The 47 Rōnin. Hiroshige and the Utagawa School

The exhibition presents a comparative overview of three series of woodblock prints by Hiroshige (1797 – 1858), Shigenobu (1826 – 1869) and Kuniteru (active around the mid-19th century).

Curated by Moira Luraschi (MUSEC), the project highlights both the similarities and differences between the aesthetic languages and styles of the three artists, who were exponents of the Utagawa School, the most important and prolific in 19th-century Japan. The prints share a common subject: the ‘Chūshingura’ (‘The Loyal Retainers’), the famous kabuki play that tells the story of the revenge orchestrated by a group of forty-seven masterless samurai, the so-called rōnin, against those who had killed their lord and sullied his honour. ‘Chūshingura’ has been performed continuously for almost three hundred years, thus keeping the memory of a historical event alive.
Although the focus is on the key scenes from the individual acts of the play, Hiroshige also devotes considerable space to the landscape, a field in which he was considered an undisputed master. The landscape is never an idyllic or neutral backdrop but rather echoes and amplifies the emotions driving the characters in the scene. His prints are graphically clear and convey the expressive power typical of kabuki.

Hiroshige’s influence is evident in the work of Shigenobu, his pupil and son-in-law, who also served briefly as head of the Utagawa School. He too condenses the energy and emotions of an act into a single main scene, though he does not match his master’s excellence in the treatment of the landscape.

Kuniteru, on the other hand, moves in a different aesthetic direction, depicting several scenes from the same act on a single sheet, across different visual planes. His prints are extremely dynamic, crowded with characters and events, but they lose the expressive power of kabuki in favour of a depiction that is perhaps somewhat more didactic.

The works by Hiroshige and Shigenobu come from the Perino Collection. The works by Kuniteru belong to the Marco Fagioli Archive. As a counterpoint, on the walls, are reproductions of several rōnin, taken from prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798 – 1861) belonging to the MUSEC Collections.