Event Details
Azuchi Castle was a watershed in Japanese visual culture. Completed in 1579 as the home of Oda Nobunaga and destroyed in 1582 in the wake of Nobunaga’s assassination, Azuchi was the first castle to de-emphasize military preparedness in lieu of opulent materials and visual impact. Azuchi’s form is today generally understood as a symbol of its master. However, this characterization fails to account for Azuchi’s unique attributes. In particular, the form of its tenshu, a towering edifice that rose seven-stories, is one-ofa- kind in the history of East Asian architecture. This paper argues that the Azuchi tenshu and particularly its keep, a golden, square hall seated upon an octagonal hall, represents an adaptation of the architecture of sage kings of classical Chinese histories for the social and political context of Warring-States period Japan. Through an examination of the tenshu’s character, the castle complex, the etymology of tenshu, and Nobunaga’s Zen monk advisors, the long ignored Chinese roots of Azuchi Castle are made apparent. Azuchi’s tenshu was not just a reflection of Nobunaga, but a loud proclamation of Nobunaga as heir to a long history of Chinese and Japanese rulers.
This seminar is co-sponsored by the School of Culture and Communications Art History, Art Curatorship, Arts and Cultural Management Research Seminar
Mark K Erdmann is a Lecturer in Art History in the School of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Australia. Erdmann specializes in Japanese pre-modern architecture, particularly of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, and the intersection of space, painting, carpentry, and power. His research focuses on castles, warrior elite residences, palaces, as well as the Jesuit mission in Japan and their impact on visual culture. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 2016 and Masters from the University of London in 2001. He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Azuchi Castle: Oda Nobunaga and the Origins of the Japanese Castle. Erdmann is also a founding member of the Azuchi Screens Research Network, a group of scholars and artists attempting to discover the fate of a lost painting of Azuchi Castle gifted by Oda Nobunaga to Pope Gregory XIII via the Jesuits in 1585. He is also working on an annotated translation of Shōmei (Elucidation of the Craft), a secret sixteenth-century architectural manual written by Heinouchi Masanobu.