Response: Medievalists and Early Modernists— A World Divided?

Abstract

In this response essay, two early modernists consider some of the major themes and topics examined in this collection on new trends in medieval art history, such as the importance of the local, intersectional identity, and the role of postmodern conceptions of globalization. The article reveals many of the continuities between medieval and early modern global art histories while at the same time demonstrating the divide between the periods through analysis of an early woodcut frontispiece and through the definition of five major differences in artistic production, reception, and transmission.

AS SPECIALISTS IN early modern European art, the articles in this collection in The Medieval Globe fascinate us with new approaches to objects, teach us about zones of cultural interactions that are little known outside specialist circles, and invite us to consider some of the themes they share and the larger questions they raise about current trends in premodern art historical scholarship. The essays collected here draw on artifacts dating from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries which circulated around Africa, Asia, and Europe. As such, they provide an expanded view of medieval art history beyond its traditional European focus, and enrich earlier interpretations of artworks as diverse as ivory sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, ceremonial vessels, and weaponry. As a whole, this collection of essays makes clear the ways in which current medieval and early modern histories of art are considering similar issues from multiple and, at times, compatible points of view. Both fields share an interest in the relationship between the local and the global, the complexities of identity, and the methodological challenges posed by considering objects within a global network. At the same time, reading these pieces has reminded us of some crucial differences between the global medieval world and the global early modern world, and they have thrown into relief the diversity of art historical concerns on both sides of the period divide, however artificial that divide may seem.

The Importance of the Local

One of the most prominent themes of this volume is the emphasis on the diversity of local adaptations and interpretations of objects and texts that were shuttled across remarkable distances and terrain, traversing (modern) political, social, religious, and linguistic borders. In each case, exegetical strategies were mobilized to signal either local religious or political ideology. For example, Cecily Hilsdale takes up Byzantine monastic iterations of the tales of Barlaam and Ioasaph—a narrative that emerged in Buddhist India and that moved through the Byzantine Empire to the Latin West over the course of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. Hilsdale makes clear that translations of Barlaam and Ioasaph in monastic contexts stressed the ascetic dimensions of the narrative, while at the same time ascetic monastic centres created textual objects that would have been valued, in part, for their sumptuous illuminations.

Such local appropriation, manipulation, emulation, and display of foreign images and objects is a shared interest among early modern art historians who focus on Europe, Colonial Latin America, as well as East and South Asia. For instance, Ebba Koch and Yael Rice have examined Mughal paintings, produced by the court artists Bichtir and Abul’Hasan, which incorporated European mythological and religious imagery familiar from the work of artists like the German printmaker Albrecht Dürer and the English painter John de Critz.¹ Likewise, Alessandra Russo, Diana Fane, and Gerhard Wolf have turned their attention to objects that reproduced and reinterpreted European Christological imagery in indigenous media—in this case, the feather paintings that were painstakingly crafted by amenteca artists in New Spain.² And the display of exotic objects and the representations of exotic peoples at courts in the Italian-and German-speaking worlds is being taken up by a number of scholars, among them Mark Meadow and Joaneath Spicer, who have found common ground between two traditionally divided fields of “Northern” and “Southern” early modern art history.³

Intersectional Identity

But how might the local appropriation of objects and images from distant locations and other religions have impacted medieval society and culture more broadly? One could perhaps imagine an Orthodox member of the Byzantine court in Constantinople recognizing “Islamic” imagery and forms on precious vessels, while at the same time associating those images and forms with Byzantine culture or cultural identity. For the Byzantine court was a place where objects from around the world were given, collected, and displayed, and where elites of different ethnicities, religions, and political allegiances mingled, dined, and conversed with one another regardless of political and religious tensions beyond the walls of the palace.

How are we to understand the formation and maintenance of religious, ethnic, or social identities in contexts like this? Alicia Walker takes up this question in her case study of the category-defying Beryozovo cup. Walker examines not only the oscillations of identities among Byzantine elites who may have used this vessel (and others like it) and the identification of certain aspects of the vessel’s Islamic origin, but also what she recognizes as an expansive terrain of cultural reference. In her assessment of the Furusiyya dagger, Heather Badamo interrogates how this prestige object, which was worn on the body during the hunt or handled at courtly feasts, “performed for diverse audiences.” Badamo argues that objects like the dagger, remarkable for its Arabic inscription and icon of a Christian warrior-saint, helped mediate cross-cultural interactions in regions that were characterized by religious, ethnic, and linguistic differences. Both Walker and Badamo are concerned with luxury objects that were used by those on the highest rungs of the social ladder in the pursuit of leisure and power. Together, their essays alert us to the extreme religious and ethnic diversity that was one of the characteristics of elite social spheres in the medieval world, and show us that objects played a vital role in negotiating difference and sameness in these contexts.

Elite cultural identity can be of two or more kinds, yet religious doctrine endlessly spells out the distinctions between identities. It insists in explicit terms on the alterity of other belief systems in dogma and practice. This insistence on religious difference in both Islamic and Christian theologies has fostered the presupposition of an essential binary between “East and West” and “Muslim and “Christian” in the medieval and early modern periods. Jennifer Pruitt, though, makes clear that inter-confessional concord between Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and Latin Christians can be found beyond the confines of the court, and she does so by looking to the architectural history of Jerusalem during the Abbasid and Fatimid eras. The zones of mutuality shared between Muslims and Christians in the years preceding the Crusades throw light on the complex local dynamics in the Holy City, while at the same time reminding us that the rhetoric of religious difference is not always representative of the lived experience of medieval peoples.

These essays are a testimony to the fact that global art history is beginning to move beyond mapping the circuitous routes in which Western or Eastern images emerged in different parts of the globe, or determining the subtle transformations that images (like that of warrior saints) underwent on account of their global mobility. When examining objects like the silver dagger and the Beryozovo cup, we must adjust how we circumscribe their intended audience because they were not subject to the gaze of one individual or culture, but a multiplicity of mutual gazes. These are also the concerns of early modern art historians. Take, for example, the work that is being done by Christina Cruz González, Elsa Arroyo Lemus, Aaron Hyman, and others on sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Flemish prints that were transported to the Americas and used to aid in religious conversion and in the fabrication of new altarpieces seen by both European colonizers and indigenous communities alike.⁴

Rethinking Models of Globalization

This collection in The Medieval Globe has brought together papers that, in the past, would have been atomized in journals for scholars in specialized fields such as Byzantine, Islamic, African, or East Asian art history. Placed here side by side, they reveal the authors’ mutual interest in questioning disciplinary assumptions, practices, and methods. As a result, this volume questions the Eurocentric perspective that continues to dominate non-specialist views of the period in order to depict a global medieval world. Taken together, they show how medieval identities were shaped by constant negotiations, that borders were crossed, and that cultures were interacting with each both pacifically and militarily.

Like their counterparts in the history of early modern art, the authors in this volume call for and propose new approaches to understanding medieval objects in a global context. Inspired by the pioneering work of scholars such as Arjun Appadurai and Craig Clunas, art history’s global turn in both medieval and early modern studies is intertwined with a renewed attention to the mobility of objects and the various meanings they acquired as a result of their social lives.⁵ All the authors here are not only interested in the trajectories of peoples and things but also explore mobility’s transformative impact on culture, knowledge, religion, and art-making. As Sarah Guérin’s study shows, paying attention to the very materials available to artists is extraordinarily productive and revealing of global processes. Objects from other lands could provide insights into foreign places and inspire cultural and artistic transformations, and the study of mobile materials makes clear the permeability of artistic traditions. Hilsdale, for instance, asks us to take seriously the “routes” (instead of the “roots”) of Barlaam and Ioasaph by examining the various versions of the tale and its movement through space and time, rather than attempting to find its point of origin. In this way, her essay is in kinship with current scholarship in early modern art and cultural history which focuses on the mobility of raw materials, crafted objects, knowledge, and the agents that orchestrated the complex circulation of global goods and information—particularly essays in Daniela Bleichmar and Meredith Martin’s September 2015 special edition of Art History, “Objects in Motion,” and in Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello’s 2015 edited volume, The Global Lives of Things.

Following a theme that permeates The Medieval Globe series, several of the authors question whether modern and postmodern notions of the globe have any explanatory force when applied to the medieval or the early modern world: an issue at heart of Carol Symes’ seminal study “When We Talk about Modernity.”⁶ For Bonnie Cheng, certain popular models of the global risk collapsing crucial distinctions among patrons, materials, techniques, and exchange networks; at the same time, she recognizes that ideas fashionable in global art history circles can help to destabilize both older Eurocentric narratives and the current nationalistic narratives still prevalent in contemporary China. Hu sounds a similar note of caution about conflating modern supply chains with the much more dangerous and episodic exchanges of the eighth century. Hilsdale, on the other hand, draws on models of connected history in medieval literature derived from the scholarship of early modernists such as Sanjay Subrahmanyam.⁷

At this date, and to our knowledge, the historical relevance of postmodern theories of globalization does not appear to be a live question in art historical discussion of the European early modern globe. But the issues raised here, we hope, will prompt early modernists to begin to think about the explanatory force of certain concepts, such as network theory, that have been discussed implicitly and explicitly in some early modern art historical scholarship. When such networks are evoked, it is often assumed that objects and ideas travelled across the early modern globe instantaneously; rarely are delays or challenges to cargo discussed. Though she primarily focuses on the late eighteenth century, Jennifer Roberts’s work on objects arriving and departing the American colonies has begun to reveal that the transmission of objects and information across the Atlantic Ocean was rarely successful and efficacious.⁸ Perhaps, with more attention to the physical conditions of global mobility in the early modern world, early modern art historians will begin to more closely interrogate the language and concepts we have borrowed from scholars writing in and thinking about the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Early Modern Period: What’s the Difference?

Thus far, we have highlighted some of the affinities between the global medieval and early modern worlds, and within the art historical scholarship that attempts to come to terms with them. There are, however, some cleavages between the two periods, which might be defined by some distinctions in the roles that objects and images played in cross-cultural interactions. One such image, the earliest known representation of the Americas produced by Europeans, visualizes the seismic cultural shock of this encounter and its imagined potential: a woodcut (Figure 9.1) that appeared in an edition of Christopher Columbus’s Epistola de insulis nuper inventis, published in Basel in 1493. Here, from an elevated site, we observe Europeans and Native Americans approaching each other for the first time, a titanic galleon in the foreground. The geometric precision of this product of European technology is an emblem of the sophistication that the print is meant to project: isosceles triangles, squares, and circles characterize the vessel that carried Columbus and his crew of sailors across the Atlantic. Although the deck is empty, the presence of the crew is signalled by the thirty-four oars that rest upon the placid water, while the maintenance of social hierarchies is evoked not just by the banners of an absent sovereign but also in the way the ship itself is designed and equipped. The covered captain’s quarters are prominently on display; the oars suggest the hidden social structures that built and power the ship; and the barrelled provisions and penned livestock point to a society that is organized with an eye to the future.

This depiction of a complex European world stands in stark contrast to the presentation of the indigenous society that Europeans are seen witnessing for the first time, just beyond the ship’s mast. According to the unknown artist, the natives of the Indies are to be envisioned as two bands of naked figures ensconced in a rolling landscape. For some of the inhabitants of this new land, their nudity is unremarkable; for others, like the woman who crosses her arms to cover her breasts, it is something to shield. Through this gesture she indicates a new and sudden awareness of the difference between herself and the clothed Europeans approaching by boat. Conceivably, it was the act of veiling herself that precipitated the gaze of the male native, who holds in his hand a shell: for he now, too, recognizes her nakedness and perhaps this epiphany stokes his lust. Surrounded by uncultivated nature, these naked figures invite comparison to Adam and Eve. (This kinship, we would venture to say, is made explicit not just to the intended European viewer outside of the image, but also to the audience inside the woodcut.) The landscape that hems in the natives on the left side of the picture appears unused. This recognizable terrain meets the sea, and it is at this confluence of land and water that two distinct social, cultural, religious, and ethnic worlds converge.

This convergence is mediated by an exchange of objects. Inner-pictorial attention to the exchange—by all the figures in the image who witness its centrality— corresponds to our extra-pictorial interest. The same male figure who recognizes his female companion’s nudity stands at the head of a group of men, grasping a shell and lunging forward to hand it over to the turbaned figure on the boat. The shell is a natural artifact that has been improvised to serve as the object of exchange. The repurposing of the shell through native expediency thus transforms

Figure 9.1.

Woodcut from an edition of Christopher Columbus’s Epistola de insulis nuper inventis: Basel, 1493.

it into a commodity. (A shell like it, artfully placed on the shore, keys us into the improvisation.) But its difference from the worked vessel that extends from the hand of the bearded and clothed European marks how this exchange diverges from those that typically occurred between Europeans and non-Europeans during the medieval period, when both sides were seen as equally likely to manufacture high-quality goods and where there was often a mutual understanding of an object’s material worth and cultural value. The artist constructs the disparity in material value by emphasizing the found-object quality of the native artifact, in order to expose a perceived disparity between the cultural level of Europeans and that of Native Americans.

Here, then, one aspect of early modern alterity rests on this seemingly asymmetrical exchange: not crudely rendered ethnic otherness, or idol worship, or savagery, as would soon become the case. But there are also signs of the desire for assimilation and homogenization that would also characterize European colonial encounters with the peoples of the New World. By engaging in the transaction, the natives show that they are capable of civility, that outsiders can become insiders and that a potentially hostile situation could be converted into a situation of amity. Given that the woodcut associates the New World with biblical notions of paradise—through the naked native bodies, unworked land, and the recognition of shame and potential lust—it subtly suggests that this foundational engagement could bring forth a cornucopia of possibilities for objects whose origin point is somewhere outside the world’s fringe.

Some art historical studies focused on the years after 1492 have begun to engage with this radically expanded post-Columbian world; but, like the 1493 print, they have predominately interrogated the European powers that sought to dominate it. Early modern global art historical studies have been trained on the explorations of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns in the late fifteenth through the sixteenth century; the relationship of different regions of Christendom—such as the Italian-and the German-speaking states—to the Islamic East; and the Dutch and English trading companies in the Asian seas and on the Atlantic. Such research has made clear that, by the late sixteenth century, the global systems of trade had shifted substantially from those of the medieval world, both in scope and in structure. Two centres now dominated extraordinarily vast expanses: Habsburg Spain, which encompassed the New World and much of Asia, and late Ming and early Qing China. This rather different global system, as well as other accompanying technological and social changes, have encouraged art historians to attend to diverse issues in the early modern period. Here we very briefly bring to the forefront five major factors that affected the conditions of global early modern art production and which also condition current art historical scholarship, all of which diverge from the themes and issues foregrounded in this collection.

1. The Print and the Copy

The European print revolution is commonly defined as a main catalyst for cultural and political change in the fifteenth century. Significantly for the history of art, the development of the woodcut and the engraving allowed for the mass production of images and in turn led to intellectual property issues that had not been documented previously. Most famously, as Lisa Pon has explored in depth, Marcantonio Raimondi was brought to trial in Venice for reproducing engraved versions of Albrecht Dürer’s “Life of the Virgin” woodcut series, even including Dürer’s monograph.⁹ This moment signalled both the rise of the artist as endowed with intellectual invention and the power of the printed image to disseminate not only the artist’s imagery but also his name. In turn, engravings rose in prominence throughout the sixteenth century and became the central form of artistic production to disseminate style and subject matter across the globe. For instance, the prints designed by the Flemish artist Giovanni Stradano, who lived in Florence, made their way to Mexico and South America within a few years of their production in Antwerp. A basic search on the “Project on the Engraved Sources of Spanish Colonial Art” (PESSCA) reveals some fifty-four paintings in colonial contexts based on Stradano prints.¹⁰ Produced in multiples and disseminated throughout the world, these small-scale portable images inspired artists, religious converters and converts, collectors, and various other members of society. In turn, iconographies of art became standardized and a global style of art developed on a scale beyond the “International Gothic style.”

2. More Goods in Abundance, a Changing Demographic, and New Artistic Media

While the medieval luxury market was still thriving in the early modern period, a larger demographic became able to acquire exotic objects and commodities—and so a greater diversity of goods entered common circulation than had been typical in the medieval world. Gerritsen and Riello have inspired the scholarship of early modern art historians by showing how, after the late sixteenth century, “evergrowing regular flows of commodities traded in bulk across vast distances.”¹¹ Indeed a study of the documents recording the flow of goods entering the new Medici port of Livorno in the late sixteenth century reveals a gradual increase in large quantities of goods such as cochineal, sugar, pearls, and guaiacum being distributed to the middle and upper classes. Along with this came new materials and methods that were difficult to define or at times were “untranslatable” between cultures, according to Alessandra Russo.¹² Europeans now struggled to comprehend a painting made of feathers just those in the New World adapted to learn from a print. Florentines endeavoured to emulate Chinese blue and white porcelain, while “mannerist” art first developed in Europe was produced in the Philippines.

3. New Genres

The exchange of novel goods among diverse populations inspired the production of new goods and new genres. In the early modern period, exotic images, motifs, and objects were not just freely incorporated into longstanding pictorial traditions, but also contributed to the development of new pictorial genres. Two new genres emerged prominently in sixteenth-century Europe and the Americas: the still life and the landscape. While the subjects of these two genres appeared in illuminated manuscripts and details within paintings during the Middle Ages, it was in the early modern period that they developed into autonomous forms in conjunction with economic factors. Dutch still life painting in the seventeenth century, which was extremely popular at the height of the Dutch trading empire, is a case in point. As Dutch ships brought back more and more goods from Asia and the Americas, still lives became increasingly more lavish in content and complex in composition. Like the commodities from around the world they pictured, still life paintings became commodities that were fervently bought up by individuals on all rungs of the social ladder. This entanglement of the artistic and the economic was also importantly political. Through their ubiquity, as Julie Hochstrasser has shown, still life paintings were one of several mechanisms that naturalized the Dutch presence throughout the world.¹³ And Claudia Swan has demonstrated that the prominence of exotica in Dutch homes and in Dutch painting was paradoxically seminal to the creation of a Dutch national identity.¹⁴

Similarly, landscape painting emerged in the sixteenth century from cartographic views inspired by early modern travel and became a favourite subject matter for middle and elite classes of collectors. A recent panel entitled “Nature, Landscape, and Sacredness in the Era of the Missionary,” presented by members of the Getty-funded research project on Spanish Italy and the Iberian Americas, has explored the flexibility of the new genre that could communicate complex sacred, political, and scientific significance to all layers of society between Europe and the New World.¹⁵ Thus, as we see it, new genres whose content was in large part dependent on the picturing of non-European goods, places, and people were in heavy circulation by the turn of the seventeenth century; their visibility and pervasiveness contributed to the crystallization of the modern nation-state, and the nation-state’s existential reliance on the cultivation of difference between other nation-states in Europe and beyond.

4. The Rise of Systematic Collecting

Systematic collecting remains a major topic in global early modern art historical scholarship. While treasuries acted as important spaces for controlling, displaying, and categorizing precious objects in the medieval period, they remained intimate spaces of the religious and princely elite. Though essays in this volume, such as Jun Hu’s, consider artistic patronage and collecting, medievalists have only just begun to address the history of collecting and the ways in which collections offered up spaces for individuals to vicariously experience far-flung lands.¹⁶ In contrast, early modern art history is replete with collecting studies: the Journal of the History of Collecting and early modern collecting research groups and conferences flourish and continue to produce scholarship. The following questions are at the crux of this research: What was the place or status of non-European objects in Europe’s collections? Why were these objects pictured, utilized, and transformed by European artists? How was European art altered as a result of the encounter with radically different visual practices, materials, and techniques? Finally, how can art history, a European discipline that studies works of art according to a linear history of periodization and hard geographic boundaries (e.g., French Gothic architecture, Italian Renaissance sculpture, Dutch Baroque painting) understand objects that transcend these categories? These questions have driven art historical scholarship devoted to understanding the formation and circulation of knowledge in the early modern world, as well as the development of the modern aesthetic and art historical categories that have become the keystone of European art historical practice. By revealing the historically determined assumptions of the discipline, and the ways in which early modern globalization was integral to their formation, early modern art historical studies have begun to re-examine the time-honoured questions of the discipline of art history. And we are certain that medievalists can make important contributions to our knowledge of the acquisition, organization, and maintenance of the medieval collections that may have inspired these practices.

5. Colonization and Ethnographic Interests

Several of these developments in early modern art history stem from the culture shock of 1492 and the European colonization that ensued. Early modern global art history is intimately tied to Colonial Latin American studies. Thanks to Walter Mignolo, Serge Gruzinski, Claire Farago, Thomas Cummins, and others, early modern art history can no longer be separated from the European colonization of Asia, Africa, and North and South America. For example, Renaissance art historical studies are shifting from a focus on humanist learning and the revival of antiquity to examine how transatlantic travel, novelty, and violence impacted artistic production, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This shift is creating a scholarly gap between the medieval and early modern global art history and, in a sense, is reviving an examination of Greco-Roman models of empire in early modern art historical scholarship in new and unexpected ways.

The recent books by Stephanie Leitch and Surekha Davies have made clear that the travels of explorers and colonizers in the years following 1492 provoked an “ethnographic impulse” quite different from anything previously experienced. While Leitch focuses on peoples depicted in single-sheet prints and books to demonstrate how difference was represented, Davies examines representations of peoples and monsters on maps to explain that, not only is ethnic difference defined by place, but also that the category of the human was newly invented through cartographic representations. While earlier texts such as the Nuremberg chronicle made reference to diverse people throughout the globe, its images did not articulate alterity in the way as did Cesare Vecellio’s late sixteenth-century Venetian costume book Degli habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo (1590, 1598), with page after page of detailed woodcuts of peoples from around the world dressed in their indigenous clothing. By helping us understand how early modern exploration challenged ancient views of the world, and how early modern individuals attempted to understand humanity through the practice of image-making, work on the early modern European ethnographic impulse has forced us to rethink how the Renaissance notion of the individual came about.

Conclusion

In tracing these trends, we are concerned with making clear that artistic production and reception were not just bound within a particular location or culture, but also that works of art were created upon the shared foundations of a variety of places, peoples, and beliefs. And this concern is fundamentally shared by the studies in this collection, making it clear that medievalists and early modernists have even more incentives to share methodologies and to communicate the findings of their research. What we can say with certainty, at present, is that when we take on images and objects that flourish among individuals who spoke different languages, who prayed to different gods, who fought for different causes, and who bowed down to different sovereigns, we are witnessing the visual making apparent cultural contact in a way that languages and texts cannot.

While we have endeavoured to trace some critical distinctions between art historical concerns relevant to the medieval and early modern globes, we must note that, at a practical level, the global turn has begun to coalesce medieval, early modern, and colonial studies into “premodern” art history. Departments are often unable to hire both a medievalist and an early modernist, for example, in part because faculty lines once dedicated to these fields are being reallocated to increase the number of positions in non-European specialties. Notably, much of the most provocative writing in early modern global art history, as evidenced in just some of the examples cited above, is not being produced by scholars in art history departments. Divisions between the two periods and the Vasarian notion of decay and rebirth are thankfully disappearing and the “darker side” of the Renaissance is coming to light in art history, even as earlier generations dispelled the myth of a medieval “Dark Ages.”¹⁷ While differences can, and in some respects should, remain in the ways that we study and understand the medieval and early modern eras, the global turn has brought those who study the world from 300 to 1800 closer together.