‘No one would wish to learn about Botticelli from a Japanese’: Yukio Yashiro, Bernard Berenson and the historiography of Western art in Japan

Japan has an over one-hundred-year-old venerable history of studying the history of Western art. Yukio Yashiro (1890-1975) was probably the scholar who made the greatest impact during the first half of the twentieth century with his magnum opus Sandro Botticelli and the Florentine Renaissance published in London in 1925. Yashiro was appointed as Professor of Art History at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1918 before he set off to Europe in 1921and settled in Florence as an early disciple of Bernard Berenson. When Yashiro wanted to write on Botticelli, Berenson advised him to publish a small book in which Yashiro as an ‘Oriental’ would write simply about his impressions of Botticelli. The reason for giving this advice, said Berenson, was that: ‘No one would wish to learn about Botticelli from a Japanese’. This advice served to spur Yashiro on to complete what became a much more substantial book on Botticelli than Berenson had ever imagined.