The quality of Fundação Medeiros e Almeida's collection in Lisbon is on par with the Gulbenkian's: there is not a single item here which is not a masterpiece. Though the website advises helpfully that it takes an hour to see the whole place; and some people apparently manage it in less (by the draft of their passage, I was made aware of some figures gliding past me without apparently slowing down at all); I was barely done after four. Closing time brought me up short rudely, but no doubt also saved my life: I went straight home and packed myself off to bed with that kind of emotional exhaustion one might feel after an 18-hour love making marathon: I was bushed.
Of the many wonderful pieces there, one has been with me day and night since: a Chinese blue and white cup and saucer, extremely finely and beautifully potted, of unusual size and shape. The shape is undeniably oriental but the size larger than any category of either Japanese or Chinese drinking vessel: it does not seem to fit into any occasion of oriental life. The decoration reveals why: both the cup and the saucer feature Christ crucified and beneath The Virgin and St John ("mother, this is your son; son, this is your mother"). The figures on the vessels are striking: the Virgin wears a Japanese court dress and both Jesus and John have the shaved pates and loose long hair of ochimusha, or "former samurai". This is enough to identify the set as a Portuguese Jesuit chalice and paten ordered in China for use in Japan.
It is porcelain because Japanese Christians would have found gold or silver too vulgar by half to receive the Lord's Blood. (The most precious implements of the time were porcelain used in tea-ceremony, which is, if you think about it, a lot like the Holy Mass: take this and drink of it, this is my tea). And the men are ochimusha -- their shaved pates indicate their samurai origin while the loose long hair indicates that they have left the military life, or -- "left the world"; in other words, while they are religious, they are also of aristocratic birth. In Japan the Portuguese presented themselves as an aristocratic warrior society, which the Japanese found easy to understand, relate to, and respect. (Harping on Jesus' woodcutter origins was just not cutting any ice).
The history of Jesuits in Asia is a history of cultural cross-dressing. Mateo Ricci in China originally tried to copy the dress and shaved heads of Chinese Buddhist monks, thereby hoping to steal automatically into the respected position of priesthood by the mere dint of donning a dress; but they soon discovered that while this did earn them some automatic respect with the lower orders, it also earned them disrespect of the religiously skeptic and overtly anti-Buddhist mandarin class. So, Ricci soon adopted the Confucian dress and called his teaching Xiyangxue, or western studies -- to avoid calling it something disagreeable -- like, god forbid, religion.
Likewise in Japan, the Jesuits found, there was nothing to be gained by adopting the Buddhist style; but, au contraire, a lot to be gained by adopting the aristocratic and military manner. This of course came easily to the Jesuits who were by and large of aristocratic background and who had been founded by a former soldier and along military lines.
One does wonder, however, who tricked whom, the Portuguese the Japanese or the other way around? Portuguese Jesuits did not seem to need any encouragement to adopt Japanese cultural practices, tea ceremony included. The chalice and paten at the Almeida may as much be a sign of Jesuits exploiting Japanese cultural conventions to press their message as Japanese civilization subverting the Portuguese Jesuit mind: perhaps the Portuguese Jesuit who had ordered it really did come to the conclusion that gold was too vulgar a vessel to receive the Holy Blood.
When I think of all the complex ways in which this piece fits into European, Chinese and Japanese cultural realities of the time, how they mix and clash in it, I am rendered speechless. I am surprised and delighted by the richness of its associations.
And delighted by my own scholarship.
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PS. See this for some interesting examples of Jesuit Asian art. I find the Mughal Virgin especially touching: appropriately to the requirements of Persian painting genres, she holds in her hand a book of Persian poetry. In the absence of the photo of the Almeida chalice and paten (not to be photographed, God forbid that anyone should see our collection), I reproduce her here.
Also, see Yoshitomo Okamoto, The Namban Art of Japan, Tokyo 1972, p. 14o, for a grainy black and white photo of a makie-e chalice now in the Fujitsugu Azuma collection.
PPS. Some Japanese TV executives in town; when told about the Namban art here, they said Asoka? Amazing: they didn't care.
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