from Palermo created in the country of the Rising Sun.

Ragusa is also known for his important cultural intermediation activity between Italy and Japan, which he carried out together with his wife.

Finally, the exhibition is an opportunity to delve deeper into the artists and themes of Japanese artistic production that reaches back to Utagawa Kunyioshi (1798-1861), one of the last great masters of Japanese painting and woodcut.

The project makes use of the collaboration of the Museum of Civilizations, through the exhibition of the corpus of works that are part of the so-called Ragusa collection, together with the collaboration of the Chiossone Museum of Genoa.

Photo: Katsushika Hokusai, La [Grande] Onda presso la costa di Kanagawa dalla serie Trentasei vedute del monte Fuji 1830-1832, Silografia policroma ©Courtesy of Museo d’Arte Orientale E. Chiossone