Giovanni Niccolò (also Giovanni Nicolao;

Nola Nola is a town and a municipality in the Metropolitan City of Naples, Campania, southern Italy. It lies on the plain between Mount Vesuvius and the Apennines. It is traditionally credited as the diocese that introduced bells to Christian wor ...

, 1560 –

Macau Macau or Macao (; ; ; ), officially the Macao Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (MSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China in the western Pearl River Delta by the South China Sea. With a p ...

, 16 March 1626) was a Jesuit

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance language *** Regional Ita ...

painter who in 1583 was sent to found a seminary of painting, named the '' Seminary of Painters'', in Japan. This painter's name was Giovanni Colla. He has become known as Giovanni Niccolò, but this is an error.

Alessandro Valignano Alessandro Valignano, S.J., sometimes Valignani (Chinese: 范禮安 ''Fàn Lǐ’ān''; February 1539 – January 20, 1606), was an Italian Jesuit priest and missionary born in Chieti, part of the Kingdom of Naples, who helped supervise the i ...

, one of the first Jesuit missionaries sent to Japan with

Francis Xavier Francis Xavier (born Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta; Latin: ''Franciscus Xaverius''; Basque: ''Frantzisko Xabierkoa''; French: ''François Xavier''; Spanish: ''Francisco Javier''; Portuguese: ''Francisco Xavier''; 7 April 15063 December ...

, who, with Ignatius Loyola later became the first canonised Jesuit saints, appreciated that art communicated where languages often could not. In a desire to both educate and provide Christian art to new converts, Valignano wrote to Rome requesting an accomplished Christian artist who could both produce art for his mission as well as teach students. Giovanni Colla arrived in Japan in 1583 "and began to train students, including Watano Mâncio, Mâncio João and Pedro João. The Seminario dei Pittori, or Painting School, was officially established in Kumamoto around 1590". The Painting School's students included not only Japanese, but also Europeans and Chinese who were taught a variety of techniques ranging from oil to watercolours. Examples of its students' works were shipped to Rome as proof of its success. The school would become the largest school of

Western painting The history of Western painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from classical antiquity, antiquity until the present time. Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned with Representational art, representational ...

in Asia. While there, Colla also created devotional objects for use by Japanese Catholic churches and converts. His preferred images were primarily the

Salvator Mundi , Latin for Saviour of the World, is a subject in iconography depicting Christ with his right hand raised in blessing and his left hand holding an orb (frequently surmounted by a cross), known as a . The latter symbolizes the Earth, and the wh ...

and Madonna. No known works remain that can be positively attributed to Giovanni Colla, although a tentative identification of an oil sketch of the Virgin and Child currently in an Osaka collection has been made. Although the school had to relocate several times to avoid persecution, it was eventually exiled from Japan less than three decades later when the last missionaries were expelled from Japan in 1614. Several of the school's students fled to

, where they contributed to St. Paul's Cathedral, while some were sent to China to assist Matteo Ricci. These included Emmanuele Pereira (1572-1630, the artist of the only picture known of Matteo Ricci painted by someone who had known and seen him) and Ni Yagu (1579-1638, who painted two large altarpieces for Saint Paul's church in Macau in 1601), who became famous in their own right.Carvel, Alexandra. "Nagasaki: an European artistic city in early modern Japan" in ''Bulletin of Portuguese-Japanese Studies'', no. 2 (June 2001), p. 31.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Niccolo, Giovanni 1560 births 1626 deaths 16th-century Italian painters Italian male painters 17th-century Italian painters 16th-century Italian Jesuits Catholic painters People from Nola Painters from Campania