The 47 Rōnin. Hiroshige and the Utagawa School.

The project curated by Moira Luraschi (MUSEC) emphasizes both the similarities and differences between the aesthetic languages and styles of the three artists, exponents of the Utagawa School, the most important and prolific in 19th-century Japan. The prints share a common subject: the Chūshingura ("Loyal Servants") famous drama of kabuki theater about the revenge orchestrated by a group of forty-seven masterless samurai, the so-called rōnin, against those who had killed their lord and besmirched his honor. Chūshingura has been staged continuously for nearly three hundred years, thus keeping the memory of a historical event alive.

Although the main subject is the mother scenes of the individual acts of the drama, Hiroshige also gives great space to the landscape part, of which he was considered an undisputed master. The landscape is never an idyllic or neutral backdrop, but rather echoes and amplifies the feelings that animate the characters in the scene. His prints are graphically well readable and convey the expressive power typical of kabuki.

Hirosghige's lesson is evident in the work of Shigenobu, his pupil and son-in-law and briefly head of the Utagawa School. He, too, condenses the energy and emotions of an act into a main scene, though he does not achieve the master's excellence in his treatment of landscape.

Kuniteru, on the other hand, moves in another aesthetic direction, depicting multiple scenes of the same act on different visual planes on one sheet. His prints are concise, crowded with characters and events, but they lose the expressive charge of kabuki, in favor of a depiction that is perhaps a bit more didactic. The works of Hiroshige and Shigenobu come from the Perino Collection.

Kuniteru's works belong to the Marco Fagioli Archive. Counterpointing them on the walls are reproductions of some rōnin, taken from prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861) belonging to the MUSEC Collections.

Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.