11Story

22 January 2010

Goyo

 

Chitasei Goyo (and) possibly Ferdinand Verbiest. Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861). Japan, Circa 1827 Photograph. Original colour woodblock print on paper. 26.45 x 18.41 cm © Trustees of the British Museum 1906, 1220, 0.1311

From a popular translation into Japanese of the Chinese novel Tales of the Water Margin, this print features Chitasei Goyo (in the original, Wu Yong, ‘Wise Star’) in dragon-patterned robes, standing beside astronomical or navigational instruments. Chitasei Goyo is a hero of the novel, an outlaw credited with outstanding wisdom and responsible for his organisation’s military strategy.   It is has also been suggested that the print may have represented a quite different, historical, figure: the Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest, who taught mathematics and astronomy in China in the 1660s. With less individualised faces, images can be more ambiguous. To many in the past, and perhaps to more recent commentators, Verbiest and Chitasei Goyo may have seemed equivalently larger than life.

 
 
 

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