Giovanni Niccolò

Portrait of Oda Nobunaga, created after his death by Jesuit painter Giovanni Niccolo, 1583-1590.

Giovanni Niccolo (also Giovanni Nicolao) was a Jesuit Italian painter who in 1583 was sent to found a seminary of painting, named the Seminary of Painters in Japan. This seminary, founded in 1590 and exiled from the Japanese archipelago fewer than three decades later, would become the largest school of western painting in Asia. While there, Niccolo also created devotional objects for use by Japanese Catholic churches and converts.^[1] His preferred images were primarily the Salvator Mundi and Madonna.^[2]

References

1. Lach, Donald F, and Edwin J Van Kley: Asia in the Making of Europe, vol.II, book I; The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993, p.67
2. Bailey, Gauvin A. “Creating a global artistic language in late renaissance Rome: artists in the service of the overseas missions, 1542-1621”, p.21