Hiroshi Sugimoto


In spring of 2015, I traveled various places in Europe as part of my life-long project, photographing theaters. One place I visited was Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, in the central part of Vneto, designed by Andrea Palladio. It is the oldest surviving opera house in Europe and is decorated with numerous Greek-style sculptures inside. The ceiling of the foyer is adorned with beautiful fresco paintings. During my visit, the theater director pointed at one section of this fresco and explained to me that the painting depicted a scene of the reception held for the Japanese envoys who paid a visit to this town on their way to Rome in 1585, the year the theater first opened. When I took a good look, I could make out four Japanese-looking people in the front row. They were the famous boy envoys, the Quattro Ragazzi, of the Tensho Embassy.

Curiosity prompted me to find out their footsteps in Italy; they disembarked at the port of Livorno and traveled through Pisa, Florence and Siena to Rome, then visited Assisi and Venice. I realized that I had indeed been to the Pantheon in Rome and seen the Leaning Tower of PIsa as well as the Siena Duomo. These buildings had already bee in existence at the time of the Tensho Embassy’s sojourn. It occured to me that I was seeing with my own eyes the same buildings that the youmb ambaassadors had seen. This realization struck me with a pang of sensation as if a voice spoke to me saying, “ we want you to see through your eyes the same European scenes that we once saw.“ Was it a voice that transcended from heaven or was it m inner voice?

I made a conscious decision to visit and photograph all of the places they had visited. It was an inevitable outcome prompted by chance encounters. I am not sure how authentic the scenes would be after more than 400 years since their time, but I managed to photograph the Pantheon empty of people under full moon at night, the spiral staircase of Villa Farnese when it was closed, the Florence Duomo before dawn and the Gates of Paradise, a Renaissance masterpieces now in the Duomo Museum, when the museum was shut.

Pope Gregory XIII welcomed the four boys because he saw them as renewing the spirits of three wise men coming from the East to pay homage to the new born Christ. The first encounter of the Japanese with the West, and Westerners’ first encounter with Japan - that sense of mutual surprise from over four centuries ago still flows in my bloodstream. I visited the places of origin of my own spirit and made a journey for visual confirmation purposes, which I unveiled here.

- Hiroshi Sugimoto