Giovanni Niccolò

Giovanni Niccolò, born Giovanni Colla in Nola around 1560, was an Italian Jesuit painter sent to Japan in 1583 to establish training in Western art for local converts. Around 1590 he founded the Seminario dei Pittori in Kumamoto, which grew into the largest Western-style painting school in Asia, training Japanese, European and Chinese students until the expulsion of missionaries from Japan in 1614. Several of his students then relocated to Macau and China, where they contributed to major religious artworks including decoration of St. Paul Cathedral in Macau, where Niccolò died in 1626. No work securely attributed to his own hand survives, though an oil sketch of the Virgin and Child in an Osaka collection has been tentatively linked to him. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/