Japan continues to dazzle and amaze me. This past weekend, Masumi took me to the Otsuka Museum of Art, and it was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen. It is located on Shikoku island and until recently was the largest art facility in Japan, 29,412 square meters (316,588 square feet).
This museum has extremely high-quality reproductions, a collection of all of the greatest paintings of the West. If they left one out, I don’t know what it is. It embraces a span of over two millennia, from Egyptian and Greek antiquities up through the modern art of the 20th Century. As the museum explains: “The museum houses over one thousand reproductions of treasured Western artworks specially selected by a six-member committee, from ancient frescoes to modern paintings in the collections of more than 190 galleries in 26 countries around the world.”
To capture the exact color of the originals, they use photographic imaging which is then transferred to ceramic panels. Any anomalies are expertly touched up by hand, the entire process guaranteeing faithfulness to the originals and permanence. These reproductions will stand up over time infinitely better than the original paintings themselves. They will retain their color and resolution for 2000 years.
The facility is so huge, to view all of the galleries, requires walking 4 kilometers (2 1/2 miles)! And get this. Every single painting is life-size. Yes . . . the exact size as the original.
They even have a full-scale model of the Sistene Chapel. I’ve been in the Sistene Chapel in Vatican City and it was astonishing to see it replicated perfectly.
By the way, the grounds — which includes the roof of the complex — are also quite stunning.
In any case, here is just a tiny sampling of the 1000+ works of art on display.
I was so overwhelmed by all of the Christian art, I dropped to my knees for the first time in over a half century.
