Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration (Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History)

Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration

bettie allison rand lectures in art history

Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration Edited by Mary D. Sheriff the university of north carolina press chapel hill

The publication of books in this series is made possible through the generous support of william g. rand in memory of bettie allison rand.

©2010 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved. Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker and set in Whitman by Rebecca Evans. Manufactured in the United States of America. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cultural contact and the making of European art since the age of exploration / edited by Mary D. Sheriff.—1st ed. p. cm.—(Bettie Allison Rand lectures in art history) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8078-3366-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Art and globalization—Europe. 2. Art, European— Themes, motives. i. Sheriff, Mary D. n72.g55c85 2010 709.4—dc22 2009049095 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Acknowledgments

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1

Introduction Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art, 1492–1930 mary d. sheriff

1

2

On The Peripatetic Life of Objects in the Era of Globalization claire farago

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3

Remapping Dutch Art in Global Perspective Other Points of View julie hochstrasser

43

4

Travel and Cultural Exchange in Enlightenment Rome christopher m. s. johns

73

5

The Dislocations of Jean-Etienne Liotard, Called the Turkish Painter mary d. sheriff

97

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Images of Uncertainty Delacroix and the Art of Nineteenth-Century Expansionism elisabeth a. fraser

123

7

Gauguin in Black and Blue carol mavor

153

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A Different Shade of Modernism Difference and Distinction in Pedro Figari’s Representations of Black Bodies lyneise e. williams

177

Selected Bibliography

203

Notes on the Contributors

207

Index

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Acknowledgments Without the generosity of Mr. William Rand this volume would not have been possible. Our most heartfelt thanks go to Bill for supporting this publication in honor of his wife, Bette Allison Rand. I am grateful to my research assistants Allison Klos and Alison Hafera for their invaluable work both in preparing the manuscript and in obtaining photographs and permissions. And special thanks to Elaine Maisner, press editor for the Rand Lecture Series, for her continued support of this project. I am indebted to Melissa Hyde and David O’Brien for their careful reading of the manuscript and for their many excellent suggestions and recommendations. It has been a pleasure to work with all the authors in this volume, and as editor, I have appreciated their spirit of collective endeavor and mutual cooperation. Such collegiality has made my job an easy one.

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Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration

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1 Introduction Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art, 1492–1930 mary d. sheriff

Imagine entering a museum for the first time, anxious to learn about European art. You pay the entry fee, pick up a map, and hurry to the works you have come to see. Following the numbered floor plan, you traverse sequential rooms dedicated to different national schools at different historical moments: Italian art of the early Renaissance, 1400–1500, in one suite; Spanish Baroque Painting, 1600–1700, in another. When your circuit seems complete, you again consult the floor plan, just to make sure you have seen it all. And now you notice there is a department of Islamic art one floor up and that the arts of China and Latin America are located in an entirely different building. The trajectory of this imagined visit implies the primacy of national traditions within Europe and the separation of the arts of Europe from those of other cultures. Walking through the museum, visitors often follow a path much like that traveled in thumbing through a history of world art. Museum and text together emphasize the distinctiveness of art forms, even if the odd label or caption points out that a French artist imitates an Italian precursor or that an English patron collected Chinese porcelain, and even if the occasional museum room or history subchapter focuses on an “international” moment. The divisions that structure both galleries and textbooks are surely heuristic necessities, but they nevertheless obscure processes of cultural appropriation and exchange fundamental to the making of European art.

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The goal of this book is to elucidate and explore those processes as they shaped the visual arts between 1492, when Europeans first landed in the Americas, and the early twentieth century, when numbers of Americans gathered in Paris, exerting a profound influence on the cultural scene. These processes presuppose at least two recognizable entities (e.g., nations, cultures, regions, etc.) in contact with one another. We do not set out, then, to abolish notions of national schools or cultural difference, nor to discard the concept of European art. Rather, this collection aims to explore cultural contact as a set of dynamic, varied, and continuous processes that have been essential to forming the arts we call European. By using the term “European art” I do not mean to suggest that we can identify a specific group of artworks to which the label naturally belongs. The idea of “Europe” has always been and continues to be unstable, and it is impossible to say incontestably what states and cultures count or counted as European where and when. Adding to the instability of the concept are the hostilities and the differences, the prejudices and the stereotypes that divided one European group from another. Religious strife pitted Protestant against Catholic Europe; theories of climate and its effects on the human animal led northern Europeans to view their southern neighbors as sensual, hotheaded, and even degenerate. And in the course of the eighteenth century, the continent was split in a second direction, with those living in the west posing themselves as different from—and superior to—the less civilized folk who hailed from a newly conceived “eastern” Europe. At the same time, ruling families throughout Europe married one into the other, creating a sort of pan-European aristocracy. Bloodlines, position, and wealth also defined a cosmopolitan class who could imagine themselves as both transcending national borders and distinct from persons of lower status with whom they shared a similar heritage, religion, or nationality. Contact made differences apparent, but it also allowed for the adaptation and hybridization of practices and customs, which moved back and forth across national, regional, and religious divides. In terms of art production, there have always been many different forms circulating on the continent, each shaped by contact between and among cultures without and within Europe’s real or imagined boundaries. Despite the hostility, prejudice, and separation that often marked the relation between different peoples, retaining the term “European” is 2

introduction

both useful and appropriate. As historian Anthony Pagden has pointed out, when faced with cultures very alien, Europeans have persistently described themselves to be not merely French or Spanish but also European.1 Retaining the term “European” thus acknowledges the common heritage claimed by those dwelling on the continent: the classical past of Greece and Rome that was never as pure or unified as it was imagined to be. We do aim, however, to loosen and redraw the boundaries of what has constituted “European art,” whether it be through adding hybrid works made in contact zones, considering forms of production not usually classified with the “fine arts,” attending to a wider range of art traditions within Europe, or including painters such as Pedro Figari, whom Lyneise Williams discusses in our final essay. Born in Uruguay of Italian parents, Figari built his reputation in Paris, where the style and subject of his paintings engaged the discourse of “the primitive” evident throughout Europe and the Americas in the first decades of the twentieth century. The essays that follow focus on different contact zones, and in distinguishing different sorts of exchange, they pose a range of pertinent questions. How were artistic practices that we recognize as “European” shaped in contact with objects, artworks, and people in border zones, colonies, “discovered” lands, and sovereign states distant from Europe? How were they shaped by contact between cultures within Europe that were perceived as quite different from one another? What social, commercial, and political conditions enabled and shaped the European appropriation of objects and ideas made elsewhere? How did cultural contact affect not only the individual European artist but also larger artistic movements and the histories we make of them? How do we redraw the boundaries of artistic movements once we acknowledge the global circulation of artworks? And if cultural contact can tell us something about art, what can art tell us about cultural contact? While the essays are arranged chronologically, this introduction is organized around and focuses on significant issues raised explicitly and implicitly in the essays that follow. The title of this collection, Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration, acknowledges the groundbreaking and inspirational work of historians Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley: Asia in the Making of Europe (1965–93). In this monumental multivolume series, Lach and Van Kley investigate the relations between East and West from 1500 to 1800, demonstrating the deep and widespread influence 3

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of Asian societies on developing European culture and illuminating the many ways that “the revelation of Asia” transformed and modified—in essence helped to make — Europe.2 This project also draws inspiration from the work of literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt, especially from her influential book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992). Where Lach and Van Kley focus on Asia, Pratt attends to the contact zones, and especially South America, in which Europeans encountered denizens of the “New World.” She borrows the notion of transculturation, which ethnographers used to describe how “subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture.”3 Expanding the definition of transculturation, Pratt asks not only how Europe shaped those places it colonized but also how Europe’s “constructions of subordinated others [were] shaped by those others.” And through exploring European contact with South America and its textualized representations, she concludes that the “entity called Europe was constructed from the outside in as much as from the inside out.”4 Although many art historians are now making inquiries similar to our own in relation to specific historical moments, this volume further posits that contact with other cultures has been an essential factor throughout the history of European art, and one that is in constant dialectical tension with adherence to national (or regional) traditions.5 Our volume, moreover, also explores the historiography of art, considering in particular the assumptions that in the past have worked to limit the role of cultural contact. Individual authors address current scholarship that moves beyond those assumptions and in their essays trace out paths for the future. Eurocentrism — the point of view that holds European culture as both the apex of “civilization” and the privileged focus of interest and inquiry — can all too easily be blamed for art history’s shortcomings. There is no doubt that a sense of the continent’s supremacy has played a substantial role in marginalizing the effects of contact with other areas of the globe. But Eurocentrism is too simple an explanation that neither touches on the disciplinary assumptions that ground art history nor illuminates the many types of exchanges — some between nations within Europe — that have contributed to the making of European art. In addition to analyzing different forms of cultural contact, the authors in our volume also address art historical practices and assumptions that have limited the scope of our histories and enlarged those blind spots that are their unavoid4

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able by-product. What I mean by “blind spots” are those artists, practices, movements, or traditions occluded because they cannot be framed in established categories of analysis. One blind spot has been the artist Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702–89), who is the subject of Chapter 5. Despite a fame spread over all of eighteenthcentury Europe and beyond, only recently has Liotard captured the attention of more than the most specialized specialists. What has sparked recent interest in this artist is precisely what first brought him notice in his own day: a five-year sojourn in the Ottoman Empire and a selfgenerated image as the “Turkish Painter.” Art history’s concern with cultural contact accounts for Liotard’s increasing prominence in publications and exhibitions, but why was Liotard—given his fame and talent—so long held offstage? Hailing from Geneva, Liotard came from what has been a no-man’s-land for the history of art — at least as that history has been written outside Switzerland. Each temporal episode in the story of European art typically focuses on a small, select group of regional or national traditions while excluding many others. Swiss artists, like those working in Croatia, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, and many other sites in Europe, are largely absent from the master narrative, as are the artistic practices and traditions of those polities. Especially in the United States, art history’s vision of “European art” has been narrowly focused indeed, and this historiographic tradition continues to limit considerations of cultural contact by restricting those areas of Europe that register in art’s history. Liotard, moreover, executed many of his works in media that have long ranked low in established hierarchies. Our general histories of art between the Italian Renaissance and the Jazz Age typically focus on fresco and oil painting and, to a lesser degree, sculpture and architecture. Liotard, however, was a master of the pastel portrait, a medium and genre long associated with cosmetics, women, and amateur artists. He was also known for his miniatures and enamels, small works set into jeweled mounts or used to decorate snuffboxes and the like. The sharp distinction between “high art” (e.g., painting and sculpture) and “decorative art” (porcelain, jewelry, furniture, etc.) or between art and luxury goods is a historical construction that gained force only at the very end of the eighteenth century. At the same time that buyers, sellers, and even many artists treated art as a luxury product, those concerned to raise the status of the fine arts—academicians, aestheticians, and the like — tried to separate art and commerce 5

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by imposing theoretical distinctions that elevated fine art above concerns of the marketplace. In the case of the decorative arts (or objects of “material culture”) other alleged differences from the fine arts supported the theoretical divorce between art and commercial enterprise. The decorative arts, for example, were often marked by a utilitarian function — holding a candle, containing food, telling time, covering a wall surface — that seemed to ally them with other trade or manufactured goods. In contrast, the fine arts — painting and sculpture, for example — were said to be of higher status because they had no such utilitarian purpose but, rather, appealed to the spirit and mind. Moreover, where the fine arts of painting and sculpture could and did claim intellectual or liberal art status, the decorative arts were, in contrast, confined to the merely artisanal —the manual and the mechanical.6 As a discipline, art history inherited these distinctions, and maintaining them has much diminished our awareness of how contact with different cultures affected the arts in Europe. It is precisely in the production of snuffboxes, fans, sofas, teapots, reliquaries, wallpapers, and fashion — to cite just a few examples—that we often find clear traces of contact with different forms of artistry. And just as often we find that the same men and women who made the works we vaunt as fine art also involved themselves in the design and production of luxury goods, as well as in creating theatrical sets, military uniforms, and commemorative medals. The objects from other parts of the globe that had a notable impact on the arts of Europe were not always forms of high art. Often they were objects of commercial exchange: porcelains or textiles, for example. Sometimes they were even consumables, like the coffee that came into Europe from the Ottoman Empire. Coffee generated an entire range of European arts, from actual coffeepots to images of coffeehouses and coffee drinkers. As Christopher M. S. Johns tells us in his contribution, even the pope had a coffeehouse specially built in Rome and outfitted with an expensive imported porcelain service. Attending to a diverse array of artistic products demonstrates that the realms of commerce and art have never been distinct, and this point is argued strongly in our first three essays. In Johns’s essay, for example, Rome emerges as an entrepôt, a gathering place for the rich and famous and the essential stop for English gentlemen on the Grand Tour. The city was a complex site of exchange in which wealthy tourists purchased and carted 6

introduction

home pieces of the local patrimony: Renaissance bronzes, contemporary paintings, Roman antiquities, and all manner of curiosities. Such transactions increased the social prestige of buyers, but they also altered local artistic practices, as Johns’s essay makes clear. Moreover, because of this visitor-driven art market, the Romans would later come to understand that “art was essentially an export product, like leather handbags, elegant shoes and silk neckties.” In her analysis of seventeenth-century Dutch art, Julie Hochstrasser shows how imported textiles, rugs, and porcelains changed the vocabulary of objects visible in Dutch still life painting. These changes, moreover, celebrated the success of Dutch commerce not only for bringing the objects represented back home but also for creating the wealth necessary for many more citizens to own luxury goods like Chinese porcelains and Dutch still life paintings. Hochstrasser, moreover, describes the process that transformed Chinese Ming porcelain into “Delftware,” the blue-and-white pots and vases that still signify as quintessentially Dutch. Yet from the point of view of Hochstrasser’s essay, what makes Delftware Dutch is its origin in products brought to Holland through foreign commerce. The importance of cultural contact in the making of European art has thus been diminished not only by Eurocentrism but also by longestablished historiographic practices: attending only to the art of a very few countries within Europe, separating the high arts from the decorative arts, and divorcing the arts from commerce. We can add to these factors several others that are equally important. The first is another binary distinction that has helped to frame art history as a discipline: that between ethnographic specimens (or what were earlier called curiosities or exotica) and fine art. Save for exploring the modern “primitivist” aesthetic created by artists like Gauguin and Picasso who “discovered” the art of indigenous peoples, European borrowings from “curiosities” and “ethnographic specimens” have remained relatively unexamined, and this is especially true for earlier centuries. The separation between art and ethnographic specimen—as well as the impossibility of actually maintaining such a separation — is evident in considering the phenomenon of the ethnographic museum, born in the nineteenth century. While the very existence of such a museum suggests that there is a separate category of objects that belong in such a setting, many of the objects displayed in ethnographic museums could easily be — and have been—integrated into 7

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art museums with collections of African or Oceanic or pre- Columbian art. In the realm of private (as opposed to institutional) collecting, which Claire Farago also discusses in her contribution, the cabinet of curiosity persisted well into the eighteenth century and beyond. These collections mixed natural history specimens, ethnographical objects, and European engravings, paintings, sculptures, and antiquities, suggesting that those who bought and owned these objects did not separate into distinct realms the fine arts, the decorative arts, and exotica. Nor did they draw a sharp line between the artful objects nature made (e.g., corals, crystals, and shells) and those wrought by human hand, all of which found their way into the same collections housed and displayed in the same spaces. Only later were curiosities, such as the Aztec featherwork fans Farago discusses, relegated to ethnographic museums and storerooms.7 Collecting curiosities, especially when taken from colonized peoples or peoples Europeans considered as “savage” or “primitive,” also raises a series of questions that do not press upon exchange between equal trading partners. The Dutch appropriation of Ming porcelain grew from commercial trade in which each side exercised some control over the exchange. In the case of many Mexican featherworks, Spanish conquistadors looted these objects as they subjugated the Aztec kingdoms. Such featherwork made into ceremonial objects such as capes and fans had a visible impact on European art making, and featherwork was immediately adapted to European missionary needs and made to represent Christian iconography. Yet, as Farago points out in our opening essay, such works have never been recognized within the existing framework of “Renaissance art.” The forcible appropriation of Aztec materials, moreover, presents ethical problems that should also be acknowledged in our histories of art, especially since the repatriation of cultural property removed forcibly or illegally from its original setting remains an ethical issue in the world today. Many Aztec objects were “collected” from a culture forced by invading conquistadors and missionaries to convert to an alien religion and to renounce traditional ways of life. Where there was a definite gain for the Chinese merchants trading with Holland, there was a loss for the Nahuatl-speaking people of Mexico. Another aspect of the prevailing art historiography that has contributed to the undervaluation of cultural contact is the assumed dichotomy between formal properties and subject matters. It is primarily in the area 8

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of formal innovation — and especially challenges to linear perspective and illusionism — that contact with other art forms has been accepted as having a substantive effect on European art. This chapter in the story of European art generally begins with the French Impressionist painters “discovering” Japanese prints and moves to artists like Gauguin and Picasso “discovering” Oceanic and African art. My point is not to suggest that stylistic appropriations are insignificant. Indeed, Lyneise Williams in her contribution takes up the issue of “primitivism” in early twentiethcentury Europe and Latin America, analyzing it as a style that mimics art made by peoples Europeans considered in a lesser state of civilization (or put otherwise, closer to the state of nature). Her discussion tells us much about how Europe imagined for its own purposes these “others,” many of whom were colonial subjects. Yet Williams’s analysis also shows that in the case of Pedro Figari, subject matter was just as significant. In Paris, he represented elements of the Afro-Uruguayan culture in ways that ran counter to some of the stereotypes primitivists embraced and that thwarted, if only inadvertently, the desire of Uruguayan authorities to efface traces of the rich traditions derived from African sources. Figari’s paintings create a hybridized art that diverges from the prevailing primitivist mode precisely through a use of the naïf vocabulary of forms joined to a personal selection of subject matter. Throughout our volume, essays engage issues raised by both form and subject matter, considering, for example, Frans Post’s depiction of the church at Olinda, Brazil; Pompeo Battoni’s portraits of Scottish nobles in Rome; Eugène Delacroix’s representations of Moroccan doors and thresholds; and Paul Gauguin’s depictions of childhood. Attending to subject matter also offers the opportunity to examine cultural attitudes and prejudices as they are embedded in works of art—attitudes and prejudices that inherently presume cultural contact, no matter how distant from the point of creation and no matter if the artist’s contact with the other culture was entirely mediated. Many commentators today are indeed attending to subject matter in sophisticated ways that illuminate a history of attitudes toward the many “others” that Europeans encountered around the globe. Nevertheless, art historical writing sometimes adopts a hierarchy of subject matter that diminishes the import of European engagements with the non-European. And at other times commentators underestimate the extent to which those who were the objects of a “European gaze” determined how they were represented. 9

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We see the first practice at work when historians assume, rather than interrogate, the hierarchies of subject matter that were in place during the periods they study, or more typically, when they uncritically impose their own assumptions on the past. Art history textbooks, for example, have long distinguished implicitly between works whose subjects the authors consider “serious” and works they consider “frivolous,” and these judgments, typically made on the basis of a superficial impression, either authorize (in the case of the serious) or forestall (in the case of the frivolous) further interpretation. Works that represent historical events, for example, are described in relation to their cultural and political background, while images of sensory, physical, or narcissistic pleasure (as opposed to erotic violence or domination, which is always taken seriously) are often passed over as if what they represented lacked a conceptual history. In addition, representations that show “real life” in a “realistic” manner are often valued over those deemed as playful escapist fantasies. Such attitudes toward subject matter are at work, for example, in the way eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representations of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa have been treated in studies of those periods and in our general histories of art. Until quite recently, art historians have generally imagined that the eighteenth-century contact with things Ottoman had no lasting or important influence on European art forms, a topic I take up in my essay. If written into the larger history of art, this engagement—which is seen in the subject matter rather than the form of European art—has been cast as a moment of turquerie, the instance of a passing fascination with things Ottoman. Turquerie is manifested in art through the (often fantasized) representation of Ottoman subjects and goods and through European sitters displayed in exotic costumes. As turquerie, this contact with the Ottoman Empire is commonly reduced to a fashion and thereby put into the category of the ephemeral, along with other contemporaneous fads, notably eighteenth-century chinoiserie and egyptomanie. These fashions, moreover, stand in contrast to “neoclassical art,” a return to Greek or Roman classical forms that gathered force in the 1770s. Neoclassicism is still imagined as a pivotal moment in the history of art, one that marked a rational return to the basic principles, both ethical and stylistic, of Western art and a purging of the fantasies and excesses invested in the manie

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(a French term that implied a sort of mental obsession or derangement) for things outside the West. Later engagements with Islamic cultures—for example, those of Eugène Delacroix or Jean-Léon Gérôme — have generally received more serious consideration. Art history has long embraced Delacroix as a father of romanticism — a seminal European cultural movement—and his most frequently studied Orientalist fantasies mix violence with sensuality, as does the notorious Death of Sardanapalus (1827; Paris, Musée du Louvre). In the case of Gérôme, his “realism” has for many decades been a subject of serious scholarly investigation.8 More recently, paintings by both Gérôme and Delacroix are seen as embodying “Orientalism,” and thus they are taken as both formed by and formative of European imperialism. Starting with Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking essay “The Imaginary Orient,” many art historians have adopted and adapted Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism with impressive and illuminating results, demonstrating how artworks helped create a vision of the East that could justify and abet European aggression.9 Whatever the advantages and shortcomings of any individual analysis, these readings together give significance to the art under critique. European art is seen as powerful and as having an important, if nefarious, political role. This view stands in contrast to the naming of eighteenth-century Europe’s interest in the Levant as turquerie, a conceptualization that trivializes (we might even say masks) the intense contact between Ottomans and Europeans throughout the eighteenth century and long before, and that leaves unexamined the relation between contact and art production. In putting side by side the notions of turquerie and Orientalism, we find Eurocentrism taking an unexpected turn: when Europeans meet Ottomans on more or less equal footing—as they did in the eighteenth century —the visual record of their real or imagined encounters is taken as mere fashion. When Europeans begin to appropriate Ottoman territories in North Africa, the images that focus on the peoples of those territories are read as serious business, whether those images are faithful recordings, wishful fantasies, or racist caricatures. The idea of European art representing other peoples in an overtly racist manner raises questions about a second way in which analyses of subject matter have, often inadvertently, limited our view of cultural contact. For the past decade or more, art historians working on European art have

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studied how works imagined and caricatured other peoples, and this process has led to provocative and illuminating results. Yet such analyses sometimes risk either maintaining European art as a “pure product,” untouched by either the cultures or the peoples represented, or seeing transculturation only as moving from Europe to its colonies. Interpreters sometimes sidestep the possibility that experiences with other cultures, practices, and traditions — no matter the extent to which they were caricatured, misunderstood, appropriated or politically dominated by the West — had actual formative effects on European art and artists. In the desire to unmask Eurocentrism, interpreters risk ignoring, or at least underestimating, these effects. Elisabeth Fraser’s study of Eugène Delacroix’s Moroccan sketchbooks speaks to the real and sometimes disorienting effects that travel and encounters with an alien culture produce on individuals. She explores the tensions and uncertainty — the insecurities of the European artisttraveler who despite his nation’s imperial ambitions has little control in the contact zone. Such travelers often see only what the individuals they encounter want or allow them to see. In the case of Delacroix, the assured subjectivity he shows when painting Oriental subject matter in his Paris studio is distinctly missing from the sketches made in the contact zone, in this case the Kingdom of Morocco. Focusing on both the subject and form of these sketches, Fraser argues for the uncertainty of Delacroix’s works and their exemplification of the nineteenth-century tensions over cultural contact. Even in a situation of conquest and apparent control, Europe’s assumed superiority over subjugated peoples was never secure and had to be obsessively refigured. Reading Delacroix’s Moroccan sketches as substantially different from both his painted Orientalist fantasies and the travel sketches he made in his native France, Fraser shows how the direct encounter with otherness led to a different sort of representational practice. In a larger sense, then, we can see Mary Louise Pratt’s expanded notion of transculturation at work in Delacroix’s Moroccan images, which demonstrate how his “constructions of subordinated others [were] shaped by those others.” In considering Europe’s appropriation of techniques, motifs, and styles from other peoples, it is important to acknowledge not only gestures of European imperialism but also those aspects of appropriation that operate in many different circumstances. Anthropologists have theorized com12

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mon patterns of cultural borrowings — whether they be of form, subject, or medium; whether taken by force or freely given; whether pushed on subjugated peoples or chosen by them—noting how borrowings are incorporated to a greater or lesser extent into known practices, assumptions, and traditions. Pratt’s notion of transculturation defines such a process, as does Alfred Kroeber’s idea of “stimulus diffusion” cited by Julie Hochstrasser, whereby “the receiving culture adopts ideas and patterns from the outside source, but gives them a new, native content and is thus propelled in directions it would not otherwise have taken.”10 Anthropologist Greg Dening demonstrates, as well, that even in a “first contact” situation (in specific, the encounters between Europeans and Polynesians) each side attempts to control the encounter intellectually, and that both “native” and “stranger,” to use Dening’s terms, position the other in terms of their own cultural understandings, habits, and practices.11 In bringing cultural contact to the center of European art, the ideal, of course, would be to see each encounter from two sides, to write the history from both points of the view, as Dening does. Yet this approach sometimes runs into practical problems—few of us have the skills (historical and cultural knowledge, language facility, familiarity with artistic traditions, etc.) to explicate both sides of the encounter in a meaningful and original way. What we can do is imagine art history as a more collaborative discipline, or perhaps better said, a less compartmentalized one, with specialists in vastly different fields working together—or at least drawing on one another’s work. What I am suggesting is more contact — contact between those working on European art and those working on other areas of the globe, between those working on aspects of the European tradition well studied, and those working on European arts produced in venues that have never commanded our attention. I am suggesting we imagine the discipline of art history as a contact zone. Claire Farago’s analysis here provides an example of this collaboration through engaging with fields of scholarship distant from her own. Drawing on the work of specialists in African art, she discusses how works like African Portuguese ivories produced in the sixteenth century were understood differently in Sierra Leone than they were in Europe. In the absence of a contemporaneous written European response to these works, Farago reconstructs the European understanding of them from her deep knowledge of Renaissance art theory and then draws on Suzanne Blier’s expertise in African art to 13

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explicate the other side of the equation. She similarly explores Mexican manuscripts in tandem with scholars such as Serge Gruzinski. Profoundly engaged with the results of cultural mixing, Farago’s work calls for a decentered Renaissance that explores how cultural contact changes not only the meaning of things but the way people live: “The kind of art historical practice I would like to see goes all over the world and deals with all kinds of practices, representational systems, and cultural conditions — not only at the level of social history, but at deeper epistemological levels, studying what happens when new identities are formed, when new communication occurs, and when representational practices that have never been in contact before are suddenly in collision and contention, when the readability of the art changes because of contact, and when people’s lives are changed because of their altered material culture.”12 While many scholars in their analysis of contact are focusing on large cultural assumptions, Carol Mavor reminds us in her essay that in the contact zone, the particular artist’s desires, as well as—or sometimes even more than — the dominant cultural norms, are pertinent for understanding the relation an individual has with a culture he considers “other” or “primitive.” She sees Paul Gauguin as lost in a lifelong utopian quest and imagines him dreaming a life of difference. For Mavor, Gauguin’s blue is the color of longing and dreams; black and blue together metaphorize the bruising of racism and colonialism that are the inseparable surround to his reveries. It is only because Gauguin is already searching for the noplace of Utopia — searching in childhood, in provincial France, and in his imagination — that he finds himself in the real place of colonial Tahiti. Mavor interprets his paintings as nostalgic not only for a lost utopia, or a lost primitive other (an imagined other), but also for a lost childhood. She argues that this longing is formative of Gauguin’s work and reminds us that an individual’s engagement with the exotic or the primitive is not only a representation of cultural assumptions but also the fulfillment of individualized, psychic desires. Mavor shows that if Gauguin’s work is embedded in a colonial situation and a primitivist mentality, this embeddedness does not preclude other meanings and emotions. Colonialist ambition provided the setting in which Gauguin made his art; it facilitated his contact with Tahiti. His art may even be seen to promote primitivist, racist, and sexist stereotypes. Yet as true as these observations may be, they neither fully “explain” nor fully exhaust Gauguin’s paintings. Mavor’s 14

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evocative reading of Gauguin is in many ways a cautionary tale, warning us not to lose sight of the individual as we construct a sociopolitical history of art. Granting that the colonial situation enabled artists to travel and live as privileged citizens does not prohibit us from analyzing how personal desires and longings may also be at stake in works of art. Carol Mavor’s essay does not ask us to return to the concept of the artist as genius, nor does it ask us to give unlimited agency to artists or to see them as free of cultural assumptions. It does, however, speak to how we interpret works of art, warning against too easy an assimilation of the individual psyche to the collective “cultural” and showing us the advantage of keeping both in play. Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art concerns not only the effect of contact on individuals like Liotard, Delacroix, Gauguin, and Figari but also the broader consequences of forcibly appropriating artworks from indigenous peoples, of engaging in commercial exchange with empires of equal power, and of selling off one’s patrimony to wealthy tourists. Taken together, the essays in our volume show that the diverse arts of a diverse Europe did not spring full blown from the classical tradition. They were formulated through contact with the strange and the wondrous, with the “barbarian,” the “infidel,” the “primitive,” and the “savage,” as well as with the ancient Roman past and its “degenerate” Italian present. In their different forms, the European arts were nurtured through commercial enterprise, utopian dreams, imperial ambition, and sheer curiosity, and by a genuine search for knowledge that was always mixed with other motivations.

notes 1. Anthony Pagden, “Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent,” in The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge and Washington, D.C.: Cambridge University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002), 33. 2. Donald F. Lach, introduction to A Century of Discovery, vol. 1 of Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), xi–xx. 3. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6. 4. Ibid. 5. Examples include Claire Farago’s pathbreaking study, Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age (New

15

Mary D. Sheriff Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Jill Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); and Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), to name only a few among many recent works. 6. See, for example, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 40–43, 147. 7. Although many Aztec objects were plundered, the mosaic Farago analyzes was actually a gift to the pope. 8. Linda Nochlin, for example, treats this aspect of Gérôme’s art in Realism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). 9. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), and Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 33–59. 10. See Hochstrasser essay in this volume. 11. Greg Dening, Performances (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 64. 12. See Farago essay in this volume.

16

2 On The Peripatetic Life of Objects in the Era of Globalization claire farago

Introduction: Whose Renaissance? We usually associate economic globalization with the rise of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century, but in fact, a global network of trade and commerce was already established in the sixteenth century.1 Works of art and other cultural products from all parts of the world were imported into Europe, where they formed prize specimens in collections and made an impact on European ideas of art and on the practices of European artists over several hundred years. The present volume is devoted to studying these processes through a series of strategic case studies. For art history, a discipline traditionally organized in terms of national cultures, it is a relatively recent phenomenon to investigate how art in Europe was shaped by contact with societies outside Europe. What enabled processes of cultural appropriation and exchange? How did Europeans’ experiences with nonEuropeans affect individual artists, larger artistic movements, and even the writing of history itself? In addressing such questions, the present volume is intended to encourage methods of inquiry that produce not only new information but different kinds of knowledge. In her introduction, our volume editor Mary Sheriff maintains that art history should retain its dominant categories (such as “European art” and “national culture”) while revising the ways in which we understand these categories to operate. In doing so, Sheriff argues, we will come to understand how extra-European art and artifacts contribute to our understanding of European art. Indeed, there is a practical advantage to retaining

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enough of the discipline’s existing categories to allow our archives, our databases, and our professional modes of being in the world to continue to function in recognizable ways. The intellectual attractiveness of intercultural approaches stems from their ability to institute a more pluralistic historical vision. The binary model of center and periphery implied in constructs that privilege European civilization deserves to be replaced with a dialogical model. By this I mean an approach that considers different cultural traditions, representational systems, worldviews, and contexts of use on equal footing. The give and take between cultures merits our attention, but the realities of political and economic domination cannot be ignored. Since the 1970s, critics like Edward Said, Henry Louis Gates, Jacques Derrida, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and numerous others have charged that contemporary scholarship keeps itself pure by not taking certain kinds of contexts into account. They advocate making the history of our categories part of our subject of study, so that the values attached to these differences are exposed. To better understand how the categories of art and culture are historically constructed, we must develop what Joan Kelly called a “double vision” by looking both “inside” and “outside” the frameworks of art history traditionally associated with Europe.2 Whether the existing categories into which our discipline is subdivided are suited to analyzing questions of cultural exchange is therefore not an easy matter to resolve. Nor can nineteenth-century assumptions about what constitutes knowledge — the epistemological foundations of the discipline—be effortlessly accommodated to changing research agendas. Against an Enlightenment notion of truth as universally given is the relativist concept of situated knowledge limited to its places and conditions of emergence.3 Sometimes the political engagement of historians with inherited values is interpreted as a lack of objectivity, but I think the question today is how to acknowledge and deal with the bias in every text. For example, in recent years there has been a great deal of attention paid to collecting practices in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly to the phenomenon of the humanist wunderkammer and kunstkammer, with their emphases on strange and exotic objects. Yet the extra-European artifact itself is routinely interpreted from an exclusively European perspective as enriching the stylistic vocabulary of the Italian Renaissance, for example, or as encouraging accurate modes of visual doc18

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umentation and scientific classification. I say “extra-European” rather than “non-European” because in many cases, such as the examples discussed in this chapter, the object produced outside Europe is already touched by European ideas. It is not exactly a non-European object. The approach used here, developed to deal with just such complexities, considers the entire arc of cultural production from point of origin to ultimate destination. To understand how extra-European art shaped European artistic ideals, we must also understand how European values shaped the production of art and culture outside Europe. The following discussion looks closely at the peripatetic histories of two prize wunderkammer objects that made the trip in both directions: that is, they were made outside Europe by artists who used European models but also incorporated indigenous elements. By the mid-sixteenth century, these two objects might have been prize specimens in European collections, where they are still located today. The question I want to explore is how these “hybrids” of previously unrelated systems of artistic representation outplay the codes and conventions on which they rely for their overt subject matter, style, and cultural identity.

Sapi-Portuguese Ivories in the European Imaginary From the mid-fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, the period broadly designated by the term “Renaissance,” painting, sculpture, and architecture “rose” from their medieval association with the manual or mechanical arts. They became associated with theoretical branches of knowledge, such as optics, anatomy, and poetry. This intellectualization of the manual arts was based on a neo-Aristotelian model of cognition that privileges vision above all the other senses. As the new literature on the three “arts of design” (arti del disegno is Vasari’s term) developed in Europe, writers put increasing emphasis on the exclusively human ability to think abstractly. Predictably, writers emphasized the involvement of the visualizing powers of sight in combination with the imagination. As increasingly rational powers were granted to the artist’s mental deliberations, fiction and fantasy remained subordinated. As a result, tension developed in the discussions about art between the important role granted to the imagination in the creative process and its relatively low position among mental operations. Non-Western cultural products were judged in these terms that have nothing to do with the function of art in their 19

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cultures of origin. In assessing processes of cultural appropriation and exchange, it is also important to bear in mind that the word “art” did not yet mean what it does today. “Art” most often signified skill or procedures and, as such, was the equivalent of terms like “method” or “compendium.” Both skill and procedures were, however, associated with the mental activity of artists, particularly their ability to invent new things out of their imaginations. While the definition of art is only one thread in a complex weave of changing attitudes toward human knowledge during this period, perhaps a concrete example can suggest the negative implications in the new sixteenth-century understanding of art for non-European artifacts. The appearance of a work of art — its style — did not yet signify its cultural or national identity. Yet the style of an object was thought to reflect the mentality of its maker. Certainly, a sixteenth-century humanist collector would have appreciated a magnificent ivory object, commissioned from Sapi artists by Portuguese traders, for its precious material, skillful carving, and especially the figures as products of the artist’s fertile imagination (fig. 2.1).4 But at the same time, for the same audience, the figures’ elongated proportions and disproportionately large heads may have signified the artist’s deficient knowledge of anatomy and ignorance of classicizing principles of proportion. Consequently, the maker of this object, that is, the Sapi carver, might have been characterized by his or her European humanist collectors as possessing an active but irrational imagination, unaccompanied by the rational powers exemplified in contemporary Italian painting and sculpture, where the artists’ knowledge of the scientific principles of anatomy and perspective was manifest in the work. For the inhabitants of Sierra Leone, as Suzanne Blier has shown, such carved images belonged to an entirely different conceptual framework.5 Portuguese traders brought European models for African artists to imitate.6 Yet the large, seated figure at the top, despite its Negroid physiognomy, was probably meant to represent an ancestral spirit incarnated in the form of a Portuguese trader (since both were white in the Sapi imaginary), made by artists who may not have had access to a living Portuguese model. In Blier’s reconstruction of the Sapi artist’s cultural imaginary, the severed heads and the main figure’s seated position can be connected specifically with Sapi burial traditions.7 By contrast, the same scene is likely to have encouraged European 20

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figure 2.1. Sapi-Portuguese, saltcellar. Ivory, ca. 1490–1530. © Soprintendenza al Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico L. Pigorini Roma eur —Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. (Photo by Sergo Rossini, courtesy of the museum)

fantasies of decapitation and cannibalism among “savages” — to judge from the popularity of such stories in sixteenth-century travel literature.8 Sensationalizing fantasies may even have prompted the commission of the object, although we are likely never to know because no such records survive. The lack of documentation is characteristic of the entire class of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century African Portuguese ivories (referred to as saltcellars only since the nineteenth century). This circumstance further suggests that these objects were valued primarily as exotic collectors’ items, not as representations of Sapi beliefs, by the Europeans who owned them and assimilated them into their own frames of reference. Of course exotic objects did not carry just one set of connotative meanings. Nonetheless, a wide range of artifacts, regardless of their cultural origins, may have evoked similar responses from European audiences. I would argue that the desire to possess such unusual objects was fueled by 21

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the apparent connotations of the grotesque inherited from ancient writers and developed in contemporary artistic practice and the new literature on art. Grotteschi— the word refers literally to a kind of pictorial embellishment composed of playful, monstrous figures in ancient painting and architectural ornament—had long been associated with the active powers of the imagination.9 For some sixteenth-century writers, grotteschi were practically synonymous with the artist’s unlimited ability to invent.10 For others, such as the archbishop of Bologna Gabriele Paleotti, the manner in which artists embellished their work might have branded them as irrational.11 Understood in this sense, the concept of the grotesque has a long, contested, and culturally specific history. What signified the grotesque or what corresponded to grotteschi for those familiar with this tradition would have been meaningless to others unfamiliar with it — and that is crucial to keep in mind as the following argument unfolds. As early as the sixteenth century (much earlier, in fact), European viewers thought it was possible to read the mentality of the artist out of his or her artistic productions. Moreover grotteschi signified in a double-handed way. On one hand, they signified artists’ freedom and capacity to invent images out of their imaginations. On the other hand, grotteschi were associated by some writers with an active imagination unrestrained by human reason. By describing the Sapi-Portuguese carvings under discussion here in terms of their hypothetical European reception, I do not mean to suggest that African audiences could not or did not appreciate the aesthetic qualities of their cultural productions.12 What I want to stress is that European viewers recontextualized exotic objects within their own, loaded frame of reference.13 In fact, although Blier does not dwell on its implications, these ivory objects were made for export. Despite the resonance of their imagery within a Sapi context of belief, they did not serve any function in their culture of origin aside from their production for export. SapiPortuguese ivories are an early type of art object made for export—what anthropologist Nicholas Thomas refers to as “entangled objects.”14 Upon entry into the early modern wunderkammer, imagery that could be associated with the grotesque became part of a larger European category of exotic objects. Nearly all such items sought by European collectors were originally valued as trophies, gifts, or souvenirs, that is, objects that confer status on their owners — but not necessarily on whoever made them. Anthropologist Serge Gruzinski argues that the category of 22

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the grotesque enables indigenous pictorial traditions to coexist comfortably with ancient European mythological signs.15 It is important to bear in mind, however, that this “coexistence” positions indigenous truth values in a subaltern relationship to European knowledge. Far from providing insight into cultural differences, the monstrous and the grotesque construed in the cultural terms I have described are projections of European ideas. Extraordinarily interesting hand-carved boxes were made by African artists working for Portuguese slave traders who saw additional opportunities for profit in these curiosities. This was hardly an exchange conducted on equal terms. Ultimately, Sapi-Portuguese ivories defeat attempts to distinguish between colonizer and colonized in binary terms. An adequate explanation requires a more complex understanding of the relationships that historically existed. In this case, where documentation is scarce, one can only speculate on their reception in Europe; but in the case that follows, a Mexican featherwork mosaic depicting a Christian subject, there is enough evidence to launch an extended historical inquiry into its intended significance for its original audience.

The Mass of St. Gregory Featherwork: Circumstances of the Commission The Mass of St. Gregory featherwork in the Musée d’Auch (plate 1) is another early product of cultural interaction made for export that draws on both indigenous and European sources. It was crafted by indigenous artists working under the direction of ecclesiastics in early colonial Mexico. Although grotesque imagery is conspicuously missing from this object, it can be linked with the same European ideas about the imagination as the Sapi-Portuguese ivories. In this case, we know the names of both the commissioning patron and the person for whom the commission was intended. A Latin epigraph dates this remarkably well-preserved feather mosaic (amantecayotl) to 1539, making it the earliest dated work of art surviving from New Spain.16 Although the Latin contains minor errors, the inscription in Roman capital letters that borders the image clearly states that the object was made in Mexico City under the supervision of Pedro de Gante (1486–1572), the Franciscan lay brother who in 1524 established the famous mission school of San José de los Naturales, where the mechanical and liberal arts were 23

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taught to Amerindians. Many of its students came from native families of high social rank, continuing in this transformed Christian setting the Aztec custom of selecting artist/scribes (tlacuilos) from the nobility and training them at state expense. Mexican featherwork, traditionally made into ceremonial objects such as capes and fans, was the most highly prized form of artistic production in the Aztec Empire (this name itself for a complex political alliance of three cultures is problematic) at the time of the Spanish conquest, and the technique was immediately used by missionaries to produce objects with Christian imagery. Both pre- Columbian and colonial featherwork objects were highly prized in Europe, where they circulated as rare gifts at the highest levels of society. By the nineteenth century, when the first public art museums came into existence, these, like many other exotic items prized in Renaissance humanist wunderkammers, were relegated to ethnographic museums and storerooms. Only quite recently, with the selfconscious celebration of multiculturalism, have scholars and the viewing public shown interest in these objects.17 The consecutive recontextualization of featherwork mosaics over several centuries, from their point of origin where the Nahuatl-speaking people of Mexico lost their cultural heritage to their point of final destination in public and private European museums, provides a key example of the complex ways in which non-European culture has contributed to European ideas of art. The following discussion explores these complex resonances on both sides of the cultural divide between Europe and the Americas. The subject of the Gregorian Mass was depicted numerous times in the early years of the Spanish conquest, when it was painted on convento walls and depicted on ceremonial objects, including gifts of state such as a featherwork miter that is still in the Escorial Palace.18 The iconography of the Gregorian Mass includes the arms of Christ, a favorite devotion of the earliest Franciscans in Mexico, and a motif that can be associated with a utopian concept of the universal Christian church. It has been suggested that the feather mosaicist (amanteca) responsible for the featherwork mosaic of the Gregorian Mass was Don Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin, nephew and son-in-law of Moctezuma II who was appointed governor (tlatoani) of Tenochtitlan/Mexico City in 1538 by the viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza.19 The basis for this claim is the dedication to Pope Paul III 24

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inscribed around the border of the image, which states that the work was made during the governorship of “D[omi]no Didaco.” It is highly unlikely, however, that during his tenure as governor Don Diego, who is not known to have been an amanteca, would have been a student at the Franciscan convent school working under de Gante. As Aztec royalty and the ranking native government o∞cial in the Republic of Indians, Don Diego might have been in a position to offer this extraordinary gift to Paul III, the pope who had recently published a series of declarations protecting the rights of Amerindians. Only two years earlier, on June 9, 1537, Pope Paul III had issued the bull Sublimis Deus, news of which reached Mexico in 1538/39.20 This papal decree against enslaving the Amerindians and seizing their property pronounced “Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians” to be endowed with the “nature and faculties” necessary to receive the Christian faith solely by “preaching of the word of God and by the example of good and holy living.” In this decree, Pope Paul III specified the penalty of excommunication for those who violated imperial law.21 And although the penalty was nullified by another bull decreed two years later by the same pope, some jurists today consider Paul III’s unprecedented position on human rights to be the true foundation of international law.22

Iconography of the Mass of St. Gregory and Politics In the following discussion, I draw connections between the Mass of St. Gregory featherwork and European understandings of the imagination’s role in establishing memories. The 1537 papal bull proclaiming the human status of Amerindians was issued in direct response to an escalating contest over human and material resources in the Americas. It is within this politicized, ideologically freighted frame of reference that the significance of this particular Mass of St. Gregory must be sought. First, it is important to note that the Holy Roman Emperor and the Roman Catholic Church did not always act in concert. A central issue in what amounted to a complex power struggle was whether Amerindians had the ability to maintain dominion over their own property, a topic much discussed by theologians and jurists as dependant upon their humanness. The basis of their discussion was Aristotle’s distinction between two types of enslavement: 25

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through capture and in the form of creatures born “slaves by nature” who are constitutionally incapable of fully human powers of reasoning.23 The outcome of the debate over the true nature of Amerindians had obvious economic implications: if they were not fully rational creatures, they were legitimately subject to enslavement, conveniently providing the Habsburg emperor and the Spanish crown with an ample labor force to extract silver and gold from Mexican and Peruvian mines. To speed the decision along, the Royal Council of the Indies encouraged Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, translator of a highly respected edition of Aristotle’s Politics, the text in which his crucial discussion of slavery appears, to justify war against the Amerindians (ultimately the council rejected his argument). Alternatively, if Amerindians were merely immature like children—so it was argued in their behalf — they possessed the capacity for fully rational thought and only needed the proper guidance. The initial step in this education process, as St. Augustine maintained, was to accept the Christian doctrine of salvation — in other words, to be baptized.24 Paul III had addressed these complicated issues regarding the humanness of Amerindians in no uncertain terms in the 1537 bull. He sided with the Dominican Julián Garcés, the bishop of Tlaxcala; the Franciscan Juan de Zumárraga, the bishop of Mexico; and other missionaries, such as Bernardino de Minaya and Bartolomé de las Casas, who defended the Amerindians’ capacity to be converted by teaching rather than conquered by force.25 As is well known, this contest for Amerindian souls culminated in a famous debate with no clear outcome between Sepúlveda and las Casas, held in Valladolid, Spain, in 1550/51. The Mass of St. Gregory feather mosaic, however, was made eleven years earlier, immediately after Paul III’s decree reached New Spain. At this time, an assimilated, Christianized government o∞cial of noble Aztec descent like Don Diego might have felt optimistic about the future and deeply grateful to a pope who recognized the intelligence of all Amerindian peoples. What does this history have to do with the Mass of St. Gregory feather mosaic? The imagery on this featherwork mosaic was directly derived from a European print similar to, or perhaps even identical with, an engraving by Israel van Meckenhem, circa 1480–85 (Lehrs IX.288.353) (fig. 2.2), one of ten versions of the Gregorian Mass by the same artist.26 A Latin inscription below the image in the European engraving indicates

26

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that the sheet was intended as an indulgence granted to whoever recites enough prayers to the instruments of Christ’s passion. According to a legend popular in the fifteenth century, as Gregory was celebrating mass in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Rome, one of his assistants expressed doubt that Christ was actually present in the host. At that moment, Christ miraculously appeared rising from the altar, surrounded by the instruments of the passion and displaying his five wounds.27 Fifteenth-century popes attached indulgences to devotional images of the Gregorian Mass because they dramatically illustrate the doctrine of transubstantiation. In this connection, it is relevant that St. Gregory the Great, a sixthcentury pope and one of the four Latin church fathers, famously defended the religious use of images because they function as a “Bible for the illiterate.”28 There are significant differences, however, between an inexpensive broadsheet issued to pilgrims and a unique gift of state crafted in precious, exotic materials, intended for the chief representative of Christ on earth. Given the timing of the gift, the choice of subject suggests that Pope Paul III was to be praised as a latter-day St. Gregory, no doubt for his strong defense of the Indians’ fully human capacities. Viewed in this context, this featherwork mosaic is a magnanimous gesture, eloquently rendered in a medium well-established in pre- Columbian times as a form of tribute that both the Amerindians and their European conquerors considered the most elevated form of Mexican art.29 The choice of subject was strategic on several levels, as a close inspection of the manner in which it diverges from its print prototypes suggests. The most striking difference is an omission in the feather painting: representatives of the secular church — several cardinals and bishops standing around the sides of the altar — have been eliminated. In the feather mosaic, only the kneeling assistants and the o∞ciating priest witness the miracle taking place behind the altar. Moreover, in the Mexican colonial image the priest and kneeling deacons could readily pass for tonsured Franciscan friars. Beneath their richly ornamented sacerdotal vestments the three religious wear simple cassocks exposing the soles of three pairs of bare feet — although the present condition of the feather mosaic prevents an absolutely certain identification of their footwear. Two tentative conclusions can be drawn from these iconographic additions: first, it is likely that the details of the ecclesiastics’ costume allude to the first Fran-

27

figure 2.2. Israel von Meckenhem, The Mass of Saint Gregory. Engraving, ca. 1490–1500. Louvre, Paris, France (photo by Madeleine Coursaget). (Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y.)

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ciscan missionaries—which included the supervisor of this mosaic, Pedro de Gante—whose ascetic lifestyle figured prominently in their program of evangelization. Second, during the first few decades of spiritual conquest by the regular clergy, in imitation of the original apostolic era of the “primitive church,” a mission system was established without accountability to the secular church hierarchy. Tension between the regular and secular clergy over the right to claim Amerindian souls soon developed, however.30 Two years later, in 1539, the date of this mosaic, the first in a series of general assemblies was called to resolve di∞culties and disagreements over the administration of baptism and marriage. Could a reference to contemporary events, even a trace of escalating disputes between the regular and secular clergy, be detected in the elimination of cardinals and bishops in this Spanish colonial version of the Mass of St. Gregory? It is tempting to think so but impossible to substantiate. Nonetheless, subtle though the changes in subject matter are, given the historical circumstances just described, they are su∞cient to render contemporary understanding of the iconography to a certain degree unresolvable and open-ended—characteristics typical of many artistically and culturally hybrid colonial works of art.

A Colonial Manual of Christian Rhetoric with Double Meanings The previous discussion dealt mainly with European contexts for understanding the Mass of St. Gregory mosaic. In this and the following section, additional evidence supports a reading of the mosaic as a form of indigenous resistance to European understandings of Amerindians as mentally inferior creatures. There is no doubt that Pedro de Gante established innovative methods for teaching Christian doctrine to his Amerindian neophytes.31 The arms of Christ were a popular devotion among the first Franciscan missionaries, though the iconography is by no means unique to the Order. De Gante and other missionaries used visual images extensively during the early years of the conquest when language difference was a barrier to communication, as is known from numerous sources, including the 1579 Italian publication of an important pedagogical text, De rhetorica christiana, written and illustrated by de Gante’s pupil Diego Valadés, 29

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another Christianized, assimilated Aztec nobleman like Don Diego. From his testimony, and from other material evidence such as the atrial cross that stood in the forecourt of the Capilla de los Indios of the Basilica de Guadalupe in Mexico City, we know that rebus-like signs, specifically the arms of Christ, were used to teach the catechism.32 In his book, Valadés provided engraved illustrations of catechism classes being taught in the open-air atrium of the Franciscan mother church at San José using similar visual signs. He also introduced a sort of pictographic syllabary (fig. 2.3) of his own, involving signs in the shape of sacred hearts, a symbol with connotations on both sides of the cultural and linguistic divide. Some of Valadés’s heart signs include recognizable elements from Nahuatl pictograms. Although their exact meaning has never been deciphered, the manner in which they function in his text makes the important point that they are a culturally hybrid means of communication. The arms of Christ are visual signs of the sort that missionaries widely understood as a pictorial language comparable to Nahuatl pictograms. The Franciscans in particular were interested in Indian hieroglyphics. They invented a hieroglyphic system of their own based on the pre-conquest rebus-style script of Aztecs and Mixtecs, believing that Amerindians would be more receptive to Christian catechism communicated in pictures and symbols.33 This fact in itself is perhaps less significant in the present context of discussion than the method of learning through pictograms. In the feather mosaic, the central Christian doctrine of transubstantiation is conveyed by the naturalistic depiction of Christ as the Man of Sorrows displaying the five wounds as he rises from the open sepulcher behind the altar where Holy Communion is about to be performed. The depiction of Christ would have been considered universally accessible by the Church because of its naturalistic style of representation. Grouped around this Eucharistic image, prominently displayed against a bright blue ground composed of feathers, are the rebus-like signs known as the arms of Christ. These signs are actually mnemonic devices intended to initiate a series of associations in the mind of the beholder. Each sign, whether it be the coins of Judas signifying his treason, the crowing cock of Peter signifying his betrayal, or the instruments of the passion alluding to the crucifixion and to major points of Christian doctrine (for example, the three nails remind the beholder of the Trinity), as well as the image as a whole, serves as an object meant for contemplation. Just as a person 30

figure 2.3. Diego Valadés, syllabary containing recognizable elements of Nahuatl pictograms combined with European symbols, from Diego Valadés, De rhetorica christiana (Perugia, 1579). Engraving. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence, R.I. (Photo courtesy Special Collections, Norlin Library, University of Colorado at Boulder)

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learned in Latin might ruminate over the many senses of scripture, attaching in turn literal, tropological, and anagogical significance to the same words, so the visual representation of St. Gregory’s Mass was intended to enable an illiterate audience to contemplate the richness of Christian doctrine by visual means. In the Mexican feather mosaic, alongside conventional signs like the cock, nails, sponge, hammer, column, and flageolet, are some innovations. To Christ’s right, behind the open sepulcher, is a delicately shaped tree, or perhaps it is a small plant. On the front ledge of the open sepulcher rest two prominent pink flowers with dark green leaves, apparently an offering, perhaps of the kind formerly associated with sacrifice in preColumbian ceremonies. The innovative imagery, while unorthodox by European standards, suggests some kind of an analogy to Aztec ceremonial offerings, but their significance is di∞cult to assess. In the European prototype imagery, moreover, blood from the wound in Christ’s side flows into the chalice on the altar table. This detail illustrating the central Eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation is missing in the amantecayotl. Considered in conjunction, both the suppressions and the unorthodox elaborations of conventional subject matter prompt speculations about the artist’s motive. Intentionality eludes modern interpreters, however: these transformations may be meaningful, or they may be no more than “misunderstandings” on the part of indigenous artists. From what is known about the circumstances of the commission, it is likely that de Gante himself approved the innovations. None of the alterations discussed here nor the rendering of the priest’s cape with thirteen round medallions (which one contemporary writer suggests is derived from Aztec symbolism) may therefore have been considered to interfere with or subvert the orthodox doctrinal content of the image.34 In the feather mosaic, the conventional setting in a church interior has been eliminated in favor of an undifferentiated blue background. The blue aids the beholder perceptually by isolating each sign against a brilliantly colored ground, making it easier to remember the images, as European treatises devoted to training memory recommend and as other visual examples of the same motifs, such as Fra Angelico’s mid-fifteenth-century frescoes in the cells of San Marco monastery in Florence attest.35 Yet the choice of color might also be interpreted as serving a narrative function, indicating an outdoor setting for this particular Gregorian Mass — an 32

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especially inviting hypothesis because the priest and his assistants appear to be humbly kneeling on the bare ground.

Human Memory and the Task of Recollection The mnemonic devices, moreover, attest to the mental capacity of their users to “recollect,” that is, to remember the central mysteries of the Christian faith by contemplating the mnemonic signs that refer to them. Mnemonic signs initiate the inferential process of recollection that is uniquely human, according to Aristotle and elaborated by his commentators from Cicero to St. Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, to name only some of the major contributors to a long historical discussion. The crucial task of recollection is retrieval: a memory image, wrote Aristotle in De memoria (450b11–20), is like an imprint or drawing, causing us to remember what is not present: a memory drawing, like a painted panel, is an object of contemplation, a sort of copy and a reminder. Thomas Aquinas described memory as the faculty responsible for the conversion of images into abstractions or universals and reserved the term “recollection” to describe a kind of human reasoning, a “quasi-syllogistic search.”36 In the fifteenth century, the archbishop of Florence Dominican St. Antonine, whose Summa theologica was among the earliest books recorded in New Spain, urged his readers to learn the art of projecting sacred concepts into memory figures. Valadés described and illustrated the basic tenets of medieval faculty psychology that Saint Antonine of Florence promoted, focusing on the role played by the art of memory in teaching sacred doctrine to neophytes at San José de los Naturales (fig. 2.4). The engraving of the idealized courtyard of the church shows where images were placed in strategic locations along liturgical procession routes (fig. 2.5). The mental capacity to recollect, that is, to draw a series of inferences, as Aristotle and his commentators defined the human faculty of memory as distinct from the retentive memory of animals, was both directly cited and indirectly implied throughout sixteenth-century discussions of the Amerindians’ mental capacities.37 The significance of this language of signs in a gift destined for Pope Paul III is clarified by the historical context of the pontificate’s Sublimis Deus issued thirteen years after the opening of San José de los Naturales. In 1539, Paul III would have been ideally well disposed to understand what was implied by the choice of both the 33

figure 2.4. (Above) Diego Valadés, diagram of the inner senses, from Diego Valadés, De rhetorica christiana (Perugia, 1579). Engraving. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence, R.I. figure 2.5. (Opposite) Diego Valadés, idealized scene of neophytes receiving the catechism in the courtyard of San José de los Naturales, Mexico, from Diego Valadés, De rhetorica christiana (Perugia, 1579). Engraving. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence, R.I. (Photo by Ken Iwamasa)

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subject and the artistic medium. Indeed, for any beholder attuned to the debate about the rationality of Amerindians, the Mass of St. Gregory testifies to their truly human nature in terms that predate Valladolid by at least a decade. It is perhaps not overstated to claim that, by 1539, the terms on which the Indians’ mental capacities were judged were part of an international, transcultural discourse in which the culturally dispossessed also participated—at least to the limited extent of a few assimilated members of the Amerindian elite. Ironically, this erudite gift offered by a bicultural colonial subject in the language of the conqueror, in a medium prized by the colonizer, as evidence of the subject’s own humanness never reached its intended destination in the sixteenth century. The whereabouts of this featherwork before it appeared on the art market in 1987 are unknown, leading to speculation that it was captured by pirates on its way to Europe.38

Toward a Theory of Cultural Hybridity The discussion so far has suggested that culturally hybrid, colonial works of art played a strategic, multilateral role in the history of European ideas of artistic creativity. My hypothetical reconstructions also raise the more di∞cult interpretative question of what the criteria for dealing with objects should be if cultural interaction is the subject. While these two objects look very different in terms of style, imagery, function, materials, and so on, they elicit similar, culturally specific ideas regarding the significance of artifice. We could never come to this understanding of cultural interaction if we simply followed art history’s established procedures. Yet I hope I have been able to suggest how a deeper philosophical grounding is needed to understand how the object operated in its social milieu. Art history would benefit from paying greater attention than it currently does to the historical construction of ideas. We focus too much on objects without examining the conceptual nature of their social existence.39 The imagery of Sapi-Portuguese ivories and Mexican featherworks derives from European models but assumes indigenous knowledge as well. The phenomena of hybridization apparent in the two case studies point to large issues regarding our research agendas and our responsibility to society as intellectuals. The kind of art historical practice I would like to 36

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see goes all over the world and deals with all kinds of practices, representational systems, and cultural conditions—not only at the level of social history, but at deeper epistemological levels. It should study what happens when new identities are formed, when new communication occurs, when representational practices that have never been in contact before are suddenly in collision and contention, when the readability of the art changes because of contact, and when people’s lives are changed because of their altered material culture. Neither of the objects discussed in this chapter was of any scholarly interest until quite recently, in the wake of multiculturalism. I am concerned with what we pass on to future generations. What kinds of political implications are there to the knowledge we produce? Our work can seem apolitical when we produce it, but at the same time it excludes other work from taking place or relegates that work to the margins. Once we start thinking about objects from a broader perspective, we begin to recognize how inherited values structure our contemporary practices. Which values do you wish to keep?

notes Warm thanks to Susan Lowish for her astute reading of an earlier draft of this essay. 1. Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization, trans. Deke Dusinerre (New York: Routledge, 2002), 4. 2. Joan Kelly [Gadol], “The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory: A Postscript to the ‘Women and Power’ Conference,” in Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 51–64. 3. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 4. The first example is drawn from my edited book, Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 5. Suzanne Blier, “Imagining Otherness in Ivory: African Portrayals of the Portuguese c. 1492,” Art Bulletin 75, no. 3 (September 1993): 375–97. 6. Ezio Bassani and William Fagg, Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory, ed. S. Vogel with C. Thompson (New York: Center for African Art, 1988). 7. Blier, “Imagining Otherness,” 390–91, citing further evidence that the ornament of these ivories derives from textile patterns that carried cosmic significance, writes that the imagery often concerned the land of the dead. For the object reproduced here, see Bassani and Fagg, Africa and the Renaissance, cat. no. 31.

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Claire Farago 8. Margaret Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), is an excellent source of information for sixteenth-century cultural geographies. Among more recent studies, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), and Mary Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 9. See David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 496–97, for an excellent discussion of grotteschi, and more recently, “The Archeology of the Modern Grotesque,” in Modern Art and the Grotesque, ed. Frances S. Connelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 20–46. 10. On grotteschi as emblematic of artistic license to invent, see further, David Summers, “Michelangelo on Architecture,” Art Bulletin 54, no. 2 (June 1972): 146–57, and “Archaeology of the Modern Grotesque.” 11. Invoking the same contrast between reasoned imagination and the capricious fantasy, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, author of an influential treatise on painting (1582; Latin edition of 1594), introduced extensive new qualifications drawn from the standard authorities. He constructed a theory of style that, in effect, favored the scientific embellishments of optical naturalism but retained the artist’s right to depict grotteschi as long as these vivid representations were not capricious figments of the imagination. Paleotti developed his position in consultation with his lifelong friend Ulisse Aldrovandi, the renowned naturalist and collector of New World materials, as documented in their correspondence. He seems to have taken to heart Aldrovandi’s advice concerning the proper principles guiding artistic illustration when, for example, he admitted that painters should be allowed to represent novel things that seem to lie outside the order of nature (se bene fuori dell’ordine suo), as long as they actually do exist. These include “monsters of the sea and land and other places.” The difference is that embellishments that have counterparts in nature are “proportioned to reason” (proporzionati alla ragione), while grotteschi refer to fantasms, things “that have never been, that could not exist in the manner in which they are represented.” These condemned forms of artifice are (contra Lomazzo) the capricci of painters, products of their irrational imaginations (irragionevoli imaginationi). See Gabriele Paleotti, in Trattati d’arte, del cinquecento, ed. Paola Barocchi, 3 vols. (Bari: Giuseppe Laterza e Figli, 1961), 2:425 (book 2, chapter 37); see also 382–89. See further, Claire Farago and Carol Parenteau, “The Grotesque Idol: Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real,” in Idols in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions, and the Early Modern World, ed. Michael W. Cole and Rebecca Zorach (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2009), 105–32. 12. On this, see Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and AfroAmerican Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983), and Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of African and the African Americas (New York: Museum for African Art and Munich: Prestel, 1993). 13. In fact, slaves themselves became objectified as manifestations of prestige, ornaments to a lady’s or lord’s other magnificent possessions — or to persons making

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objects in the era of globalization pretense to be wealthy and noble aristocrats. See Kim F. Hall, “ ‘An Object in the Midst of Other Objects’: Race, Gender, Material Culture,” in Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 211–53. 14. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 15. Serge Gruzinski, El pensiamiento mestizo, trans. Enrique Folch González (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2000), 206–8. 16. pavlo iii pontifici maxima / en magna indiarv[m] vrbe mexico / co[m]posita d[omi]no didaco gvberna / tore cvra fr[atr]is petri a gante minoritae ad 1539 (Made for his excellency Pope Paul III in the great city of the Indies, Mexico, during the governorship of Don Diego [?], under the supervision of the Minorite Brother Peter of Ghent, a.d. 1539). 17. Gerhard Wolf is currently organizing an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on featherwork. 18. See further discussion by Donna Pierce in Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, exhibition catalog (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990), 260–63, and Detlef Heikamp and Ferdinand Anders, Mexico and the Medici (Florence, 1972), 16–18. The Mass of St. Gregory was depicted on a number of feather mitres and in murals in Franciscan convents at Tepeapulco and Cholula, as noted by De Gerlero and Martínez del Río de Redo, in Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, 259–60. The following discussion is an expansion of my entry, “Mass of Saint Gregory,” in Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life, 1521–1821, ed. Donna Pierce, Rogelio Ruiz Gomar, and Clara Bargellini, exhibition catalog (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2004), 98–102. 19. De Gerlero and Martínez del Río de Redo, in Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, 260. 20. Lewis Hanke, “Pope Paul III and the American Indians,” Harvard Theological Review 30 (1947): 65–102, and the translation by Francis MacNutt, Bartholomew de Las Casas (New York, 1909), 427–31. 21. Hanke, “Pope Paul III,” 72–73. 22. Ibid., 74, citing James Brown Scott, The Spanish Origin of International Law: Francisco de Vitoria and His Law of Nations (Oxford, 1934), 281. 23. Aristotle, Politics, 1254b15–1255b40, is the crucial discussion. 24. On which, see Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The Amerindian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and further, Claire Farago, “The Classification of the Visual Arts during the Renaissance,” in The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. D. R. Kelley and R. H. Popkin (The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1991), 25–47. 25. See Hanke, “Pope Paul III,” 68–71; Bishop Garcés wrote a letter to Paul III on the recent missionary activity of Bernardino de Minaya that paved the way for the pope’s momentous bull Sublimis Deus. 26. See Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Fifteenth-Century Engravings of

39

Claire Farago Northern Europe, exhibition catalog by Alan Shestack (1968), cat. no. 214 (similar engravings by the same artist are cataloged as nos. 214 and 215). 27. On the history of the iconography in Europe, see J. A. Andres, “Die Darstellung des Gregoriusmesse im Mittelalter,” Zeitschrift für Christliche Kunst 30 (1917): 145–56, cited in Shestack, Fifteenth-Century Engravings, cat. no. 214, and Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. 51. On the iconography in New Spain, see Sonia Pérez Carrillo, “Aproximación a la iconografia de la misa de San Gregorio en América,” Cuadernos de arte colonial 4 (1988): 95–106, with further references, 104 n. 1. 28. In his famous letter to Sernus, ca. a.d. 600, Gregory the Great wrote in defense of images that “it is one thing to adore a painting, but quite another to learn, through the story the painting recounts, what ought to be adored,” for painting is made for “idiots and illiterates, for ignorantes who must be content to find in images what they cannot read in texts.” See Gregory the Great, Epistolae 11.4.13, in G.-P. Migne, Patrolgia Latinae, vol. 78, col. 1128; translation cited from Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (1990), trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 25. 29. Fray Bernardino de Sahagun described and illustrated featherwork techniques in his Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, book 10, compiled in the second half of the sixteenth century (see the modern edition, The Florentine Codex: A General History of the Things of New Spain, books 1–12, trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibbie [Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press; Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950–81]). 30. As attested, among other things, by a letter written in 1537 to Charles V at a meeting of the provincial bishops (who were appointed from the regular clergy at this time) to review the problems of evangelization. See Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572 (1933), trans. Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 7. 31. The Franciscan trade school adjacent to the monastery of San Francisco in Mexico City was functioning as early as 1526; on its organization, curriculum, and relationship to other mission schools, see Jeanette A. Peterson, The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 50–65. 32. De Gerlero, in Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, 250–52. 33. Samuel E. Edgerton, Theaters of Conversion: Religious Architecture and Indian Artisans in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 27–28, with further references to testerian manuscript studies. 34. De Gerlero and Martínez del Río de Redo, in Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, 259, identify these disks with chalchihuiite, a precious stone associated with water in the pre-Hispanic world. 35. On the memory arts, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Mem-

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objects in the era of globalization ory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. 19–23, 62–72; on Fra Angelico’s use of color in San Marco in the context of the memory arts, see Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico, 60–75. 36. Thomas Aquinas, St. 1a, Q. 78, a.4, response. Aristotle also described a mnemonic technique done through some kind of system of images (see De anima 427v; Topics II–VII). See Carruthers, Book of Memory, 62–63. 37. Roughly two centuries later, the same texts and arguments played a key, and more pernicious, role in racial theory. Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London: Macmillan; Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1982), is an excellent introduction to the texts and issues well beyond Britain. 38. De Gerlero and Martínez del Río de Redo, in Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, 259. 39. I owe this insight to my student Cassiope Sydoriak.

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3 Remapping Dutch Art in Global Perspective Other Points of View julie hochstrasser We now know that narratives are made up of silences, not all of which are deliberate or even perceptible as such within the time of their production. We also know that the present is itself no clearer than the past.—michel- rolph trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 152–53.

The history of the Dutch Republic in its golden age is global in its reach. Dutch merchants voyaged to what seemed at the time like the ends of the earth in their quest for desired goods: the Indies for spices and rare hardwoods; Asia for porcelain, silks, and tea; the Americas for salt, sugar, pelts, and tobacco; and Africa for gold and even human slaves. A full account of Dutch art in this period should reflect this distinctly global perspective, yet true to the Eurocentric tendencies for which the discipline of art history has lately been indicted, most studies of Dutch art have until recently focused on themes and issues indigenous to the Dutch Republic on its home shores. These are, of course, essential and valuable components of any history of Dutch art. But so, too, are the chapters that have to date been less su∞ciently addressed, of the production, exchanges, and influences inspired by the extensive—and really quite astounding—travels and cultural interactions that were so much a part of the fabric of this tiny but dynamic country in its early modern heyday.1 These interactions had a profound impact on the visual arts in The Netherlands. First, they yielded the wild commercial profits that fueled the burgeoning prosperity of the United Provinces during the seventeenth century, which in turn funded unusually widespread patronage of the

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arts.2 So in the 1660s, when Willem Kalf (1622–93) painted this magnificent still life typical of his mature production, Amsterdam was at the peak of its prosperity and Dutch painting was in its golden age (plate 2). Newly emerging as an independent genre at the dawn of the seventeenth century just as the Dutch rose to primacy in world trade, still life in its material focus figured forth an extraordinary expression of the merchant capitalism that generated this wealth. But the splendid objects depicted in Kalf’s composition convey more than just a general air of sumptuous luxury. They present also more specific evidence of the cultural contact of the global trade network established by the great Dutch trading companies: a Turkish carpet; citrus fruits from the Mediterranean; wines from Germany, France, and Spain in goblets of Venetian glass or crafted out of a nautilus shell from the Indo-Pacific ocean; and a covered bowl of finest Chinese porcelain, probably filled with sugar from Brazil. These paintings clearly show proud evidence of this global trade and cultural contact — or really, show off: the Dutch word pronken, meaning exactly that, was used much later, in the twentieth century, to designate these still lifes of rich display as pronkstilleven. There is ample verbal testimony, too, from the time that the Dutch were duly impressed with their own commercial accomplishments. Even Jacob Cats (1577–1660), the poet and jurist affectionately known to this day as “Father Cats” for his status as virtually the moral father of the Dutch Republic, could not refrain from waxing a shade boastful: “Everything the Heaven sends, or grows out of the earth, That comes to us by sea imported into our harbors.”3 Dutch prowess in this regard was widely recognized by foreign observers as well: by 1699, one British traveler to The Netherlands commented, “Perhaps it may yield to none whatever in riches and the vast extent of its trade and commerce.”4 But even that is only the beginning of the story. Investigation soon reveals that there is a great deal more to this commerce than meets the eye in these elegant scenes.5 The interactions that transpired from place to place ranged broadly in their tone and substance, and it is revealing to contrast the arts and visual culture that emerged from these widely various “contact zones.”6 The commodities in Kalf’s composition alone take us far afield — to Asia, the Americas, and Africa — with some very surprising discoveries. In what follows, this painting serves as our point of departure for three distinct case studies that represent this drastic variety in 44

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exchanges between the Dutch and other parts of the early modern world and offer object lessons in the different ways that art and visual culture express them.

Asia Let us begin, for example, with the extraordinary piece of porcelain highlighted in Kalf’s painting. Crafted in China, its tiny sculptural accretions — the figures of the eight immortals around its sides, symbolizing long life, and the Fu lion or dog on the lid, representing prosperity, valor, and energy — make it a finer piece than the majority of Chinese porcelain to be found in Europe by this time. But its patterns of cobalt blue underglaze on a milky white ground were typical of the simpler Chinese export wares admired and imitated in many countries around the world.7 While some ceramics had come to Europe as early as Roman times by way of the Silk Road, China began exporting large amounts of porcelain from the fifteenth century, and by the late sixteenth the Portuguese were shipping it worldwide.8 European royalty had collected and treasured it for some time, but the first large quantity of Chinese export porcelain to reach northern Europe arrived when, in the first years of the seventeenth century, the Dutch seized two Portuguese ships with a quarter-million pieces that were auctioned in Amsterdam at handsome profits.9 Seeing a ready market, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or voc), founded in 1602, placed large orders through their “factories” (really, trading posts), first in West Java in Bantam (soon moved to Batavia) and in East Malaya in Patani; once the voc founded a fort on Taiwan in 1624, the headquarters for their porcelain trade centered there.10 Initially produced under the reign of Emperor Wan-li (1573–1619) in the late Ming dynasty, and mostly traded between 1600 and 1640, this kraakporselein, so called apparently for the Portuguese ships, or carracks, that had carried it, was made at the Chinese imperial center of Jingdezhen expressly for export. The Chinese themselves reportedly scorned the relatively low-grade export produce as “barbaric”; imperial tastes were quite different.11 But European buyers embraced it enthusiastically, and the voc was quick to exploit the lively trade, sending wooden models for particular European forms unfamiliar to Asian craftsmen, such as shaving mugs or mustard pots. They even experimented 45

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with the decoration, commissioning copies after motifs in European engravings, but soon discovered that the distinctive Chinese patterns were decidedly preferred.12 These blue-and-white wares became so popular that when the Ming dynasty fell in 1644, and Chinese production at Jingdezhen dwindled under the political instability, production centers outside China rose to address the burgeoning demand from Europe. Already in command of the techniques for producing fine decorated porcelain, Japanese imperial purveyors in Arita, on the southern island of Kyushu, responded with competent imitations which voc o∞cials began importing in 1657; the large Aritaware plates with the voc logo at their center are to be found far and wide today, everywhere the Dutch had traveled during the seventeenth century.13 China resumed its production in the 1680s, with a slightly modified style known as overgangsporselein, or transitional ware (for the transitional period from the Ming dynasty to the Q’ing), but by then, Dutch faiencebakkers, too, had gotten into the act. So arose what is probably the single most striking case of the influence of cultural contact upon indigenous Dutch art.14 The secret of true hardpaste porcelain would not be discovered in Europe until 1709 in Meissen, Germany, but meanwhile, the tin-glazed earthenware (known as faience) being manufactured in Delft could emulate shapes and decorations of the popular Mingware.15 Of course, since the voc commissions had already influenced the production of Chinese craftsmen at their behest, things now became very complicated indeed; as in the case of these two pitchers (fig. 3.1), Dutch pieces (such as the earthenware pitcher at left) were often fashioned after Chinese pieces (such as the porcelain pitcher at right) that had themselves been formed after Dutch models.16 Gradually, Dutch potters, while retaining the popular blue-and-white color scheme, developed their own distinctive idiom for the decoration, replacing Chinese motifs with Dutch ones: philosophers and pagodas gave way to milkmaids and windmills. In turn, as this distinctive Dutch style emerged, with its vivid floral decoration, the Japanese embraced this exotic Oranda (Holland) ware and copied back.17 The intermingling (or, as C. J. A. Jörg so aptly dubbed it, wisselwerking) was further extended in chine de commande, whole services with family coats of arms made to order by Chinese craftsmen for European commissions.18 By the eighteenth century the European interest culminated in the pastiche chinoiserie of the 46

figure 3.1. (Above) Two pitchers: left, Delft, faience, ca. 1750–75; right, China, porcelain, ca. 1720. Collection Keramiekmuseum Princessehof, on longterm loan of the Ottema-Kingma Foundation. (Photography Johan van der Veer © Keramiekmuseum Princessehof) figure 3.2. (Left) The Parasol Lady. Porcelain plate made and decorated in China after design by Cornelis Pronk, 1736-38. Collection of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.

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Rococo period, such as Dutchman Cornelis Pronk’s design for a service in the Chinese manner, which was sent back to China for craftsmen there to imitate (fig. 3.2)—thus resulting in the odd scenario of the Dutch artist instructing the Chinese in the production of their own motifs!19 Particularly fascinating in all this exchange is that Delftware, notwithstanding its origins as knockoffs of Chinese originals, could come eventually to be seen as so quintessentially Dutch. The process of this dissemination and adaptation into what is now world famous as Dutch Delftware is a classic case of what anthropologist Alfred Kroeber called “stimulus diffusion,” whereby “the receiving culture adopts ideas and patterns from the outside source, but gives them a new, native content and is thus propelled in directions it would not otherwise have taken.”20 Today, Royal Dutch Delftware is an art in its own right, invoked worldwide as emblematic of Dutchness itself and marketed explicitly as such in Dutch diasporic contexts as diverse as Holland, Michigan;21 the Netherlands Antilles;22 and even the extraordinary Dutch theme park Huis ten Bosch, near the seventeenth-century Dutch settlement on Dejima, in presentday Nagasaki, Japan (fig. 3.3).23 One would scarcely guess that even the little ceramic souvenirs that now line the shops along the Damrak outside Amsterdam’s Central Station — blue-and-white figurines of windmills or “wooden” shoes or little Dutch milkmaids kissing little Dutch boys (new, native content, indeed!) — were born out of the early modern faiencebakkers’ earnest facsimiles of Chinese Mingware.

The Americas But let us return to that stunning piece of porcelain in Kalf’s painting, because in addition to being itself a prized import, it also served as a conspicuously exquisite receptacle, most probably for another exotic commodity that was far more costly then than it is today: sugar. Here again, there is much more to the history of this commodity than one could ever guess from Kalf’s painting, but the sugar trade took a more sinister turn, which will prove central not only to this case study but also to the following one involving Africa. In response to escalating persecution of Protestants by their Spanish Catholic overlords, the Dutch had been embroiled since 1568 in a bitter revolt that would ultimately, in 1648, result in the o∞cial recognition 48

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figure 3.3. Delftware on sale in display window, Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles. (Photo by the author, 2003)

of the seven united provinces of the northern Netherlands as the independent Dutch Republic.24 From 1580 the Portuguese and Spanish were politically united, and the Dutch struggle against these Iberian forces extended to many colonial outposts worldwide. The expansion of Dutch trade was spurred by this military effort as another primary purpose for the foundation of the Dutch West India Company (West-Indische Compagnie, or wic). Their efforts to secure sugar-producing territories in the Americas were openly avowed to be part of that ongoing struggle.25 In 1624 a Dutch fleet unsuccessfully assailed the Portuguese colony at Salvador de Bahia in Brazil, claiming 400 chests of local sugar among the plunder.26 A Spanish fleet promptly reclaimed the fortress, so the Dutch next looked north to the captaincy of Pernambuco, attacking the Portuguese capital at Olinda and taking it by storm.27 Retaining the Portuguese to keep the sugar mills in operation, the wic named the colony New Holland and sent in Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen (1604–79) as governor-general in 1636. Maurits’s reign has been much acclaimed for its valuable scientific and artistic initiatives.28 Along with German naturalist and cartographer Georg Marcgraf (1610–44) and Willem Piso (1611–78), 49

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who was also German but educated as a physician in Leiden, Johan Maurits also brought in a group of artists, including the Dutch painters Albert Eckhout (1610–65) and Frans Post (1612–80). Eckhout documented the fascinating flora and fauna and various peoples of the colony, while Post specialized in recording its landscapes.29 These images still constitute valuable records of Brazil’s history and natural history of the time.30 Post’s landscape studies — drawings, prints, oil sketches, and paintings—give us a revealing window indeed onto Dutch Brazil. Only seven paintings survive today from the ones he completed while actually in residence there, though we know that eighteen small paintings of a consistent format that Post painted in Brazil were later given by Maurits to King Louis XIV of France; several of these still hang in the Louvre.31 But also after Post’s return to The Netherlands in 1644, the European appetite for exotica provided him with a steady market, so throughout his career he regularly returned to views of Brazil for his subject matter. In the early years after his return, he continued to produce works drawing on his live studies, creating exotic views that were very popular with his Dutch audience; his large oil painting View of Olinda hanging today in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is one of these (plate 3).32 His later work gradually retreats from these early observational skills into exotic pastiches of declining quality, but this painting done in 1662 shows Post at his best. The foreground is alive with the bizarre flora and fauna of the South American jungle: anteater, lizard, sloth, armadillo, monkey, and various tropical birds are all accurately depicted. In the middle distance, a group of people are gathered around a church that, upon closer inspection, turns out to be standing in ruins: its crumbling walls sprouting overgrowth cast a faintly melancholy pall before the flat expanse of landscape that stretches to the horizon. In place of the many objects encompassed in our first case study, here we shall focus on just this one. On its surface this seems to be a proud account of the Dutch colony in Brazil. Yet upon deeper investigation, one learns forcefully how differently one’s point of view may inflect such a scene. Visiting Olinda nowadays, one may be shocked to learn just how this church came to be in this ruined state: the Dutch themselves were responsible.33 Travel guides celebrate Olinda today for its many beautiful Portuguese cathedrals; the Dutch bank ABN-Amro (to its credit) has published a small pamphlet titled A Guide to the Churches of Olinda 2003 50

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that is circulated for free in town, reviewing the history of the churches. No fewer than thirty were already built by the seventeenth century; most, in fact, were constructed in the sixteenth. But running down the list, one learns that nearly every single church extant in the town at the time the Dutch invaders arrived in 1631 was destroyed by the conflagration—which must have been quite spectacular — when they put the city to the torch. Collectively, the brochure’s litany conjures a survey of devastation far more extensive than the single structure Post immortalized. It also (probably not coincidentally) offers a tribute to Portuguese perseverance. Nossa Senhora das Neves Church and Sao Francisco Convent, the oldest Fransciscan convent in Brazil, was begun in 1585. “Partially destroyed by the Dutch, it was rebuilt in the second half of the 17th Century.” Nossa Senhora da Graça Church and Olinda’s seminary were built in 1550 and “donated in 1551 to the Jesuit priests so that they could begin catechism of the Indigenous people and construction of the Royal College of Olinda.” “Burnt down by the Dutch, it was restored from 1660 onwards.” Catedral da Sé (Sao Salvador do Mundo Church), 1540 wattle and daub, was renovated in 1584 entirely in brick. “Destroyed by fire in 1631, it was restored as of 1656.” The hospital of Nossa Senhora da Misericórdia Church was founded before 1540. “In 1631, both church and hospital were burnt down by the Dutch, being restored as of 1654.” Sao Bento Church and monastery was built in 1599 where there was previously a brickworks site. “It was set on fire by the Dutch in 1631 and restored from 1654.” And Conceiçao Church and convent were founded by Dona Maria da Rosa, who took in and educated both Indian girls and “young ladies who arrived here.” “The convent was abandoned during the Dutch invasion.”34 Yet this wholesale destruction is nearly passed over in the written records of the Dutch West India Company. Caspar Schmalkalden, a German mercenary working in Brazil for the wic, is discreet to the point of ambiguity: “The city of Olinda is located by the sea. It was a beautiful and pleasant city before the Portuguese occupation. However, when the Dutch took over and made Recife the main city of their government, Olinda became an example of the fact that nothing in life lasts forever. Shortly afterwards, its debris and broken bricks were sold and used for the construction of the city of Mauricia.”35 Another German, Zacharias Wagener, employed as quartermaster to Johan Maurits himself, laid down a far more judgmental rationale for the destruction. It appears obliquely in his small notebook 51

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illustrating the various flora, fauna, and peoples of the Dutch colony. His drawing of a Mameluca (offspring of a Brazilian woman with a Dutch or Portuguese man) is annotated with an account of the habits of the various peoples of the colony, particularly regarding intermarriage, ending with a blatantly racist verdict. In brief, the Spanish and Portuguese, the Brazilians and Tapuyans, the mulattos and mamelukes almost all live like unclean, lascivious beasts, even though the former, who call themselves Christians, have received a clear and evident sign of the threats of anger and the visible divine punishments against that perverse and sodomitical life, when a few years ago, they saw our people (using the tools sent for that purpose) take their powerful and safe cities, pillaging, devastating and destroying churches, monasteries and other fine buildings, with the rest being reduced to ashes, expelling the Portuguese with their wives and children, forcing them out into totally deserted and wild regions; yet with the help of others, a few years later they reappeared, forgetting the damage done to them and returned to their former sins, wallowing in their old and abominable lust with which they are again full up and which they will certainly practice until God the Almighty not only puts an end to them but to all those who so rapidly forget his fatherly rebukes.36 Johan Nieuhof’s 1682 book on Dutch Brazil makes only the most glancing mention of the burning of Olinda. When Nieuhof discusses the town of Garazu (presumably present-day Iguarassu), “some distance from shore, over-against the island of Tamarika (Itamaracá), upon a river of the same name, about five leagues from Olinda,” he observes that it was formerly inhabited by Portuguese handicraftsmen, but “since our taking of Olinda, several rich families settled there; we became masters of the place 1633, in May.”37 When (on the next page) he comes to his description of Recife, he could scarcely be more casual about the Dutch actions: “After Olinda was forsaken by its inhabitants, and destroy’d by us, many of them, but especially the merchants, settled in the Reciffo.” By the time he gets to “the city of Olinda,” a single word su∞ces for all the havoc wrought by the arrival of the Dutch: “At a small distance from the Receif, or Maurice’s town, to the north, is the ruinated city of Olinda, once a famous place among the

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Portugueses; the whole product of Brasil, being from thence transported by sea into Europe.”38 He omits any mention of how it became “ruinated.” Nieuhof’s account goes on to chronicle the gradual decay of the fragile social fabric of Dutch Brazil, to the point of Johan Maurits’s departure in 1644. The governor does not leave in disgrace — far from it; the entire population reportedly turns out to see him off. As Nieuhof tells it: “All the citizens and chief inhabitants, both of the Receif and Maurice’s-town, appeared in arms, making a lane from the old town to the water-gate, from whom, as he passed by, he took his leave with all imaginable demonstrations of kindness.”39 The affection of the crowds might have been tinged by fear; the demise of the colony followed but a few years in the wake of his exit. Dutch hegemony remained embattled, precarious, and ultimately short lived: he departed in 1644 as the Dutch lost their grip; in another decade the colony was back in the hands of the Portuguese.40 What, then, of Post’s painting? Did it, like the ruins of the castle of Egmond in Holland, painted by Jacob van Ruisdael in the decade before (fig. 3.4), conjure nationalistic sentiment among Dutch viewers regarding their decades-long struggle against Iberian domination? If so, it did so in quite different terms. Egmond was set on fire in 1573 by the troops of Diderick Sonoy on orders of Willem van Oranje himself, to prevent the Spanish from capturing this strategic site. Post’s subject turns those tables; was it perceived as just and triumphant retribution? Or in a less bellicose and more philosophical vein, would viewers have simply shrugged their shoulders like Schmalkalden, with that resigned (and in this instance, morally noncommittal) attitude that — as ruins do inevitably remind us, apart from political partisanship — nothing lasts forever? Or, on quite the other hand, could it have challenged Dutch viewers to acknowledge the brutality of the Dutch Republic in their own turn? Painting in 1662, eight years after Brazil’s fall back into the hands of their Iberian rivals, could Post have been delivering a subtle critique of the Dutch policies there? Toward the end of Post’s life, the quality of his production declined as he slumped into alcoholism. Could he have been troubled still by the sights of his earlier years? When shortly before Maurits’s death he gave the group of Post’s paintings to the French king, he had thought to send the painter along to present them in person, but Post was deemed unfit to go.41

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figure 3.4. Jacob van Ruisdael, Landscape with the Ruins of Castle Egmond. Oil on canvas, ca. 1650–60. Mr. and Mrs. Potter Palmer Collection, 1947.475. (Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago)

Indeed, in the end the presumptuous illusion — of a sort of DutchBrazilian Manifest Destiny — could not be sustained. In Schmalkalden’s report on Dutch deliberations about the reinstitution of the wic, we find some implicit moral rumination about its ill fate inherent even in his pragmatism. The Dutch in fact had courage enough to wage war against everything, but would not [have] the strength and power to keep it. When a people become too powerful, first envious greed then violent hate are born amongst the [neighbors]. It would start on a small scale and become dangerous if transposed to bigger proportions. From that moment on [those in a strong position] would only be safe, provided they dealt very carefully with luck so that it did not break. It would be better if the Dutch decided in which place 54

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they should settle down and not where they should go from there. The bigger the riches and power, the bigger the dangers they would have to face; however, if a safe objective and the measures [for reaching such] were defined properly, they would have to worry less about it.42 Perhaps every one of those various perspectives explored above were in play between Post and his many viewers; the image itself does not say. But by the time one of Post’s studies of a sugar mill (similar to the ones in his paintings such as will be discussed shortly; see fig. 3.5) reappears as a motif in the Tapisserie des Indes (Tapestry of the Indies) produced in Louis’s Gobelins factories, sheer exoticism (albeit implicitly imperialistic) has trumped any specific political context.43 As the popularity of pictures such as the View of Olinda attested, its indigenous figures and flora and fauna continued to play well to the European fascination with exotica; but there is no question that it rouses quite different associations from the Brazilian point of view. Yet this early modern Dutch art of observation has conspicuously perpetuated cultural contact into the present. Brazilian scholars have distinguished Post as the first painter of the Brazilian landscape, and even as the first landscape painter in the Americas.44 The visual documentation of Dutch Brazil produced by Post and Eckhout is highly valued by Brazilians in every corner of Pernambuco and beyond. Of great significance to both the history and the natural history of the region, the images have been published in recent decades in a series of Brazilian editions.45 Their reproductions reappear in historical exhibitions, from the Forte do Cinco Ponte, now chicly decorated with potted flowers and surrounded by the hustle and flow of downtown Recife, to Kahal Zur Israel, the Jewish synagogue still standing on the Rua do Bom Jesus in Recife’s historic district, to a tiny sandy museum in the surviving buildings of Forte Orange, built by the Dutch on a windswept beach on the island of Itamaracá, not far north of Olinda. Cooperative exhibitions have brought Eckhout’s work back to Brazil and the Mauritshuis alike,46 and still more recently, Brazilian collector Ricardo Brennand has amassed an impressive collection of Post’s paintings and staged them, too, in an educational exhibition in his extraordinary institute.47 Clearly the work has resonance for Dutch and Brazilian viewers alike—however differently they may view it. 55

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Africa There are other omissions from the o∞cial government record produced by Maurits’s company that are still more disturbing. Other landscapes Post painted included sugar mills in scenes that are sun drenched, sleepy, and almost pastoral in feeling (fig. 3.5). But this impression is radically at odds with the real facts of sugar production. For not only was the winning and keeping of the Brazilian territory a story of perpetual violence and warfare; the production of sugar itself entailed one of the grimmest chapters in all of the history of European trade. Though the Dutch had first intended to manage this work themselves, they rapidly succumbed to the same means deployed by the Portuguese for the harsh labor of cultivating the cane and the still more brutal job of pressing it in the mills. The sugar so daintily served up in Chinese porcelain on Kalf’s silver platter entailed the large-scale importation of slaves from West Africa to the Americas, and this became its own big business for the wic. In his 1617 play Moortje, the Dutch playwright Bredero had leveled harsh criticism against the slave trade in “Farnabock” (Pernambuco, one of the chief sugar captaincies in Brazil) — at that time not yet a Dutch colony but rather still Portuguese: “Inhuman use! Ungodly villainy! That one sells men into beastly slavery! Even here in this town (there are men) who conduct such trade / in Pernambuco: but it shall not remain hidden from God.”48 But as historian Ruud Spruit wryly observes, this position reversed abruptly when the wic tried to establish colonies of their own in the New World.49 In 1638 Johan Maurits reported to his company superiors, “It is not possible to effect anything in Brazil without slaves . . . and they cannot be dispensed with upon any consideration whatsoever: if anyone feels that this is wrong, it is a futile scruple.”50 The “ungodly villainy” Bredero had condemned in Farnabock was now rationalized in a similar judgment penned to the lord directors in 1640: “Without Negroes and oxen nothing can be expected from Pernambuco.”51 So the Dutch interceded in the long-standing Portuguese monopoly on the Atlantic slave trade. Netherlanders had frequented the West African coast as early as the 1590s, not for slaves but for gold. But with the demand from Dutch Brazil as impetus, in 1637 forces of the wic succeeded in capturing the castle of El Mina, on the coast of present-day Ghana, which had been the main Portuguese stronghold on the African coast; by 56

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figure 3.5. Frans Jansz Post, The Sugarmill. Oil on canvas and panel, ca. 1653. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

1642 they had captured the last of the coastal stations controlled by Portugal.52 From 1636 to 1641 the Dutch transported an average of 1,500 slaves per year to New Holland; with the wic at the height of its power over the next four years, these numbers peaked: in 1644 alone, they shipped 5,000 souls to Brazil.53 The following year the Portuguese settlers, or Moradores, rebelled against the wic administration, and Dutch holdings were lost to Portugal piece by piece; Recife was the last stronghold to fall, in 1654. But as these markets receded, others arose, particularly in the Spanish American colonies through Spanish government contracts known as asientos. By 1641 the Dutch had established themselves on the island of Curaçao, arid enough to be ignored by the Spanish but offering a useful harbor for refurbishing ships. By the late 1650s, this tiny island not far off the coast of Venezuela had become a major center for the Atlantic slave trade; a decade later it was the biggest slave depot in the Caribbean. In 1667 57

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the wic signed a contract to supply nearly 4,000 slaves per year to the Spanish colonies; for eight successive years from 1679, the contract was for 6,500 per year. And these were only the o∞cial numbers; historian Wim Klooster stresses that extensive smuggling made the real numbers significantly higher.54 By the end of the century, Dutch participation had receded relative to other European powers: between 1680 and 1688 approximately 2,250 slaves per year went to the Spanish ports by way of Curaçao, but in the 1690s the Portuguese regained the upper hand, followed by the French in 1701 and the English in 1713.55 The terrifying and often fatal horrors of the Middle Passage that carried slaves from Africa to America have since been much documented;56 for the slaves who did make it to the Americas, the fate that awaited them in the “hell of the sugar mill” was further fraught with the danger of grisly dismemberment: “Cutting the cane in the burning sun was di∞cult, pressing with the mills dangerous. Many slaves lost their fingers in the work with the quickly turning rollers and an axe stood always ready to chop off a trapped hand before a victim was completely mangled. The work over the great sugar kettles was an infernal job, in which great masses of foam and filth constantly had to be cleared off from the boiling kettles.”57 In stark contrast, Post’s landscapes with sugar mills such as the one featured in the foreground of fig. 3.5 were depicted at su∞cient distance to render the scene serene under the tropical sun, drowsy and even bucolic. In fact, the only visual trace of objection to the slavery in Dutch Brazil was made not by a Dutch hand at all but, rather, by that same Zacharias Wagener quoted above for his scornful critique of the indigenous population of Brazil. A German soldier in the service of the wic, his artistic talent had been recognized and encouraged by Governor Maurits himself, who made him his quartermaster. Wagener completed a series of drawings later collected in his Thierbuch (Animal Book). Most of the images are outright copies of works by Post and Eckhout, including flora and fauna, landscapes and settlements, and people.58 But there is one picture from Wagener’s Thierbuch that finds no precedent in any known source by Post or Eckhout: a drawing made around 1640 of slaves emerging from a warehouse on the Jodenstraat in Maurits’s capital city Mauritsstad—present-day Recife (fig. 3.6). Here, in contrast to his slurs of indigenous Brazilian populations cited above, Wagener’s penned caption exhibits decided sympathy for the fate of the African slaves, bluntly indicting the inhuman practices 58

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figure 3.6. Zacharias Wagener, Slave Market in the Jodenstraat in Mauritsstad, Brazil. Pen and ink with watercolor on paper, ca. 1640. Illustration from his Thierbuch, Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden.

of human bondage conducted by the Dutch in Maurits’s colony: “The poor people, half dead from hunger and thirst, came crawling out of the stalls like swine or sheep to be sold.”59 This apparently unsanctioned observation levels a critique nowhere to be found in the o∞cially commissioned works by Post or Eckhout, Maurits’s artists for hire.60 Instead, at this grievous moment in European history, when black Africans do appear in Dutch art, they are often presented in a servile role that is sleekly aestheticized. A number of still life paintings include a “Moor” acting as servant, elegantly dressed in antique Renaissance finery; their presence in this context represents yet another lucrative commodity of Dutch commerce of the time, but they are posed here in a world utterly divorced from the abasements of the slave trade (fig. 3.7). Worse still, throughout this same period of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, black African youths were included as well in portraits, frequently posed obsequiously cradling the milk-white hand of a Dutch lady (fig. 3.8). Samuel van Hoogstraten’s 1678 art-theoretical treatise advised painters “sometimes by maidens to add a Moor” for visual variety and 59

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figure 3.7. Attributed to Jurriaen van Streek, Moor with Nautilus Goblet, Porcelain, and Fruit. Oil on canvas. Formerly collection A. Kay, Edinburgh. Signed AvB (Abraham van Beijeren).

contrast — but clearly they also functioned as status symbols, since often the sitter retained no such servant in real life.61 Either way, the repetitive pattern of their subservient stance generated a caustic stereotype that worked as if to normalize a blatant racial hierarchization nothing short of appalling to postmodern eyes. The disconnect is complete; no Dutch artists recorded the nightmares of the Middle Passage or the literally gory details of slave labor in the colonies.62 After the collapse of New Holland, the Dutch had set their sites on another sugar-producing region farther north up the “Wild Coast.” Seizing the territory of Suriname from the English, they resumed sugar production in the new colony’s plantations, which became notorious for their exceptional decadence and cruelty.63 Yet even there, the visual images that survive from the colony’s early years convey a peaceful, orderly, even idyllic impression. Maria Sibylla Merian’s artistic expedition to Suriname 60

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figure 3.8. Abraham van Tempel, Portrait of the seacaptain Jan van Amstel and his wife Anna Boxhoorn. Signed and dated 1671. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

centered only on the study of native plants and insects, offering a gentle picture of minute focus; the engraved frontispiece for the publication of her work at the opening of the eighteenth century depicts Merian accompanied only by milky white cherubs—though her text does describe one plant that slave women reportedly used to abort themselves when they did not wish to bear a child into slavery.64 Dirk Valkenburg’s views of Suriname from the same years are similarly cool, detached, and even delicate — even when he depicts the sugar-making facilities or the slave quarters, as at Plantation Waterland, where his dispassionate caption reads as follows: “This view of Waterland is seen by standing before the kitchen. 1 the mill and boiling house from the front. 2 the gallery on the river side. 3 the gallery on the land side. 4 the distillery. 5 a slave house.” Yet its matter-of-fact tone belies untold narratives: it was drawn in 1708, only a few years after the plantation driver, Ayakô, had escaped into the bush.65 These images hint at none of the cruel abominations of slavery or of the dreadful dangers of sugar production recorded elsewhere. 61

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In fact, it was not until late in the eighteenth century that the worst atrocities of the Dutch slave trade were figured forth — and again not by a Dutchman but, rather, by an outside observer.66 The graphic accounts of the Scottish soldier John Gabriel Stedman gave the lie to all these idylls, illustrating a horrific record of the heinous treatment of colonial slaves, witnessed during his stay in Suriname from 1772 to 1777.67 One eyewitness account describes the merciless whipping of a female Samboe slave in 1774 for no other crime than resisting her handler’s seduction: “Lacerated in such a shocking manner by the whips of two Negro-drivers, that she was from her neck to her ankles literally dyed with blood . . . she had received two hundred lashes . . . [and almost immediately afterward was given another two hundred, yet] her only crime consisted in firmly refusing to submit to the loathsome embraces of her detestable executioner [her white overseer].”68 It must be said that there is a disconcerting appeal to prurient interest in the comely nudes of his drawings, further classicized in the engravings after them by William Blake for Stedman’s published memoir; both seem to capitalize on the sensational representation of near-naked bodies.69 Still, these graphic reports both verbal and visual of the arbitrary cruelties of slaveholders and the barbaric atrocities committed upon their slaves provided the first really frank visual depictions of Dutch injustices against slaves, and they would serve as potent fuel for the abolitionist movement in England.70 The stakes of not seeing had been high: the complicit silence of word and image must have helped to permit the perpetuation of the trade in slaves, for as Stedman’s shocking images were unleashed upon the European populace, the tide began to turn, ultimately ending in the abolition of the slave trade in England and, eventually, in The Netherlands as well.71 Dutch visual culture, so incredibly rich in so many other ways during this period known as their golden age, had turned a blind eye to the brutality of the slave trade, never acknowledging the real social costs of irrationally profitable plantation agriculture. Ironically, this same blind spot, the failure to recognize the unsustainability of slavery and exploited labor, is singled out by historian Jan Luiten van Zanden as precisely what brought the golden age of the United Provinces to a close. Van Zanden argues that for the merchant capitalism of the Dutch Republic, “the payment of labour was insu∞cient to reproduce labour power,” resulting in a series of 62

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changes in the structure of the labor market that help to explain both the transformation of Holland’s economy between 1580 and 1650 and its stagnation after 1670.72 In other words, the unsustainability of unpaid slave labor (along with the underpaid labor of the soldiers and sailors in the service of the shipping companies, which is another story) undid them in the end. Thus these extremely varied histories intensely implicate the dense network of trade and cultural exchange in a tangle of complexities not superficially visible on — often, in fact, explicitly subducted beneath — the colorful canvases of Dutch painting. Moreover, even beyond the meanings such pictures might have conveyed for viewers at the time, today we can detect still other important layers of signification, reflecting with benefit of hindsight 400 years back on the connections between these early modern cultural contacts and the making of Dutch art. Our three case studies have given us quite disparate examples of the many ways visuality functions in this global realm. In the transformations of style from Chinese porcelain to Dutch Delftware, cultural forms traveled through stimulus diffusion, as art conveyed links and ties even as content and meanings shifted and evolved. In the subtle ambiguities of Post’s View of Olinda, visual imagery opens questions that it refuses to answer—puzzles of interpretation for which history can provide enlightenment but not necessarily closure. In Baroque images of black Africans, visual imagery could also work insidiously to naturalize ways of thinking utterly unacceptable to later viewers. And returning by this circuitous route to Kalf’s fine still life, we might hence see it, too, in a new light that takes into account how very much lurks behind the silver platters of the Dutch golden age. That such a disparity in the nature and substance of cultural and artistic exchange could be encompassed within one country’s experience is as extraordinary as the subduction of all these histories within an elegant painting like Kalf’s; but that very complexity is a telling demonstration of the fruitfulness of the exercise, however challenging, of remapping Dutch art in more global perspective. So, too, does probing these histories of cultural contact lead to a fuller understanding of the making of European art more broadly. Just as we are obliged to do in our own time, we are compelled to apprehend the true social costs of these commodities in the real world and to appreciate the necessity of considering multiple points of view in the assessment of artistic meaning, which can help to retrieve 63

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and clarify layers of significance sometimes concealed beneath the polish of art’s surfaces. Art can open our eyes to some of history’s silences, but art, too, has its silences, which history in turn can help us to address. notes 1. The research for this project has been generously funded by a Faculty Scholar Award from the University of Iowa and a Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. My thanks to Mary Sheriff for inviting my participation in the Rand lecture series and this ensuing publication project that shares so profoundly in kindred convictions about the importance of reconceptualizing European art history to better account for the interrelationships of world arts. 2. On the Dutch Republic’s rise to status as a world power in the seventeenth century through its commercial successes, see Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (New York: Clarendon, 1989). 3. “Al wat den Haemel sent, of uytter aerden groeyt, Dat komt ons met de Zee ter haven in-gevloeyt” (Jacob Cats, in Johan van Beverwyck, Schat der Gesontheyt [Dordrecht: for Mathias Havius, by Hendrick van Esch, 1636], in 1672 edition, 133). 4. Notes of Several Passages and Observations in Holland etc., Part of France, Savoy, Piemont, Italy and Part of Germany, from June 1699 to July 1702, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire Record O∞ce, MS DDM 36.19, ff. 1–14, 7. See also Cornelis Daniël Strien, British Travellers in Holland during the Stuart Period: Edward Browne and John Locke as Tourists in the United Provinces (Leiden: Brill, 1993) (dissertation, Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit, 1989). 5. For fuller accounts of the histories of these and other commodities depicted in Dutch still life painting, see Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 6. The term is Mary Louise Pratt’s. See Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 7. For a useful overview of the history of kraakporselein imported by the Dutch, along with illustrated examples and explanations of the various decorative motifs, see the catalog of the porcelain excavated from a shipwreck in 1976: C. L. van der Pijl-Ketel, ed., The Ceramic Load of the Witte Leeuw, 1613 (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1982). 8. On the Chinese porcelain trade even earlier, in the fifth century with the Arabs and throughout the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia, see Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 35–36. 9. Sources vary as to the dates: 1602–3 (van der Pijl-Ketel, Ceramic Load, 9) or 1601–4 (Barbara Harrisson, Kraakporselein [Leeuwarden: Gemeentelijk Museum het Princessehof, 1964]). While ethical debate questioned the confiscation of this cargo as war booty, it was ultimately justified as revenge for the Portuguese hanging of seventeen Dutchmen in Macao. The Dutch East India Company had lawyer Hugo Grotius

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remapping dutch art draft a treatise claiming mare liberum, free use of the sea, disallowing any Portuguese hindrance to the Dutch in Asia. See Hugo de Groot, Verhandeling over Het Recht Op Buit, trans. O. Damsté (Leiden, 1934). More on the Dutch conflict with the Portuguese below. 10. See also C. J. A. Jörg, “Chinese Porcelain for the Dutch in the Seventeenth Century: Trading Networks and Private Enterprise,” in The Porcelains of Jingdezhen: Colloquies on Art and Archaeology in Asia, No. 16, ed. Rosemary E. Scott (London: Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, 1992). 11. See Oliver Impey, Chinoiserie: The Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decoration (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 89. 12. See T. Volker, Porcelain and the Dutch East India Company, as Recorded in the Dagh-Registers of Batavia Castle, Those of Hirado and Deshima and Other Contemporary Papers 1602–1682, Ministerie van Onderwijs, Kunsten en Wetenschappen; Mededelingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden, no. 11 (Leiden: Brill, 1954). 13. See C. J. A. Jörg, “Arita and the Dutch Porcelain Trade,” in Bridging the Divide: 400 Years, The Netherlands—Japan, ed. Leonard Blussé, Willem Remmelink, and Ivo Smits (Leiden: Hotei; Hilversum: Stichting Educatieve Omroep Teleac/NOT, 2000), 47. 14. See Julie Berger Hochstrasser, “Wisselwerkingen Redux: Ceramics, Asia, and The Netherlands,” in Points of Contact: Crossing Cultural Boundaries, ed. Amy Golahny (Lewisburg, Pa.: Associated University Presses, 2004), 50–79. 15. Johann Böttger finally made it in 1709, working for Augustus the Strong, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, at Dresden and later at Meissen; see Impey, Chinoiserie, 104. 16. On the exchange between Oriental porcelain and Delft earthenware, see C. J. A. Jörg, Oosters porselein Delfts aardewerk, Wisselwerkingen (Groningen: Kemper, 1983). 17. The Kobe City Museum in Japan has a particularly rich collection. See Winds from Afar: Europe through the Eyes of Edo-period Kyoto (Kobe: Kobe City Museum, 2000). 18. Many examples of chine de commande are also to be seen in the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Mass.; see the catalog Asian Export Art: Chinese Export Porcelain and Export Art from China, Japan, and India (Salem, Mass.: Peabody Essex Museum, n.d.) and the 1993 catalog of the collections. 19. See also Impey, Chinoiserie. 20. See Alfred L. Kroeber, Anthropology: Culture Patterns and Processes (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), 176–78. James Cahill claims the same sort of phenomenon in the influence of European art on Chinese painting. The quotation is his; see Cahill, The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). 21. This settlement was founded by a Dutch preacher named Albertus van Raalte (1811–76), who brought a group of settlers there in the mid-nineteenth century. Authentic “Delfts Blaauw” is marketed on-site from Holland, Michigan, and also via websites such as 〈 http://www.bluedelft.com 〉 (accessed November 15, 2008).

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Julie Hochstrasser 22. Along with Aruba, the Netherlands Antilles (which include Curaçao, Bonaire, Saba, St. Eustatius, and the Dutch end of St. Maarten) are still a part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands today. Among many signs of Dutch culture throughout these islands, I photographed the shop window full of Delftware in fig. 3.3 on the island of Bonaire. For more on the earlier history of the Dutch in the Caribbean, see below. 23. The Dutch first arrived in Japan in 1609, and with the Shogun’s expulsion of the Spanish and Portuguese in 1639, they became the only Europeans permitted to trade with Japan, and remained so for some 250 years. Although throughout this period the Dutch were restricted to Dejima, then a tiny island just off the coast of Nagasaki (but today silted in to the mainland), the Japanese developed a deep interest in Dutch culture. Japanese artists clearly enjoyed depicting the “red-furred” or “big-eyed Dutch,” and there was great interest in Rangaku (Dutch learning). For an excellent study of the eighteenth-century Japanese fascination with all things Dutch, see Timon Screech, The Lens within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan, 2nd ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002). 24. See Pieter Geyl, The Revolt of the Netherlands, 1555–1609 (London: E. Benn, 1966). 25. The charter to renew the company states this explicitly; for quotations and translations, see Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade. 26. See Geyl, Revolt. For a fuller account of Dutch colonial outreach, see C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (New York: Knopf, 1965). 27. See Ruud J. Spruit, Zout en Slaven: De Geschiedenis van de West-Indische Compagnie (Houten: De Haan, 1988), 40–44. 28. The bibliography is extensive, but for a focused and seminal history, see Charles Ralph Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957). 29. For an overview of the artistic record produced under Maurits’s patronage, see P. J. P. Whitehead and M. Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil: Animals, Plants, and People by the Artists of Johan Maurits of Nassau (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1989). On Eckhout and Post, see also Rebecca Parker Brienen, “Albert Eckhout and Frans Post: Two Dutch Artists in Colonial Brazil,” in Brazil: Body and Soul (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 92–111. 30. Together they produced a major milestone in the history of natural description: the Historia Naturalis Brasiliae, published in 1648 in Leiden and Amsterdam under the authors’ names of Piso and Marcgraf. Marcgraf had apparently also generated studies for some of the woodcut illustrations, but many more were based on the handsome sketches in oil on paper by Eckhout (long lost but recently rediscovered, after a remarkable series of adventures, in the Jagiellon Library in Cracow) and drawings by Post, including one woodcut depicting a sugar mill in operation. 31. These also seem to have provided the designs for the eighteen views of Dutch Brazil published in Caspar Barlaeus’s book Rerum per octennium in Brasilia (Amsterdam: Johannes Blaeu, 1647). 32. On the works of Post, see Joaquim de Sousa-Leao, Frans Post, 1612–1680 (Am-

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remapping dutch art sterdam: A. L. van Gendt, 1973), and more recently, Bia Corrêa do Lago and Pedro Corrêa do Lago, eds., Frans Post e o Brasil Holandês na coleçao do Instituto Ricardo Brennand / Frans Post and Dutch Brazil in the Collection of Instituto Ricardo Brennand (Recife: Instituto Ricardo Brennand, 2003). 33. Commentaries on the painting today do acknowledge that: see Alan Chong’s entry for this painting in the exhibition catalog Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, ed. Peter Sutton (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984). 34. The paucity of exceptions proves the rule: Sao Joao Batista dos Militares Church is listed as “one of the few temples preserved from the fire started by the Dutch in 1631, perhaps for belonging to the military brotherhood and having served as general quarters for the invaders. Nonetheless, there is an inscription above the pulpit dated 166 . . . , indicating that it had been reconstructed after the Dutch invasion.” As for Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe Church, built between 1626 (the facade) and 1629, “it escaped the fire, still being used for the Catholic church services, even during the Dutch occupation” (Banco Real/ABN-Amro Bank, A Guide to the Churches of Olinda 2003). 35. Schmalkalden’s explanation is pragmatic: “The cause for this devastation was the decision taken by the High Council that since Olinda was too far from the harbour and the entrance to the sea, the people should leave the city and be transferred to Recife and to the island of Antonio Vaz. . . . Some may also have feared that if Olinda remained intact, it could be used as an advantage point by the enemy and a place to hide” (Brasil Holandês: The Voyage of Caspar Schmalkalden from Amsterdam to Pernambuco in Brazil, 2 vols. [Rio de Janeiro: Editora Index, 1998], 2:68–69). 36. Zacharias Wagener, Thierbuch, in Brasil Holandês / Dutch Brazil, ed. Cristina Ferrao and Jose Paulo Monteiro Soares (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Index, 1997), 181. 37. Johannes Nieuhof, Voyages and Travels to the East Indies, 1653–1670 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988), 8. Translation from Nieuhof’s original Dutch edition Gedenkwaerdige Zee en Lantreize door de Voornaemste Landschappen van West en Oostindien (Amsterdam: widow of Jacob van Meurs, 1682). Also excerpted as Joan Nieuhofs Gedenkweerdige Brasiliaense Zee- en Lantreize (Amsterdam: Jacob van Meurs, 1682). 38. Nieuhof, Voyages and Travels, 11. 39. Ibid., 36. 40. See José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos (Recife: Instituto Ricardo Brennand, 2001), and Leonardo Dantas Silva, Hollandeses em Pernambuco, 1630–1654 (Recife: Instituto Ricardo Brennand, 2005). 41. Along with works of his colleague Eckhout, there were eighteen paintings by Post, all of similar size and framing, plus five others, all painted during the artist’s sojourn in Brazil. These were put on display at Versailles in 1679, but of those given to Louis XIV, only four survive in the Louvre today. Of the fourteen gone missing from Louis’s collection over the years, three have resurfaced: the View of Itamaracá was acquired by the Rijksmuseum in 1889, on permanent loan to the Mauritshuis since 1953. Two more reappeared in the 1930s and 1990s, respectively; one is in the Cisneros collection, and the View of Fort Frederick Hendrik entered the collection of the Instituto

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Julie Hochstrasser Ricardo Brennand in 2000—the only one of these early works by Post in a Brazilian collection. See Bia Corrêa do Lago and Pedro Corrêa do Lago, “Uma proposta de periodizaçao da obra de Frans Post / A Tentative Period Division of Frans Post’s Oeuvre,” in Corrêa do Lago and Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post e o Brasil Holandês, 5–17. 42. Schmalkalden, Brasil Holandês. 43. On the tapestries with motifs from Post, see Corrêa do Lago and Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post e o Brasil Holandês. On the history of the tapestries themselves, with motifs from both Post and Eckhout, see Whitehead and Boeseman, Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, and Quentin Buvelot, ed., Albert Eckhout: A Dutch Artist in Brazil (The Hague: Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis, n.d). 44. Corrêa do Lago and Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post e o Brasil Holandês, 13. 45. Brasil Holandês / Dutch Brazil (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Index, 1995–2002). 46. See Albert Eckhout volta ao Brasil / Albert Eckhout Returns to Brazil, 1644–2002 (Denmark: Nationalmuseet, 2002), and Buvelot, Albert Eckhout. 47. See Corrêa do Lago and Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post e o Brasil Holandês. 48. “Onmenschelyck ghebruyck! Godloose schelmery! / Datmen de menschen vent tot paartsche slavernij! / Hier zynder oock in stadt, die sulcken handel dryven / In Farnbock: maar’t sal Godt niet verhoolen blyven” (G. A. Bredero, Moortje [Amsterdam: Van Raven, 1617], ll. 233–36, also quoted in Spruit, Zout en Slaven, 61, and Johannes Menne Postma, The Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 11). Still, Dutch historians Pieter Emmer and Ernst van den Boogaart judge that to be slim evidence for any truly substantive objection to slavery among the Dutch populace at the time. Citing Ratelband and Goslinga as claiming that “there was a strong popular opposition to the slave trade, shared by a majority of the WIC board,” Emmer and van den Boogaart counter that this “certainly strains the available evidence,” calling it shallow for Goslinga to derive popular condemnation from one line in a play. In contrast, they cite the “far more influential writings of Jan Huyghen van Linschoten and Dierick Ruiters, in which the commercial opportunities in the Atlantic are discussed,” where “no marked disapproval of the slave trade appears.” See van den Boogaart and Emmer, citing Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Itinerario: Voyage ofte Schipvaert van Jan Huygen van Linschoten naer oost ofte Portugaels Indien, 1579–1592, ed. Hendrik Kern and Heert Terpstra (1596; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957), vol. 3, and Dierick Ruiters, Toortse der Zeevaert, 1623, ed. S. P. l’Honoré Naber, Werken uitgegeven door de Linschoten-Vereeniging (1623; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1913), 6. 49. Spruit, Zout en Slaven, 59–60. 50. “Sommier Discours over den state vande vier geconquesteerde Capitanias” (Jan. 1638), in Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap gevestigd te Utrecht, ii, 292–93. Utrecht, 1878 to date, quoted in Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 83. Also quoted in Postma, Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 17. Early attempts by the Spanish to enslave Native Americans had disastrous results, with appalling losses through sick-

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remapping dutch art ness and death. Consequently Scelle reports that planters valued the labor of one black slave equal to that of four Indians. See Georges Scelle, The Slave-trade in the Spanish Colonies of America: The Assiento, 2 vols. (Paris: L. Larose & L. Tenin, 1910), 615. Eric Williams argues that the notion of Negroes being better suited for hard labor in the tropics is indefensible and that it was simply a question of supply and demand between white and black labor. See Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), esp. 23; see also Daniel P. Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, Black Cargoes (New York: Viking Press, 1962), 2–3. 51. “Zonder negers en ossen komt er van Pernambuco niets terecht” (Quelen 1640, 13, quoted in Spruit, Zout en Slaven, 60; also quoted in translation in Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, 137). 52. For a concise history of the Dutch involvement, see Postma, Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 18. 53. Ibid., 21. 54. See Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795 (Leiden: KITLV [Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde / Dutch Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology] Press Caribbean Series 18, 1998), 105–20, 138. 55. Postma, Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 41. 56. Although later, eighteenth-century instances, the autobiography of the former slave Olaudah Equiano (published 2004) and Robert Harms’s reconstruction from archives on the slaveship Diligent (2002) are both valuable for being particularly close to their sources. 57. Translation from the Dutch is mine. Herewith the Dutch original: “Het riet kappen in de brandende zon was zwaar, het persen met de molens gevaarlijk. Menige slaaf verloor zijn vingers bij het werken met de snel draaiende walsen en altijd stond een bijl klaar om een beklemd geraakte hand af te kappen, voordat een slachtoffer geheel werd vermorzeld. Het werken aan de grote suikerketels was een hels karwei, waarbij voortdurend met grote spanen schuim en vuil van de kokende ketels moest worden geschept” (Spruit, Zout en Slaven, 46). 58. His image copied after Eckhout’s painting of an African slave in Brazil makes one significant departure from Eckhout’s life-size oil painting: it includes a brand on the woman’s breast that Eckhout omits. See Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). 59. “De arme, half van honger en dorst omgekomen mensen, als zwijnen of schapen uit de stallen kwamen gekropen.” Zacharias Wagener (also transcribed Wagenaer and Wagner) was already active as an artist in Brazil before the arrival of Johan Maurits. His Thierbuch, from which this is quoted, is described as “one of the most vivid and comprehensive records of the Dutch colony in Brazil during Johan Maurits’ reign” by R. Joppien in “The Dutch Vision of Brazil: Johan Maurits and His Artist,” in Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen: A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil, ed. E. van den Boogaart (The

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Julie Hochstrasser Hague: The Johan Maurits van Nassau Stichting, 1979), 297-376. Full-color facsimiles of the pages of Wagener’s Thierbuch are now available in a paperback edition; see Zacharias Wagner, Thier Buch, in Dutch Brazil (Rio de Janeiro: Editoria Index, 1997). 60. His copy after Eckhout’s striking depiction of a black African slave woman also includes a detail omitted by the o∞cial court artist: a brand (which consists of an incriminating crowned “M,” presumably for Maurits) on her breast. Eckhout’s own image is problematic in various ways that have been much discussed elsewhere—as in other of his renditions, the trappings of the woman here may well be an inaccurate amalgamation of artifacts that did not actually cohere. Compare, for example, Whitehead and Boeseman, Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil, and Brienen, “Albert Eckhout and Frans Post.” 61. Samuel van Hoogstraten (also Hoogstraeten), Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (Rotterdam, 1678; reprint, Doornspijk: Davaco, 1969). See Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, and Marysa Otte, cited in ibid. 62. Touring El Mina castle today, or its larger neighbor Cape Coast, just north on the Ghana coast, brings the African experience to life in a still more visceral way. 63. Voltaire’s ruthlessly cynical passage in chapter 19 of Candide, on the slave whose Dutch master had left him with only one leg and one hand, is staged in Suriname. See Voltaire, Candide, or, Optimism, trans. and ed. Theo Cuff (New York: Penguin, 2005), chap. 19. 64. See “Flos Pavonis,” in Anna Maria Sibylla Merian, Dissertation sur la generation et les transformations des insects de Suriname (1705; The Hague: Pierre Gosse, 1726). 65. See Richard Price, First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). Compare also Valkenburg’s detailed painting of a slave “play” on the Dómbi Plantation, 1707, in the Danish Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, reproduced in ibid., 109. 66. Significantly, it was a Fleming, Theodor de Bry (again an outside observer), who implicated the brutalities of Spanish slavery in the New World, in engravings made in the 1590s for his Grand Voyages. While his depiction of African slaves making sugar in a Spanish sugar mill is mild enough, in fact, to later be appropriated for the Dutch physician Johan van Beverwyck’s treatise on food and healthy eating habits, as frontispiece for the chapter on sugar (see van Beverwyck, Schat der Gesontheyt [1636]), what does not get carried forward is another print by de Bry showing Spaniards whipping slaves on Hispaniola. In yet another print, de Bry’s caption reports that the Native Americans are so terrified at the prospect of Spanish captivity that they leap to their deaths from the cliffs rather than be subjected. See Theodor de Bry, Americae pars VII. Verissima et ivcvndissima descriptio praecipvarvm qvarvndam Indiae regionum & insularum (Frankfurt, 1599). 67. See the authoritative English edition of Stedman’s “Narrative” coedited by Richard and Sally Price, amplified with a long and extremely useful introduction: Stedman’s Surinam: Life in Eighteenth-Century Slave Society (1796; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

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remapping dutch art 68. Stedman, “Reise naar Surinamen” (1790) (ms.), chap. 13, quoted in Price, FirstTime, 46. 69. The ironies of Stedman’s accounts are many. One illustration shows an escaped slave who stands watch by a hiding place in the woods, while another shows soldiers searching for a hiding place of Maroons as a black soldier serves as guard. Stedman himself comes as a mercenary hired by the resident government to suppress a slave rebellion, yet his sympathies are clearly more complicated. He falls in love with an AfroSurinamese slave named Joanna, whom he is ultimately (after considerable struggle) able to buy into freedom. If his own passionate expressions of sentiment seem genuine, still the prurient interest of the visual presentation of the comely young woman is disconcerting in its display. Likewise, Stedman’s figuring forth of the economic dependence of “Europe supported by Africa and America” in the allegorical forms of three shapely nudes still further accentuates the presumptions of gender and male gaze that parallel those of race throughout this period. 70. Yet notwithstanding his clear expression of compassion for the fate of these victims, even Stedman leaves us with a deeply ambiguous message: the suffering of the slave revolt is contrasted sharply with a more peaceful status quo of a “properly” functioning slave society. Stedman’s caption for this, “Family of Negro Slaves from Loango,” is fully transparent: “a Negro family in that State of Tranquil Happiness to which they [slaves] are all entitled When they are Well treated by their Owners” (Stedman, “Reise naar Surinamen,” chap. 26; in the 1796 publication of Stedman’s Narrative, this is plate 68). Price observes that Stedman’s drawing from the 1770s is “deliberately idealized” to depict this; see Price, First-Time, 79. Stedman even suggests an idyllic feeling to slave life on the plantation, in harsh contrast to the horrors suffered by the rebels: his view of the Plantation Clarenbeek on the Commewijn shows small, dark figures silhouetted against a serene river where others cavort playfully. 71. Abolition occurred first in England, France, and Spain; for a variety of reasons the Dutch were last to abolish slavery. See Gert Oostindie, ed., Fifty Years Later: Antislavery, Capitalism, and Modernity in the Dutch Orbit (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996). On the British movement that led the way, see Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Popular Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 72. Jan Luiten van Zanden, The Rise and Decline of Holland’s Economy: Merchant Capitalism and the Labour Market (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 171.

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4 Travel and Cultural Exchange in Enlightenment Rome christopher m. s. johns

In a highly optimistic society that believed in its own perfectibility through reason, rational debate, and empirical research, western Europe in the eighteenth century convinced itself that its destiny was to bring enlightenment to the four corners of the planet. In numerous allegories of the four continents of the world, Europe sits enthroned, scepter in hand, bejeweled, usually crowned, and looking serenely imperious out and over the other three continents still benighted by superstition, primitivism, Islam, and general backwardness. Giambattista Tiepolo’s Four Continents stair house fresco at the episcopal Residenz in Würzburg in German Franconia, executed in 1751–53, is a celebrated, characteristic case in point (fig. 4.1). Reified as a calm queen, Europe is surrounded by musicians, ecclesiastical dignitaries and numerous emblems of “culture,” broadly defined. Below, to the viewer’s right, a figure in livery sits atop a large cannon amid other weapons. In early sketches for the enormous fresco this figure was not included. In a middle stage of the fresco’s development, the weapons were positioned alongside a young boy, and the painting as executed presents us with a portrait of the building’s architect, Balthasar Neumann, still accompanied by military ordnance.1 The inclusion of weapons and a male figure as the substructure on which Europe rests cannot be an accident. The rapidly expanding colonial empires of western Europe were established and maintained by force of arms. But even more fundamental is the tacit recognition of European technological superiority vis-à-vis the other parts of the world. That tech-

figure 4.1. Giambattista Tiepolo, The Four Continents: Europe. Fresco, 1751–53. Würzburg, Residenz staircase. (Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N.Y.)

cultural exchange in enlightenment rome

nological advantage was crucial not only to the imperial agendas of the major Western powers, but it was also the instrument that brought “exotic” commodities to Europe as well as to other colonized parts of the globe. For example, one could find a fine piece of Chinese porcelain in a Boston mansion, a Persian carpet in a Parisian townhouse, and a Brazilian shell in a Dutch kunstkammer. In addition, another sort of commodity, human slaves, was shipped from the western coasts of Africa in arrangements of infernal e∞ciency and could be found on plantations and in domestic servitude in all European colonies. It may also not be an accident that in the Residenz, Europe looks across to Africa as the part of the world most in need of “enlightenment” and as the continent with the greatest potential for commercial exploitation. The visualization of the four parts of the world in the stair house at Würzburg owes a considerable debt to standard emblem books of the era, in this case Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia.2 The female figure of America astride a reptilian creature resembling a crocodile is taken directly from Ripa’s formula. A number of variations and mutations in the fresco, however, were suggested by travel literature that flooded Europe in the eighteenth century. This is especially true of some of the objectified attributes deployed to associate Islam with paganism in Africa and with white slavery in Asia, such as fanciful turbans and a standard topped by a crescent moon. Thus, travel illustration is a vital component of Tiepolo’s fanciful conception of a nicely ordered planet. Why was travel such a crucial component of Europe’s conception of itself and of its position in the world? How did travel literature help create the very notion of exoticism, in its eighteenth-century form? These very complex questions may be partly answered by considering ideas as diverse as a waxing intellectual interest in scientific investigation, the traditional mandate of the gospels to spread Christianity, the quest for new markets for European goods, and in rare cases, simple wanderlust. Knowledge of other cultures on the part of the West almost necessarily led to a definition of difference based on hierarchy, with the exotic nonetheless being of keen intellectual and cultural interest. Still, there could be no question of its ultimate inferiority. The intimate relationship between travel and the creation of hierarchies to define exoticism and cultural difference was also played out within Europe, and the Grand Tour was a highly significant mechanism of national and cultural self-definition.3 Many of the terms used in travel 75

Christopher M. S. Johns

literature to disparage racial and non- Christian others — backward, superstitious, fanatical, hypersexualized, and so forth — were also employed by northern European Protestants, above all the British, when describing the eighteenth-century Italians encountered during their sojourns in the peninsula.4 But like the consideration of the American, Asian, and African other, the placement of Roman Catholic Italy far below the Protestant north in the technological, spiritual, and social hierarchy in no way inhibited fascination with the art and visual culture of the south. Indeed, the desire to possess works of Italian art, both ancient and modern, reached a level of frenzy among the Grand Tourists that is di∞cult to explain without reference to the raw power of possession in the Freudian sense. Ownership of objects acquired through purchase was not only a manifestation of the financial disparity between Italian owners and producers and their privileged visitors; it also underscores a sense of at least cultural inferiority on the part of the buyers that distinguishes the Italian context from the situation of non-Europeans, East Asians possibly excepted. Within Europe, it was more a question of simple appropriation. The mania for collecting also emphasizes the fact that those who wished to possess important works of Italian art viewed them as commodities in the marketplace that could be had if the price were right. About the only thing the Protestant north lacked in its claims to global primacy, in their view, was possession of the cultural and artistic heritage of the south. At least before the French invasion of Italy at the end of the century, this could only be achieved through purchase or by artists going to Italy to study and copy the canonical masterworks of the Western tradition. The social, political, economic, and intellectual prestige art and culture still possessed in the era of the Enlightenment is explicitly illustrated in these financial transactions. The cultural commodities exchange between the north and south during the era of the Grand Tour was enormously complex and encompassed an astonishing variety of commercial activities. This essay will focus on four such forms of exchange and examine how each affected both the city of origin and the country of destination. My case studies investigate portraits of Grand Tourists painted in Enlightenment Rome, the importance of clothing in the construction of both personal and national identity, view paintings produced in Rome and Venice for the open market and sold almost exclusively to tourists, and the international trade in porce76

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lain that has only recently begun to receive the scholarly attention it so richly deserves. The unprecedented level of tourism in the middle decades of the eighteenth century occasioned profound changes at both ends of the financial transactions that became the norm in a visitor-driven art market, and in my view it is naive to consider only the purchasers and what they hoped to achieve through possession of art when considering the broader issue of art acquisition while traveling. Italy’s visual culture was also transmogrified, and its flourishing art market and thriving studio production were completely reconfigured away from a local system of ecclesiastical and aristocratic patronage, where most production remained in or near the place of its creation, to an international commodities exchange system that witnessed the definitive alienation of prized objects of the “national” patrimony, although not in the numbers usually imagined in the art historical literature.5 Moreover, tourists’ acquisition of works of art was also responsible for the removal of some of the most important products of contemporary cultural production, ultimately impoverishing a thriving artistic tradition that, in the nineteenth century, devolved into a caricature of itself almost wholly dependent on tourist money. It was then more fully understood that art was essentially an export product, like leather handbags, elegant shoes, and silk neckties, or something to be preserved in a museum essentially created to attract tourists. This was especially true in Rome, Florence, and Venice, the major centers of Italian tourism, then and now. Modern notions of protective legislation to prevent export of national treasures, debates about the ethics of excavation of sacred sites, the relationship between visual culture and national identity and identity politics, and repatriation of artworks and artifacts to their places of origin all either began or were more cogently defined during the eighteenth century. Consideration of some of these phenomena in their early stages of development in the age of the Grand Tour will lead to a deeper appreciation of their modern complexity and significance. The impressive number of portraits of Grand Tourists commissioned from Italian artists, especially painters and sculptors in Rome, where most people stayed at least long enough for the necessary sittings, is usually explained by the desire to have a memento of the trip and by the favorable exchange rate that made such souvenirs relatively cheap, compared with the price for a portrait by fashionable London artists such as Sir 77

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Joshua Reynolds or Thomas Gainsborough.6 These are of course important factors, but the phenomenon is much more complex, as investigation of some individual images demonstrates. Twenty-two-year-old Thomas Dundas was painted by Pompeo Batoni, the most prominent producer of Grand Tour portraits, during the young man’s stay in the Eternal City in 1764.7 Thomas was the son of the fabulously wealthy Sir Lawrence Dundas, a bourgeois businessman who grew rich on government contracts during the Seven Years’ War and who was knighted for his efforts in the national interest. Thomas Dundas is one of the grandest and most ambitious Grand Tour “swagger” portraits Batoni ever painted. The subject is shown in a fictive gallery among several of Rome’s most celebrated antique statues: the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, the Belvedere Antinöus, and most prominent among them, the Vatican Cleopatra, now identified as the Sleeping Ariadne. Dundas seems fully at ease with the imposing assembly and is placed in such a hyperelegant pose that he appears to be asking the fabled Queen of Egypt to dance. And why not? Rich, young, handsome, and above all, British, Thomas Dundas is the epitome of youthful self-assuredness and insouciance. And like other stylish young men from Britain visiting Rome, his clothing is new, expensive, and Italian, sure to appeal to a somnolent female monarch. Dundas sports a stylish red frock suit, cut from rich velvet and trimmed in gold braid. The exaggerated cuffs are in the à la marinière mode, a naval fashion of the middle decades of the century appropriated for civilian dress. He holds an amber-headed walking stick and a tricorn beaver hat fashionably trimmed in gold braid. Nothing could be more natty and chic, in the male line anyway. The portrait may be viewed as a subtle visual irony—the sitter wearing the latest fashions, always subject to change, prancing among the most stolid representatives of the timeless classical tradition—and the nonchalant pose may indicate Dundas’s refusal to be intimidated by the finest exemplars of Western art. Indeed, his own trappings are certainly worthy of at least as much notice. Many of Batoni’s Grand Tour portraits of British visitors include fictive antique statues, some straightforward reproductions of well-known works and others more generalized pastiches to give a generic air of antiquarianism and to document the place where the portrait was produced. Despite the deep pockets of many foreigners in eighteenth-century Rome, some works were of such importance to Roman national identity, not to men78

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tion providing tourist spectacles for visitors to keep them coming to spend their money, that they simply could not be had at any price. The deities with whom Dundas interacts all fall into this category. It may be argued that such images, if they could not be physically brought back to Britain, at least could be displayed in a portrait back home, providing mute testimony to the worthiness of the possessor to be included in such august company. But actually buying antique sculpture, as well as engraved gems, cameos, mosaic fragments, and other artifacts of the grandeur that was Rome, was certainly an option. Some Grand Tourists became so obsessed with antiquities that they continued to collect for years after they returned home, employing agents and other tourists to help feed their habit. It would be di∞cult to overestimate the impact of this form of collecting on the culture that developed around the city residences and country houses of the British elite during the second half of the eighteenth century.8 Even the architecture and interior decoration of the houses themselves attempted to transplant the cultural prestige and political authority of the classical Mediterranean tradition to cooler climes. Robert Adam’s designs for mansions for the rich are the most obvious examples of this phenomenon, above all the splendid Great Hall at Syon House, built for the duke of Northumberland, and the impressive Italianate facade of Osterley Park. Both these grand houses in the suburbs of London are symbolic of the British ruling class’s obsession with appropriating the classical tradition to support their own claims to political and social preeminence. The notion that antique classicism equaled authority so prevalent in the Enlightenment was in no small way nurtured by the phenomenon of travel. The cultural tourist spectacles of Italy were of profound importance to the evolution of Italian forms of self-definition that reached fruition in the nineteenth century. In important ways, Italy embraced its artistic past at the expense of its artistic future, despite movements led by groups of artists such as the Macchiaioli and the Futurists, who sought to bring the Italian art of their time into sync with broader European developments. For most Italians, however, the increasing economic dependence on tourism dictated how cultural properties would be displayed and managed. Italian vanity was tickled by the enthusiasm of visitors and their imitations of displays witnessed while touring the peninsula. Seen in this context, Johann Zoffany’s famous Tribune Gallery of the U∞zi with British 79

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Visitors, painted in the 1770s, is not simply about learned study and intellectual exchange conceptualized as gentlemanly scrutiny of essentially passive objects, but begs the question as to why the room looks the way it does. It is clearly spectacularized by its Florentine proprietors, even in the painter’s mediated version, with careful thought about how best to appeal to visiting worthies. The Renaissance and Baroque traditions of classicism are on display on the Tribuna’s walls, where one immediately sees important works by Correggio, Raphael, and Rubens, among others, that exemplify the type of art with which Italians wished to be identified. Notable by their absence are Michelangelo, Botticelli, and Caravaggio, although masterpieces by all these artists were in the Grand Ducal collections at the time. Such works, however, were not a part of the canonical list the curators wished to promote as quintessentially Italian. In my opinion, the dearth of scholarly interest in what is being seen and the manner of its presentation, simply assuming that the objects are just “there,” has led to a simplistic, one-sided view of this aspect of the Grand Tour. Museums, galleries, private collections, churches, and public spaces in Italy should be taken seriously as active participants in cultural exchange, not simply as passive sites to be visited without reference to how these places came to be constructed or reconfigured as tourist spectacles. The myriad attempts to reconstruct Italian cultural spaces in both public and domestic settings back in Britain are compelling evidence that Grand Tourists were cognizant of the e∞ciency and impressiveness of the displays they had witnessed in Italy. Zoffany’s Charles Townley’s Library at Seven Park Street, Westminster (plate 4), painted in 1781–83, is a celebrated example of such re-creations.9 Townley, a Roman Catholic commoner who used collecting and display to serve social ambitions that were denied to those of his faith in the political arena, assembled one of the best collections of antique sculptures, most of them heavily restored, to be seen outside Italy. Zoffany’s view of the library in the patron’s townhouse is partly imaginary, in terms of what is on display, but the objects rather faithfully record those statues actually in his collection. This picture is thematically linked to the Tribuna painting Zoffany had executed a few years earlier. Some works of art seen in that picture were actually displayed in other rooms, although everything in Zoffany’s Tribuna was certainly in the U∞zi at the time. This mediation makes a crucial distinction, in terms of spectacle, since 80

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it separates such images, and their strategies of display, from the imaginary gallery tradition popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gianpaolo Panini’s Imaginary Gallery with Views of Modern Rome and its pendant Imaginary Gallery with Views of Ancient Rome, both painted in the 1750s, are well-known examples of the older, alternative tradition.10 Insistence on representing works of art actually in a given collection gives vastly augmented authority to the physical site of display. It also helps to move the museum from the realm of the imaginary into the physical world. It goes without saying that the latter was of far greater utility to those wishing to appropriate an almost universally venerated tradition to their own purposes. A good example of this form of appropriation may be found in an American context. It is clear that the popularity of both Palladian and Graeco-Roman revival architecture in the southern United States was partly a means of visualizing the connections of a slaveholding culture of the present to an authoritative, widely admired civilization also based on chattel slavery.11 If one moves from the privileged artistic media of painting, sculpture, and architecture to other modes of cultural production, exchanges between Italy and the north also follow the general outline of symbiotic alteration at both ends of the process. In this less-traversed terrain, costume rewards study. Politics and fashion have usually been investigated either as signifiers of political identity, as in the case of the sansculottes of French revolutionary fame, or as indicators of wealth, status, or o∞ce, which at first glance may seem obvious. Scrutiny of two other Grand Tourist portraits by Pompeo Batoni may shed considerable light on the role of clothing in cultural exchange in Enlightenment Europe. In very different ways, both works comment on the paradox of the regnant cosmopolitanism and overt particularism that coexisted, often with palpable tension, during the middle and latter decades of the eighteenth century. The Honourable Colonel William Gordon, scion of two of Scotland’s most distinguished noble families, was a grandson of the earl of Aberdeen on the paternal side and a younger son of the duke of Gordon’s daughter. He was painted by Batoni in Rome in 1766 (fig. 4.2).12 In relation to most British Grand Tourists, the colonel was ancient—he was thirty when he made the trip to Italy from his home at Fyvie Castle near Aberdeen. The political and economic disruption of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–46 in which the extended Gordon family was implicated may be partly re81

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sponsible for the sitter’s delayed Grand Tour, but the portrait by Batoni certainly announced his presence with éclat. In 1766, Gordon was a lieutenant colonel of the Queen’s Own Royal Highlanders and is represented in a modified version of the divisional uniform. Because of the plaid’s association with the Highlands, with Scottish Catholicism, and with Jacobitism, after the suppression of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s uprising, the London Parliament passed draconian legislation forbidding the wearing of tartan in Scotland. Since by the 1760s a significant portion of the men in the British colonial armies was recruited in the impoverished Highlands, tartan was allowed as part of the military uniform but could only be worn while the soldiers were abroad. Thus, Gordon’s proud modeling of the Huntley tartan in conjunction with the red English military frock coat — a deliberate metaphor for the union of Scotland and England — is highly self-conscious and politically potent. Indeed, it must be proof that Gordon and many other sitters for Batoni carefully selected their own clothing for their portraits, since it is almost inconceivable that the artist could have “invented” the outfit, even in an era keenly interested in the wild Scottish bard Ossian and the romantic tales of the Highlands. Some Ossianic texts had even been translated into Italian just before Gordon’s arrival in Italy. To many educated Italians, Gordon so attired must have seemed as exotic as penitential processions, the veneration of relics, and the ephemeral “machines” erected to celebrate both religious and Catholic dynastic events did to northern, Protestant visitors. The prolific writer and cranky critic James Boswell visited Batoni’s studio while the painter was working on the tartan in Gordon’s portrait, a remarkable observation, given the fact that the artist almost always relegated such tedious work to students. It seems hard to avoid the conclusion that the colonel gave Batoni a swatch of the fabric as a model, since he only had two sittings and left Rome shortly after the commission was given. The liberties the painter took with the uniform are quite telling. He lengthened the skirt, rolled down the plaid stockings, and more elaborately draped the garment over Gordon’s shoulder. This was done to associate traditional Highland dress, then erroneously thought to be antique, more closely with ancient Roman military garb. In particular, the foot-and-lower-leg wear approximates the appearance of ancient buskins worn by men in cold weather. Fashion here makes a bold statement about

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figure 4.2. Pompeo Batoni, The Honorable Colonel William Gordon. 1766. (Reproduced by kind permission of The National Trust for Scotland Photo Library)

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two competing antiquities and helps to close the distance, in visual terms, between the European center and the periphery. Ancient rivalries also inform the portrait’s central conceit — the confrontation of the Scottish warrior with the statue of the seated goddess Roma, symbol of imperial dominion. Although Gordon’s head is presented in the manner of an ancient Roman cameo, he seems to pay no attention to Roma. His swagger is accentuated by the placement of his foot on the statue’s base in a proprietary manner. It is almost like a sic semper tyrannis image from an ancient Roman republican coin.13 In his right hand Gordon holds a basket-hilted Highland sword as if it were a walking stick. Martial posturing was as natural to the colonel as a stroll through a country house park. And since Scotland was never conquered by the Romans, despite two full-scale invasions, first by Hadrian and then by Septimius Severus, Gordon has some right to swagger before the idol of the empire that could not subdue small, peripheral, “barbarous” Scotland.14 Gordon was a committed Hanoverian, despite the Jacobite loyalties of some of his relatives, and it is tempting to see Batoni’s portrait as the subject’s personal declaration of Scottish nationalist pride in an era when Scots were finally assuming positions of political and social authority in the British system that had been created by the Act of Union of 1707.15 It should also be remembered that the portrait itself, exhibited in Batoni’s studio, which was a tourist attraction in its own right, was destined for display at Fyvie Castle in northern Scotland, where it still hangs. Surely such an image cannot be considered a mere souvenir of the Grand Tour. It allows Gordon to wear Scottish clothing that he could not don in Scotland and helps to tie Highlands culture to that of the venerable Romans of old. Historical attire of a different era is a major consideration in Batoni’s elegant Thomas Coke (fig. 4.3), painted in Rome in 1774.16 A commoner from a distinguished family of land magnates, in later life Thomas became famous as a model landlord and as a political progressive known for his interest in agricultural innovation. In 1820 he was elevated to the peerage as earl of Leicester. The gorgeous white silk costume, replete with a white silk hat trimmed with ostrich feathers, in all likelihood is a portrait of the fancy dress costume worn by Coke to a masquerade ball given to the Roman and tourist elite in 1773 by Louise Stolberg, countess of Albany and wife of the Stuart pretender king Charles Edward Stuart. In earlier decades, visits to any of the Stuart family, long established in Rome 84

figure 4.3. Pompeo Batoni, Thomas William Coke. Oil on canvas, 1774. © Collection of the Earl of Leicester, Holkham Hall, Norfolk / The Bridgeman Art Library.

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under papal protection, would have been politically dangerous, but the Jacobite threat to the Hanoverian establishment in London was all but extinguished by the 1770s.17 At her costume ball, the countess danced with the handsome young Coke and favored him with a white cockade, a traditional emblem of the Stuart dynasty. The ball’s theme was Vandyck dress, also popular in British masquerades as a depoliticized form of aristocratic nostalgia. Coke apparently had this sumptuous silk suit made especially for the occasion. Like its more famous Vandyck fancy dress counterpart worn by Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, Coke’s outfit even includes the lace Stuart “roses” on his shoes. Batoni’s awareness of his famous society portraitist predecessor is indicated not only by the costume but by the sitter’s pose—it is closely related to Van Dyck’s Portrait of James Stuart, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, painted circa 1632 and now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Coke’s wistful countenance and pretty posture help to give credence to contemporary rumors that he had fallen desperately in love with the pretender queen. Some sources even state that they were lovers, and that Albany herself had commissioned Batoni for the portrait as a present for her youthful paramour. While the former claim cannot be verified and the latter is patently false, it may be that Coke wished to promote the idea by the inclusion of the Vatican Cleopatra as his protagonist in the painting. Both beautiful, amorous queens, it has even been claimed that Albany’s likeness may be seen in Cleopatra’s face. Horace Walpole wrote to the foreign o∞ce in London from Florence: “The young Mr. Coke is returned from his travels in love with the Pretender’s queen, who has permitted him to have her picture.”18 Vandyck fancy dress was commonplace in Britain, but prominent society hostesses like Albany helped to popularize it in Italy, leading to a number of revivals of clothing styles from a wide range of historical eras as themes for costume parties, among other things. In the case of Colonel Gordon and Thomas Coke, the capacity of costume for inflection in both the public and private spheres is made manifest. The broad capacity of clothing to cross religious, national, and cultural boundaries is also demonstrated. Cultural exchange and reciprocal influence may also be seen to advantage in the production and distribution of view paintings, a genre of art in settecento Italy that, with the Grand Tour portrait, has come to visualize the age of the Grand Tour.19 Most major Italian tourist destina86

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tions had important view painters working for the tourist market: Naples, Florence, Bologna, Milan, Turin, Padua, and even Palermo. But the most significant view paintings were produced in Rome and Venice. Gian Paolo Panini, professor of perspective at the French Academy in Rome and the city’s leading view painter, enjoyed extensive patronage from tourists. He worked both on commission and for the market, producing characteristic views of major Roman sites that could literally be purchased off his studio walls by collectors. View of the Piazza del Popolo (plate 5), executed in 1741, is one such image.20 Painted as a broad panorama of the first significant urban space encountered upon entry into Rome from the north on the Via Flaminia, this square, with its noted obelisk and famous twin churches, contains numerous tourists in carriages and on foot, taking in the sights. The reasons for acquiring such paintings are obvious — nostalgia, a souvenir of the city, and adding to one’s collection a work by a famous modern artist far more affordable than a Grand Tour portrait or a “genuine” old master. But one should also consider its “exoticism”—the quality of the Mediterranean light, an obelisk, Catholic Baroque architecture, the contrast between the elegant tourists and the locals, and the presence of beggars and vagabonds, all of which give the scene an allusive appeal that is simultaneously attractive and rebarbative. Unlike Panini, the Venetian Antonio Canaletto, the most celebrated of all the eighteenth-century view painters, worked almost exclusively for the tourist market. Although the primary interest in this essay has been Rome, in this instance Panini’s Roman view painting should not be considered in isolation. More often than his Roman counterpart, Canaletto filled his shop with characteristic views of the Serenissima, often in a surprising number of multiples with only minor variations.21 He used assistants, pattern books, and mechanical devices to speed up his production. He ran for all intents and purposes a factory. The View of the Piazza San Marco, painted in the early 1730s, is an excellent if typical product of the system. Creating a coveted commodity for an expanding market necessarily led to production shortcuts, as in any good capitalist enterprise, and it is significant that very few paintings by one of Venice’s most famous artists actually remained in the city. Deep dependence on foreign buyers was a double-edged sword. In good years, customers and patrons were plentiful, but warfare often reduced the current of visitors to a trickle. The early 1740s were particularly parlous, since the War of Austrian Suc87

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cession (1740–48) made it especially di∞cult for Britons and eastern Europeans to reach Venice. There is also evidence to suggest that the market for Venetian views, in Britain at least, was approaching saturation. At the urging of Canaletto’s agent, the British consul in Venice Joseph Smith, the painter decided to go to England to be closer to his primary customers and to execute local views that might appeal to a satiated clientele for their novelty in not being Venetian scenes. Arriving in 1746, Canaletto remained in the British Isles for about a decade but had little financial success.22 Old Walton Bridge of 1754 and Whitehall and the Privy Garden from Richmond House of about 1747 are among the finest paintings executed by Canaletto in England. Although some collectors were enthusiastic about such works, overall the sojourn was disappointing as a commercial venture. The uniqueness and “exoticism” of Venice, so admired by British Whigs as a republic governed by merchant oligarchs, simply did not travel well, like many Italian wines. Moreover, the panoramic views and golden light must have struck a false note among many connoisseurs, and the demand for local views, limited as it was, could be supplied more cheaply by native painters. The final form of commodity exchange I would like to consider in relation to travel in the era of the Grand Tour was the thriving market in porcelain, both European and East Asian. In this venture, Rome is a decidedly peripheral player. The lustrous, delicate, yet highly utilitarian quality of East Asian porcelain attracted favorable notice in Europe as early as the fourteenth century, and imports increased dramatically during the sixteenth century, when Portuguese and, later, Spanish merchants began to bring it to Europe in quantity. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, the Dutch and British East India companies cornered the market. The mania for collecting porcelain was so intense by the midseventeenth century that its consumption was causing a considerable drain in bullion from Europe, an issue that became especially significant in the next century, as physiocrats systematically argued for the restriction of imports as a means to keep hard currency at home for the benefit of the native economy. Inevitably, high import duties and increasing demand led to attempts to develop an indigenous porcelain that could rival the Asian product in terms of beauty and durability. The first successful attempt was made at Meissen, in the Electorate of Saxony, and was soon followed 88

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figure 4.4. Ferdinando Fuga, Caffeaus. 1741–43. Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale gardens. (Photo by the author)

in France at Sèvres and Vincennes, at the Buen Retiro (Real Fábrica de Porcelana) in Madrid, at Capodimonte in the Kingdom of Naples, and elsewhere. At no time in the century did the European product equal the quality of Chinese porcelain, but Meissen was widely regarded as the best porcelain readily available, although it was almost as expensive as the East Asian variety.23 Popes and some Roman nobles started seriously collecting porcelain during the 1730s and 1740s, and a number of important items are recorded in inventories and published records during the pontificates of Clement XII, Benedict XIV, and above all, Pius VI. Benedict’s famous Caffeaus in the Palazzo del Quirinale gardens (fig. 4.4), built as a pleasure pavilion by the papal architect Ferdinando Fuga, actually incorporated triangular shelves in the corners of the two side pavilions to display porcelain.24 As a diplomatic favor, in 1744 the king of Poland, who was also elector of Saxony, presented Benedict with a table and coffee service possibly intended for the Caffeaus but probably never used there.25 The scarcity of high-quality porcelain, above all for table service, was so acute that a French ambassador, the duke de Nivernais, was advised to bring his own dishes with him rather than trying to rent or buy them in Rome. Porcelain, then, was one of the few products of visual culture that Romans actually imported, a remarkable notion when one considers how much of the economy of the Papal States was based on the export of works of art. 89

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The international character of commodity exchange in the porcelain market is demonstrated with remarkable clarity in a hard-paste teapot painted in enamel colors and gilt gold trim, dating about 1723–24 (fig. 4.5).26 The object is marked mpm (Meissner Porzellan Manufaktur) and is thus of Saxon origin. In the case of this small teapot, it is highly ironic that an art form invented and perfected in East Asia should be used as an instrument of figural stereotyping of Chinese and Japanese people. It should be noted, however, that in China, numerous luxury porcelain objects with stereotyped Western figures were produced for the domestic market. The Q’ing dynasty bowl and saucer illustrated here (fig. 4.6) were produced in China in the late eighteenth century and are decorated with Western-style mythological figures, including female nudes and a Venus/ Cupid group in the lower right field of the interior of the saucer.27 It seems that chinoiserie was not the only mode of decorative “exoticism” available to global eighteenth-century artists. Most early European porcelain objects either tried to imitate the appearance of East Asian production, as seen in Delft tiles, or else employed “Chinese” motifs in their decoration. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, Western ceramic culture turned to its own visual and literary traditions for inspiration. About 1762, near the end of the Seven Years’ War that devastated the Electorate of Saxony but did not touch the Meissen porcelain factory, one of its leading artists, Johann Joachim Kändler, produced an elaborate Judgment of Paris. Compositionally complex, the object is also a luxurious combination of expensive materials, including enamel and silver. Designed for tabletop display, the Judgment of Paris marks the coming of age of European porcelain.28 In recent years, it has been argued that economic globalization will improve the standard of living of everyone on the planet. Indeed, it is touted as the panacea for a wide variety of inequalities. Global commodity exchange, above all in the realm of the visual, on the other hand, also

figure 4.5. (Opposite, top) Meissen Teapot with Chinoiserie Figures. Porcelain, ca. 1723–24. Barnard Castle, Durham, England, The Bowes Museum. figure 4.6. (Opposite, below) Q’ing Dynasty Tea Cup and Bowl. Hard paste porcelain, late eighteenth century. Seattle Art Museum. (Gift of Mrs. Frank H. Molitor in honor of the museum’s fiftieth year. Photo by Paul Macapia.)

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figure 4.7. Johann Joachim Kändler, Allegory of Africa. Porcelain and gilt metal, 1745. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Conn. (Photo: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art/Art Resource, N.Y.)

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has the potential to re-enforce or even to create stereotypes of a highly negative nature. Collecting and displaying the cultural production of the global other often leads to a form of intellectual compartmentalization that tends to fetishize the objects on display while doing little to educate the spectator about the actual realities of artists, patrons, and cultural contexts. Eighteenth-century collectors understood this implicitly and made no apology for it — Johann Joachim Kändler’s Allegory of Africa (fig. 4.7) of 1745 plays to stereotype and is still displayed in a glass case, a type of transparent cage, at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut. In a more politically sensitive era, however, efforts must be made to reconnect cultural production to cultural context. This process has been under way in the history of Western art for almost a generation, but the meaningful incorporation of non-Western materials into Western narratives, as opposed to Western scholarship that considers only non-Western issues, is long overdue. A careful examination of the relationship between travel and cultural exchange in the context of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour within and outside Europe will be an important part of the formulation of any such narrative.

notes 1. For a detailed description of the creative process for the Würzburg staircase fresco, especially the superb modello in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, see Keith Christiansen, “Apollo and the Four Continents,” in Giambattista Tiepolo, 1696–1770, ed. Keith Christiansen, exhibition catalog (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996), 302–11. For Tiepolo’s extensive work at the Residenz in Würzburg, see Frank Büttner and Wolf Christian v. d. Mülbe, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: Gli affreschi di Würzburg, trans. Lorenza Terenziani (Milan: Rusconi Libri, 1981), with extensive bibliography. 2. The Iconologia, originally published in Rome in 1593, was not illustrated in its first printing. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, some editions had more than 1,000 illustrations, and the original text had been translated into every major European language. Tiepolo took considerable liberties with Ripa’s dictates for a wide variety of personifications and allegorical figures and also included innovative elements drawn from contemporary travel accounts. 3. The literature on the Grand Tour is vast. See esp. Andrew Wilton and Ilaria Bignamini, eds., Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century, exhibition catalog (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1996); Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); and Cesare de Seta, L’Italia del Grand Tour: Da Montaigne a Goethe (Naples: Electa Napoli, 2001). All have ample bibliographies.

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Christopher M. S. Johns 4. Negative characterizations of Italians by transalpine tourists is a central theme of the pioneering study by Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 5. The alienation of the Roman cultural and artistic patrimony, and papal attempts to mitigate its impact on Rome and the Papal States (largely successful until the French invasion of Italy in the mid-1790s), is a central theme of my forthcoming book “The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment.” The crucial relationship between concerns for the patrimony and the establishment of museums has been extensively studied by Jeffrey Collins in Papacy and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Rome: Pius VI and the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 132–92. Carole Paul is presently completing a book on the institutional history of the Capitoline Museum, the first of its type, which will heavily emphasize the role of the museum in the preservation and curation of the Roman artistic patrimony. 6. For example, in 1777 Reynolds charged 150 guineas for a full-length portrait, almost three times the price of a similarly scaled portrait by Rome’s most fashionable painter, Pompeo Batoni. See David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 1:15. 7. Edgar Peters Bowron and Peter Björn Kerber, Pompeo Batoni: Prince of Painters in Eighteenth-Century Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 84. See also Anthony Morris Clark, Pompeo Batoni: A Complete Catalogue of His Works with an Introductory Text, ed. Edgar Peters Bowron (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 296–97. 8. For a useful introduction to the attempt to re-create the antique world in an elite context, see Philip Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 132–51, with bibliography. 9. For Townley’s collection of antiquities, see Viccy Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 165–93, with bibliography. 10. Ferdinando Arisi, Gian Paolo Panini e i fasti della Roma del ’700, 2nd ed. (Rome: Ugo Bozzi, 1986), 476–77. 11. I have discussed precisely this type of appropriation of the antique in Christopher M. S. Johns, “Proslavery Politics and Classical Authority: Antonio Canova’s ‘George Washington,’ ” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 47 (2002): 119–50. 12. Christopher M. S. Johns, “Portraiture and the Making of Cultural Identity: Pompeo Batoni’s ‘The Honourable Colonel William Gordon’ (1765–66) in Italy and North Britain,” Art History 27, no. 3 (June 2004): 382–411. See also Bowron and Kerber, Pompeo Batoni, 66–67. 13. The image of a minerva-like female with her foot pinning a defeated male enemy to the ground was commonplace on antique coins and medals and is best known today as the centerpiece of the seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

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cultural exchange in enlightenment rome 14. Johns, “Portraiture and the Making of Cultural Identity,” 394–400. 15. This era-inaugurating political event created modern Great Britain. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), esp. 11–13, for the particulars of the legislation. 16. See Bowron and Kerber, Pompeo Batoni, 55. For the cultural context of Vandyck fancy dress in eighteenth-century Britain, see Deborah Cherry and Jennifer Harris, “Eighteenth- Century Portraiture and the Seventeenth- Century Past: Gainsborough and Van Dyck,” Art History 5 (1982): 287–309. 17. Although the pretender Charles Edward Stuart, also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, lived until 1788, it had long been clear that he would die childless. His younger brother Prince Henry Benedict assumed the royal title when his brother died, but, having become a cardinal in 1747, he, too, had no issue. Cardinal York’s death in 1807 extinguished the Stuart pretender claimants to the British throne. 18. Quoted in Clark, Pompeo Batoni, 333. 19. A convenient introduction to the view painting genre is found in Michael Levey, Painting in Eighteenth-Century Venice, rev. ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), 95–136. 20. Arisi, Gian Paolo Panini, 152–53. 21. For an excellent introduction to Canaletto and his Venetian workshop, see the essays by various authors in Katharine Baetjer and J. G. Links, eds., Canaletto, exhibition catalog (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), with bibliography. 22. Charles Beddington, ed., Canaletto in England: A Venetian Artist Abroad, 1746– 1755, exhibition catalog (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), with bibliography. 23. The market for tea, coffee, and chocolate that exploded around 1700 fueled a desire among the elite to drink these “exotic” beverages from high-style vessels, above all porcelain, which was also an import until 1710. In that year, scientists employed by Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony, created a hard-paste porcelain that approached the hardness and luminosity of East Asian import wares, and the celebrated Meissen factory was established. It dominated the European market, despite competition from France, Spain, England, and Naples, well into the nineteenth century. 24. For the papal Caffeaus, see Jeannette Stoschek, Das Caffeaus Papst Benedikts XIV. in der Gärten des Quirinal (Munich: Scaneg, 1999), with bibliography. 25. The elegant porcelain service was dispatched to the Palazzo Lambertini (each piece bears the family coat-of-arms) in Bologna in 1745. See Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Procelain for European Courts, ca. 1710–63 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 230–31. I thank Maureen Cassidy- Geiger for informing me of the existence of several objects from the Lambertini service, which are now widely dispersed. 26. The chinoiserie figures are drinking tea under a willowy tree in a space that resembles a terrace. See Howard Coutts, The Art of Ceramics: European Ceramic Design, 1500–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 91–92. For Chinese porcelain

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Christopher M. S. Johns produced for the European market, see Julie Emerson, Jennifer Chen, and Mimi Gardner Gates, eds., Porcelain Stories: From China to Europe, exhibition catalog (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 252–61. 27. Emerson, Chen, and Gates, Porcelain Stories, 257. By about 1750, Chinese potters were thoroughly familiar with a wide range of occidentalizing decorative motifs. They frequently varied the standard forms rather than simply copying images from pattern books. 28. Kändler began working at the Meissen factory in 1731, and he was the first artist to introduce French Rococo elements into porcelain design. He favored the eroticized mythological subjects so popular among contemporary French painters and sculptors. By about 1750, he was a consummate master of hybrid objects that combined porcelain with enamel, precious metals, and other luxury materials. See Coutts, Art of Ceramics, 94–102.

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5 The Dislocations of Jean-Etienne Liotard, Called the Turkish Painter mary d. sheriff

Artists were on the move throughout the eighteenth century, and none traveled more than Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702–89).1 Although many today will neither have heard Liotard’s name nor seen his works, the artist was exceptionally well known in his time. He made his fame portraying notables in both Europe and the Ottoman Empire, and his many extant portraits in pastel and miniature testify to a career of broad international reach. Yet among all of Liotard’s works, one self-portrait advertises his travels more forcefully than any other, and that image is certain to attract the gaze of anyone interested in cultural contact and the making of European art (plate 6). The artist lures his audience by throwing onto the painting a large, insistent signature and inscription: J. E. Liotard / de Geneve Surnommé / le Peintre Turc peint / par lui meme a / Vienne 1744 (J. E. Liotard / of Geneva called / the Turkish Painter painted / by himself in / Vienna 1744). The inscription tells of an artist dislocated from his origins, working in a foreign land, and identified with an ethnicity that was not his own. Dislocation, in fact, marked Liotard from the start, for he was born in 1702 to a French Huguenot family exiled in Geneva after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He first trained locally as a miniaturist and enamel painter, but in 1723 he decamped to Paris, where he spent a three-year apprenticeship in the studio of engraver and miniaturist Jean Massé, one of the few Protestants in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Liotard stayed in Paris for almost a decade after his apprenticeship

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ended, but he seems to have lacked notable success. His fortunes began to change, however, when he hitched a ride to Italy with the French ambassador to Naples and made his way to Rome in 1736. Although the Eternal City presented opportunities for talented artists, for Liotard Rome was a stop on the way to becoming the Turkish painter. It was there that he met the English tourists who would take him to Malta, Smyrna, and finally, in 1738, to Constantinople, where he remained for five years. Like Rome and Paris in the eighteenth century, Constantinople was a cosmopolitan center: polyglot, polymorphous, and polycultural. In addition to Ottoman Turks, the city was home to both resident minorities (Jews, Armenians, and Greeks, for example) and transient communities of Europeans who lived in the suburbs of Pera and Galata. Although Ottoman authorities carefully regulated the interchange between foreigners and ordinary Turks, resident minorities could mix with foreigners, and Ottoman o∞cials and merchants moved as freely among different groups as their o∞ces demanded.2 Eighteenth-century Constantinople, the capital of a still-formidable Ottoman empire, thus offered Liotard extended contact with individuals from many different ethnic groups. During his years there, he portrayed in pastel sketches and finished works diverse members of this diverse society, including Viennese ambassadors, French consuls, and Turkish o∞cials.3 His pastel drawings now in the Louvre Museum show that he also studied carefully the costumes particular to the different ethnic groups he encountered on his travels.4 Liotard left Constantinople in 1742 and traveled to Moldavia (now part of Romania), where he spent ten months in Jassy working at the court of Constantin Mavrocordato. He then relocated to Vienna for a sojourn of two years (1743–45), and there he developed a close relation with his patrons Maria Theresia and Francis I. It was Francis I who commissioned Liotard’s 1744 self-portrait for the Florentine picture gallery dedicated to the self-portrayals of celebrated European artists. Amassed by the dukes of Tuscany and now housed in the Vasari corridor of the U∞zi Palace, this collection of self-portraits was as famous in 1744 as it is today. Travelers on the Grand Tour and other well-to-do visitors comprised the primary audience for these works that together constituted a history of great artists. After leaving Vienna, Liotard spent the rest of his life — the next thirtyfive years—moving around Europe, although he punctuated his voyages with extended stays in Vienna, London, Paris, and above all, Geneva, 98

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figure 5.1. Jean-Etienne Liotard, Portait of Louise-Florence-Petronille de Tardieu d’Esclavelle, Mme d’Epinay. 1759. © Musée d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève.

where he died in 1789. The vast majority of the portraits Liotard made after returning from the Levant, such as that of Louise-Florence-Petronille de Tardieu d’Esclavelle, Madame d’Epinay (fig. 5.1), seem entirely unmarked by his travels to the East. Along with his portrait of Simon Luttrell, future earl of Carhampton (1753–55; Berne, Kunstmuseum), only a few recall Liotard’s sojourn in Constantinople by showing their sitters in Turkish garb. 99

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Liotard and Turquerie Liotard’s “Turkish” works, like his self-portrait as le peintre Turc, open questions of cultural contact, including that of eighteenth-century turquerie, which refers to artistic or literary productions that borrow their subject matter or picturesque details from Turkish manners or decor as they were stereotyped in the European arts. The phenomenon has rarely been seen either as part of an age-old and ongoing exchange between East and West or as closely related to the global politics of the moment. As used in the discipline of art history, turquerie typically describes a fashionable exoticism that swept over eighteenth-century Europe, and the term marks a superficial involvement, a playful fantasy, a passing fad. Turquerie may have been à la mode, but limiting its range to stereotype and fantasy fails to acknowledge the profound effect of Ottoman culture not only on European painting and architecture but also on fashion, furnishings, garden design, and everything from coffee drinking to inoculation against smallpox.5 Liotard’s images of Ottoman subjects and his portraits of Europeans in Turkish costume are aligned with current understandings of turquerie when his use of Turkish costume, either as his own dress or in his depiction of European sitters, is understood as sustaining fantasies of the Levant and thereby helping to promote his career. Many of Liotard’s contemporaries and rivals took this view of his practice, and commentators since have repeated the charge.6 I can well imagine that when Liotard returned to Europe, his wearing of a caftan and beard was partly a marketing ploy, one that transformed him into an example of turquerie.7 That he circulated prints after the works he made in Constantinople to presage his return to Europe also suggests that he was in the business of capitalizing on what was fashionable. But to view Liotard’s continued engagement with Ottoman culture only in relation to his entrepreneurial spirit is akin to seeing only the frivolous side of turquerie: both positions foreclose other possibilities for interpretation, possibilities that can open new understandings of cultural contact and its role in the making of European art. Liotard’s self-portrait as le peintre Turc can be neither contained nor explained as mere turquerie, and to dismiss it as an elaborate piece of advertising is to overlook the complexity of the picture it presents. The work is better allied with those self-representations that Nebahat 100

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Avcioglŭ associates with the psychology of displaced and politically precarious figures who appropriated aspects of Ottoman culture for their self-representations. She finds a prime example in the case of Stanislas Leszczynski, the deposed king of Poland whose estate at Lunéville (in the French province of Lorraine) included a series of pavilions based on the Turkish kiosk. Pointing to Ottoman palace architecture and hence the power of the sultan, the kiosk allowed Stanislas not only to negotiate and represent his status as a king without a country but also to empower himself through expressing “the other within.”8 We can understand Liotard’s self-portrayal as a parallel negotiation, especially if we consider his early history of displacement: unable to achieve his desired success in the artistic center of Paris, he found a ready appreciation for his work in the Ottoman Empire and at the eastern edges of Europe — in Moldavia and Vienna. Yet Liotard’s self-image also presents its own particular complications. The inscription includes a statement of what Liotard truly is—a citizen of Geneva. The image presents several “others within,” and the work’s placement in the Florentine collection centers Liotard in the tradition of celebrated European painters. To hang one’s self-portrait in this gallery was to paint oneself into a history of artists preserved for posterity. More than a path to riches it was the road to gloire, that reward befitting the truly great whose memory would be forever honored.9 We have only one eighteenth-century commentary evaluating Liotard’s self-portrait, and it suggests that contemporaries understood the import of appearing in the famous gallery. That commentary comes from JeanBernard, abbé Le Blanc, an art critic who in 1751 traveled in Italy with o∞cers of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In that year he caustically described Liotard’s portrait in a letter to his friend Maurice Quentin de La Tour, an artist known for both his brilliant pastels and intense jealousies: “In the gallery of painters I was quite scandalized to find the portrait of the Chianlit, who is there himself surnommé le Peintre Turc. . . . It is very curious that given all these self-portraits of painters the only error was in admitting a chianlit there among so many justly celebrated men.”10 The term chianlit referred to masked revelers who ran amok through the streets during carnival, and by extension to a person ridiculously decked out.11 In Le Blanc’s letter to Quentin de La Tour, Liotard is derided as a chianlit not merely because he seems to wear an exotic costume but also, and more profoundly, because he is an impostor. In the 101

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context of the gallery, Liotard signifies as the chianlit because he masquerades as a celebrated artist; his admission disrupts the otherwise harmonious display of the great. Le Blanc’s comment, however, likely inflicted more injury than he had intended; directed ostensibly at Liotard, the barb also hit his jealous friend, whose own self-portrait did not yet grace the duke’s gallery. Le Blanc penned his remarks on Liotard’s painting seven years after the work had been completed, and this interval is significant. If the insult had been delivered in 1744, we might admit that Le Blanc was not entirely wrong. Although by that year Liotard had made a name for himself in limited circles (e.g., in Vienna and among the Europeans in the Ottoman Empire), he was not by any means widely celebrated. By 1751, however, the artist had traveled in western Europe dressed in his Eastern garb and sporting his Moldavian beard. He visited and made portraits in Venice, Frankfurt, Geneva, Beyreuth, and Darmstadt and finally settled Paris in 1748. By that time he had attained the celebrity in the French capital that had eluded him before his Ottoman sojourn. When Le Blanc arrived at the duke’s gallery in 1751, Liotard was indeed celebrated for both his talent and his sartorial splendor, and both attracted admirers as well as detractors. I imagine that Le Blanc and La Tour, clearly among his detractors, called Liotard the chianlit even in Paris well before the abbé cast his eyes on the self-portrait that nicknamed him le peintre Turc. Seeing Liotard in the gallery of the painters, however, gave a new charge to the term. Turning our attention back to 1744 when Liotard lacked the celebrity that would shortly come allows us to focus more clearly on the import of his inclusion in the duke’s gallery. Here was the opportunity to create a self-image that would represent Liotard to present and future viewers, a self-image that would show he merited inclusion in that pantheon of the justly celebrated.

A Matrix of Identity On the face of it, Liotard’s self-portrait appears to be a simple masquerade; the artist wears a costume and beard that signify Eastern dress, and the inscription tells us he is known as le peintre Turc. Notable artists before him showed themselves in exotic costumes, and thus his masquerade positions him in a Western tradition that includes, for example, the self-portraits 102

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of Rembrandt. Yet there is something odd, even dislocated, about this image that asks us to look closer and think harder. Although the costuming is conventional, the inscription is not. No eighteenth-century selfportrait — or portrait for that matter — displayed such a bold and arresting notation. Lettering added to any painting typically produces a tension that reveals the support as both flat writing surface and illusionistic space. Liotard’s pastel seems to emphasize rather than mask the tension between these two, and that tension sets the tone for many other less obvious ones in the portrait. Deployed on five lines that fill the top left quadrant of the image, this prominent inscription is slightly tilted, irregularly spaced, and obviously written in the artist’s own hand rather than pictured in a standardized or classical script. Liotard’s name, by far the most prominent element of the inscription, both identifies him as the sitter and functions as signature and autograph. Image and inscription work together to draw the viewer’s attention; together they suggest, on one hand, that the sitter fears he will not be recognized without his elaborate name tag and, on the other, that he wants to preserve his name and face for posterity. Rather than offering a simple, stable image of Liotard as le peintre Turc, this pastel self-portrait with its elaborate inscription offers a matrix within which the artist appears. Comprising this matrix are the significations attached to figure and text, to the costume shown and the places named, and to what each reveals and masks. Suspended in this matrix is the artistic identity of Jean-Etienne Liotard, an identity forged through repeated instances of cultural engagement and disengagement and processes of imitation and differentiation. This self-portrait locates the artist in dislocation, an apparently contradictory position that is nevertheless essential to the artistic identity of Jean-Etienne Liotard as pictured in 1744. Within the matrix of the self-portrait, the figure of Liotard is entangled in skeins of meaning attached to his costume and inscription. Costume and inscription, however, seem such obvious clues to the artist’s identity that it is easy to lose sight of other signifying elements. They distract our attention not only from the formal properties of the work—for example, color, handling, and compositional dynamics — but also from pose and expression, those elements that designated the subject’s interior state. It is precisely in pose and expression that the artist seems oddly irresolute. This lack of resolution contrasts pointedly with the factual certainty 103

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claimed in the inscription and thus underlines the insecurity — the need to make sure one is noticed — that such overblown lettering also suggests. As represented, Liotard appears to lack the self-confidence that would come with a stable and secure sense of artistic identity and an established record of professional success.

A Sensitive Observer Jean-Etienne Liotard was forty-two years old and a practicing artist for more than twenty years when he made the self-portrait that names him le peintre Turc. He had seen the world and mingled with aristocrats, adventurers, ambassadors, empresses, and grand viziers. One would imagine that this travel and experience would allow him to represent himself as supremely confident. Yet this is not what the image tells us. No straightbacked, broad-shouldered, commanding posture here. Indeed, Liotard’s shoulders appear to be narrow and sloping, but perhaps better said, this part of his anatomy — especially on the right side — is scarcely marked at all. His modest brown jacket nearly fades into the background; on the right side of the canvas only a black line evident in some places and nearly invisible in others sets the artist’s body apart from the ground. The relative slimness of the body, its scale in relation to the horizontal stretch of the support, cuts the figure down to size, and unlike many other artists, Liotard shows himself as neither grand nor monumental. The inscription imposes on the figure, and his hat overpowers his thin face and narrow shoulders. To sharpen these points, compare Liotard’s self-presentation to that of Hyacinthe Rigaud, whose 1716 self-portrait already hung in the gallery when Liotard visited Florence in 1737 (fig. 5.2). Both works are rendered in shades of brown relieved by white, and the limited palette affords a basis of comparison, or rather, of contrast. Rigaud’s self-image dominates the canvas, almost filling the entire picture space. We see his highlit face in nearly a full frontal view that reveals his sharply defined features and strongly cleft chin, and although a shadow falls at the left, it falls short of obscuring the face. As he stands before us, arm akimbo, the artist shows himself as confident, thoroughly French, and even somewhat aristocratic in his long, extravagant wig and luxurious brown velvet cloak lined in gold satin. That his wig is slightly tousled adds to the sense that we have caught 104

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figure 5.2. Hyacinthe Rigaud, Self-Portrait. 1716. U∞zi, Florence, Italy. (Photo: Finsiel/Alinari/Art Resource, N.Y.)

the artist in his studio deshabille, and the drapery thrown with causal elegance at once shows the artist’s skill at this academic exercise and suggests the sprezzatura—the ability to do di∞cult things easily—claimed by both artists and courtiers. Such a display of skill and flair certainly begs for our attention, certainly asks us to look at the artist represented. At the same time, Rigaud confidently faces his audience, his gaze seeming to appraise whoever stands before him. That imposing gaze is clarified and intensified by the virtual line that runs diagonally from his right eye down the length of his upper arm, thus directing the thrust of his look outward at the viewer. 105

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To secure his identity as an artist, Rigaud holds a palette and a fistful of brushes in his left hand, and he marks himself as a French artist by standing before a canvas on which is sketched his portrait of Louis XIV. There can be no mistake: this man is a painter and an important one. With his commanding posture, directed gaze, and tightly closed lips, Rigaud’s entire force seems to move outward, and he presents a surface at once firm, self-contained, and impenetrable, an impression intensified by the high gleam of the varnished oil painting. Whether Liotard knew Rigaud’s work or not, his self-portrait seems in many ways a rejoinder to it. Unlike Rigaud, whose demeanor and gaze present him as urbane and self-assured, Liotard’s wide-eyed look suggests youth and naïveté, despite the gray in his beard. Liotard does not stare out at us directly — he offers neither the full-face frontal gaze associated with icons of power nor the imposing look of a Rigaud. He presents, rather, a three-quarter view and a sideways glance. What particularly expresses vulnerability is the way he represents the eyes made prominent because framed by the dark hair of beard and hat, and again by the brows. It is not only that the eyes seem unfocused, off kilter, and that they are rendered so as to appear soft and impressionable. They are at the same time shown as protected by the film of shadow that falls over them. They suggest not the omnipotence of the gaze but the vulnerability of the physical eye. Liotard draws our attention to their physicality by emphasizing the fleshiness of the eyelid, especially of the left lid that, like a heavy curtain, folds over itself. Looking at Liotard’s self-portrait, we see the image of an artist who is less apt to impose his gaze on the world than to have the world impose its gaze on him, to have the world touch his open eye and impress itself upon it. Liotard’s receptivity, moreover, is figured throughout the image. We see it, for example, in the parted lips set into a mass of beard and made more evident through their coloristic repetition in the red band that runs under his hat. This open mouth does not look as though it is about to speak, to throw out words into the world as another artist would throw out his gaze. Rather than speech emanating from the mouth, the mouth creates an opening, a slit through which our eye can penetrate the protective beard. Similarly the prominent ear is open to sensory perception. This is the only one of Liotard’s many self-images that draws attention to the ear, showing it as fleshy, naked, and protruding. The self-portrait (perhaps deceptively) 106

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poses the artist as more a passive receiver of sensation than an active maker of images. There is, moreover, no attribute to show us that he is actively working: no palette, brush, pencil, or canvas. We don’t even see his hands, which might at least suggest the activity or possibility of making. And if the marks of chalk on paper record Liotard’s actual touch, in the fiction of the image his lack of hands denies him the ability to touch, while his soft, furry hat and beard excite our sense of touch, arouse the desire to touch the powdery surface of the pastel and leave our mark on the artist. Before and beyond any consideration of costume or inscription, Liotard shows himself here as sensitive and receptive to sensory data. Representing himself as having such an artistic temperament — whether it was actually his or not is another question — implies that each new encounter leaves its mark, its imprint. If Liotard has any authority as an artist, the image suggests that his authority is located in his body — in his organs of sensory perception — and their actual contact with the different peoples and places cited in costume and inscription. Rigaud, in contrast, claims his preeminence by including as his context the sketch for his monumental portrait of the Sun King around whom all French academic painting revolved. Rigaud, we might say, signs his self-portrait with his image of Louis XIV. Liotard relies on an inscription to make his case, an inscription that does not associate him with any national school but, rather, reveals him as dependent on several different venues for his artistic identity as le peintre Turc.

Suspended in a Matrix Liotard’s costume and inscription weave their tale of cultural contact around his image as a sensitive artist, and the multiple relations embedded in that tale form an interpretive matrix for this self-image. The story would seem straightforward enough, with the inscription clarifying the costume and giving us key “facts” about the artist and the work. But words, like images, deceive, and like images, they are historically bounded in both their denotations and connotations. When arrayed on a painting, they also beg to be understood as elements in a visual field. With these caveats in mind, notice how the artist’s given name, “J. E. Liotard,” is separated both grammatically and spatially, but also conceptually, from “le 107

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Peintre Turc” by two terms that appear on the second line: “de Genève,” which marks his place of origin, and “surnommé,” which designates the relation between J. E. Liotard and le Peintre Turc. What does each of these terms and their placement suggest? What interpretative matrix do they begin to lay down? In recording Geneva as his place of birth, the inscription does more than identify Liotard as European. It places him as originating in a Calvinist stronghold that would have provided the starkest possible contrast to stereotypes of the Ottoman Empire, in particular those that pictured Constantinople as the locus of pleasure, excess, and sensuality. Geneva was the home of Calvinism and known for its sobriety and austerity even centuries after Calvin. We might imagine that Liotard represents his Calvinism in donning for his self-portrait a simple and unadorned white shirt and brown overgarment (a coat? a caftan?). If this costume contrasts with the elegance and richness of the garb Rigaud wears in Florence, it offers an equally pointed comparison with that worn by Turks in European representations. There they are pictured in sumptuous caftans lined with ermine, often with elegant robes beneath (see fig. 5.5). Perhaps in choosing such simple garb, Liotard inadvertently wove into his matrix a response to the fears of those Calvinist ministers who worried that their compatriots traveling in big cities like Paris or Constantinople had succumbed to the lascivious vices of urban life, vices emblematized in ostentatious dress. Indeed, for many years Calvinist ministers fretted over their coreligionists living in the Levant.12 Since the early seventeenth century, a colony of Genevans — primarily merchants and watch repairers — had been established in Constantinople, where they made their fortune satisfying the Turkish desire for exquisitely decorated timepieces. Although we often imagine that luxury moved from east to west, this was not always the case, and Geneva, the site of Calvinist austerity, was noted for its production of luxury goods: watches, enamels, miniatures, and jewelry. Huguenot refugees from France were prominent in these professions, and Liotard himself had his start within this group as a miniaturist and painter of enamels, another strand bound up in the thread called “from Geneva.” Liotard continued to make exquisite, precisely detailed miniature portraits throughout his career, and those constituted a significant portion of the work he made during his travels. Along with Liotard, the colony of Genevans who sold and repaired lux108

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ury watches lived in Pera, a suburb of Constantinople where Europeans formed communities apart from Turks and observed their own religion and customs. Catholics had their churches and priests; Protestants, their temples and ministers. Perhaps those Calvinist ministers fretted because Genevans in Constantinople were split three ways: dependent on the Muslim Turks for their financial and commercial success, on the consulate of Catholic France for their legal and political protection, and on the English and Dutch Protestant churches for their religious needs.13 Like so many areas of the Ottoman Empire, Pera was a space shared and divided among the various European communities, a space that was Turkey but not Turkish. It was Turkey in the sense that “Turc” was the name given to the entire Ottoman Empire, which spread into Europe, Asia, and Africa, encompassing peoples of different ethnicities, customs, and religions. But Pera was not Turkish in the sense that it was a space where Christians practiced their own religion and customs. In Pera, one could not help but recognize that as a European Christian, one was tolerated in the sultan’s lands but never absorbed into the culture. The only true Turks were Muslims.14 I want to stress that there were generally two uses of the term “turc” current during Liotard’s time. On one hand, the adjective “turc” was used popularly to describe persons and things from the Ottoman Empire or, more generally, from the East or from the Levant, the name given to areas of Persia, Asia Minor, and Syria that were also called l’Orient.15 On the other hand, “turc” referred more specifically to Muslims who were ethnically Turkish, a point also made in contemporaneous dictionaries: “All the Turks are Muslims but not all the Muslims are Turks. Because we know the Turks better than any other Muslims and because we have more relations with them, usage has inclined us to say to make oneself a Turk to mean, to make oneself a Muslim.”16 As arrayed on Liotard’s self-portrait, the inscription includes a gap between “le peintre Turc” and the Genevan J. E. Liotard, one that serves more than compositional ends. That gap is opened and narrowed by the term surnommé. Although Liotard is only called (surnommé) the Turkish painter, having a nickname implies an actual connection between what one is called and what one is or does. The verb surnommer, from which the adjective surnommé is derived, meant “to add a descriptor to the name or surname of a person to mark one of his actions or qualities, good or 109

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bad.”17 To be given a nickname seems to have been quite common: French language texts of the period (fiction, travel literature, personal letters, historical treatises, etc.) cited many famous historical figures, fictional characters, and ordinary people who were surnommé as this or that. Texts usually explained why a particular descriptor was awarded to an individual based on some deed or feat accomplished or on some element of either the physical person or moral character. What action or quality is marked by “le peintre Turc,” and can we see or read such a quality or feat in Liotard’s self-presentation? In other words, does the image mimic those texts that explicate the nickname? And what range of meanings might “Turkish painter” imply both in Liotard’s actual experience and in the fiction of the self-portrait? Are there other aspects of the image that sustain the gap between the Genevan Liotard and his self-selected nickname as “le peintre Turc”? The inscription tells us that Liotard is from Geneva and that he made the self-portrait in Vienna, but not what either of these places has to do with his claim to be called the Turkish painter. He does not paint in the manner of a Turk, at least not in this self-portrait, which seems entirely Western in conception and execution. The inscription does not note that he passed five years in the Levant, and Liotard includes within his selfportrayal neither some work he made in Turkey nor one based on Turkish themes. There is no view of Constantinople in the background, a tactic he did use for a portrait of Richard Pococke (fig. 5.3) wearing caftan and turban. And finally, Liotard has dressed himself not as a Muslim Turk but as a Christian Moldavian. This costume does more than simply introduce another travel experience into the matrix. As we shall see, it both sustains the gap between the pictured artist and le peintre Turc and highlights the ambiguity of the term “turc.” Recall that in leaving Constantinople, Liotard traveled to the Moldavian court at Jassy, where he passed ten months as an honored guest. Liotard arrived in Vienna in 1743 sporting a Moldavian beard, fur hat, and caftan, which we can imagine were something like those he wears in the self-portrayal of the next year. According to the fragmentary biography Liotard dictated to his son, he grew his beard in Moldavia to imitate the notables there and maintained his facial hair not only because he grew weary of shaving but also because his new look garnered many compliments.18 Although absent from the inscription, Moldavia is nevertheless 110

figure 5.3. Jean-Etienne Liotard, Portrait of Richard Pococke. 1738–39. © Musée d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève.

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figure 5.4. Georg Friedrich Schmidt, Portrait of Constantin Mavrocordato, Prince of Moldavia. 1763. Presumed to be after a lost painting by J.-E. Liotard. Public domain.

designated by the image itself, for Liotard mimics his Moldavian patron Prince Constantin Mavrocordato, a Phanariot Greek of the Christian faith and ruler of that eastern European polity. In an engraved portrait of Mavrocordato thought to be after a lost work by Liotard, we see the prince bearded and wearing a fur hat identical to the one the artist appropriates for his self-portrait (fig. 5.4). This imitation suggests as close an identification with this patron as was Rigaud’s with Louis XIV. And in Liotard’s case he copies his patron’s sartorial look repeatedly, showing himself on several occasions in his Moldavian toque and beard.19 A pastel self-portrait in Dresden, moreover, represents the artist at work not only in Moldavian fur toque and beard but also in a type of fur-lined caftan that is more like the one Mavrocordato wears in Liotard’s image of him.20 In this pastel, Liotard takes on the luxurious outfit he eschewed in the earlier self-portrait intended for the semipublic venue of a Florentine gallery. 112

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In wearing Moldavian costume, Liotard dresses himself in the garb of a small polity in eastern Europe that was then an autonomous tribute-paying vassal state of the Ottomans. Situated on the direct route from Poland to Constantinople, Moldavia was regularly visited by Greeks, Armenians, and Jews who traded with Turkey, and like Constantinople itself, Moldavia was a place of cultural mixing. Unlike Constantinople, however, Moldavia was not an Islamic state; the religions practiced publicly were limited to the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Armenian churches.21 Even if viewers who saw Liotard’s self-portrait could not recognize the costume as Moldavian, Liotard certainly knew in what manner he was dressing himself. Wearing his Moldavian hat was a choice he made, and in such dress he appears as a vassal who pays tribute to the Turks. Tribut was that which one state paid to another from time to time as a mark of dependency. Moldavians, in fact, exemplified tribute payers for French speakers. Dictionaries give this example to explain the word tribut: “The Moldavians pay tribute to the Turk.”22 Paying tribute is a kind of dependency or servitude, but the term could be used figuratively, as it is today: to pay tribute was to pay respect. This range of meanings in the eighteenth century adhered to the sign “Moldavia” as the sign of a tribute-paying state, and thus they constitute another part of the matrix surrounding Liotard’s self-image. Dressed as a Moldavian, this J. E. Liotard from Geneva called the Turkish painter pays his respects to two places that welcomed and even feted him. Most of the art lovers who visited the Florentine collection probably could not pinpoint Liotard’s costume as Moldavian, and there was certainly a tendency throughout eighteenth-century Europe to refer to any vaguely Eastern dress as à la turque or to someone wearing such dress as en levantin. It was the turban, however, that for audiences in the eighteenth century most clearly marked a man as a Turk in the specific sense, that is, as a Muslim. Consider, for instance, this example of usage taken from the Encyclopédie entry turban: “One says, to take the turban, in order to say to become a Muslim, to become a Turk.”23 Even if eighteenth-century viewers called Liotard’s dress turc or levantin, they very well might have recognized that his costume did not resemble what Muslim Turks could be seen wearing both in reality and in representations. Did his Moldavian toque distinguish Liotard from the Turk as “infidel” and make clear that he had not “taken the turban”? 113

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Throughout the eighteenth century and earlier, European travelers to the Levant saw and reported on Turkish costume. Recall that Liotard traveled east from Rome as an artist commissioned to draw such costumes for a travel book that was eventually published but never illustrated. Other collections, such as Charles de Ferriol’s Recueil de cent estampes représentant differents nations du Levant tirés sur les tableaux peints d’après nature en 1707 et 1708 par les ordres de M. de Ferriol Ambassadeur . . . et gravés en 1712 et 1713 par les soins de Mr. Le Hay (Paris, 1714), distinguished the costumes of the different ethnic groups that populated the Ottoman Empire. If such costume books reached relatively few eyes, Ottoman ambassadors visiting European capitals drew gawking crowds, as did the spectacular entry of Mehemet Efendi into Paris in 1721. French artists commemorated that entry in a variety of visual representations, including a 1731 painting by Charles Parrocel now at Versailles. In 1742, just two years before Liotard’s self-portrait appeared in the gallery, a second Ottoman ambassador arrived in France, and Joseph Aved’s sumptuous portrait of Mehemet Saïd Efendi appeared at the salon of that year (fig. 5.5). Such works showed the Turks in their magnificent fur-lined kaftans and elaborate turbans, in dress very unlike that which Liotard wears in his self-portrait. Although some Europeans did, in fact, make themselves into Turks by taking the turban, others wore the turban in masquerade, momentarily dressing à la turque for a ball, theatrical performance, carnival parade, or fancy-dress portrait. These costumes could be rather authentic, as in Liotard’s portrait of Richard Pococke (fig. 5.3), or totally imaginary like the costumes Joseph Vien created for the 1748 Roman Carnival when the students of the French Academy performed the caravan of the sultan to Mecca. In either instance, however, the images are a travesty: the identity as a Turk is a temporary disguise, although in some cases the sitter had an actual connection with the Ottoman Empire. Such was the case for Liotard’s sitter Richard Pococke, who spent several years traveling in the Levant and published A Description of the East and Some Other Countries between 1743 and 1745. Although Pococke brags to his mother that he adopted Turkish dress, turban and all, it is unlikely that he or anyone regularly donned such masquerade in Constantinople, where the wearing of turbans and other garments was carefully regulated by sumptuary and religious laws.24

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figure 5.5. Joseph Aved, Portrait of Mehemet Saïd Pacham Bey de Roumélie, Ottoman Sultan Mahmoud Ist at Versailles. Oil on canvas, 1742. Chateaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles, France (photo by Franck Raux). (Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y.)

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What is the nature and significance, then, of Liotard’s costuming, both in his life and in his art? How does it help to constitute the matrix that surrounds his self-image? Liotard claims to have adopted a caftan (but not a beard) in Constantinople, and thus he had “gone native,” at least to some degree. With other travelers, Liotard explained that he wore this element of Eastern dress for comfort but added that he always wore a wig and three-cornered hat to identify himself as European.25 In this getup he would not have been mistaken for a Turk, but he might have been thought to dress the part of a European ambassador granted an audience with the sultan, since on those occasions emissaries were given caftans to wear over their Western clothing. The artist Jean-Baptiste Vanmour (1671–1737), who preceded Liotard in Constantinople, portrayed them in just such dress in his undated Reception of a French Ambassador at Constantinople (Bordeaux, Musée des Beaux-Arts). Even as he painted Western sitters wearing turbans as part of a Turkish masquerade — and all his male sitters in Turkish dress sport them—Liotard never donned one himself or painted himself wearing one.26 Thus we might say that the Turkish painter never masqueraded as a Turk or as a Muslim, even if he indulged in a bit of cultural cross-dressing. In contrast, he does seem to have masqueraded as a Moldavian, at least in his self-portraits. When he returned to western Europe, Liotard apparently kept wearing his caftan and for many years maintained his beard. It is indeed curious that no one in Europe seems to have called him “the Turkish Painter.” At least there is no written record that refers to any “J. E. Liotard, called the Turkish Painter.” When contemporaries do mention him, they call him the painter from Geneva. They often note that he wore a caftan and beard, a habit he acquired in the Levant, and sometimes they assert that he dressed à la turque. Detractors and supporters alike believed this self-presentation brought patrons to Liotard’s door. Contemporaries consistently took his dress as a vestige of his travel, as a sign that he had been touched by the sights and sounds of the Ottoman Empire. Liotard’s evocation of Geneva, Turkey, and Moldavia within the context of his self-portrait puts into place a matrix of three different sites, none of which in itself is original to his artistic identity, but all of which constitute it. Geneva, the place of his birth, is evoked by a certain precision, modesty, and sobriety and by a relation to luxury articulated through Geneva’s

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ties to Constantinople. Moldavia is imaged in Liotard’s costume but, at the same time, masked by an inscription that does not name it. To proclaim himself as the Moldavian painter, after all, would not have carried much cachet. Thus while Liotard assumes a Moldavian masquerade, he stops short of locating his artistic identity there. If Moldavia is evoked by the image and occluded by the inscription, the epithet “Turkish painter” moves in the opposite direction, claimed by the inscription but blurred by the image. He appears to be the Turkish painter only by virtue of claiming a nickname that he inscribes on a self-portrait. To be a true nickname, however, the descriptor had to be given by someone else who recognized one’s deeds or qualities; it had to come from elsewhere, from someone other than the person nicknamed. Who, then, would have nicknamed Liotard, or to put the question more broadly, from where would Liotard be called “surnommé le peintre Turc”? Such an appellation would have made no sense in Constantinople or in Moldavia, unless it was used ironically. But irony, which presumes a certain coolness and detachment, is not what Liotard’s image expresses. It is possible to imagine that Liotard was called the Turkish painter in Vienna, a European capital situated outside the Ottoman Empire and one in which Liotard had indeed located himself both literally and figuratively in the self-portrait constructed there. In Vienna, where the fashion was to wear European dress, Liotard drew attention to himself in his caftan, beard, and Moldavian hat. At the very least we can say that it was there that the artist acknowledged and accepted, if not created, his nickname and inscribed it on his self-portrayal. But is Vienna named only to legitimize the nickname and to mark another displacement? And what does the term “Vienna” add to the interpretive matrix independently of whether or not Liotard intended it to do so? Vienna marks Liotard’s relation with another patron, in specific with Francis I, who was then grand duke of Tuscany and who in 1746 would be Holy Roman Emperor. In his role as grand duke, Francis could determine and commission works for the Florentine gallery, and Liotard only appears there thanks to his association with the imperial family in Vienna. If Liotard imitates and refers to his Moldavian princely patron in his dress, and to his Turkishness in his nickname, he signals another supporter by inscribing on his canvas the place from which his portrait emerged. We

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might even think of Vienna as forming a pendant to Geneva, a second birthplace, the birthplace not of J. E. Liotard, but of “le peintre Turc.” The relation between Vienna and Turkey, however, was a complicated one, and to be the Turkish painter in Vienna also brings to mind the poles of imitation and differentiation, attraction and aggression, that often mark cultural contact. If Geneva signified as a Calvinist stronghold, Vienna not only represented staunch Roman Catholicism; it also evoked Europe’s eastern edges. When Metternich opined a century later that “Asia begins on the Landstrasse,” that is, on the high road leading from Vienna to Hungary, he was likely mouthing what had been long held as common wisdom. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Voltaire, among others, began to distinguish not only Europe from the Orient but also western from eastern Europe. In this latter construction, the east came to be seen as a border zone, a less civilized and less cultivated place, and hence both physically and psychologically closer to the Turks, Tartars, and their ilk.27 No other European power lived in such intimate contact with the Turks as did the Austrian Habsburgs, and no other European power was more like them. Both empires, moreover, were multinational and multicultural, and the borders between them were neither clear nor stable either culturally or politically. At the same time, Vienna was the site of hostile exchanges between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, as well as between Christians and Muslims, and memories of the 1683 siege of Vienna lingered on long after the Turks had been repelled. Throughout the eighteenth century, Vienna continued to view itself as the defender of Catholic Christianity against the threat of Islam. But if religion and imperial designs put Austrians at odds with their Turkish neighbors, that did not prevent Empress Maria Theresia from desiring their goods and luxuries or from dressing up à la turque. She was, in fact, passionate for things from the Muslim East, including Turkish rugs and Persian miniatures, and she even had herself portrayed as a sultana, albeit holding a mask to point out that she was merely in temporary masquerade.28 It is, then, from the frontier of Europe, from the place that is nearest the Turks and most hostile to them, that the painter J. E. Liotard from Calvinist Geneva, who is dressed as a Moldavian but for unseen reasons is called the Turkish painter, makes his return to the West, to a gallery of celebrated European painters located in Florence, a city that since the Renaissance has been at the heart of Western culture. Within a matrix that 118

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suggests the artist has been constantly in motion, always dislocated from any possible center, Liotard’s self-image shows him as passive and immobile but also as alert, with eyes and ears open to sensation. It is a selfpresentation that represents Liotard as inviting “alien” cultures to imprint themselves on him and, at the same time, one that as a work of art shows his deep attachment to European traditions of image making. We cannot know from Liotard’s self-portrait or from any work of art to what extent Liotard was “really” impressionable or open to the influence of the world outside. That his work presents such a temperament might only be an effect of art. Yet even if we see Liotard as an opportunist cashing in on the popularity of Turkish themes, even if we assume the worst about Liotard, what should give us pause is that he chose to portray himself as receptive—and as receptive to a culture perceived to be alien to Europe—in a work made to position him among the celebrated European artists. Does this self-presentation not point out that European art is made in situations of cultural contact, situations here embodied in the person of an artist who not only shows his senses open but also proclaims in costume and inscription that they have been open to the experience of cultural difference?

notes 1. My sincere thanks to colleagues who commented on this essay: Nabat Avcioglŭ, Elisabeth Fraser, Melissa Hyde, Marianne Koos, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Keith Luria, and David O’Brien. Their suggestions and observations have greatly improved it. My thanks, as well, to the staff of the Musées d’art et d’histoire in Geneva for their help in gaining access to Liotard’s pastels, and to Dario Gamboni for his stimulating conversations in front of Liotard’s work. I have also benefited from discussion with Mechthild Fend, Madeleine Dobie, Abigail Solomon- Godeau, and the members of Ewa LajerBurcharth’s seminar at Harvard. 2. Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 116–35. For a traveler’s description of eighteenth-century Constantinople, see Voyage du sr A. De la Motraye en Europe, Asie, et Afrique (La Haye: Chez T. Johnson and J. Van Ouren, 1727), 203–4. 3. Examples of these works can be found in Dessins de Liotard (Paris: Réunion des museés nationaux, 1992). See, for example, nos. 17, 27, 28, 53, 63. 4. Marcel Roethlisberger and Renée Loche, Liotard: Catalogue, Sources et Correspondance, 2 vols. (Doornspijk: Davaco Publishers, 2008), cat. nos. 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 96, 97. For a sensitive analysis of these drawings, see Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “Jean-

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Mary D. Sheriff Etienne Liotard’s Envelopes of Self,” in Cultures of Forgery: Making Nations, Making Selves, ed. Judith Ryan and Alfred Thomas (London: Routledge, 2003), 127–42. 5. Some scholars, however, have taken a more serious look at turquerie. See, for example, Thomas Kaiser, “The Evil Empire? The Debate on Turkish Despotism in Eighteenth- Century French Political Culture,” Journal of Modern History 71, no. 1 (March 2000): 16–18, and Asli Cirakman, “From Tyranny to Despostism: The Enlightenment’s Unenlightened Image of the Turks,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 33, no. 1 (February 2001): 49–65. For serious art historial considerations of the phenomenon, see Perrin Stein, “Amédee Van Loo’s Costume Turc: The French Sultana,” Art Bulletin 78, no. 3 (September 1996): 417–38; Isabel Breskin, “On the Periphery of a ‘Greater World’: John Singleton Copley’s ‘Turquerie’ Portraits,” Winterthur Portfolio 36, no. 2/3 (Summer–Autumn 2001): 97–123; and esp. Nebahat Avcioglŭ, “Stanislas I’s Kiosks and the Idea of Self-Representation,” Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (December 2003): 662–84. On Liotard and smallpox, see Marianne Koos, “Malerei ohne Pokenspuren: Oberfläche im Werk von Jean-Etienne Liotard,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 4 (2007): 545–72. Koos is completing her Habilitatsschrift at the University of Fribourg on Liotard. 6. For examples of this attitude, see Dessins de Liotard, 17; François Fosca, La vie, les voyages et les oeuvres de Jean-Etienne Liotard Citoyen de Genève, dit le Peintre turc (Lausanne-Paris: La Bibliothèque des arts, 1956), 42, 46; and J. A. Dulaure, Pogonologie ou histoire philosophique de la barbe (Paris: chez le Jay, 1766), 41–42. 7. On Liotard’s beard, see Marianne Koos, “La jouissance du détail: Liotards Bartlocke,” Kritische Berichte 36 (March 2008): 19–27, and Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, “Liotards Bart: Transkulturelle Maskeraden der Männlichkeit,” in Männlichkeit im Blick, ed. Mechthild Fend and Marianne Koos (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004): 162–80. 8. Avcioglŭ, “Stanislas I’s Kisosks and the Idea of Self-Representation,” 66. 9. Artists attempted to donate their portraits to the gallery, as did the painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. The work was accepted because her advocates made strong claims for her worthiness. See Mary Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 299–30. 10. As quoted in Roethlisberger and Loche, Liotard, 1:312. 11. Trésor de la langue française informatisé available through ARTFL at 〈 http:// atilf.atilf.fr/dendien/scripts/tlfiv5/advanced.exe?8;s=685201830 〉. Chianlit is derived from chié-au-lit, which literally means “defecated in bed.” The 1694 Dictionnaire de L’Académie française explains that “one mocks the masked revelers who run at carnival time by shouting, ‘He shat in his bed.’ ” See ARTFL, 〈 http://colet.uchicago.edu.libproxy .lib.unc.edu/cgi-bin/dico1look.pl?strippedhw=chier 〉. 12. Anthony Babel, “L’Horlogerie genevoise à Constantinople et dans le Levant du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle,” Etrennes Genevoises (1926), 64. 13. Ibid., 61–74. 14. Turc, in Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 4th ed. (1762), 891, ARTFL.

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jean- etienne liotard, the turkish painter 15. Levant, in Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694), 641, and (1762), 28, ARTFL. 16. Turc, in J. F. Féraud, Dictionnaire critique de la langue française (1787–88), ARTFL. 17. Surnommer, in Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694) and (1762), ARTFL. 18. Ibid. 19. See, for example, Roethlisberger and Loche, Liotard, cat. nos. 106, 164. 20. Ibid., cat. no. 158. 21. For a discussion of the various ethnic and religious groups in Moldavia, see E. Schwarzfeld, “The Jews of Moldavia at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century,” Jewish Quarterly Review 16, no. 1 (October 1903): 113–34. 22. Tribut, in Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694), (1762), and (1798), ARTFL. 23. Ibid. 24. Michael McCarthy, “The Dullest Man That Ever Travelled? A Reassessment of Richard Pococke and His Portrait by J.-E. Liotard,” Apollo Magazine 143, no. 5 (May 1996): 26, and Donald Quataert, “Clothing Laws, State, and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 1720–1829,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 29, no. 3 (August 1997): 403–25. Disguise as a Turk could also serve other purposes, as outlined in Giovanni Ricci, “Crypto-identities: Disguised Turks, Christians and Jews,” in Finding Europe: Discourses on Margins, Commmunities, Images, ed. Anthony Molho, Diogo Rameda Curto, and Niki Koniordos (New York: Berhahan Books, 2007), 39–54. Sometimes Europeans were allowed to wear the turban and disguise themselves as Muslim Turks when they were traveling in dangerous areas of the Ottoman Empire. See also Matthew Elliot, “Dress Codes in the Ottoman Empire: The Case of the Franks,” in Ottoman Costume: From Textile to Identity, ed. Suraiya Faroghi and Christoph K. Neumann (Istanbul: Eren, 2004), 105–23. 25. Louis Gielly, “La Biographie de Jean-Etienne Liotard écrite par son fils,” Genava 9 (1933): 196. 26. Roethlisberger and Loche, Liotard, cat. nos. 59, 60, 62, 64, 75, 82, 84, 277. Although Liotard is known for his turquerie, only this handful of works shows male sitters in Turkish disguise. One other drawing (cat. no. 98) shows M. Levett dressed as a Tartar with a fur hat. 27. Larry Wolff, “Voltaire’s Public and the Idea of Eastern Europe: Toward a Literary Sociology of Continental Division,” Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 932–42. 28. Roethlisberger and Loche, Liotard, cat. no. 116. There are three replicas of this work, two in pastel, one in oil. The original Liotard that is presumed to be the model for these images is lost.

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6 Images of Uncertainty Delacroix and the Art of Nineteenth-Century Expansionism elisabeth a. fraser

The making of European art in the nineteenth century was often intertwined with the politics of expansion, beginning with the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt and Syria in 1798. Napoleon besieged Egypt with an army of 55,000, an event that was celebrated in many works of art and that resulted in a massive scientific study of ancient and modern Egypt, the twenty-three-volume Description of Egypt, sponsored by the French ruler. Edward Said, among others, has argued that the Napoleonic invasion and the Description marked the origins of a modern imperialist project and the underpinnings of what he called Orientalism. “To feel oneself as a European in command, almost at will, of Oriental history, time, and geography; . . . to possess (or think one possesses) actuality mainly because nothing in the Orient seems to resist one’s powers: these are the features of Orientalist projection entirely realized in the Description de l’Egypte, itself enabled and reinforced by Napoleon’s wholly Orientalist engulfment of Egypt by the instruments of Western knowledge and power,” Said brilliantly wrote in 1978.1 His critical account gave life to a vibrant discourse informing most writing on European depictions of the Middle East ever since. Yet, Napoleon’s triumphant self-congratulation notwithstanding, his army was defeated in the Orient. His soldiers fell deathly ill, and he fled secretly, leaving only a laconic note commanding General Kléber to take over for him. If this was the beginning of modern European imperialism

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in the Islamic Mediterranean, then we can say that uncertainty marks the nineteenth-century expansionist project from its very inception. Some uneasiness shows through in the masterful Description of Egypt itself, perhaps above all in its repetitive assertion of conquest and possession, exemplified by its magnificent frontispiece (fig. 6.1): framing and containing a view of important ancient monuments and artifacts, Napoleon as classical warrior overwhelms recoiling Mamluks, the centuries-long rulers of Egypt. Emblems of the French general’s military efforts, rule, and power are sprinkled throughout.2 If French dominance of this cultural inheritance was so secure, why did it need to be so insistently asserted? Nonetheless, imperialist politics continued to make travel beyond Europe’s borders possible throughout the nineteenth century. The Islamic Mediterranean particularly attracted interest, as western Europe sought strongholds in regions dominated by the Ottoman Empire. Far from providing a sense of empowerment and security, however, travel was often di∞cult and dangerous, rife with political uncertainty and complicated by rivalries among European powers. Traveling artists grappled with these circumstances in a variety of ways: while visual culture of this period often masks the tension and danger artists felt when in contact with nonEuropean “others,” it can simultaneously reveal in subtle ways artists’ occasional uneasiness, discomfort, and insecurity. The rich travel sketches made by painter Eugène Delacroix when he traveled to North Africa in 1832 exemplify these nineteenth-century tensions over cultural contact. Delacroix accompanied an o∞cial French envoy seeking Moroccan acquiescence to French occupation of neighboring Algeria. Spending six months in North Africa, mostly in Morocco, the French mission stayed the longest in the Moroccan port city of Tangier, with a three-week stay in the interior imperial city of Meknès, where the French had their o∞cial audience with the sultan. On the return voyage to France, the mission passed briefly through two Algerian coastal cities, Oran (five days) and Algiers (three days). Delacroix represented his encounter with North Africa and its peoples in many drawings and in seven sketchbooks filled with watercolor and pencil sketches and lengthy notes.3 Made within the “contact zone,” they record the ambiguities and insecurities of the European traveler in a place where he has little control.4 The fame of the oil paintings with North African subjects that Delacroix made after his journey have overshadowed the travel sketches themselves, 124

figure 6.1. Frontispiece, Description of Egypt. 1809. From the copy in the Rare Book Collection, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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but it is precisely because of their difference from the painter’s other art that they should command our attention. If we ignore the departure from Orientalist certainty signaled by the artist’s travel sketches, viewing them as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,”5 we risk reinforcing the very colonial imperatives Said’s Orientalist critique meant to call into question in the first place. When Delacroix embarked for North Africa, his notions of it were certainly invested with prior travel images and texts, and even a longing for the glory days of Napoleonic imperialism. Yet to see an unremitting sameness in the images he produced before, during, and after his trip, and a seamless continuity with all imperialist imagery, maintaining that “Delacroix conformed to what he already knew about the Orient and to what and how observer-artists were supposed to respond,”6 is to strip Orientalism of its explanatory power and to ignore the implications of cultural contact.

Travel Images Despite the o∞cial context in which they were made, Delacroix’s Moroccan drawings seem anything but invasive. Perhaps this is why they have been seen more as personal records than as part of a larger French view of North Africa. Indeed, the sketchbooks are best known—shorn of their images—as part of the artist’s journal, originally compiled and published in 1893.7 Although Delacroix did date many passages and images, however, the notebooks cannot easily be read as a journal: rarely writing in the first person, the artist presents not a narrative of experience but a disconnected, fragmented description that is not chronological. Moreover, far from having a journal-like emphasis on the artist’s active, subjective, viewing presence, many of the images suggest instead their author’s neutral remove.8 An abundance of fragments, blank spaces, and pencil annotations emphasizes local detail rather than compositional whole (fig. 6.2). The fragmentary quality of many of Delacroix’s drawings implies note taking, a re-presentation of visual information, in a manner unlike the artist’s usual travel sketches made during journeys within Europe. In a sketchbook from 1828 (fig. 6.3), when he stayed in Tours in western France, for instance, full-page views predominate, replicating the unbounded plenitude of visual perception, the “view” experienced by the traveler. In contrast to his normal predilection for dynamic compositional unity, many 126

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of the Moroccan drawings include static depictions of isolated figures, objects, and empty architectural structures, appearing in white voids. Lacking backgrounds, the images are so many visual “facts” floating on an apparently uncomposed page. The artist leaves the pieces incomplete, not folding elements and props into a unifying scene. In this aspect, Delacroix’s Moroccan sketches also depart from contemporary travel accounts, which tended to emphasize the experiential nature of travel. Structured as “views,” travel images replicated the act of vision, invoking the seeing I and the feeling subject, anchoring the external world in the visual experience of the observer.9 One of the most influential and extensive sets of contemporary travel images to do this was the Voyages pittoresques series on French regions directed and published by Baron Taylor in over twenty volumes beginning in the 1820s, among the earliest travel publications to use lithography.10 Lithography introduced a new convention of immediacy to printmaking: prints could now replicate the presumed expressiveness of drawing, undergirding an already existing association of subjective experience with travel imagery.11 With their wide distribution, Taylor’s publications arguably established a visual norm for travel images of the period. Both Taylor’s Voyages pittoresques and Delacroix’s North African images present visual discoveries that explicitly abandon the metropolitan center — Taylor in looking at the neglected regions of France, Delacroix in traveling outside Europe to a region for which very little previous visual imagery existed — but whose ultimate interest depends on the travelers’ return to this very metropolis. Both enterprises sought in this travel away from the habitual art centers (of Paris, of Rome) to circumnavigate, even to sap, classicizing traditions. Unlike Delacroix’s North African sketches, however, Taylor’s famous Voyages pittoresques highlight particular topographical characteristics and identifying monuments (fig. 6.4). Their hallmark is an emphasis on the fully rendered view and, hence, on the act of viewing, untrammeled by boundaries or self-consciousness: the subjective response of the viewer is associated with the arrangement of nature itself. Like much travel literature of the period, they operate on the tropes of experience and spectacle, projecting the eventual reader/viewer into the position of armchair traveler. Taylor’s lithographs frequently use another convention of travel imagery: the panoramic view. Panoramic images, often the first plate in 127

figure 6.2. Eugène Delacroix, Travel Album from North Africa: Three Studies of Women’s Clothing and a Sketch Seen from the Back. Watercolor and graphite, 1832. rf 9154, f. 35r. Louvre, Paris, France (photo by Michele Bellot). (Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y.)

figure 6.3. Eugène Delacroix, Sketchbook with Views of Tours, France, and Its Environs. Graphite and watercolor on wove paper, 1828–29. Folio 8, recto. (Gift of Alexander and Grégoire Tarnopol, 1969 [69.165.2]. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, N.Y.)

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figure 6.4. Villeneuve, Vue générale de la Ville de Rouen, prisé du clocher de Darnétal. 1823. Plate 177 in Taylor, Nodier, and Cailleux, Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France: Normandie, vol. 2 (Paris: Didot l’aîné, 1825).

travel albums, where they are conventionally called vues générales (general views), can signal the optical possessiveness of the traveler who has arrived and takes in, at this moment, the whole view. A stock element in travel writing, panoramic vistas have often been associated with the authoritative voice of the travel writer: I arrive, I see. French artist JeanLéon Gérôme neatly illustrates this literary trope in a depiction of Napoleon as would-be conqueror of Egypt, astride a horse, looking down from a high precipice at the city of Cairo spread at his feet below.12 To be sure, there are some panoramic views among Delacroix’s Moroccan sketches and, tellingly, they tend to occur at moments of arrival, including picturesque scenes of Tangier (plate 7). But these authoritative figurations of a subjectively viewed scene are rare in Delacroix’s Moroccan drawings. Instead, ethnographic details are scattered throughout: a musical instrument (fig. 6.5), clothing, architectural fragments, jewelry, cookery, a horse’s harness. This tightly rendered, objectively presented visual 129

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figure 6.5. Eugène Delacroix, Two Studies of an Arabian Lute. Blacklead and watercolor, 1832. RF10102. Louvre, Paris, France (photo by Michele Bellot). (Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y.)

information is redolent of the traveling naturalist’s disinterested collection of specimens. Delacroix’s manner of presentation at times directly echoes the visual modes of classification: serial views of single objects or people seen from multiple angles, or multiple examples of a given object. The images depict social “types,” artifacts, habitats, and customs, in careful, almost stiff detail, anathema to his usual painterly practice: a street in Meknès, a Jewish house, a Jewish wedding, soldiers on horseback. If Taylor’s lithographs discern typicality in natural shapes and topographic features, Delacroix emphasizes the human and the social, not the natural, in his depiction of objects and dress, registers of custom and human manufacture. If the natural topography of a French region appears in Taylor’s Voyages pittoresques as an unchanging essence—defying the ravages of historical change in a revolutionary age—Delacroix’s images randomly collect visual artifacts without seeming to discern an underlying essence of place. 130

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figure 6.6. Eugène Delacroix, Seated North African Man. Pencil with sanguin and watercolor highlights, 1832. © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Strikingly, even in their very construction, the artist’s Moroccan drawings function differently from comparable sketches and studies he made before and after the voyage. In general, his renderings are full of tight, nuanced description, where carefully penciled details define contours and boundaries, within which color, as a subsidiary and secondary element, is applied and contained. This is anathema to his general practice. There is little of the nervous movement we associate with Delacroix’s gestural drawing. To take one example of this, in a drawing of a North African man (fig. 6.6), the body is no longer a surface, an index of the 131

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movement of the artist’s hand across the paper. Instead, the body is now a volumetric container where weight and gravity, posture and placement, are recorded with a sensitivity at odds with the usually broad, loose manner of Delacroix’s figurative sketches, as witnessed by a drawing made in 1854 of a mounted Arab attacking a tiger (Fogg Art Museum), probably a preparatory sketch for his painting of a tiger hunt, now in the Louvre. In the drawing from 1832, the distribution of the body’s weight is pulled in two directions: the heaviness in the seat against the pull of the torso leaning forward, as the lines of garment subtly shape the body. The overall effect is a breaking of the movement so important to Delacroix’s work, a series of static notations where pencil and line emphasize careful visual observation over sensual pictorial effect. The stiffness and exactness of many of Delacroix’s North African travel sketches, with their emphasis on information gathering rather than experience and subjectivity, are such a strong departure from the artist’s usual pictorial procedures as to suggest hesitation and lack of confidence about normal pictorial procedures.

Renouncing Intimacy In another telling way, Delacroix emptied his depictions of his usual subjectivity while in Morocco, relinquishing the clichés of the sensual exotic he had elsewhere elaborated. His earlier Aspasie of about 1824 (fig. 6.7), a study of a model, is clearly a studio production where one easily imagines the close physical proximity of artist and subject. With Aspasie’s knowing glance and partially exposed breasts, the oil sketch suggestively links painting and caressing in the carefully worked, highly modeled field of her torso. It frankly signals Delacroix’s sense of prurient privilege, associating Aspasie’s ethnicity with sexuality and sexual availability.13 Many travelers’ depictions of Mediterranean women imply intimate, sometimes sexually charged contact between artist and sitter, often in degrees dependent on the sitter’s social class, age, gender, and ethnicity. A watercolor from 1834 of a young Jewish woman of Smyrna by Charles Gleyre, who spent nineteen months traveling in the Ottoman Empire, records a compelling openness in the sitter’s gaze, yet the woman’s refined dress and elevation on a sofa indicate her status and establish a boundary between viewer and sitter.14 More strikingly intimate are the casual, closeup images of women made by Théodore Chassériau during his travels to 132

figure 6.7. Eugène Delacroix, Aspasie. Oil on canvas, ca. 1824. Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France. (Photo: Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, N.Y.)

figure 6.8. Théodore Chassériau, Jewish Woman of Algiers Seated on the Ground. Watercolor over graphite, 1846. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1964 (64.118).

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French-occupied Algeria in 1846 (fig. 6.8).15 The viewer hovers near Chassériau’s seated woman, his presence acknowledged by her intense, direct scrutiny. Unlike these examples, Delacroix’s many images of North African women record no such intimate relationships, and certainly not sexual ones. In his Jewish Bride of Tangier (fig. 6.9), for instance, nearness yields none of the privileged access of Chassériau; no sense of relationship between viewer and subject seems to be posited at all. We know from Delacroix’s many notes and sketches that his closest contact with Moroccans was formed with Jewish families, largely through the mediation of his interpreter Abraham Benchimol, and particularly with Jewish women, of whom the painter made many fine sketches.16 But even this access did not spawn images suggestive of intersubjective exchange. Although unusually close to the viewer, in comparison with many of his other Moroccan images, his Jewish bride is rendered in a stiff specificity and exactness, with a color-by-numbers sort of precision to the dress that contrasts with the vagueness and blankness about the face—in exact inverse relation to Chassériau’s woman. Indeed, to scan Chassériau’s travel sketchbook in conjunction with Delacroix’s is to be struck over and again by the importance of faces, of closeness, and of sexuality and race in Chassériau’s and of their near absence in Delacroix’s. Conversely, Delacroix’s interest in manners and customs — dress, objects, and the like, but not race itself — is nearly absent from Chassériau, who gives far less attention to costume but plenty to what must have been for the artist markers of ethnicity: heavy eyebrows, dark skin, and sensuous lips. Chassériau’s Algerian women pierce the viewer with their smoldering gazes, implicating the original beholder, the artist who made the image. The emotional and physical restraint of Delacroix’s travel images contrasts with images made after his return to France. In his pen sketch of Pauline Villot in Algerian Costume (Pierpont Morgan Library), done in Paris in 1835, the masquerade of a European woman, an intimate friend of the artist, allows the conjunction of costume and seduction absent in the Jewish Bride. Likewise, the famed Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (Musée du Louvre), a large oil painting made after the artist’s return to Paris, infuses seduction and intimacy, with a fetching play of mysteriously inscrutable expressions and dark recesses, into the artist’s encounter with North African women.17 135

figure 6.9. Eugène Delacroix, Jewish Bride of Tangier. Watercolor and graphite on beige paper, 1832. RF 4614. Louvre, Paris, France (photo by Michele Bellot). (Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y.)

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Self-E≠acement The denial of the maker’s presence operates above all through the absence of Frenchmen and other Europeans in Delacroix’s drawings made during his journey.18 Effacing references to nonnatives, his images maintain the illusion of distance and a sense of unmediated difference from the viewer’s world. In this way, the Morocco he depicts is circumscribed and preserved from outside contact.19 Although Delacroix’s scribbled notes refer obliquely to the substantial diplomatic society of the European consulates in Tangier, he does not represent it visually. But it is to this very diplomatic community that Delacroix owes his presence in North Africa. Leaving it out occludes the conditions of his observation and access, as though he were not there at all. The erasure of authorial presence in the Moroccan drawings also contrasts once again with the visual and thematic tropes of the picturesque voyage. As exemplified by the Voyages pittoresques lithographs, they frequently include figures of artists sketching (see fig. 6.4); the artist’s presence reiterates the subjective connotations of the drawn quality of the lithograph itself. As Charles Nodier noted in his preface to the first volume of the Voyages pittoresques in 1820, “Freer, more original than the burin, the bold pencil of the lithographer seems to have been invented to fix the free, original and rapid inspiration of the traveler who is aware of his sensations.”20 In a departure from the artistic afflatus Nodier describes, Delacroix’s Moroccan drawings undercut the aesthetic of the sketch and the association of travel, experience, and immediate sensation in the Voyages pittoresques.21 For instance, the painter appears inordinately preoccupied in some passages with a kind of visual authenticity, registering a surprising lack of confidence in representation as visual interpretation and a desire to anchor representation in the “truth” of the thing itself. Rendered first in pencil, then colored in, many images are bordered by an abundance of notations that repeat in verbal language what has already been given in visual form: including notes on color, size, and texture. It is as though Delacroix, cross-checking the “truth” of what he saw in text and image, wanted to be absolutely sure of his accuracy. Of course, his notes were meant to guide him when he applied watercolor to pencil drawing or when he made oil paintings back in France; but it is striking that he

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thought it so important to get things “right,” to be true to what was initially there before his eyes. About two decades later, it is this obsession with accuracy that the painter claimed he most disliked about the drawings he made in Morocco: “I began to make something tolerable of my African journey only when I had so far forgotten the trivial details as to recall in my pictures just the striking and poetic side of the subject; up to that time, I had been haunted by the passion for accuracy that most people take for truth.”22 I take this retrospective self-criticism as evidence of the artist’s earlier desire for truth and accuracy, which he later rejects. This traveler’s anxiety about authenticity brings to mind the work of ethnography, for which accurate travel notes are guarantees of reliability and authority. But Delacroix’s way of proceeding can be usefully contrasted (anachronistically) with the theory of “classical” functionalist ethnography, as defined by Marianna Torgovnick, in which the ethnographer (1) intuits deep social mechanisms after accumulated experience amid the “natives” and (2) through this intuitive process of insight comes to understand and explain the fundamental, underlying unity, meaning, and function of the society.23 Delacroix’s work records not the smooth ticking of intuition but the stuttering, painstaking process of notation. His renderings are all surface, no underneaths, no “whys,” no explanations, no unifying reasons. The evidence of his own work before and after the North African journey, along with the conventions of travel images of the period, help us see these drawings in all their specificity.24 These are not the self-glorifying images from the colonial idyll of unconstrained power and total freedom, of the arrogant projection of self onto the other, of the willful appropriation of the other for the spinning of erotic fantasies. A skeptical reader might interject at this juncture, Of course these images are different. Delacroix is simply making preliminary studies for later use in paintings; there is nothing more to it than that. But with art, one must always ask, Why do these studies take a particular form and what does that form signify? Why is Delacroix compelled to make this kind of study? Finally, why are these sketches so different from ones the artist made during his European journeys and why do they depart from the subjectivist conventions of travel accounts? It seems to me that the key to answering these questions lies in the quality of restraint, omission, disavowal, and renunciation hovering around these images. That sense is so palpable that it begins to speak. 138

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French Hostility Delacroix’s recordings, with their apparent objectivity, seem to separate him from the frank aggression and hostility underlying o∞cial French views of Morocco since as far back as the late eighteenth century. A measure of those views can be found in Louis de Chénier’s comprehensive study of the Moroccan Empire published in 1787.25 Written as a “scientific” introduction to Moroccan history, commerce, government, and culture, Chénier’s authoritative book became standard reading for modern visitors, and it is full of Orientalist verities. (Delacroix, an erudite reader who prepared for his voyage to North Africa, may well have read Chénier.) A former French consul to Morocco, Chénier forthrightly speaks as a scout of the state and in the economic interests of France, openly uniting information gathering with spying. Mixed in with his intelligence on Moroccan peoples, whom he frankly views as primitive, naturally servile, and lazy, he intersperses information of an overtly expansionist nature, including the defensive capacities of ports, the navigability of the coast, commercial and agricultural potential, and the degree of the sultan’s political and military hold on various regions. His generally disparaging tone and overarching assessment that there is nothing in Morocco (certainly not important monuments) create the overall impression that it is available for the taking; in the classic “civilizing mission” mode, the sultan’s oppression of the inhabitants would urge this taking. Indeed, his detailed descriptions of Morocco’s productive potential, with its rich soil and gardens, suggest how desirable such a territory would be and how fruitful in the right hands. Chénier’s scorn is echoed by the diplomat Charles de Mornay, who led the 1832 mission in his many o∞cial reports sent to the French minister of foreign affairs in Paris. Consistently describing Moroccans as hateful and fanatical, he characteristically wrote after one round of negotiations, “In this ignorant land of both barbarity and conceit, it is di∞cult to encounter definite truth.”26 This overt hostility seems worlds away from Delacroix’s impassive recordings. Naturally, the goals of the French mission were anything but innocent. With the loosening of Ottoman control over Mediterranean territories in the early nineteenth century, the British increasingly dominated North African trade from their perch in Gibraltar. When the new sultan Mulay 139

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Abd er-Rahman decided to revitalize Moroccan commerce with Europe beginning in 1822, the French also looked to North Africa to shore up a position of power and influence within the Mediterranean and the Islamic world.27 Mornay’s mission was part of that plan: with the taking of parts of Algeria in 1830, the French government sought Moroccan neutrality in an ongoing war against Algerian insurgents. Although he was not ultimately completely successful in his mission, Mornay clearly did not approach his negotiations with the sultan as a diplomatic dialogue between equals. (Naturally we should not take Mornay’s views as an indication of Moroccans’ powerlessness or lack of agency in these negotiations.) His reports adumbrate larger imperial designs, revealing a readiness to use military aggression if his demands are not met. Mornay urged the minister to consider the reestablishment of a French consul in Morocco to undermine the privileged commercial relations between Britain and Morocco: “The proximity of Gibraltar means that England is monitoring all our steps, and at this moment I am virtually certain that she indirectly presses our demands to avoid a rupture between France and the Moroccan Empire. England fears our growth on the Mediterranean shore and knows well that a war would give us a few more ports, rendering almost meaningless her possession of the entry to the Strait [of Gibraltar], so important up to this point.”28 Delacroix was surely cognizant of the hostile and even violent intentions of his compatriots toward their hosts, yet the striking disavowal and detachment of his drawings seem to separate him from the overall enterprise of the French mission. At times this detachment is maintained at the expense of clarity: when a military exercise in the countryside results in Mornay being shot at directly, Delacroix’s account of the experience is fragmentary and dissolves into a description of colors.29 This stance, suppressing open hostility and confrontation, is telling. We might assimilate this seeming innocence into what Mary Louise Pratt has described as the strategy of “anti-conquest” of eighteenth-century naturalists: the way an obsessive focus on factual information worked to exclude and deny the histories of European aggression and conquest to which the investigator is linked. As Pratt writes, “The conspicuous innocence of the naturalist . . . acquires meaning in relation to an assumed guilt of conquest, a guilt the naturalist figure eternally tries to escape, and eternally invokes, if only to distance himself from it once again.”30 140

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It is in this sense that I think of Delacroix’s omissions and disavowals as “speaking.” It is important to perceive how much pressure surrounded Delacroix’s neutral-seeming stance, how much it is held in contradiction to the unbridled hostility and aggression of French attitudes and policies, and what a strain it must have been to maintain. I believe this strain and an attendant uneasiness are revealed in the drawings themselves. The presence and situation of the viewing subject intermittently intrude into the notebooks, contradicting the predominant mode of observational innocence and forcing us to reread the whole.

Thresholds The sketchbooks and other drawings are full of various borders and frontiers, places of transition and crossing but also of obstruction. Several pages are devoted to the approach to and arrival, o∞cial reception, and ceremony in Meknès in a sequence of watercolor-and-ink images: a distant panorama of the city; o∞cial figures on horseback carrying flags and seen from behind, with a city gate in the distant background; a close-up of a monumental city gate (about to be entered); a narrow, walled road (after the city has been entered). These images are positioned axing into the page in a way that transforms the book into a metaphor for the movement of travel: as one turns its pages, advancing through the sketchbook, one moves through the temporal and geographical sequence of travel.31 The sequence dramatizes the approach inward into the (inaccessible) imperial city and, ultimately, the imperial palace. In the section of Delacroix’s notebook made during the stay in Meknès, where the artist’s movement was the most constrained, there is a crescendo of liminal spaces (plate 8, figs. 6.10 and 6.11). These motifs construct awareness of the indirectness of the artist’s access to Morocco and Moroccans, sometimes to the point of illicitness. Delacroix repeatedly depicts gates and entrances to cities, as here in Meknès (plate 8 and fig. 6.10), and doors, thresholds, bays, and windows, open or closed, to private homes (figs. 6.10 and 6.11). City walls, narrow passageways, and dark recesses with indistinct figures looking out (fig. 6.11 esp.) are other visual barriers that clearly articulate inside and outside positions. Roadways angle into crenellated walls (as in the lower right of fig. 6.10), figures 141

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figure 6.10. Eugène Delacroix, Albums of North Africa and Spain. Watercolor, pen and brown ink, 1832. RF 1712bis, f.24v–25r. Louvre, Paris, France (photo by Michele Bellot). (Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y.)

hover in doorways, and dark arches articulate openings into lighted space beyond. In this section fragmented images are knitted together within and across the pages, giving the page a kind of articulated deep space and plasticity, as open and closed spaces appear in rhythmic alternation. This plasticity structurally replicates the motifs of windows, arches, doorways, and so on that appear on these pages. Among the most visually compelling in all of the notebooks, this section of threshold images at Meknès is the moment at which Delacroix has at last fully utilized the carnet de voyage (travel sketchbook) as a distinct artistic genre with specific visual possibilities. No longer simply a notebook filled with sketches, these pages constitute travel images in their own right. The motif of the threshold occurs more frequently than any other in the Moroccan sketchbooks. It is a condensed metaphor of the traveler’s 142

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figure 6.11. Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Sketchbook, Album of North Africa and Spain. Watercolor, pen and brown ink, 1832. Inv. RF 1712bis, fol. 26v–27r. Louvre, Paris, France (photo by Michele Bellot). (Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y.)

state in a foreign place: the experience of being outside, the possibility and desire of entering before him, the privilege of access not quite attainable. The literal meaning of the doorway as a place of passage from the outside to the inside also figures the French relationship to North Africa: access to the Arab world, penetration to the exclusive center of the North African interior (Meknès) from the international port city of Tangier, commercial foothold and political prerogative. It embodies in indirect form the subjectivity of the observer, in so many other ways denied by the artist. Unlike the naturalist who feigns objective detachment, then, Delacroix’s representations do not always erase his authorial presence in neutral observation; they often heighten awareness of it and point to its most complicated, vulnerable aspects. These conflicting strategies show the artist coming to terms with a world in which he had little control. 143

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Ephemeral Disturbance Delacroix had good reason to be hesitant. The Empire of Morocco was in the most practical sense inaccessible to Europeans in this period. Unlike the North African regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, which had been part of the Ottoman Empire, the Moroccan Empire deliberately closed itself from outside influence and closely controlled foreign commerce. For centuries, most Europeans were able to travel intermittently only to coastal cities. Even the numerous consuls residing in these cities had extremely limited contact with North Africans. Furthermore, these consuls did not usually have knowledge of Arabic — let alone the regional Arabic of the Maghreb — but hired interpreters, customarily Moroccan Jews. Diplomats on o∞cial business were allowed only brief access to the imperial palace during the audience with the sultan.32 The French mission of 1832 followed the traditional protocol for visits to the imperial city: traveling under heavily armed escort and sleeping in designated camps away from towns and villages, the French could have no conception of mobility, autonomy, or deep contact with most Moroccans. Delacroix’s own movements and contacts in North Africa were determined by the diplomatic mission. Arriving in Tangier on a French battleship, La Perle, Delacroix spent most of his time in the company of European consuls and their associates. As was theirs, his contact with North Africans was limited by language and mediated through translators. Maghrebin society was for the most part closed to Delacroix. Tangier, despite its relative accessibility to Europeans, lacked open, public spaces other than the marketplace; domestic space and even residential streets were self-contained and visually inaccessible.33 Under these circumstances, it is clear that Delacroix’s experience occurred within very specific, constraining conditions that determined what he saw and what he knew. In Delacroix’s drawings there is an overwhelming feeling of distance separating him from what he observes. During the journeys from Tangier to Meknès, the artist had the closest contact with North Africans, but his views of them are still distanced and generalized. The figures have nothing of the immediacy and individuality of a companion’s pencil portrait, a unique European visage among Delacroix’s Moroccan images.34

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figure 6.12. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Stairway in Algiers (Escalier à Alger). Oil on canvas, 1882. Private collection. (Artwork in public domain. Photo by author.)

the images of uncertainty produced by early nineteenth-century European expansionism gave way after midcentury to those produced by formal colonization. As France gradually settled Algeria, increasing numbers of artists, such as Renoir, took advantage of the spaces of security mediating contact with the other, as had Chassériau already in 1846. The imperial adventurer became a colonial tourist. But it is important to retain the flickering memory of Delacroix’s uncertainty: for although Renoir and others could experience Algeria as another stop on a Mediterranean vaca-

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tion, when they stepped away from the tourist infrastructure, the possibility of disorienting contact was always present (fig. 6.12). Roger Benjamin has recently shown that for Renoir and others the blinding bright light and omnipresent white of Algeria served as metaphors for disorientation; vertiginous angles and shadowy figures remind one how fragile the social relations of French Algeria were.35 This ephemeral disturbance, embodied also in Delacroix’s drawings, could be taken to suggest that images of the other, even the colonized other, are a two-way proposition. Sometimes even incidental images deserve particular attention.

notes 1. See Edward W. Said’s classic text, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), 86. 2. On Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and the production of the Description of Egypt, see Yves Laissus, Description de l’Égypte: Une aventure humaine et éditoriale (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2009); Lisa Small, Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists, and the Rediscovery of Egypt (New York: Dahesh Museum, 2006); and David Prochaska, “Art of Colonialism, Colonialism of Art: The Description de l’Egypte (1809–1828),” L’esprit créateur 34 (1994): 69–91. More recent revisionist accounts can be found in Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East, 1750–1850 (London: Harper Perennial, 2006), and Elizabeth Oliver, “Vision and Disease in the Napoleonic Description de l’Egypte (1809–1828),” M.A. thesis, University of South Florida, 2006. For discussions of art and Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, see Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); David O’Brien, After the Revolution: Antoine-Jean Gros, Painting, and Propaganda under Napoleon (State College, Pa.: Penn State Press, 2004); and Todd Porterfield, The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism, 1798–1836 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 3. The albums were sold in the posthumous sale of works left in Delacroix’s studio at the time of his death in 1863. Three of the notebooks are now located in the Louvre, and one is in the Musée Condé, Chantilly; many of the loose drawings featuring North African subjects may originally have been part of Delacroix’s travel sketchbooks. According to Maurice Sérullaz, a fifth sketchbook was mentioned in a sales catalog in 1976. Another sketchbook featuring Moroccan images, rarely mentioned in the literature, was acquired by the Pierpont Morgan Library in 1940. For recent studies, see Delacroix, le Voyage au Maroc, exhibition catalog (Paris: Flammarion, 1994); Maurice Arama, ed., Eugène Delacroix, le Voyage au Maroc, 6 vols. (Paris: Editions du Sagitaire, 1992), which includes facsimiles of the four sketchbooks in France; Maurice Arama, Le Maroc de Delacroix (Paris: Editions du Jaguar, 1987); Guy Dumur, Delacroix et le

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delacroix and nineteenth- century expansionism Maroc (Paris: Herscher, 1988); and the exhibition organized by Stéphane Guégan, De Delacroix à Renoir: L’Algérie des peintres (Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe, Hazan, 2003). Following his return to France, Delacroix painted North African subjects throughout the rest of his career. For discussions of Delacroix’s journey in relation to his painting Women of Algiers, see Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Orients and Colonies: Delacroix’s Algerian Harem,” in The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix, ed. B. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 69–87, and Porterfield, Allure of Empire, 117–41. See also Jennifer W. Olmsted’s essay, “The Sultan’s Authority: Delacroix, Painting, and Politics at the Salon of 1845,” Art Bulletin 91, no. 1 (March 2009): 83–106. 4. Mary Louise Pratt coined the term “contact zone” to emphasize the negotiation and exchange that occurs between travelers and “travelees”; see her Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 5. Said, Orientalism, 3. 6. Porterfield, Allure of Empire, 129. A central tenet of Said’s theory of Orientalism is that frequent repetition lends Orientalist knowledge a truth value and authority; Orientalist views begin to seem natural. To denaturalize imperialist views, then, we should identify the moments when the repetitive discourse fails, where discontinuity rather than continuity is apparent. 7. Notes from one of the sketchbooks, the so-called Burty album, were published in part, stripped of their accompanying images, as early as 1893 in Paul Flat’s and René Piot’s edition of Delacroix’s journal. See Jean Guiffrey, Le Voyage de Eugène Delacroix au Maroc: Facsimile de l’album du Musée du Louvre (Paris: Marty, 1909), 11. Text from the Moroccan sketchbooks (again, without images) was also incorporated into André Joubin’s 1932 edition of the journal (and in subsequent reprintings). 8. This absence of a first-person narrator is all the more striking given its dominance in travel literature. See, for instance, Robert L. Herbert, Monet on the Normandy Coast: Tourism and Painting, 1867–1886 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), esp. 131. 9. See Elisabeth Fraser, “Books, Prints, and Travel: Reading in the Gaps of the Orientalist Archive,” Art History 31, no. 3 (June 2008): esp. 348–49. Claudio Greppi has written about the increased importance of direct observation in travel literature of this period; see his “ ‘On the Spot’: Travelling Artists and the Iconographic Inventory of the World, 1769–1859,” in Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, ed. F. Driver and L. Martins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 23–42. 10. Lucie Goujord, Annette Haudiquet, Caroline Joubert, and Diederik Bakhuÿs, eds., Voyages pittoresques: Normandie, 1820–2009 (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2009); Bruno Foucart, ed., Adrien Dauzats et les voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France du Baron Taylor (Paris: Fondation Taylor, 1990); Jean-Marc Cadier, “Les Voyages Pittoresques et Romantiques de l’ancienne France, du Baron Taylor,” Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale 40, special issue: “Voyager” (1991): 56–63. 11. See Jean Adhémar, La France romantique: Les lithographies de paysage au XIXe siècle (Paris: Somogy Editions d’Art, 1997). The original term for lithography, “polyautography,” conveys the perceived link between lithography and expression. See Har-

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Elisabeth A. Fraser rison C. White and Cynthia A. White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (New York: Wiley, 1965; rpt., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 79–83, on the development of the lithographic vues pittoresques and their relation to a shift in the image of the artist and the institutions of the French art world. 12. Gérôme’s Bonaparte at Cairo is known in a photogravure reproduction; see Small, Napoleon on the Nile, 9. Mary Louise Pratt has identified the frequency of the “promontory view” in travel writings of exploratory expeditions and its afterlife in neocolonial tourist writings; see Imperial Eyes, esp. 197–204, where she discusses the “monarch-of-all-I-survey scene” as it marks significant narrative turning points, moments of discovery and arrival. On the panorama (and related pictorial metaphors) in travel representation, see also Deborah Cherry, “Algeria in and out of the Frame: Visuality and Cultural Tourism in the Nineteenth Century,” in Visual Culture and Tourism, ed. David Crouch and Nina Lübbren (New York: Berg, 2003), 44–46; Chloe Chard on detached pictorial observation in travel writing, “Crossing Boundaries and Exceeding Limits: Destabilization, Tourism, and the Sublime,” in Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon, eds. Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginary Geography, 1600–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 137–38; James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 13; and John Zarobell, “Jean-Charles Langlois’s Panorama of Algiers (1833) and the Prospective Colonial Landscape,” Art History 26, no. 5 (November 2003): 640–43. 13. Widely reproduced in the Delacroix literature, this painting is discussed in Grigsby, Extremities, 259–74. 14. The watercolor, as well as a pencil sketch of it, is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Gleyre traveled extensively within the Ottoman Empire, from North Africa to Egypt and on to Turkey and Greece, in the company of the American John Lowell, for whom the artist executed 150 watercolors, now in Boston. On his voyage, see Albert Boime, Art in an Age of Counterrevolution, 1815–1848 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 372–80. Because of an abundance of fabric in the woman’s dress, Boime unaccountably surmises that the woman is selling shawls. 15. On Chassériau, see Stéphane Guégan, De Delacroix à Renoir: l’Algérie des peintres (Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe, Hazan, 2003), and Stéphane Guégan, Vincent Pomarède, and Louis-Antoine Prat, Théodore Chassériau, 1819–1856: The Unknown Romantic (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 16. For a discussion of Delacroix’s interaction with Jewish families, see Cissy Grossman, “The Real Meaning of Eugène Delacroix’s Noce Juive au Maroc,” Jewish Art 14 (1988): 64–73. 17. Grigsby has recently argued, however, that Delacroix’s attempt to refurbish the allure of the harem, in the context of public contestation of French colonial policies, ultimately failed when the painting’s critical reception undermined its seductive potential; see her “Orients and Colonies.” Indeed, this complicated painting deserves

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delacroix and nineteenth- century expansionism further investigation, as issues of agency and power have come under closer scrutiny in writing on colonial culture. 18. There are two notable exceptions: a portrait head drawing of a jovial European (unidentified) confidently pu∞ng a cigar, and a self-portrait sketch. (See n. 34 below.) 19. Johannes Fabian has called this a “denial of coevalness” in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 35. Representation of the Middle East as a timeless essence, from which Europeans are absent, fundamental to Said’s definition of Orientalism, was highlighted in Linda Nochlin’s classic essay, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on NineteenthCentury Art and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 33–59. Many writers have commented on this element in other kinds of travel representation as well: the inherently contradictory pretense of the traveler encountering a “pure” world that has no contact with the “outside” world beyond it. James Buzard insightfully relates this drive for purity to what he calls “anti-tourism,” a constitutive element of modern tourism, he argues; see Buzard, Beaten Track, esp. 1–17. Delacroix’s textual notes do include a few fragmentary and oblique references to Europeans, mentioning a name or a rendezvous. Tellingly, when Delacroix finally articulated an anticolonial position in an unpublished manuscript from the 1840s, it was precisely in terms of the denigrating effect of contact; see his Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc, ed. L. Beaumont-Maillet, B. Jobert, and S. Join-Lambert (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). 20. From Charles Nodier’s preface to Isidore-Justin-Séverin Taylor, Charles Nodier, and Alphonse de Cailleux, eds., Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France: Ancienne Normandie (Paris: Imprimeur du Roi, 1820), 1:10. 21. The objection that I am comparing unlike media—lithographic prints and watercolor and pencil drawings—might be raised. But my point here is less about medium than about the widespread use of picturesque conventions in travel contexts; Taylor, Nodier, and Cailleux’s Voyages pittoresques is an important example because of its preeminence in Delacroix’s time. For the conjunction of tourism and the picturesque, see Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Aldershot, 1989). For a recent discussion of the picturesque and imperialism, see Jill Casid, “Transplanting the Metropole: Imperial Picturesque,” in Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 45–93. 22. Delacroix, Journal, October 1853. 23. See Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 24. These travel conventions shed light on Delacroix’s art, but I am not arguing for Delacroix’s utter uniqueness in the history of art. Naturally, his images use conventions of his own period and earlier in their constructions. My point is more to uncover highly contextually specific ways in which his art functions, replacing, I hope, the tendency to look at the art produced within imperialism in blanket terms.

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Elisabeth A. Fraser 25. Recherches historiques sur les Maures et histoire de l’Empire de Maroc, 3 vols. (Paris, 1787). 26. “Dans ce pays d’ignorance, de barbarie et de jactance en même temps, il est bien di∞cile de rencontrer la vérité positive” (Archives of the Ministère des Affaires étrangeres [AMAE], Series Correspondence politique, origines—1871, Maroc; 1830–1832; Delaporte, f. 201). 27. See Jean Brignon, Abdelaziz Amine, Bahim Boutaleb, Guy Martinet, and Bernard Rosenberger, Histoire du Maroc (Paris: Hatier, 1967), 278–81, and Charles-André Julien, History of North Africa: Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, from the Arab Conquest to 1830, trans. John Petrie, ed. C. C. Stewart and R. Le Tourneau (New York: Praeger, 1970), 269–71. 28. “Le voisinage de Gibraltar fait que l’Angleterre a les yeux ouverts sur toutes nos démarches et même dans le moment, j’ai presque la certitude acquise qu’elle appuie indirectement nos réclamations pour empêcher un choc entre la France et l’Empire du Maroc. . . . Elle craint notre agrandissement sur le littoral de la Méditerranée, et sait très bien qu’une guerre que nous livreraient encore quelques ports rendrait presque illusoire sa possession si importante jusqu’à présent, à l’entrée du détroit” (AMAE, Series Correspondence politique, f. 205). 29. It is very hard to understand what happened without the supplementary narratives available in o∞cial reports of the event. Delacroix records another life-threatening mishap, when the French mission is shot at during a river crossing, omitting pronouns altogether, making it di∞cult to discern who is shooting at whom. See his North African notebook, Louvre RF 1712bis, f.9v, 7v, 8r. Grigsby discusses this aspect of sublimation in her “Orients and Colonies,” 76–77. 30. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 57. 31. Borrowing from Barbara Stafford’s account of temporality in travel literature, Todd Porterfield refers to the strategy Delacroix employs in this section as “paratactic.” See Allure of Empire, 125. 32. Lucette Valensi, On the Eve of Colonialism: North Africa before the French Conquest, trans. K. Perkins (New York: Africana Pub. Co., 1977), xxiii–xxiv. 33. Ibid., 37–39. 34. See Louvre album RF 1712bis, fol. 90v (an unidentified man who Sérullaz speculates may be the British consul Drummond Hay) and also Delacroix’s penciled selfportrait, fol. 89v. A comparison of these sketches, with their direct gazes and finely individuated faces to the blank and simplified “deux têtes d’Arabes” (fols. 47v and 48r of the same album) underscores the distance between Delacroix and indigenous culture. Two interesting exceptions are sketched faces of Abraham ben Chimol (fol. 14r) and Mohammed ben Abou (fol. 17r) in another Louvre album, RF 9154, among the very few portraits of Moroccans. 35. Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 48–55. Victoria Thomp-

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delacroix and nineteenth- century expansionism son has written compellingly on the instability of imperial identity in French travelers’ accounts of Algeria; see her “ ‘I Went Pale with Pleasure’: The Body, Sexuality, and National Identity among French Travelers to Algiers in the Nineteenth Century,” in Algeria and France, 1800–2000, ed. P. Lorcin (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 18–32.

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7 Gauguin in Black and Blue carol mavor Gauguin wanted to know how I had got my blacks, I told him I had made them from Prussian blue. — émile bernard

When a black volcanic island rises out of the Prussian blue sea, it is making a dream. An island is a bed in the sea, a hatchery for dreams, an invitation to daydreams of refuge.1 Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) accepted this invitation, sailed away, and painted his dreams through a lens of black and blue. Dreams, like other forms of pilgrimage, make cultural contact with the other as both real and imagined (and all that lies between). Dreams are a form of travel. But rather than in airplanes, cars, boats, and trains, dream travelers escape in soft beds, well-worn comfortable armchairs, and couches piled with pillows. A bed can be a boat. Without leaving home, they go somewhere else. Their fantasies and knowledge of the other are fed not only through daydreams and sleeping dreams but also through dreams that emerge out of books; dreams that fall out of the mouths of the storyteller; dreams that are combed out of poems (think of Baudelaire’s voyage through his lover’s hair: “All languid Asia, blazing Africa, a whole faraway world that is absent”); dreams that float out of photographs (perhaps Paul-Emile Miot’s 1869–70 The Royal Family of Vahitao, Marquesas Islands); and dreams that stir from the color of paint (like Gauguin’s 1892 Spirit of the Dead Watching [fig. 7.1]). Dreaming affords us the cultural contact of not only a geographic other but also an other time. Time is place.

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figure 7.1. Paul Gauguin, Manao Tupapau (Spirit of the Dead Watching). Oil on burlap mounted on canvas, 1892. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y. A. Conger Goodyear Collection, 1965.

Taking a cue from Miro’s 1925 abstract painting Photo, where underneath his little island of thick azure paint he has written in lovely black script, Cecie est la couleur de mes rêves (This is the color of my dreams), we dream blue. We make blue reveries in the darkness of our mind. Like little travelogues, these dreams come in bursts and spurts, from the blackness of our imagination. They come like fifty-second films by the Lumières. When Gauguin was in Tahiti, the early cinematographers that worked for the Lumières were traveling the world and making short travelogues. Affording cultural contact, these films moved around the globe like real dreams. Viewers saw floods, crowds, men smoking opium, children run154

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ning behind a rickshaw, trains coming and going, a gigantic ship, and the drama and boredom of everyday life in Chicago, Mexico, Moscow, Jerusalem, China, Vietnam, Argentina, Algeria, Turkey, and Istanbul. According to Michael Balint, such flights of fancy escape, both real and imagined (and all that lies between), are centered on a fantasy of the return to the Motherland: “Flying dreams and the oceanic feeling are to be regarded as repetition either of the very early mother-child relationship or of the still earlier intra-uterine existence, during which we were really one with our universe and were really floating in the amniotic fluid with practically no weight to carry.”2 In this claim, Balint is making use of Freud’s famed notion of the oceanic: “a sensation of ‘eternity,’ a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, ‘oceanic.’ ”3 This oceanic feeling, Freud argues, is a form of travel back home, a return to early childhood experiences. Likewise, according to Freud, the oceanic is associated with personal mysticism and spirituality.4 Gauguin’s voyages home (whether they be geographic, temporal, spiritual, artistic, or mental) were always exotic, even when in France. They were tirelessly oceanic. Gauguin dreamed of Tahiti before he took the boat across the ocean to Tahiti. Lost in a lifelong utopian quest, Paul Gauguin, the island-man, the selfproclaimed savage, who flaunted the fact that he was one-eighth Peruvian, was an eternal pilgrim, always already in search of a blue dream-home that did not, that could not, exist. “Gauguin in Black and Blue” tends to this Eden, his endeavor to dream a life of difference. Reacting to the bourgeois standards of late nineteenth-century European existence, Gauguin left behind his famed beauty, often painted with an emphasis on, or even by limiting his palette to, black and blue. But (as has already been widely acknowledged) this black-and-blue art was as bruising as it was beautiful. There were many black-and-blue effects on those, especially women and children, touched, even harmed, by his pursuit.5 The resulting plot of Gauguin’s dreams blooms neither utopian nor distopian. His cultivations were neither good, nor bad. They were, we might say, black and blue.

Table des Matières In order to prepare the reader for this black-and-blue pilgrimage on the sabots of Gauguin, this essay falls along the lines of a Table des matières 155

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that might be found at the start of a real Guide bleu, one of those picturesque travel guides famous for more than a century in French culture. We will begin with Organisation et préparatifs du voyage (Organization and Preparations for the Voyage), which focuses on how Gauguin escapes time and place. Itinéraires d’altérité en France (Routes of Otherness in France) shows how Gauguin sought the other/primitive culture within Europe, through Brittany, his pilgrim dreams, his belief in Nirvana, and the use of japonisme. Avis important aux touristes (Important Advice for Tourists) discusses the usefulness of using two guides, two different approaches: both The Blue Guide and The Black Guide. Renseignements généraux (General Information) alerts the reader to the fact that utopia is no-place, to the value of getting lost, and to how the past is a foreign country. Du voyage en Tahiti (Voyage in Tahiti) discusses Gauguin’s representation of the South Seas as both literally and metaphorically black and blue. The essay ends with Hospitalité (Hospitality), encouraging the reader to shake hands with Gauguin, as a way of acknowledging the usefulness of the painter’s indisputably problematic cultural contact with the other, as bruising as it is beautiful.

Organisation et Préparatifs du Voyage Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art is certainly about the strangeness and the exoticness of the other, but it is also about the strangeness and exoticness of the past. How quickly we lose the past; how quickly it becomes a faraway island wrapped in the vastness of the blue sea, ripe for imagination. “Blue,” in the words of Rebecca Solnit, “is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.”6 In 1881, many years before Miro’s blue dream, Gauguin painted his own blue painting of his dreaming daughter, his treasured Aline, asleep: La petite rêve / Little Girl Dreaming (plate 9). Later in life Gauguin would refer to this painting as Sweet Dreams.7 Aline, Gauguin’s favorite of his five children from his Danish wife, Mette, is age three and one-half.8 Her blousy nightshirt is a sail of grey-blue, baby blue, and dappled violet-blue. With her feathery hair mysteriously shorn, like the fuzzy head of a baby 156

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bird (she suffered from hair loss throughout her young life), she rests in her black-iron bed that snuggles her like warm toast in a basket, as if in a nest. She is further bowered by the shadowy black wainscoting that holds her bed’s cloud of white bedclothes, the latter speckled with Monet-like reflections of light-filled greens, transparent lavender, and sky blues. In the corner of the painting a bearded clown figure, perhaps a doll, wears a red Harlequin jacket with brass buttons, a blue-and-yellow striped hat, and blue pants. The doll-man, helpless with no hands, beckons us into the dreamscape he shares with the girl. The clown is curiously reminiscent of Gauguin and might be read as a portrait of the artist himself, not unlike Manet as Polichenelle (or Pierrot) in the corner of his 1873 Masked Ball.9 Carried away by the clouds of her bed and the dreams in her head, her bed is a kind of boat. In line with the turned-away gaze of the dreaming girl’s unseen closed eyes is the “evocative motif of a bird taking flight”10 from a field of wistful greens. Aline is pictured as seeing a vision, as if reiterating her father’s emphasis on “inner vision,” of seeing with one’s eyes closed.11 Closed off from the world, but alive in her dreams, Aline is also in tune with Gauguin’s intriguing 1889 ceramic Jug in the Form of a Head, Self-Portrait (“the pathos of his tortured features, shaped to suggest an ancient Peruvian portrait vase”),12 where not only are the artist’s eyes closed but his ears are cut off (fig. 7.2), making him an island unto the world. (In Gauguin’s painting Nature morte à l’estampe japonaise, we find the same self-portrait jug being used as a vase. In this painting, also of 1889, flowers sprout from Gauguin’s head, as if to suggest his Edenic dreams. Cultural contact with the other is further highlighted by the style of Gauguin’s painting, which mimics the Japanese print that hangs on the wall behind the table on which the artist’s head in bloom sits.) Many years after documenting Aline asleep and dreaming of flight in unreal color, Gauguin painted his famed 1892 Manao Tupapau / Spirit of the Dead Watching, which features his child-bride, the thirteen-year old Tahitian girl named Teha’ amana. One year after that, in a little book that Gauguin wrote for his daughter, Cahier pour Aline, the artist describes his creepy 1892 Spirit of the Dead Watching as “in many respects a reworking of Sweet Dreams [Little Girl Dreaming].” The child is indisputably part of Gauguin’s “primitive” repertoire.13 Gauguin’s compelling and problematic nostalgia for childhood is a blue thought that links his early, innocent Little Girl Dreaming / Sweet Dreams 157

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figure 7.2. Paul Gauguin, Jug in the Form of a Head, Self-Portrait. 1889. Danish Museum of Decorative Art, Copenhagen.

with his late, erotic Spirit of the Dead Watching: one plays at loss with a blackbird ready to take off; one boldly gives loss the face of an old woman clothed in blue-black cloth. Both Little Girl Dreaming / Sweet Dreams and Spirit of the Dead Watching are black and blue. The effect of the two paintings together, of the two children together (one Gauguin’s daughter, the other a later wife), is unpleasant, is bruising, is black and blue. The theme of the artist as a kind of child-dreamer (which characterizes both Little Girl Dreaming and Spirit of the Dead Watching) can be found throughout his career but is of particular interest in Gauguin’s very blue 1884 Clovis Asleep (plate 10). Clovis Asleep features his second son, not with shorn, Aline-like hair, but with beautiful long golden hair. Clovis is asleep on a table, beneath a blue, blue wall-papered sky of flowers and white birds. Returning to the subject “close to” Gauguin’s “heart, the dream world of a child,”14 we find, again, the motif of the bird in flight. “To this portrait of Clovis . . . Gauguin has added the enormous [wooden] 158

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tine that followed the family from house to house. This was so large an object—26 centimeters tall and 19 in diameter—that Gauguin had little need for expressive exaggeration.”15 The tine here, in which we might hear, in our imaginations, the clomping sound of its hinged wooden lid hitting the oversized pot, hails the clomp-clomp of the wooden shoes that Gauguin would wear when returning to Paris from Brittany. (The tine itself is Norwegian and has the date 1740 under its lid.) Primitive by way of its clunky carving, which has been rendered as even more primitive by Gauguin, the tine becomes the artist’s Pandora’s jar. In Gauguin’s hands, utopian Hope takes the form of an archaic past, an elsewhere, which lies underneath the lid, like a sweet dream. We hear this dreamy clomp-clomp of Hope again in a strange and irrational box that Gauguin carved for his wife Mette in 1884; open the lid and you find his wife nude, an image of Hope trapped for Gauguin. But being trapped in a box was hardly hopeful for Mette, who felt the macabre Christmas present as an emotionally abusive bruise.

Itinéraires d’Altérité en France pilgrim dreams In 1888, Gauguin went with his companion Van Gogh on a trek to see Courbet’s painting the 1854 Bonjour Monsieur Courbet! at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier. In this work Courbet images himself as a traveler, as an eternal wanderer (based on a popular woodcut of the “wandering jew”). In 1889, Gauguin bonjours himself with his painting Bonjour M. Gauguin. Here, Gauguin wears a blue-black beret, amongst unevenly shaped bluebrown rocks, dusted by cocoa light and granules of violet. Perhaps the blue-and-white furry movement at the bottom of the gate is a little dog. The Breton woman is wearing blue as part of her traditional dress, and the sky is blue, as it should be. Gauguin has pictured himself as a pilgrim, in the spirit of his friend (and enemy) and fellow-painter Van Gogh. After all, “Van Gogh had wanted to become a missionary . . . influenced by The Pilgrim’s Progress; he routinely walked tremendous distances and went south where he finally found his triumph and martyrdom. Gauguin was to go still further — to die on a South Sea Island.”16 The visual image of the pilgrim had influenced Gauguin ever since childhood. When he was nine years old, a folk print of a pilgrim that 159

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had hung on the wall of his home caused him to run away. As Gauguin writes, At Orléans, when I was nine years old, I took it into my head to run away to the forest of Bondy with a handkerchief full of sand at the end of stick which I carried over my shoulder. It was a picture that had beguiled me, a picture representing a traveler with his stick and a bundle over his shoulder. Beware of pictures!17 Gauguin: always in search of home, but never at home. brittany: returning “home” in sabots During the summer of 1866, Gauguin discovered the picturesque village of Pont-Aven in Brittany, an area that he would revisit two more times, in 1888 and 1889–90. Gauguin thought that he had found home in Brittany. In 1889, when returning to Paris, Gauguin carried the image and the sound of this newfound home on his feet by wearing a pair Breton sabots that he had carved himself. As might be expected, he caused quite a stir (fig. 7.3).18 Gauguin loved the sound of these thick wooden shoes on his pilgrim feet; they must have prompted soulful memories of his newfound Nirvana. He enthused to his artist/friend Emil Schuffenecker: “I love Brittany. I find wildness and primitiveness there. When my wooden shoes ring on the granite, I hear the muffled, dull, powerful tone I seek in my painting.”19 Gauguin carved three known pair of these sabots. One pair depicts a fox, an animal that, along with its close cousins the dog and the wolf, gave great pleasure to the artist and is a theme that he incorporated throughout his career. (Gauguin’s favored icon of the fox-wolf-dog is a subject that we will return to at the end of this essay.) In Gauguin’s early work, we see the sabots: they are hanging on the wall of his 1881 Interior, Rue Carcel (fig. 7.4), looking as if they had walked down the wall only to stop to ponder the dark wainscoting, which we have already seen in Little Girl Dreaming / Sweet Dreams. “The presence, before Gauguin’s visits to Brittany, of a pair of clogs is somewhat surprising.”20 Perhaps we can understand them as a sign of his commitment to find home through “a commitment to seek the primitive life.”21 According to The Moon and Sixpence, the 1919 novel by W. Somerset

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figure 7.3. (Left) Paul Gauguin, Pair of Wooden Shoes (sabots). Polychromed oak, leather, and iron nails, 1889–90. Chester Dale Collection. Image © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

figure 7.4. (Bottom) Paul Gauguin, Still Life with Flowers, Interior of the Artist’s Apartment, Rue Carcel, Paris. 1881. National Gallery, Oslo, Norway. (Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N.Y.)

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Maugham based on the life of the painter, Gauguin was motivated by a “divine nostalgia.”22 While the Greek root of the word “nostalgia,” nostos, means “the return home,” anyone who has made the journey knows that the return home is never without pain. Nostalgia feels like getting the blues. And the impossibility of really ever returning home is a dark promise. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “nostalgia” is “a form of melancholia caused by prolonged absence from one’s home or country; severe homesickness.” “Nostos might hold out that promise that, yes, you can return whence you came, but nostalgia happens because you can’t go home again.”23 Simply said, blue nostalgia hails black melancholia. As the narrator of The Moon and Sixpence says to the character we recognize as Gauguin, “I see you as the eternal pilgrim to some shrine that perhaps does not exist. I do not know to what inscrutable Nirvana you aim.”24 setting out for nirvana In 1889–90, Gauguin painted Nirvana. In the center is Gauguin’s bluecoated and black-capped friend, fellow artist, and pupil, the Dutchman Meyer de Haan. In this painting, the hat and gown suggest de Haan’s Orthodox Jewish faith, but their abstraction suggests “a generic type of religious clothing worn by other eastern personages.”25 De Haan, we see, has a foxlike face with orientalized eyes. His right hand, coiled by a golden snake, points toward the Buddhist inscription “Nirvana,” written in milky, barely legible script. Behind de Haan (as religious fox), we see two women and the “eternal sea with its pounding surf.”26 Setting out for Nirvana, a place no less fictional than Tahiti or Brittany (at least in the hands of Gauguin), we are struck by the style (the form) of his painting, which is as otherworldly as its content. Nirvana is a fantasy paved in japonisme. japonisme: outlining life in black and blue The heavy black outlines and dark flat shapes of Gauguin’s use of the cloisonné style surfaces most readily for the first time in his 1888 Vision after the Sermon and can be read as figuratively and metaphorically holding this melancholic impossibility of a blue quest. As an outgrowth of japonisme, the cloisonné technique is a trace of armchair licorice-whip travel that winds its way toward a utopic vision of an unreal Japan: an unreachable island in the blue distance. Furthermore, this cloisonné harkens back to

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the past, for it grew from a fascination with stained glass (from the eleventh through seventeenth centuries) that artists like Émile Bernard, Van Gogh, and Gauguin were looking to for inspiration: they referred to this colored glass outlined in black as “primitive art.”27 Gauguin’s cloisonné style (and that of other painters of the period), then, is drawn from the strangeness and the exoticness of the other and the strangeness and exoticness of the past. Naturally, Gauguin’s supple, twisting, winding, graceful, flowing, yet always awkward black line (that swims its way toward the forever distant blue) never stops. Complicated with travels to the past and to the East, the line of the cloisonné’s double exoticness is further drawn out and knotted by Gauguin’s insistence on his own identity as a Peruvian savage. It was after Vision after the Sermon that Gauguin began getting his black outlines by painting darkly with Prussian blue. As Émile Bernard (whose painting of Breton women Gauguin had greatly admired) wrote, “Gauguin wanted to know how I had got my blacks, I told him I had made them from Prussian blue; he didn’t have this colour in his palette, so he borrowed some from me and made his own from the same product.”28 Just as the blue of nostalgia is always already becoming black, Prussian blue, according to Bernard, makes the best black. In regard to Gauguin’s 1888 Young Wrestlers, a painting of two Breton boys, which is outlined in a blue that is softer than the Prussian blue of the later Vision after the Sermon, our painter writes that it is “absolutely Japanese by a [‘Frenchman’ crossed out] savage from Peru.”29 From 1888 onward Gauguin would refer to himself as a “savage,” as “inclining to a primitive state,” and as an “Indian.”30 He wrote to Vincent Van Gogh’s brother: “You know I have Indian, Inca blood in me, and it comes across everything I do. It’s the basis of my whole character. / I’m looking for something more natural to set against the corruption of civilization, with savagery as my starting point.”31 brittany’s le pouldu in black and blue There are, of course, many works throughout Gauguin’s life that erupt with a centralized, dramatic exchange of black and blue: La belle angèle (1889), Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98), and Nevermore, O Tahiti (1897) are but a few. There is also Gau-

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figure 7.5. Paul Gauguin, Girl Guarding Cows. 1889. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, Denmark. (Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N.Y.)

guin’s self-portrait, Les Misérables (1888), where amidst the yellow wallpaper of dancing flowers the viewer is eye-to-eye with a man of mostly black and blue. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to suggest that the famed creator of the very, very red Vision after the Sermon, The Yellow Christ (1889), The Green Christ (1889), or Self-Portrait with Halo (1889) was at all limited to a palette of black and blue, especially if we consider the work before his Tahitian period. Nevertheless, there can be no arguing that even in a work like his Self-Portrait with Halo, there is an emphasis on the blue serpent with the black head. Perhaps Gauguin’s love of black and blue grew out of the mysterious black-and-blue costume of the Breton women as presented in works like his 1889 Girl Guarding Cows (fig. 7.5). This striking dress is in harmony 164

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with the “color” of the coastal town of Le Pouldu (Brittany), a place known for its black rocks at the edge of the blue Bay of Biscay, where Gauguin worked in 1889–90. “The coves of Le Pouldu, even today, are distinguished by craggy, granite rocks jutting out from the sea; they are encrusted with blackish mussels and seaweed and, when dry, have a jet black sheen.”32 Gauguin’s 1889 watercolor The Black Rocks especially depicts this black-blue punch of Le Pouldu. Brittany is described in its native Breton language as a land of two lands: “armor,” meaning “land of the sea,” and “argoat,” meaning “land of the woods.” Gauguin nestled himself in the blue “armor” of the sea and the black “argoat” of the woods. He found that it was useful to get lost in both the black and the blue.

Avis Important aux Touristes les guides bleus and les guides noirs As a result of Gauguin’s cruelty to his wife, his exploitation of young women, and his own savage dreams (black, melancholic marks), which are then coupled with his sincere desire to reveal a better way of life through other cultures, his gorgeous body of work, and his captivating writing (blue, utopian marks), Gauguin’s meanderings both geographically and ethically have been notoriously di∞cult to map. The guidebooks that I offer here are not one but two interrelated, if conflicted, black and blue guides. Playing upon the French production of those real tourist guides—the famed Guides bleus, which are picturesque to a fault and have been demythologized by Roland Barthes and the not-so-familiar Guides noirs, which began in the 1960s and were a pun on the typical tourist guide, providing the reader with a more irrational and illicit pilgrimage—I offer the two approaches as bookends to the conflicts of travel, both in the past and today. (Incidentally, I was delighted to find a particular Guide noir devoted to Bretagne/Brittany.) In sum, it is true and necessary to be guided by both the melancholic black guide and the nostalgic blue guide. One must go black and blue. gauguin was famously drawn to a self-imposed erotic, exotic, mystical “dark continent” of his imagination, a metaphor that Sigmund Freud 165

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would develop in his “The Question of Lay Analysis” (1926). It is notable, if obvious, that Freud’s theory of “travel and explorations are the instigators of a theory of the Other.”33 Significant is the fact that the German Freud left the metaphor of the “ ‘dark continent’ in its original English,” as a gesture toward the first usage of the trope in 1878: “H. M. Stanley’s explorer’s narrative about Africa: Through the Dark Continent.”34 Seeking to exploit his own savagery upon an imposed savagery of the other, whether on Brittany’s coast or in the South Pacific, Gauguin’s blue-black paintings are, at first glance, in opposition to the images by the American photographer Henry Bosse, who documented the taming of Mississippi. Bosse fittingly used the early photographic process of cyanotype to cast all of his watery pictures in a “cameo of blue.”35 Working around the same time, Gauguin and Bosse created bodies of work that seem oppositional in every conceivable way: medium, content, intent, and affect. But perhaps this apparent opposition is due to the fact that we cannot see the black in Bosse’s pristine blue cameos. For the taming of the Mississippi was dependent on slaves to clear the wild forest and subdue it with levees. As the contemporary African American artist Kara Walker points out in relationship to her project on the Gulf blue–Louisiana black horror of Katrina, the black body has long had a “bad relationship with water” that began with “the trans-Atlantic slave trade.”36

Reseignements Généraux utopia is no place In 1903, Gauguin gathered his notes and letters and articles and published a book that was as meandering as his life and his travels. Its title, Avant et après / Before and After, plays on Gauguin’s utopian hope of living in the present while being thrust forward to a brighter future that he imagines to be like the past, specifically a prettied-up past, which is not hindered by modern life. In spirit, Avant et après is in the same blue air as William Morris’s famed 1890 News from Nowhere, or, An Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance, in which back-to-the-future women wear medieval-inspired handwoven dresses of naturally died azure. Loose and free flowing, the women of Nowhere and the dresses they wear are

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uninhibited by the now long-ago modern fashion of whalebone corsets, bustles, and hoops. Morris’s blue dresses are not Gauguin’s Tahitian sarongs and blue missionary dresses, but they are both utopically imagined by their creators as otherworldly — one othered by time, the other othered by geography. In Greek, as utopian seekers know, “u-chronos” means “no time.” Uchronos is a timely hailing of u-topia, whose etymology of “no-place” has spilled endless seas of blue ink and black ink. In was in Thomas More’s philosophical novel Utopia that “utopia,” a noun as both a real place and a nonplace, was used for the first time. Thereafter we see its island form repeated, often in connection with boyish literature, as in J. M. Barrie’s 1904 Neverland (“the island come true,” “second to the right and straight on till morning”),37 Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 Treasure Island, and Daniel Defoe’s 1719 Robinson Crusoe. Gauguin’s imagined world, too, is a philosophical and politicized island wishland. Even before he reached Tahiti, Gauguin was obsessed with finding culture outside capitalism. In a letter to Van Gogh written from Le Pouldu, he writes, “Here in Brittany the peasants have a medieval air and do not have the sense that Paris exists or that we are in 1889.”38 Likewise, Thomas More staged his utopic play at the formative period of Western capitalism, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries: “a natural breaking point between the feudal world and its transformation into the world of capitalism.”39 With More’s Utopia and Gauguin’s utopian paintings, we find utopia as a place (a nonplace) that is at play with the forces of the dominant ideology of capitalism: not as synthesis or as isolated oppositions but, rather, like two sides of the same coin, like being at sea between an island and the coast of France. Gauguin’s utopia, even if not consciously so, owes its origins to Thomas More. While u-topia is not a place it is also not not a place. It’s just lost. Elsewhere, I have waxed sorrowfully and nostalgically on blue as the color of loss, but recently I have learned from Rebecca Solnit that the color blue is made up of the light that got lost: The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not

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travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in the water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of the land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of what is in the color blue. Blue, then, is not only the color of loss, as getting the blues and singing the blues and feeling blue; blue is light lost. perdu (getting lost) For Gauguin, getting lost meant not only contacting cultures far different from his own for all of their exotic pleasure. But, it seems to me, it was also a way of making contact with what he perceived as another time, or even a place without time. Again, I repeat his words: “Here in Brittany the peasants have a medieval air and do not have the sense that Paris exists or that we are in 1889.” In 1889, Paul Gauguin painted the Portrait of Meyer de Haan by Lamplight, in which we find the artist’s friend reading two books: Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus / The Tailor Retailored and a French translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost / Paradis perdu. In regard to the latter, painted in bright yellow like the lamplight itself, Gauguin has cleverly and carefully obscured part of the book, so that all we can read of the title is the word perdu (lost), scripted in blue.40 “Never to get lost is not to live,” claims Solnit in her Field Guide to Getting Lost.41 the past is a foreign country How quickly the past becomes remote, as lost as the blue light that does not travel. When I think of Gauguin, I think not only of faraway cultures (Peru, Martinique, the Marquesas islands, Tahiti) and France, the latter nearer but still far from my own country. I imagine Gauguin as making his

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walk through life far from my own. But the more I think about him, the closer he gets. The lost blue light begins to travel toward me. It’s quite possible that my great-grandfather, the New Zealand–born merchant Edward Seering Matthews (1869–?), might have met Gauguin (1848–1903) or at least walked by him on the street. Both men got around. My great-grandfather Edward was a real traveler—he sped all around the world, including France but also Australia, San Francisco, Hong Kong, New Caledonia, Japan, Canada, and Tahiti. It is quite possible, perhaps even likely, that Gauguin may have passed my great-grandpa Edward on the streets in Papeete (Tahiti), if not Sydney (Australia) or Paris (France) or Auckland (New Zealand). Contact between my great great-grandpa and that self-claimed savage Gauguin—what a novel idea. Contact seems even more likely with the knowledge that in 1895, from August 19 to 29, on his way back to Tahiti, Gauguin found himself stuck at the Albert Hotel on Queen Street. Back then, and still today, Auckland is centered on Queen Street. The daughter of Edward Seering Mathews, my great-aunt Lorna, was even born by then. Could Gauguin have shot Lorna a loving, paternal look in memory of his own, then abandoned, children? Perhaps when he saw Lorna asleep and cradled in the arms of her father, Gauguin dreamed of his own Aline dreaming? My point is simply this: The past is a foreign country, as the 1985 David Lowenthal book of the same title makes clear, even if the past turns out not to be as distant as we might have first thought.42 In all of those art history classes of my youth, the past seemed so far away, so foreign. I could never have imagined any contact between Gauguin and a relative I knew and whom I loved — Great-Aunt Lorna. Edward Seering Matthews and his daughter, who would become Lorna Starr, and a being so foreign to me, the painter Paul Gauguin, each traced maps, it seems, onto a possible shared terrain. Such contact is minuscule. But it hits me with its own punctum-like force. I feel it when I look not only at old photographs of my New Zealand relatives but also at old photographs of Gauguin. I am touched, as Barthes would say, by “the delayed rays of a star.”43 I feel surprise. In my thesaurus under “surprise,” I find “bolt from the blue.”

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Du Voyage en Tahiti a black- and- blue race The clear blue sky illustrates a different kind of happiness and the soft dark night a different kind. There are an infinite number of different kinds of happiness. — Painter agnes martin speaking of her series The Islands

In Gauguin’s 1891 painting of his first Tahitian model, Vahine no te tiare / Woman with a Flower (fig. 7.6), we find a young Polynesian woman adorned in her full-length European smock of royal blue, violet blue, cerulean blue, and azure blue. She is not wearing the traditional Tahitian pareos. Her blue dress hails the Virgin, the European missionary of colonialism, and the knowledge that she and her fellow Tahitians now spend as much time plaiting straw hats (to be worn to chapel on Sundays) as they do weaving garlands of flowers. Blue, here, signals both the bliss of Tahitian existence (both real and imagined) and a way of life threatened with extinction. Blue, here, is both a sign of beauty and a racial marker. (After all, blue can be understood as the color of whiteness, as in Toni Morrison’s 1970 The Bluest Eye.) Nevertheless, Gauguin’s colorful paintings with their heavy outlines and rich palette are also black, a color that is always aligned with race and is as contradictory in its meanings as blue. To be in the dark is to be in both a place of dreams and a place of ignorance. Blueness and blackness, then, are both unequivocally about race: the two colors burst into other ever-expanding tropes as they shade, highlight, tint, and dye Gauguin’s story of happiness outlined in heavy black. The blackness of the Tahitian bodies of Gauguin’s paintings are clearly exoticized and othered. Yet, they are also worlding (as Gilles Deleuze might suggest), taking us from a singular memory verging on extinction (Tahiti itself) toward a memory for two (a Tahitian-French exchange). The utopian blue and the somber black are two kinds of memories on their way home toward another home, an image of worldly roundness: the image of the earth from afar as a marble of black and blue. For Deleuze, this utopian “roundness” revolves around insisting on making a “memory for [at least] two.”44 Whether wholly intentional or not, the black of Gauguin’s work, as in the beautiful child-woman who dreams in Manao Tupapau / Spirit of the Dead Watching, gives us the color of difference, of night, of death, of 170

figure 7.6. Paul Gauguin, Vahine no te tiare (Woman with a Flower). Oil on canvas, 1891. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, Denmark. (Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N.Y.)

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beauty, of the sunless sky after a volcanic eruption, and of colonialism itself. In fact, the blackness of Gauguin’s paintings prefigures colonialism at one of its darkest hours: the black skies of the experimental atomic testing that France began in French Polynesia on the tiny atoll of Moruroa in the 1960s. “For thirty years, France conducted 193 atmospheric and underground tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in French Polynesia, with indigenous Maohi employed as labourers at the test site from 1966 to 1996.”45 The French performance artist and minimalist painter Yves Klein, most famous for his obsession with ultramarine blue, used his favored color, writes art historian Nan Rosenthal, “as though it could be an explicit and overtly political tool for ending wars, because if you paint a single color over a relief map of Western Europe and North Africa, you thereby eliminate the boundaries between the countries with a unifying bath of blue.”46 Making works specifically in response to the shadows of people evaporated by the radiation of “Little Boy” dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, Klein found some hope in these terrible images. He wrote: “Hiroshima, the shadows of Hiroshima. In the desert of atomic catastrophe, they were witness, without doubt terrible, but nevertheless a witness, both for the hope of survival and for permanence — albeit immaterial — of the flesh.”47 Gauguin clearly did not have such political aspirations, for he was a real devouring wolf-dog. But perhaps with a little help from St. Francis, we might find Gauguin’s eating of the other as still unacceptably devouring but also as affectively and ambitiously bruising in its black and blue consumption.

Hospitalité shaking hands with le loup maigre When Gauguin returned to France from Tahiti, with armfuls of his new, wildly exotic paintings and bizarre carvings, Edgar Degas compared him to le loup maigre (the hungry wolf) of La Fontaine’s fable. Like La Fontaine’s wolf, Gauguin was prepared to starve himself rather than to suffer the humiliation and indignity of the collar and chain of European bourgeois life. As the fable’s horrified wolf exclaims to the domesticated dog in horror, “Chain! Chain you! What! Run you not, then, just where you please, 172

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and when?” Gauguin loved Degas’s image of him as a wolf. We find that the wolf and wolflike dogs and foxlike wolves are often repeated in his artwork: in his 1890–91 The Loss of Virginity; in two pages from an 1888–89 notebook showing a fox and a dog; in the hungry critter at the top of the “Menu with Fox,” which he designed for a Tahitian banquet; in the foxlike face of his Dutch friend Meyer de Haan, where we find him revived from the dead; in the 1902 Tahitian painting Contes barbares / Primitive Tales, and of course, as carved on the top of his clomping sabots. While I do not claim any saintliness at all (for Gauguin or even my approach), I am attempting here to mimic St. Francis of Assisi, who tamed the wolf of Gubbio. The wolf of Gubbio had slain and devoured the beasts and men of the city, but St. Francis was able to make contact with the terrible wolf through a handshake (and, well, also a promise to feed him every day) that enabled the townspeople to see that there was more to the wolf than they had understood. St. Francis’s labor was a kind of reparative work; it did not foreclose the history that preceded the wolf before he lifted up his right paw to shake the hand of the saint. Likewise, I am not denying the history of wrongdoings by Gauguin. Coming full circle, I find Gauguin’s painting of his daughter Aline asleep and dreaming in the 1881 La petite rêve to be worlded by the black and blue of the 1892 Spirit of the Dead Watching. Contact is performed, not only between black and blue, between France and the South Pacific, between 1881 and 1892, between a child and a child bride, but also between Gauguin’s various “homes,” both real and utopically imagined. When Gauguin famously shut his eyes in order to see, he saw black and dreamed blue. Even when painting in red or yellow or green, Gauguin was painting in black and blue. notes 1. I am playing with a lovely phrase by one of my former students, the artist Wendy Chin. In a seminar paper (Spring 2006) on the beds of the late Cuban American artist Felix Gonzales-Torres, Chin noted that “the bed is a hatchery for dreams.” 2. Michael Balint, “Flying Dreams and the Dream Screen,” in Thrills and Regressions (New York: International Universities Press, 1959), 75. 3. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 21:64. Originally published in German as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer, 1930). Emphasis on “eternity” is mine.

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Carol Mavor 4. Freud came up with the term in his correspondence with Romain Rolland. See Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 91–95. 5. See, for example, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native,” Art in America, July 1989, 119–130; Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits, 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992); and Nancy Mowll Matthews, Paul Gauguin: An Erotic Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), to name only a few. 6. Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (New York: Viking, 2005), 30. 7. Daniel Wildenstein, Gauguin: A Savage in the Making, Catalogue Raisonné (1873– 1888), vol. 1 (Milano: Skira, 2002), 87. 8. Ibid., 86. 9. Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991), 91. See also John Hutton, “The Clown at the Ball: Manet’s Masked Ball at the Opera,” Oxford Art Journal 10, no. 2 (1987): 76–94. 10. Wildenstein, Gauguin, 89. 11. In regard to the genesis of his famous 1897–98 painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? / D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?, Gauguin “wrote to the critic André Fontainas that it flowed out, at night and in ‘total silence,’ as ‘my eyes close, to see without comprehending the dream in the infinite space before me.’ ” See Deborah Silverman, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 389. 12. Matthews, Paul Gauguin, 127. 13. Wildenstein, Gauguin, 422. 14. Ibid., 172. 15. Ibid. 16. Jonathan Jones, “Thoroughly Modern Manet,” The Guardian, June 27, 2006. 17. Paul Gauguin, Paul Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, foreword by Emil Gauguin, trans. Van Wyck Brooks (Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2007), 154. 18. Bogomila Welsh- Ovcharov, “Paul Gauguin’s Third Visit to Brittany, June 1889–November 1890,” in Gauguin’s “Nirvana”: Painters at Le Pouldu, 1889–90, ed. Eric M. Zafran (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 15. 19. Ibid., 16. 20. Wildenstein, Gauguin, 88. 21. Welsh-Ovcharov, “Paul Gauguin’s Third Visit to Brittany,” 15. 22. W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (New York: Penguin, 1944), 191. 23. Lynne Huffer, Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question of Difference (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 14. 24. Maugham, Moon and Sixpence, 150–51. 25. Welsh-Ovcharov, “Paul Gauguin’s Third Visit to Brittany,” 59. 26. Eric M. Zafran, “Searching for Nirvana,” in Zafran, Gauguin’s “Nirvana,” 112. 27. Wildenstein, Gauguin, 457.

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gauguin in black and blue 28. Bernard, as quoted in ibid., 458. 29. Wildenstein, Gauguin, 418. 30. Ibid., 422. 31. Ibid. 32. Welsh-Ovcharov, “Paul Gauguin’s Third Visit to Brittany,” 17. 33. Khanna, Dark Continents, 49. 34. Ibid. 35. Solnit, Field Guide to Getting Lost, 35. 36. Walker interview, “The Eyes of the Storm,” Modern Painters: International Arts and Culture, April 2006, 58. 37. J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens: Peter and Wendy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 108, 89. Also of interest here would be an object like John Davis’s 1888 photograph of Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa. See Tahiti 1904/1921, Lucien Gauthier, Photographe (Paris: Les Éditions du Pacifique, 2004), 10. Stevenson, of course, traveled the South Seas islands (including Tahiti) and was a favorite author of Barrie’s. The adventure side of the fairy tale of Peter Pan grew from Barrie’s love of the work of his fellow Scotsman. 38. “Ici en Bretagne les paysans ont un air du moyen âge” (letter from Paul Gauguin to Vincent from Brittany, 1889). As cited in the exhibition catalog Oeuvres écrites de Gauguin et van Gogh: Collections du Musée National Vincent van Gogh (Amsterdam: Institut Néerlandais, 1975), cat. no. G 32. 39. Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Space, translated by Robert A. Volrath (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1990). 40. Zafran, Gauguin’s “Nirvana.” 41. Solnit, Field Guide to Getting Lost, 14. 42. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 43. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 81. First published in French as La chambre claire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980). 44. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005), 117–18. 45. Suhas Chakma and Marianne Jensen, eds., Racism against Indigenous Peoples (Denmark: IWGIA Document, International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2001), 108. 46. Nan Rosenthal, “Assisted Levitation: The Art of Yves Klein,” in Yves Klein, 1928– 1962: A Retrospective, catalog from the exhibition at Rice Museum, Houston, February 5–May 2, 1982 (New York: The Arts Publisher, 1982), 123. 47. Yves Klein, in Sidra Stich, Yves Klein (Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, 1995), 179.

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8 A Different Shade of Modernism Difference and Distinction in Pedro Figari’s Representations of Black Bodies lyneise e. williams

Pedro Figari is one of the most enigmatic early twentieth-century painters. A first-generation white Uruguayan of Italian descent, he occupies a compelling and vexed position within the traditions of European modernism. A perceptive and subtle interpreter of the social, ethnic, and political complexities of Uruguayan society, he engaged the French discourse of “the primitive” in innovative visual language that was dynamic and suggestive enough to encapsulate candombe, an idiosyncratic performance and music fashioned by Uruguay’s marginalized African descendants. Figari’s paintings assert the presence of this little-known and -studied African diaspora group and are rich sources for information. His work is complicated and often contradictory. A man of his time, Figari cannot be valorized for representing Uruguay’s black population in a completely respectful manner. For example, if not for Figari we would not know about the courageous act of black Uruguayan Felizarda Acosta in an 1894 court case, because she was erased in the popular press. Figari recovers and names her in his sketches of the trial, but his visual strategies cast her simply as a victim, minimizing the dynamism and significance of her pivotal testimony, which he also documented in a published text. An analysis of selected works by Figari produced in Paris between 1925 and 1933 reveals a unique style, demotic yet avant-garde, alert to racial and ethnic difference, yet too nuanced to simply replicate the racist tropes that prevailed in French popular culture. The international set-

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ting of 1920s and 1930s Paris provides the stage for Figari’s unmaking of European art through critical visual strategies he appropriated from European visual traditions but then used to disparage Europeans. His paintings are oppositional in several directions. They critique French attitudes of cultural superiority as reflected in popular representations of blacks, and they mock Uruguay’s and Argentina’s Spanish Creole elite class who modeled themselves after French culture.

Figari in Uruguay Figari executed more than 3,000 works in his 4,000-plus oeuvre that featured members of Uruguay’s black population, despite their relatively small numbers there during his lifetime. What fueled his engagement in depicting black Uruguayans? Glimpses of his biography and key experiences prior to becoming a full-time painter at the age of sixty in 1919 provide insights into the attitudes about black Uruguayans that shaped his aesthetic development. Figari’s Italian immigrant parents were lured to Uruguay by generous government incentives and immigration policies enacted to whiten the country’s population. Guided by a political and cultural imperative influenced by the Argentine statesman and intellectual Domingo F. Sarmiento with whiteness as the most valuable possession, Uruguay and Argentina, along with most countries in South America, aggressively recruited the white European population intended to replace non-Europeans through the institutionalization of immigration laws. Argentina’s wealthier government sponsored the relocations of its immigrants, where the Uruguayan government borrowed money from local industrialists in the mid1830s to support the active recruitment of white Europeans.1 Uruguay’s constitution of 1852 as well as Argentina’s constitution of 1853 featured stimuli including “transportation (to the new country), farming tools, construction equipment and materials for homes, tax exemption and support for four years.”2 Statistics from the 1868 census, when Figari was a child, stated that foreigners, primarily from Italy, constituted 55 percent of the population in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay.3 More than 1 million Europeans immigrated to the country between 1850 and 1930. Attractive incentives that brought more than 1 million white Europeans, coupled with laws enacted in 1886 prohibiting the entry of anyone of 178

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African origin, moved the government closer to accomplishing its goal of establishing a white European population.4 Indeed, the government intended that the relocation of more than 1 million white Europeans would erase the presence of the African population, no longer being used as slaves, creating the appearance of a country populated by white European immigrants. The force behind the country’s whitening endeavor was the ruling class, comprised of Spanish Creoles. Like their Argentine counterparts, they framed themselves as a cohesive group on the basis of ancestral links to a “pure” Spanish heritage connecting them to early colonizers, viewed as the founders of the region.5 The emphasis on Spanish heritage separated this group from white European immigrant groups relocating to Uruguay from Britain, France, Spain, and Italy, asserting a system of difference within the category of whiteness. Nonetheless, for immigration purposes, the Figari family’s Italian heritage was understood as white. Thus, European ancestry and generous incentives eased the transition of Figari’s parents into Uruguay’s upper middle class, at the expense of black Uruguayans. Figari had much exposure to the black population of Uruguay, even though he occupied a social position that afforded him and his family numerous advantages denied to this group. A lucrative textile business established by his father gained upper middle-class status for the Figari family. Their home on the corner of the fashionable Avenida 18 de Julio and Convención Street positioned them in the new business district, or the “Centro,” one of two sections comprising central Montevideo. The Centro offered signs of modernity modeled primarily after Paris, such as tree-lined sidewalks separating wide streets and residences featuring Beaux-Arts and some Italian architectural styles.6 This middle-class setting was situated alongside a district formerly used as a holding area for enslaved Africans. After the 1870s, Montevideo’s black population and large numbers of new immigrants filled the inexpensive, deteriorating housing structures, or conventillos. Fernando Saavedra Faget, Figari’s great-grandson, noted that his great-grandfather’s family owned a farm in what was Montevideo’s rural region, Tres Cruces, located “in the vicinity of soldiers’ barracks where many African slaves had lived and where they remained with their descendants after emancipation.”7 Figari was also familiar with blacks in the domestic spaces of his childhood, where they were prized symbols of middle- and upper-class status. 179

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Black servants tended the household and children in Figari’s childhood home, where Old and New World sensibilities intermingled. The family spoke Italian at home and Spanish in public. Saavedra Faget asserted that there was frequent two-way tra∞c between the Figari household and their black servants’ homes.8 Figari recalled occasions when, as a child, he visited with an older former slave, Donata. He reminisced, “The black woman, named Donata, became very serious when she heard the rhythms of the tam-tam which incited her to dance.”9 His statement suggests that he witnessed private moments during his sojourns involving drumming and dancing similar to his painted depictions. As Figari began a legal career, an incident with a black Uruguayan woman occurred that was a turning point in his reservoir of knowledge about blacks. It caused him to reconsider Uruguay’s mandate by ruling elites to erase blacks from the country’s o∞cial narrative. This wellpublicized criminal case, in which Figari served as a public defender, also revealed the limitations of his white social space, that is, the internal hierarchy of whiteness that situated Italians below Spanish Creoles.10 In the mid-1890s, Figari served as a lawyer in a case where prejudicial views resulted in the misadministration of justice. He defended Lieutenant Alferez Enrique Almeida, a mixed-race Uruguayan man of African and Spanish descent with rural roots wrongfully accused of murdering Tomás Butler, the son of a wealthy British businessman. Figari won his client’s release, but he indicated that “the court refused to state Almeida’s innocence.”11 The prosecutor summoned Felizarda Acosta, a black Uruguayan woman who was the servant of the family of the main witness, to corroborate the witness’s testimony against Almeida. Acosta rejected her assigned role, refused to lie on the witness stand, and asserted the name of the actual killer along with supporting physical evidence. Protecting the interests of the Spanish Creoles who dominated the courts and police, the prosecutor tried to silence Acosta by imprisoning her for two weeks. In this police cover-up, Figari was supposed to assist in the conviction of his client despite the evidence to the contrary presented in the trial and by Acosta. Not long after the trial, it was revealed that the chief of police had hired an assassin to kill Butler. In the case that propelled him into the national spotlight, Figari was being used. Like Acosta, he recognized the court’s attempt to manipulate him and responded by denouncing its actions. A year before the case was 180

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decided in 1897, Figari published his notes of the trial in the text, Cause célèbre, el crimen de la Calle Chana: Defensa del Alferez Enrique Almeida. It presented a voice of dissension in an arena where public opinion assumed Almeida to be guilty. He outlined accusations and misdeeds in sections under headings titled, “Duality of Criteria,” “Prejudices and Dangers,” “The Innocent Accused, and Illegality of the Proceedings.” Pointing out the court’s biases against his client, he declared the case was “based only on some appearances instead of taking precautions not to make mistakes” and indicted them for “assuming Almeida to be a born criminal of Arenal Grande Street while assuming others to be born geniuses.”12 Figari’s treatment of Acosta in his text is extremely complicated and demonstrates the consequences of his significant change of thought regarding the attitudes of the Spanish Creole ruling class toward blacks, despite the fact that he had married into that class. Rejecting the status quo to erase this black woman from the o∞cial document of the trial, he includes Acosta by name, retells her testimony, and discusses the fact of her imprisonment when the newspaper coverage during the trial barely mentions “la negra [the black woman].”13 However, he contradicts this display of respect and plays into the Spanish Creole ruling-class conventions by marking Acosta as different. By describing her behavior in estranging language such as “loquacious, speaking without introduction,” he alienates her. Furthermore, characterizing her as “excited, but always talkative, and persistent” reinforces a sense of distance from acceptable behavior in the courtroom setting even as he criticizes the prosecutor and others in the court for being “shocked and surprised” when she emerged from her incarceration undeterred in her insistence on the truth of her earlier testimony.14 Figari’s descriptive strategies may present Acosta in a way that allows her to be construed as an alien, but her testimony defies the role of the submissive black Uruguayan relegated to the bottom of the social hierarchy. She resisted the court’s attempts to silence and control her. Assuming a position of power, she acted as an accuser rather than a victim of manipulation. Her actions resonate with the defiance and self-assuredness Uruguay’s blacks articulated in print mediums during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Montevideo they began publishing their own newspapers in 1872. They used these forums to openly express their opinions about themselves and the society that denied them the same 181

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rights and privileges as other citizens. Historian Marvin Lewis remarked, “In fact, Afro-Uruguayan journalism was born on a note of protest against racism.” In the 1872 inaugural issue of The Conservation: Organ of the Society of Color, the editor asserted, “Let’s make them understand, those men who even today look upon us with disdain, that we are their equals even though our faces are a dark color. We have a heart which beats with the best of them and we harbor the same conscience.”15 Acosta’s behavior in court underscored this formidable pronouncement of identity. But it seems as though Figari could never fully view and applaud Acosta’s act as her individual endeavor. His case notes are published in the spirit of protest against what happened. However, Figari’s text emphasizes the court’s misuse of justice against Acosta rather than her heroic stance against it. Thus, he minimizes her moment of triumph. He uses the injustice against Acosta to strengthen his argument about corruption in Montevideo’s courts. Thus, Figari contradicts his noble act of rendering Acosta visible. Still, Acosta’s act of defiance greatly influenced Figari’s life from the moment it occurred. It forced him to choose between the laws of the court, which he held highly as Uruguay’s ideal, and the interests of the Spanish Creoles, whose support undergirded his social and economic success. He chose to follow the letter of the law and therefore align himself with Acosta. She did not know the accused, nor did she benefit from the privileges of the laws of justice she adhered to, yet she risked her life to assert what she knew to be true. As a result of his rejection of Spanish Creole interests by publishing his case notes, Figari lost his paying clientele and eventually his law practice and his favor with many powerful individuals among the Spanish Creole ruling class. Despite these losses, he maintained a large degree of his social standing, which allowed him to become a legislator, journalist, published philosopher, director of the National School of the Arts, and a painter, all of which translated into more privileges than Acosta was ever given. Figari continued his critique of Spanish Creoles and their Europeanderived value system in ways that suggest the impact of his experience with race prejudice in the Almeida trial. His critique of European notions of intelligence used to exclude blacks and other non-European groups reflects changes in his attitudes. Figari’s assertion in a speech given in 1914 at the Athenaeum in Montevideo that “every human being uses intelli182

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gence to live” takes on a profound resonance, considering Acosta’s strategic intervention in the courtroom.16 Her counterargument and imprisonment that exposed the court’s double standards ground the contradictions Figari points out in imperialist justifications for exploiting Africans in his statements: “When they [Africans] use poisonous arrows and put traps in paths, ‘savages’ seem ferocious to us. But they are doing nothing more than those who are ‘civilized’ when they make war weapons for defense and to trap food.”17 Figari’s increasingly sympathetic view is explicit in a letter sent to Charles Lesca, the French translator of his philosophical tome Arte, estetica, ideal, explaining clarifications he wanted to include in the French version of the books. Responding to Lesca’s question regarding his use of the term “Manyema” to refer to an African group, Figari replied, “In the Larousse, the French name Manyema means a region in the Congo. I chose Manyema to refer to their conspicuously genuine human personalities because the explorers of Africa describe them as cannibals. Does this not seem like a tribute to our memory toward these demigods rather than to reduce their humanity?”18 Considering the broadening of his scope of humanity to include blacks, perhaps Figari’s publication of the Almeida trial case notes can be viewed as his emerging understanding that the experience of the other was worthy of visibility. When he began painting black Uruguayans in 1919, the year he started his full-time career as an artist, Figari made a choice to go against the representational styles put forth by Uruguay’s pioneers depicting this subject, Rafael Barradas (1890–1929) and Pedro Blanes Viale (1878–1926). Their portrayals are firmly naturalistic when weighed against Figari’s works. For example, in the painting Blacks Dancing, executed in Montevideo by Barradas in 1912, the physiognomy of the young, stylish woman in the foreground is proportional and depicted in realistic colors. Stereotypically overstated lips like those in Parisian Paul Colin’s 1927 Poster for Bal Nègre (plate 11) are only implied on the centrally located male figure. Blanes Viale’s portrayal of black bodies takes Barradas’s sense of naturalism to a higher level. The black man in Remembering the Island of Madeira, from 1915, is not only described by his servant position but through physical particularities such as his high cheekbones and forehead and a carefully shaped moustache framing appropriately scaled lips underscored with pale pink. While his broad grin resonates with minstrel figures, naturalism, individual nuances, and the absence of exoticism complicate the 183

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racializing stereotypes. Barradas and Blanes Viale are better known for works in which blacks do not appear, suggesting that their naturalistic depictions did not bring critical attention. Figari knew these artists and their work personally, and he chose a different trajectory. Figari made a deliberate choice to adopt a faux naïf style in 1919. The shift is evident in the comparison of two works from two different moments in his career, Old Market (1907) (fig. 8.1) and Funeral Procession through the Old Market (1932), executed in his naïf style. Both paintings depict the same setting, the old marketplace in Montevideo, but their differences are telling. Figari chose a traditional French academic style that embraced the Renaissance tradition of verisimilitude and naturalism in the earlier work. This genre scene, populated by a single figure and a distant horse, shows the bright sun beating down on buildings carefully angled back toward an invisible vanishing point. Between the buildings, a winding pathway, framed by precisely rendered balconies and archways, recedes into the distance. He employs shading and modeling techniques to create the illusion of sunlight falling on the marketplace. The stronger colors at the base of one building convincingly suggest shadows in comparison with the washed-out colors of the structure’s higher level. This painting’s execution attests to Figari’s years of artistic training by Italian painter Godofredo Sommavilla, who like many other European painters, traveled to Uruguay for a period of time to teach and to work as portrait painters for the elite class. Its traditional academic style situates it within the prevailing conservative modes of late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Uruguayan painting. On the other hand, Funeral Procession through the Old Market, executed in the style that earned Figari success in the early 1920s, suggests many of the traits associated with modernism that were popular in Paris earlier in the twentieth century. For example, eschewing the naturalism that characterized his execution of architecture in his earlier work, Figari flattens the forms and spaces by way of a lack of modeling and freer brush strokes. The clarity and precision of the lines are replaced by adjoining panels of soft colors. Simplistic slashes approximate the meticulous handling of the balcony railing. Marching through the center of this formerly desolate marketplace setting is a procession of black bodies. Figari carries his rudimentary quality through in a nonnaturalistic approach to his representations of Afro-Uruguayans. Male and female forms are reduced to 184

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figure 8.1 Pedro Figari, Old Market. (Photo courtesy of Fernando Saavedra Faget)

uncomplicated patches of color. White, dotlike eyes punctuate indistinct, darkened faces that match somber-colored clothing. The quick, gestural brushstrokes denoting running dogs stand in opposition to the painstaking accuracy in the signage of Old Market. Uruguayan and Argentine audiences openly expressed their opposition to Figari’s faux-naïf-style paintings featuring black Uruguayans in his first exhibitions in the two countries in 1921. Art critics in South America all but panned both shows. The response of the press regarding exhibitions at Galería Müller and Comisión Nacional de Belles Artes in Buenos Aires was “reticent and amiable, but cold and incomprehending.”19 In Montevideo, critics and Spanish Creole elites were pointed in their strong disapproval of his black subject matter, calling his depictions “an insult to Montevideo society,”20 and berated Figari for “publicly presenting those black men and women, and those hungry dogs.”21 Art critics in Uruguay and Argentina accepted the prevailing idea of French artistic superiority. They denigrated artistic innovations, such as Cubism, that rejected academic conventions. Figari’s flat painting style and his focus on regional innovation in the recovery of the black population and a performance both countries sought to erase did not fit into the Parisian mode of progress Uruguay and Argentina imagined for themselves. He indicated as much 185

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in a letter to a friend in 1917. He advocated for Uruguay to develop its own “largely uncovered, American art” instead of participating in the “circuit of colonial legitimization” where Uruguay’s resources are “sold to Europe for little money, manufactured there, and then sold back to Uruguay in a more expensive form and accepted nationally as innovative and modern.”22 Figari may have understood that he could make a name for himself nationally, something he was denied, by using this “colonial circuit” to gain legitimacy in Paris. If he produced work that was accepted by Parisians, then the same South American audiences that shunned it would buy it because of its approval by the French.

Figari in Paris Figari’s first exhibition in Paris in 1923, where he exhibited the same paintings of black Uruguayans rejected by Uruguayan and Argentine critics, was a success. He sold forty-five of the sixty works in the show, establishing his international presence. Representations of black Uruguayans dominated his exhibition at the Galerie Drouet in the fall of 1925 just after his relocation to Paris. One of the reasons he achieved this success was tied to the way his introduction to Parisian society engaged the French discourse of the modernist primitive. His longtime friend Jules Supervielle, a poet of French descent born in Uruguay and raised in Paris, presented Figari to Parisian society as “one of the first lawyers of Montevideo,” whose “clients were rural people who came from far away on horseback.”23 But it locates him as less sophisticated compared with France, with its history of law and legal treatises. Evoking newness in the idea that he was one of Montevideo’s “first” lawyers further establishes his difference from the French. However, this particular otherness suggests a kind of innocence that plays into the notion of the “primitive” naïf, described by Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten as “the artist whose gaucherie guarantees his sincerity, spontaneity and originality.”24 A lawyer was not expected to be a trained artist, lending further credibility to a naïf artist persona. Aspects of Figari’s style such as his thick surfaces created by quick, short brushwork; flat swathes of vivid colors that work against illusions of depth; and abbreviated gestural marks indicating physiognomy and black bodies signaled naïf status for the Parisian public. Inserting phrases like “no painting teachers in Montevideo” and the “mediocre collection in the Na186

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tional Museum” in his introduction, Supervielle buried Figari’s decades of lessons with Sommavilla in favor of the image of the “authentic naïf” painter. The paintings’ dominant subject matter, black dancing bodies, played a significant role in the public’s interest in Figari’s work. Europeans used the black body as a cipher for their fears of difference, to reinforce their white superiority by creating distance between themselves and blacks. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, blackness was construed as representing the undesirable other —savage, dangerous, and primitive—the foil to European civilization. Avant-garde artists such as Picasso and Matisse appropriated these associations and repositioned them as challenges to the bourgeois values of the ruling class in Paris during the first decade of the twentieth century. However, they kept the notion of inferiority intact. Beginning in 1919, however, black subject matter became the height of fashion beyond the avant-garde. This was cutting-edge subject matter that defined what was hip in Paris in nearly every facet of life. Blackness was conflated and reduced to stereotypes, then popularized through simplified forms, often with the cooperation of willing black participants. Extravagant shows attended by Parisian socialites featured African American performer Josephine Baker, who was also the subject of art posters by French artist Paul Colin, which played up the idea of black women as hypersexualized beings through a depiction of a scantily clad female body with bright red, oversized lips (see plate 11). Figari was deeply aware of artistic trends occurring in Europe. Paris was one of many European destinations during his four-year Grand Tour honeymoon following his marriage in 1886. He traveled there on three different occasions between 1913 and 1919. An essay from 1914 attests to his alertness and disapproval of French artistic trends of the early twentieth century despite his great distance in Latin America. In a lecture delivered at the Montevideo Athenaeum in 1914, he called them “unintelligible” and declared that “distortions of reality like Cubism, Futurism, and Simultanism are sources of confusions since they create a web of illusion and daydreams.” In his mind, these styles “only help to make art seem more useless and irrelevant.”25 Not only would he have witnessed the impact of painters like Matisse and Picasso, as his writings suggest, but it was impossible to miss the avant-garde Parisian’s infatuation with African people and cultures. His a∞liations with French educators like Ernest 187

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Martinenche at the Sorbonne and friends like the writer Blaise Cendrars situated him among those attuned to events such as exhibitions of African art and soirees, or evenings of theatrical events where one could hear poetry, lectures, and music based around avant-garde perceptions of Africa. Figari’s focus on black subject matter in his faux naïf style is no pat replication of Picasso’s and Matisse’s appropriation and reinforcement of notions of black inferiority. He rejects Parisians’ tendency to gloss over Africans, African Americans, and French Caribbean blacks, and he denounces Uruguay’s and Argentina’s social behavior of indifference toward an erasure of their black populations. His paintings are specific in their references to Uruguay. He employs visual strategies and subject matter that particularize his representations of black Uruguayans. His main strategy is situating them in candombe, a performance unique to Uruguay. Figari’s representations of candombe are the largest group of works in his oeuvre. He depicted this theme from the time he began painting full time in 1919 until he stopped painting in 1933. Candombe, a dramatic performance with dance and religious aspects, was created by African slaves in colonial Uruguay during the eighteenth century, when they comprised one-third of Montevideo’s population.26 They cohered as groups for mutual support, based on similar African regions of origin or linguistic commonalities, naming themselves Minas Nago, Banguela, African Congos, and Murema. Spanish Creole observers assigned the term candombe to all dances performed by blacks in Montevideo and the neighboring countryside regions.27 Poems describe the coming together of various mutual support groups, referred to as nations, for the celebration.28 Colonial candombe performances generally took place on Sundays, when slaves were given time away from work. Figari’s strong assertion of candombe by way of so many depictions suggests an effort to distinguish black Uruguayans from among the plethora of black bodies represented in Paris in the 1920s. By situating them in an art form they created, he asserts black Uruguayans as innovators and contributors to the national body. Figari contradicts this powerful claim in ways similar to those that undercut the visibility he gave Acosta in his text. In the work Candombe (ca. 1927) (plate 12), he seems to honor blacks through his lavish use of paint. With vivid colors, he articulates black bodies in long frock coats, top hats, and sleeveless gowns. In the central male figure, Figari includes details like pinstripes in trousers, white shirt cuffs, and stylish spats on 188

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shoes. Absorbed in their candombe performance, these Afro-Uruguayans do not acknowledge either Figari’s gaze or that of the viewer. Heads are positioned downward or upward in ecstasy. There is no mugging or referencing viewers as in Paul Colin’s works. These participants are not playing to an audience. Their eyes are blurred, closed, or undecipherable. There is a sense of inwardness projected from the faces and body positions. Black bodies face each other and are rendered with their backs toward the picture plane, denying viewers’ access. In contrast to Paul Colin’s depictions of African Americans whose only context for existence is within the fantasy of Parisians, Figari suggests a degree of autonomy for Uruguay’s blacks by depicting them performing for themselves, not as spectacles for a white audience. Contradictions are apparent in Figari’s depictions of sexuality in black female figures. He avoids depicting seminude bodies as seen in Colin’s depictions of Josephine Baker (plate 11). Sleeveless tops may expose arms and necks, but black women’s breasts and legs are covered completely. A female is shown lifting her skirt, but the gesture exposes only stocking-covered calves. The women do not display vulnerability. In fact, one woman boldly denies entrance to the viewer by turning her back to the picture plane, evoking Felizarda Acosta’s defiance and self-confidence. This posture can be interpreted in another way that betrays Figari’s conflicted attitudes. Positioning the body this way brings focus to the black female buttocks, pushing this depiction toward the racist stereotype of hypersexualized black women. Employing a profile position for another black female emphasizes the exaggerated roundness in the same part of her body. Prominently situating bodies in these positions, featuring large, rounded forms, and highlighting them through juxtapositions beside light colors suggest French strategies for marking black bodies as overly sexual, as in depictions of Sarah Baartman, better known as the Hottentot Venus (fig. 8.2). Similar anatomical emphasis is centrally located in Candombe (1925) (fig. 8.3). Black bodies are grouped to each side of the painting, clearing the central area for the unobstructed view of a female figure’s exaggerated behind. Her pale green, patterned dress creates a notable contrast with the darker surroundings, calling more attention to this overstated feature. In the text, Figari used language and behavior to mark Acosta’s difference. In the paintings, he uses exaggerated buttocks, an established European trope to express black females’ hypersexuality, 189

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figure 8.2. Aaron Martinet and Louis Francois Charon, Satire of the Hottentot Venus (Saartje Baartman). Exhibited in Paris naked except for a loin-cloth, with two Scottish soldiers, a young Parisienne, and a well-dressed gentleman admiring her. Hand-colored etching, September 1815. British Museum, London, Great Britain. © The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, N.Y.

but he employs a different set of visual strategies to call attention to this feature. Figari also communicates mixed attitudes toward black Uruguayans through his depictions of male bodies. Exaggerated lips associated with minstrelsy are referenced in the pink color used for the mouths on male figures in both paintings as well as in Nostalgias de Candombe (ca. 1927) (fig. 8.4). Although the color and application are more subtle than those of the male in Colin’s poster, the strategy effectively calls attention to this feature and stands out against brown faces as unnatural and different. In Nostalgias de Candombe, Figari plays into long-established European tropes that equate blacks with monkeys. Taking a more sly approach, he elongates the faces of black males into a form similar to a primate’s muzzle. He extends that visual association by elongating and broadening the figure’s feet and rendering them in a color similar to that of his face, so the figure’s 190

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figure 8.3. Pedro Figari, Candombe (Woman in green dress in foreground). Private collection.

face resembles his bare feet. In another male figure, Figari even exploits a palm-over-palm gesture to underscore apelike associations by displaying highly contrasting pink palms against dark brown upper hands. Figari’s visual strategies for representing clothing for male figures feminizes black male bodies. The male figures’ loose, fluid clothing, like baggy pants and frock coats, hides body contours, especially the pelvis area. The angularity of tailored garments like frock coats and starched shirt collars is absent in Nostalgias de Candombe. He replaces the sharp lines used to describe mens’ broad shoulders and narrow hips with curvilinear strokes representing loosely draped garments over rounded bodies similar to the female figures. As a result, black Uruguayan male sexuality is erased, ren191

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figure 8.4. Pedro Figari, Nostalgias de Candombe. Private collection.

dering the black men unthreatening to white women, unlike popular Parisian portrayals of African American men groping white females in jazz clubs. Thus, even as he asserts a black Uruguayan male presence, Figari renders the men emasculated. Figari endows black Uruguayan males with power in representations of candombe’s symbolic king figures. These works offer visual representations of an alternate system of government, implicitly challenging the authority of Uruguay’s o∞cial governing system as well as the Spanish crown. King and queen characters appeared in the more elaborate performances of candombe that occurred around Christmas, culminating on January 6, Three Kings Day and the Feast of the Epiphany on the Catholic calendar. One of the focal points of the performance was the coronation of a symbolic king and queen, chosen from among the various nations, honoring the African Saint Balthazar/Benedict, one of the three wise men who vis192

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ited the infant Jesus in Bethlehem. The crowning ceremony included a choreographed procession with ombligada (belly bumping), improvised solos, movements in a circular formation, and entrevo (mix-up), the high point of candombe when all involved performed improvised movements. Afterward, participants proceeded through the city to the church to pay their respects to the altar of Saint Balthazar/Benedict and to the o∞ces of the town o∞cials, who often contributed money for the nations’ private celebrations.29 The tones Figari conveys in visual and written expressions of king and queen figures are aggressive, admiring, evenhanded, or conflicted even as they challenge European and Uruguayan authority. In a published essay about Uruguay’s blacks for an Argentine newspaper Figari wrote in 1925 while living in Paris, he seems impartial in his detailed descriptions of candombe kings and queens. According to Figari, kings wore “a pastiche of different uniform and military clothing” that was “a mix coming from different positions and titles.” He observed that “old military helmets, even really rotten ones in bad condition were highly sought after. . . . It wasn’t odd to see a king wearing a worn out hat but acting as an authority for one day.”30 He takes a sharper tone in a painting executed around that same time. In Visite al gobernador / Visit to the Governor (ca. 1927) (fig. 8.5) the black body, in Figari’s vividly imagined scenarios, boisterously inhabits precisely those spaces from which Spanish Creole elite society would exclude it. Figari challenges European and Uruguayan authority aggressively here. In his depiction of the visit to elected o∞cials during candombe, the governor appears as the lone white figure, outnumbered by blacks who ignore him while dominating his space. In the center of the composition, the king and queen hold court from a lush, red sofa flanked by attendants standing erect and wearing military regalia. Formally dressed black women and men pay tribute to their king and queen by creating space for their unobstructed display, clustering on either side and gazing in their direction. The women’s pastel dresses and the men’s dark jackets stand out against dark red drapes and red walls and carpet. The governor, dressed in a pale gray suit, looks wistfully at a large painting of a regally decorated white figure seated majestically on a horse, perhaps the king of Spain, hung above the enthroned couple. Painted in the same quick-stroke style, his face is as undefined as those of the blacks in his o∞ce, suggesting his lack 193

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figure 8.5. Pedro Figari, Visite al gobernador. Private collection.

of authority in Figari’s view. His rounded-shoulder stance with his back to the picture plane offers a full view of his hands clasped behind his back. Despite his title and foregrounded position, he does not appear as a figure of effortless authority. The governor is but a small and timid despot in danger of being unseated. Mixed attitudes seep into Candombe (1925) (fig. 8.3), where Figari portrays king and queen characters seated on an elevated dais on opposite sides of an altar in the center of the composition. Underscoring their exalted position, he distinguishes them from the other participants through attire and accessories. The king is marked by a hat covering his head, while a bright gold ribbon, reminiscent of a crown, encircles the queen’s head. In the place of a scepter, the queen holds a broad fan whose gold flecks repeat her headband color. A military-like medal worn conspicuously on the king’s chest symbolizes his authority and pulls the eye in his direction. Parisians would have recognized the medal and the fan, since such objects were a part of French and Spanish culture. The idea of mark194

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ing royalty through head adornments resonates with traditional European practices. However, these particular pieces are a departure from known European styles. As such, they can be interpreted as a sign of difference. That mark of difference is understated when compared with the outlandishly “African” quality of the headgear assigned to blacks in popular Parisian illustrations. The colorful medal against the king’s muted brown shirt and contrasting textural details of the queen’s fan over her solid-colored dress attract as much attention to the royal couple as their headgear, if not more. Figari’s visual strategy draws viewers’ eyes to objects that suggest commonality with and assimilation into European culture, while head adornments, commonly appearing as outrageous spectacles marking distance and difference, are rendered relatively inconspicuous. His observations include king and queen characters, suggesting their continued significance in the second phase of candombe. He recalled, “With a great degree of dignity, each tribe, which they call ‘nation’ chooses two people to be king and queen. These responsibilities fell on those who had the most prestige, as it happens in any democracy. Whoever has the most important master gets selected. No matter how white we are we understand this process.”31 Figari’s description is notable for the way it positions blacks as similar to whites in their selection of leaders, rather than finding ways to separate blacks out as lacking in the abilities to organize and govern themselves. To do so would be to render them incapable of being included in the Uruguayan nation. Indeed, he is pointed in his critique of Europeans and Spanish Creoles who believe in their superiority and exclusive rights to practice democracy. More remarkable is the implication of his phrase “no matter how white we are,” which alludes to Uruguay’s hierarchy of whiteness that placed Spanish Creoles in the highest position, while those of Italian descent, like himself, were assigned lower positions. In the painting, the king and queen characters do not make gestures or movements that call attention to themselves. The queen’s arm appears close to her body, suggesting subtle movements of her fan, and the king’s hands, extending from rounded shoulders and limp arms, lie still on his lap. Dark, barely discernible eyes appear focused on the male and female figures in front of them. Indeed, despite their symbolic position and centrality in this composition, this king and queen are upstaged by the two performers in the foreground. Their size is diminutive in comparison to the performers’. Figari’s visual attributes represent them as quiet and 195

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figure 8.6: Pedro Figari, Honeymoon (with Spanish Creole couple). Private collection.

restrained. Within this candombe context, they are elevated, decorated monarchs situated among saint figures on an altar complete with attendants. While these figures act as symbolic counterpoints to European and Spanish Creole authority figures, Figari’s conflicted attitudes are revealed in the way he limits their visual power by minimizing their size. Figari explicitly expresses respect toward black Uruguayans and contempt toward Spanish Creoles in two different paintings that beg comparison: Luna de miel / Honeymoon (n.d.) (fig. 8.6) and Luna de miel / Honeymoon (fig. 8.7). One represents a Spanish Creole couple and the other a black Uruguayan couple. Both sets of newlyweds are shown in domestic settings. The Spanish Creole couple is depicted in an elegant salon. The required marker of status, framed portraits of ancestors, adorns pastel walls between heavily draped doorways. Dominating the composition is a woman wearing a long, voluminous yellow peignoir. Her fashionably 196

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figure 8.7. Pedro Figari, Honeymoon. (Photo courtesy of Fernando Saavedra Faget)

upswept hair, held in place with an elaborate comb, frames a sour expression as she glares off into the opposite direction of the groom. Wearing a robe, her husband sits on a notoriously uncomfortable camelback sofa. His carefully parted hair is clearly displayed due to his bowed head. His thin, childlike body slumps with reluctance and defeat. Everything is in place here except for signs of an emotional connection or affection toward each other. Instead of walking toward her groom on this wedding night, the haughty woman proceeds like a swollen organic form dragging a tail toward a suggested bedroom off to the far left. Her man-child husband folds limply under her power while enduring the surveillance of the parental gaze. Figari suggests this ruling class duo is coupled only to meet the rigid social constraints of class. On the other hand, the black Uruguayan couple’s expressions of affection appear to be mutual. Their kiss and embrace fuse their bodies into 197

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one form in the center of the composition. Lively people in formal attire share in the bride and groom’s union, replacing the formal portraits of absent ancestors in the salon of the Spanish Creole couple. Albeit moderately furnished, the interior setting of the black couple hints at comfort and more. The vibrant red chaise longue prominently displayed in front of the couple, and the bed behind them, alludes to intimacy. This communal scene of shared enthusiasm is joyful and celebratory. Stylistic aspects of Figari’s paintings deeply rooted in French modernist aesthetics continue and deepen his challenge of French underlying ideas of cultural and moral superiority. He holds on to the form as it is retained in mosaics of discrete patches of color in Impressionistic and postImpressionistic styles, but he pushes this technique to a loose and flowing quality for his portrayals of black Uruguayans. Their bodies are lyrical and fluid shapes with soft edges that invite perusal for structure and clarity instead of for their freakish atavistic qualities. Their gestures and colorful forms provide the central dramatic arcs in the composition or become highly decorative patterns melding into larger patterned composition. This quality allows Figari to incorporate numerous black Uruguayans into his settings. The sheer numbers of blacks might appear threatening if depicted with greater clarity. Audacity is suggested through bold, contrasting color choices rather than the sharp, threatening angularity characterizing Colin’s portrayal of Baker and jazz musicians, with its restricted black, white, and red color palette. With this fluid style Figari fashions Uruguay’s blacks as assimilated in varying degrees into the social mores associated with Uruguay’s European-descended population. He situates class hierarchies through varied candombe settings that reveal brightly colored dwellings featuring luxuries like heavy drapery, textured rugs, and ancestral portraits that evoke middle and elite class, or the plainly attired groups celebrating in interior patio spaces dominated by monotone earth tones with the sky overhead of the working class. The human proportions and movements assign a degree of dignity to his portrayals of even the least wealthy black Uruguayans and, moreover, suggest a position of distinction from Parisian portrayals of black American, African, and Caribbean groups. In conclusion, Pedro Figari’s deceptively simple-looking paintings challenge European assumptions of cultural authority and lay bare the pretensions and hypocrisy of elite Uruguayan and Argentine Spanish Cre198

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ole culture with a melancholy subtlety that a slicker or more explicitly satirical approach could not achieve. He merged his commitment to social justice into a complicated alliance with his acknowledgment of the lived experiences of Uruguay’s black population to imagine a Uruguayan art that was grounded in Uruguay. Significantly, his assertion of black Uruguayan bodies in paintings makes this group known to those outside Uruguay. In recognizing his country’s black population by making it visible in more than 3,000 works, Figari situates himself as unique among early twentieth-century white Uruguayan men of his social class. But he is also a product of his time in situating himself in a dialectic of sorts, where his presence is ensured by the visualization and erasure of blacks. His contradictory attitudes toward black Uruguayans are revealed as he literally paints himself into the landscape as a hybridic expression of this new sociopolitical space he defines.

notes 1. In a decree signed on August 26, 1834, o∞cials stated they would “establish a fund of $10,000.00 to be reimbursed to Lucas Jose Obes for lodging, travel expenses and feeding of immigrants who voluntarily came from Europe.” See Juan José Arteaga and Ernesto Puiggrós, “Legislación y Politica Inmigratoria en el Uruguay: 1830–1939,” in Legislación y politica inmigración en el Cono Sur de America: Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay (Washington, D.C.: Organización de los Estados Americanos, 1987), 407. 2. Ibid., 418. 3. Ernesto Puiggros, Maria del Carmen Pintado, and Uruguay R. Vega Castillos, La inmigración española en el Uruguay (Mexico: Organización de los Estados Americanos y el Instituto Panamericano de Geografia de Historia, 1991), 5. 4. Leslie Rout Jr., The African Experience in Spanish America, 1502 to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 202. 5. Michael Johns observes, “The ruling class’ claim to be the authentic maker, owner, and caretaker of Argentine history resided on its relation to forefathers who, through heroic deeds, created modern Argentina” (“The Antinomies of Ruling Class Culture: The Buenos Aires Elite, 1880–1910,” Journal of Historical Sociology 6, no. 1 [1993]: 90). 6. Ibid. 7. Fernando Saavedra Faget, e-mail message to the author, March 1, 2004. 8. Ibid. 9. Figari cited in Luis Victor Anastasia, Figari, lucha continua (Montevideo: Instituto Italiano de Cultura, 1994), 248. 10. Indeed, Figari’s paintings indicate a hierarchy among Italian groups where

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Lyneise E. Williams northern Italians like himself were situated above southern Italians, the last and largest group to immigrate to Uruguay. 11. Pedro Figari, Cause célèbre, el crimen de la Calle Chana: Defensa del Alferez Enrique Almeida (Montevideo: Imprenta Artistica de Dornaleche y Reyes, 1897), 12. 12. Ibid., 10–11, 60. 13. Even more contemporary sources, such as Luis Victor Anastasia, Angel Kalenberg, and Julio Sanguinetti, Figari: Crónica y dibujos del caso Almeida (Montevideo: Acali Editorial, 1976), refer to her as “la morena inventora de embustes [the black woman who invented lies],” despite the fact that Figari provides her name and validates her testimony in his text. 14. Figari, Cause célèbre, 120, 121. 15. Marvin A. Lewis, Afro-Uruguayan Literature: Post-Colonial Perspectives (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Press, 2003), 29. 16. Pedro Figari, Art, tecnica, critica (Montevideo: Pena House, 1914), 8 (emphasis in original). 17. Ibid., 12. 18. Letter from Pedro Figari to Charles Lesca, Montevideo, May 19, 1914, Museo Histórica Nacional, folder 2642. 19. Carlos A. Hererra MacLean, Pedro Figari (Buenos Aires: Editorial Poseidon, 1913), 15–16. 20. Ibid. 21. Fernando Laroche, cited in Jacqueline Barnitz, The Martinfierristas and Argentine Art of the Twenties (New York: City University of New York, 1996), 186. 22. Letter from Figari to Alfredo R. Campos, Montevideo, August 10, 1917, Museo Nacional Histórico, folder 2462. 23. Jules Supervielle, “A Propos d’une exposition de Pedro Figari,” La revue de l’Amérique latine 2, no. 6 (December 1923): 289. 24. Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, Cubism and Culture (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001), 51. 25. Figari, Art, Tecnica, Critica, 9. 26. Militia Alfaro, Carnaval: Una historia social de Montevideo desde la perspective de la fiesta, pt. 2 (Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce, 1998), 142. 27. The earliest account using the term mentions candombe performances by blacks as part of Uruguay’s independence celebrations in 1830. The accounts were written by whites who observed blacks dancing among themselves in their living spaces formerly used as colonial slaveholding camps along the southern coast of Montevideo alongside the Rio de la Plata. See Luis Ferreira, Los Tambores del Candombe (Montevideo: Colihue-Sepe, 1997). 28. Abril Trigo, “Candombe and the Reterritorialization of Culture,” Callaloo 16, no. 3 (1993): 716. 29. Lauro Ayesterán, El folklore musical uruguayo (Montevideo: Arca, 1967), 145; Trigo, “Candombe and the Reterritorialization of Culture.” This characterization is

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pedro figari’s representations of black bodies designated by Mundo Afro, a contemporary Afro-Uruguayan organization as the first of candombe’s three phases of its historical development. During Figari’s early years, candombe was in its second phase, viewed as the most significant regarding national identity. “The second phase or that of Afro-Creole dances is precisely where the Candombe is formed as an Afro-Uruguayan expression, composed of a mixture of African dance and the group counter dance, and other choreographic elements assimilated from the white man. This candombe, which gestated at the end of the eighteenth century languished around 1870.” Candombe in the current and third phase, involving numerous changes since it emerged over a century ago, is the major attraction of carnival. It features the camparsa, consisting of a large battery of drummers and several characters from the earlier phases as well as new additions, like the Vedette, a voluptuous female dancer whose minimal garments accentuate her body. Cited in Lewis, Afro-Uruguayan Literature, 64. 30. Pedro Figari, “Los Negros,” El pais, August 10, 1927. 31. Ibid.

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Selected Bibliography

Avcioglŭ, Nebahat. “Stanislas I’s Kiosks and the Idea of Self-Representation.” Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (December 2003): 662–84. Beaulieu, Jill, and Mary Roberts, eds. Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. Beddington, Charles, ed. Canaletto in England: A Venetian Artist Abroad, 1746–1755. Exhibition catalog. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Benjamin, Roger. Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880–1930. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Blier, Suzanne. “Imagining Otherness in Ivory: African Portrayals of the Portuguese c. 1492.” Art Bulletin 75, no. 3 (September 1993): 375–97. Bohrer, Frederick N. Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Bowron, Edgar Peters, and Peter Björn Kerber. Pompeo Batoni: Prince of Painters in Eighteenth-Century Rome. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Brienen, Rebecca Parker. Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. Breskin, Isabel. “On the Periphery of a ‘Greater World’: John Singleton Copley’s ‘Turquerie’ Portraits.” Winterthur Portfolio 36, no. 2/3 (Summer–Autumn 2001): 97–123. Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). Casid, Jill. Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Cassidy-Geiger, Maureen. Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts, ca. 1710–63. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Chard, Chloe. Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Childs, Elizabeth C. “The Colonial Lens: Gauguin, Primitivism, and Photography in the Fin-de-Siècle.” In Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, edited by Lynda Jessup, 50–70. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

Selected Bibliography ———. “Eden’s Other: Gauguin and the Ethnographic Grotesque.” In Modern Art and the Grotesque, edited by Frances S. Connelly, 175–92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Coltman, Viccy. Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760–1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Coombes, Annie E. “The Recalcitrant Object: Culture Contact and the Question of Hybridity.” In Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iverson, 89–114. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Coutts, Howard. The Art of Ceramics: European Ceramic Design, 1500–1830. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Crouch, David, and Nina Lübbren, eds. Visual Culture and Tourism. New York: Berg, 2003. Emerson, Julie, Jennifer Chen, and Mimi Gardner Gates, eds. Porcelain Stories: From China to Europe. Exhibition catalog. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. Farago, Claire. Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Flam, Jack, ed. Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Fraser, Elisabeth. “Books, Prints, and Travel: Reading in the Gaps of the Orientalist Archive.” Art History 31, no. 3 (June 2008): 342–67. Gauguin, Paul. Paul Gauguin’s Intimate Journals. Foreword by Emil Gauguin. Translated by Van Wyck Brooks. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2007. Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Hackforth-Jones, Jocelyn, and Mary Roberts, eds. Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Hochstrasser, Julie Berger. Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. ———. “Wisselwerkingen Redux: Ceramics, Asia, and The Netherlands.” In Points of Contact: Crossing Cultural Boundaries, edited by Amy Golahny, 50–79. Lewisburg, Pa.: Associated University Presses, 2004. Impey, Oliver. Chinoiserie: The Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decoration. London: Oxford University Press, 1977. Israel, Jonathan. Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740. New York: Clarendon, 1989. Johns, Christopher M. S. “Portraiture and the Making of Cultural Identity: Pompeo Batoni’s ‘The Honourable Colonel William Gordon’ (1765–66) in Italy and North Britain.” Art History 27, no. 3 (June 2004): 382–411. Klooster, Wim. Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795. Leiden: KITLV (Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land en Volkenkunde / Dutch Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology) Press Caribbean Series 18, 1998.

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Selected Bibliography Kriz, Dian. Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Nieuhof, Johannes. Voyages and Travels to the East Indies, 1653–1670. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988. Nochlin, Linda. “The Imaginary Orient.” In The Politics of Vision: Essays on NineteenthCentury Art and Society, 33–59. New York: Harper and Row, 1989. Olmsted, Jennifer W. “The Sultan’s Authority: Delacroix, Painting, and Politics at the Salon of 1845.” Art Bulletin 91, no. 1 (March 2009): 83–106. Pagden, Anthony. “Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent.” In The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, 33–54. Cambridge and Washington, D.C.: Cambridge University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002. Porterfield, Todd. The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism, 1798–1836. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Postma, Johannes Menne. The Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600– 1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Roberts, Mary. Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978. Screech, Timon. The Lens within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan. 2nd ed. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. “Going Native.” Art in America, July 1989, 119–30. Stedman, John Gabriel. Stedman’s Surinam: Life in Eighteenth-Century Slave Society. 1796. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Stein, Perrin. “Amédee Van Loo’s Costume Turc: The French Sultana.” Art Bulletin 78, no. 3 (September 1996): 417–38. Whitehead, P. J. P., and M. Boeseman. A Portrait of Dutch 17th-century Brazil: Animals, Plants, and People by the Artists of Johan Maurits of Nassau. Amsterdam: NorthHolland Publishing Company, 1989. Wilton, Andrew, and Ilaria Bignamini. Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century. Exhibition catalog. London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1996. Wright, Beth, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Zafran, Eric M., ed. Gauguin’s “Nirvana”: Painters at Le Pouldu, 1889–90. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

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Notes on the Contributors claire farago is professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is author and contributing editor of thirteen books, including Re-Reading Leonardo: The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550-1900 (2009); Leonardo da Vinci and the Ethics of Style (2008); the award-winning Transforming Images: New Mexican Santos in-between Worlds (2006); Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (2004); Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History (2003); The Codex Leicester (1996); Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America (1995); and the award-winning Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone: A Critical Interpretation (1992). She is also contributing editor of a five-volume series dealing with aspects of scholarship on Leonardo da Vinci ranging from biography to his artistic career, theory, and science and technology (1999). elisabeth a. fraser is associate professor at the University of South Florida. She published Delacroix, Art and Patrimony in Post-Revolutionary France in 2004, as well as articles appearing in French Historical Studies, Oxford Art Journal, and Art History, among others. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, the Bibliographic Society (UK), and the German Academic Exchange Service. In 2007–8 she was a fellow at the Columbia University Institute for Scholars, Paris. She is currently completing a book, “Mediterranean Encounters: Artists and Other Travelers in and around the Ottoman Empire, 1780–1850.” julie hochstrasser is associate professor at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History. Specializing in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, she has been awarded fellowships from Fulbright, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts in Washington, D.C., and the American Council of Learned Societies (Burkhardt Fellow). Her book Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age was published by Yale University Press in 2007, and a second book on still life is forthcoming. Her essays on Dutch art have appeared in numerous international anthologies and exhibition catalogs. For her current multimedia project, “The Dutch in the World,” she has traveled to key sites of early modern Dutch trade throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas,

Notes on the Contributors investigating arts of interculturation from the seventeenth century through the present day. christopher m. s. johns is Norman and Roselea Goldberg Professor of History of Art at Vanderbilt University. He is also a fellow and past resident in art history at the American Academy in Rome. Professor Johns is the author of two books, Antonio Canova and the Politics of Patronage in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe (1998), which was a finalist for the prestigious Charles Rufus Morey Prize, and Papal Art and Cultural Politics: Rome in the Age of Clement XI (1993). He was also a major contributor to the monumental catalog that accompanied the pathbreaking exhibit of 2000, Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century, and author of many essays published both in the United States and abroad. His current book project is titled “The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment.” carol mavor is professor of art history and visual studies at the University of Manchester. She has published three books: Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (1995); Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (1999); and Reading Boyishly: J. M. Barrie, Roland Barthes, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust and D. W. Winnicott (2007), the latter of which was named by Turner Prize–winner Grayson Perry as his “Book of the Year” in London’s Observer. Mavor is currently completing an academic book titled “Black and Blue” and a novel titled “FULL.” Her latest publications have been on the adolescent as captured by the photographer Bernard Faucon, the impossibility of representation in the film Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais and Duras), the meaning of blackness in Chris Marker’s Sans soleil, and eating and forgetting in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. mary d. sheriff is W. R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a specialist in eighteenth-century French art and culture. Her publications include J. H. Fragonard: Art and Eroticism (1990); The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (1996); and Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France (2004). From 1993 to 1998 she served as coeditor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Studies. She is currently at work on a new book, “Enchanted Islands: Picturing the Allure of Conquest in Eighteenth-Century France,” and a coauthored volume with Melissa Hyde titled “Women in French Art: Rococo to Romanticism,” which has won the Mellor Prize from the National Museum of Women in the Arts. lyneise e. williams received her Ph.D. in the history of art from Yale University in 2004. Her field of research is late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Latin American art and visual culture. She is especially concerned with the representations, meanings, and performances of blackness and nationality in Latin America and the

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Notes on the Contributors Spanish Caribbean. Williams considers depictions of race in the broadest sense to include the cultural experience of multiple ethnicities in Latin America and the African diaspora. Williams is currently completing a manuscript that explores the portrayals and self-representations of black Latinos in 1920s and 1930s Paris.

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Index Acosta, Felizarda, 177, 180–83, 188–89 Africa, 9, 13, 75, 93, 153, 166, 172, 183; African descendants, 177; African diaspora, 177; African Portuguese ivories, 13–14, 20–23, 36–37; Africans in Dutch art, 59–60, 63; AfroUruguayans, 9, 182, 184; allegory of, 74 (ill.), 75, 92, 93 (ill.); North Africa, 10–11, 124–27, 137, 139–40, 143–44. See also Algeria; Morocco; Tangier Albertus Magnus, 33 Algeria, 124, 135, 140, 144–46 Almeida, Alferez Enrique, 180–83 Amerindians: and the Mass of St. Gregory, 27–29, 30–33, 36, plate 1; rights and nature of, 24–26 Antiquities, collecting of, 76, 79, 84 representation of: Apollo Belvedere, 78 Belvedere Antinöus, 78 Laocoön, 78 Roma, 84 Sleeping Ariadne, 78 Vatican Cleopatra, 78, 86 Antliff, Mark, 186 Antonine, Saint, 33; Summa theologica, 33 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 33 Aristotle, 25–26, 33; De memoria, 33; on slavery, 25–26 Arms of Christ: in iconography of Mass

of St. Gregory, 24, plate 1; in Nahuatl pictograms, 29–10 Art: as commodity, 76–77, 88–89; distinction between high and decorative, 5–6; European ideals of, 17–18, 20, 23–24; naïf, 184–88; story of European art, 1–5 Atomic testing in the Pacific, 172; Fangataufa and Muroroa, 172 Avcioglŭ, Nebahat, 101 Aved, Joseph, 114; Portrait of Mehemet Saïd Pacham Bey de Roumélie, Ottoman Sultan, Mahmoud Ist at Versailles, 114, 115 (ill.) Aztec, 8, 24–26, 30, 32 Baartman, Sarah (Hottentot Venus), 189, 190 (ill.) Baker, Josephine, 187, 189, 198, plate 11 Balint, Michael, 155 Balthazar/Benedict, Saint, 192–93 Barradas, Rafael, 183–84 Barrie, J. M., 167; Neverland, 167 Batoni, Pompeo, 9, 78–86; portrait of Thomas Coke, 84–86, 85 (ill.); portrait of Thomas Dundas, 78–79; portrait of William Gordon, 81–84, 83 (ill.) Benchimol, Abraham, 135 Benedict XIV, Pope, 89 Benjamin, Roger, 146

Index Bernard, Émile, 153, 163 Bhabha, Homi, 18 Black and blue, metaphor of, 153, 155–58, 163–65, 170–73; Prussian blue, 153, 163 Blier, Suzanne, 9, 20, 22 Bosse, Henry, 166 Boswell, James, 82 Brazil, 9; Dutch in, 44, 49–58 Bredero, Gerbrand Adriaensz, 56; Moortje, 56 Brennard, Ricardo, 55 Brittany, 156, 159–68 Canaletto, Antonio, 87–88; Old Walton Bridge, 88; View of the Piazza San Marco, 87; Whitehall and the Privy Garden from Richmond House, 88 Candombe, 188–94 Carlyle, Thomas, 168; Sartor Resartus, 168 Carnival, 101, 114 Cats, Jacob, 44 Cendrars, Blaise, 188 Chassériau, Théodore, 132–35, 145; Jewish Woman of Algiers Seated on the Ground, 132–35, 134 (ill.) Chénier, Louis de, 139 Chinoiserie, 10, 46. See also Porcelain Churches of Olinda, A Guide to the, 50 Cicero, 33 Clement XII, Pope, 89 Cloisonné technique, 162–63 Coffee, 6; pope’s coffeehouse (Caffeaus), 89 Coke, Thomas, 84–86 Colin, Paul, 183, 187, 189–90, 198; Bal Nègre poster, 183, plate 11 colonialism, 14–15, 145 Comisión Nacional de Belles Artes, Buenos Aires, 185 commerce: commercial exchange, 17, 18,

44, 59, 88, 90; commodities, 75–77; separation of art from, 5–7 The Conservation: Organ of the Society of Color, 182 Constantinople, 98–100, 108–10, 113–19 passim; suburbs of Pera and Galata, 98, 109 Continents, allegories of, 73–75 Courbet, Gustave, 159; Bonjour Monsieur Courbet! 159 Creole, 178–85, 193–96, 198–99 Cubism, 185, 187 Curaçao, Dutch in, 57–58 Curiosities, 7–8; cabinet of curiosity, 8 Defoe, Daniel, 167; Robinson Crusoe, 167 Delacroix, Eugène, 9, 11–12, 15, 123–46; Albums of North Africa and Spain, plate 8; Aspasie, 132, 133 (ill.); Death of Sardanapalus, 11; Jewish Bride of Tangier, 135, 136 (ill.); Landscape between Tangiers and Meknès, plate 7; Moroccan sketchbook of, 124–46, 128 (ill.), 130 (ill.), 142 (ill.), 143 (ill.); Pauline Villot in Algerian Costume, 135; Seated North African Man, 131, 131 (ill.); tours of in western France, 126; Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 135 Deleuze, Gilles, 170 Dening, Greg, 13 Derrida, Jacques, 18 Description de l’Egypt, 123, 125 (ill.) Display of artworks as tourist spectacle, 79–81 Dreams, 153–57, 165, 170, 173 Dundas, Thomas, 78–79 Dutch Republic, 43–44, 49, 53, 62, 64 Eckhout, Albert, 50, 55, 58–59 Egypt, 123–24, 129; Description of Egypt, 123; egyptomanie, 10

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Index Eurocentrism, 4,7, 11–12, 43 Europe, idea of, 2–3; Eastern Europe, idea of, 113, 118 Exotic, exoticism, 7–8, 10, 75, 82, 87–88, 90; exotic objects, 17–18, 21–22, 24, 27. See also Curiosities; Museums, ethnographic Extra-European, concept of, 17–19 Faget, Fernando Saavedra, 177, 180, 183, 199; Arte, estetica, ideal, 183 Featherwork, 8, 23–27, 30–32; amanteca (mosaic maker) 24–25; amantecayotl (feather mosaic), 23, 32 Ferriol, Charles de, 114; Recueil de cent estampes représentant differents nations du Levant tirés sur les tableaux peints d’après nature en 1707 et 1708 par les ordres de M. de Ferriol Ambassadeur . . . et gravés en 1712 et 1713 par les soins de Mr. Le Hay, 114 Figari, Pedro, 9, 15, 177–99; Candombe (ca. 1927), 188, plate 12; Candombe (ca. 1925), 189, 191 (ill.), 194–95; Funeral Procession through the Old Market, 184; Luna de miel (Honeymoon [with Spanish Creole couple]), 196–98, 196 (ill.); Luna de miel (Honeymoon), 196–98, 197 (ill.); Nostalgias de Candombe, 190–92, 192 (ill.); Old Market, 184–85; Visite al gobernador (Visit to the Governor), 193–96, 194 (ill.) Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor, 98, 117 Franciscans, 23–30 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 173 Freud, Sigmund, 155, 165, 173; notion of the oceanic (from Civilization and Its Discontents), 155; “The Question of Lay Analysis,” 166 Fuga, Ferdinando, 89 Futurism, 187 Fyvie Castle, 81, 84

Gainsborough, Thomas, 78, 86; Blue Boy, 86 Galería Müller, 185 Galerie Drouet, 186 Gante, Pedro de, 23, 25, 29, 32 Gates, Henry Louis, 18 Garcés, Julián, 26 Gauguin, Paul, 7, 9, 14–15; Avant et après, 166; La belle angèle, 163; The Black Rocks, 165; Bonjour M. Gauguin, 159; Clovis Asleep, 158, plate 10; Contes barbares (Primitive Tales), 173; Girl Guarding Cows, 164, 164 (ill.); The Green Christ, 164; Interior, Rue Carcel, 160, 161 (ill.); Jug in the Form of a Head, 157, 158 (ill.); The Loss of Virginity, 173; Manao Tupapau (Spirit of the Dead Watching), 153, 154 (ill.), 157–58, 173; Les Misérables, 164; Nature morte à l’estampe japonaise, 157; Nevermore, O Tahiti, 163; Nirvana, 162; La petite rêve (Little Girl Dreaming), 156, 173, plate 9; Portrait of Meyer de Haan by Lamplight, 168; sabots, 155, 160, 161 (ill.), 173; Self-Portrait with Halo, 164; Sweet Dreams, 156–58, 160; Vahine no te tiare (Woman with a Flower), 170, 171 (ill.); Vision after the Sermon, 162; Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 163; The Yellow Christ, 164 Geneva, 5, 97–98, 101–2, 108, 110, 113, 116, 118 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 11 Gibraltar, 139–40 Gleyre, Charles, 132 Globalization, 17, 90 Gogh, Vincent van, 159, 163, 167 Golden age of Holland, 43–44, 62 Gordon, William, 81 Grand Tour, 6–7, 75–88, 98 Gregorian Mass, 24–27, 30–32

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Index Grotesque (grotteschi), 22–23 Gruzinski, Serge, 14 Guide bleu (Blue Guide), 156, 165 Guide noir (Black Guide), 156, 165 Hiroshima, 172 Hoogstraten, Samuel van, 59–60 Hottentot Venus (Sarah Baartman), 189, 190 (ill.) Huanitzin, Don Diego de Alvarado, 24–25 Hybridity, 2, 19, 29–30, 36, 199 Imagination, 19–25 Imperialism, 123, 126 Ivories, 13–14, 20–23, 21 (ill.), 36–37 Japonisme, 156, 162 Jassy (Moldavia), 98, 110 Jingdezhen, 45–46 Jörg, C. J. A., 46 Kalf, Willem, 44, 48, 56, 63; Still Life with a Nautilus Cup and Other Objects, 44–46, 63, plate 2 Kändler, Johann Joachim, 90, 93; Allegory of Africa, 92–93, 92 (ill.); Judgment of Paris, 90 Kelly, Joan, 18; double vision, 18 Klein, Yves, 172 Klooster, Wim, 58 Kroeber, Alfred, 13, 48 Kunstkammer, 18, 75. See also Wunderkammer; Curiosities; Exotic, exoticism; Museums, ethnographic Lach, Donald F., 3–4; Asia in the Making of Europe, 3–4 La Fontaine, tales of, 172 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 26 Le Blanc, Jean-Bernard, abbé, 101–2 Leighton, Patricia, 186

Le Pouldu, 163, 165, 167 Lesca, Charles, 183 Leszczynski, Stanislas, 101 Liotard, Jean-Etienne, 97–119; beard of, 100, 102, 106–7, 110, 112, 116–17; as chianlit, 101–2; inscription on self-portrait, 102–4, 107–10, 117; Portrait of Constantin Mavrocordato, Prince of Moldavia, 112, 112 (ill.); Portrait of Louise-Florence-Petronille de Tardieu d’Esclavelle, Mme d’Epinay, 99, 99 (ill.); Portrait of Richard Pococke, 110, 111 (ill.); portrait of Simon Luttrell, 99; Self-Portrait as the Turkish Painter, 91–119, plate 6; surnommé (nicknamed) 101, 108–10, 117; as the Turkish painter, 5, 97, 100, 102, 109–10, 117–18 Lithography, 127, 137 Lowenthal, David, 169; notion of the past as a foreign country, 168–69 Lumière brothers, 154 Luxury goods, 5, 7–8. See also Art; Commerce Manet, Edouard, 157; Masked Ball, 157 Marcgraf, Georg, 49 Maria Theresia of Austria, Empress, 98, 118 Marquesas, 153–54, 168 Martin, Agnes, 170; The Islands, 170 Martinenche, Ernest, 188–89 Masquerade, 86, 102, 114, 116–18 Massé, Jean, 97 Mass of St. Gregory: Christ as man of sorrows, 30; doctrine of transubstantiation, 27, 30, 32; Mass of St. Gregory, 23–29, plate 1 Matisse, Henri, 187–88 Maugham, W. Somerset, 160–62; The Moon and Sixpence, 160–62 Maurits, Johan, 49–51, 53, 56, 58–59

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Index Mavrocordato, Constantin, 98, 112 Meckenem, Israel van, 26; Mass of St. Gregory, 28 (ill.) Meknès, 124, 130, 141–44 Melancholia, 162 Memory, 33, 36 Mendoza, Don Antonio de, 24 Merian, Maria Sybilla, 60–61 Mexico, 8, 17, 23–26, 30, 155 Mexico City: Basilica de Guadalupe, 30; San José de los Naturales, 23–24, 33; Tenochtitlan/Mexico City, 24 Meyer de Haan, Jacob, 162, 168, 173 Milton, John, 168; Paradise Lost (French translation), 168 Minaya, Bernardino de, 26 Miot, Paul-Emile, 153; The Royal Family of Vahitao, Marquesas Islands, 153 Miro, Juan, 154, 156; Photo, 154 Moctezuma, 24 Modernism, 177, 184 Moldavia, 98, 101, 112–13, 116–17 Montevideo, 178–79, 181–88, 199 More, Thomas, 167; Utopia, 167 Mornay, Charles de, 139–40 Morocco, 9–12, 124–46 passim Morris, William, 166–67; News from Nowhere, 166–67 Morrison, Toni, 170; The Bluest Eye, 170 Mulay, Abd er Rahman, 139–40 Multiculturalism, 24, 37 Museums, 1, 7–8, 79–81; ethnographic, 7–8 Nahuatl: pictograms, 30–32; speakers, 24, 30; syllabary, 30, 36 Naples, 87, 89, 74, 75; Capodimonte, 89 Napoleon, 123–24, 129 National identity, Italian, 77–79 Neumann, Balthasar, 73 New Holland, 49, 57, 60 Nieuhof, Johan, 52–53

Nirvana, 156, 160, 162 Nochlin, Linda, 11; “The Imaginary Orient,” 11 Nostalgia, 157, 162–63, 190 Olinda, 49–52, 55, 63 Oranje, Willem van, 53 Orientalism, 11, 123, 126 Ossian, 82 Osterley Park, 79 Ottomans, 5–6, 10–11, 97–98, 101–2, 108–9, 114, 116–19, 124, 132, 144 Pagden, Anthony, 3 Paleotti, Gabriele, 22 Panini, Gianpaolo, 81, 87; Imaginary Gallery with Views of Ancient Rome, 81; Imaginary Gallery with Views of Modern Rome, 81; View of the Piazza del Popolo, Rome, 87, plate 5 Paris, 3, 6, 13, 15, 16, 97–98, 101–2, 108, 114, 119, 127, 135, 139, 146, 159–60, 167–69, 177–79, 184–88, 193; Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, 97, 101 Paul III, Pope, 24–25, 27, 33; Sublimis Deus, 25, 33 Pernambuco, 49, 55–56 Picasso, Pablo, 7, 9, 187–88 Pilgrim, 155–56, 159–60, 162; Pilgrim’s Progress, 159 Pius VI, Pope, 89 Pococke, Richard, 110, 114; A Description of the East and Some Other Countries, 114; portrait of by Liotard, 110, 111 (ill.) Porcelain, 1, 5–8, 75–76, 88, 90; Chinese export ware, 45–48, 47 (ill.); Delftware, 7, 47 (ill.), 48, 49 (ill.), 63, 90; Meissen, 46, 88, 90, 91 (ill.); Ming dynasty porcelain, 7, 8, 10, 45–46; Q’ing dynasty porcelain, 46, 90, ill. 91; Sèvres, 89

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Index Portugal, 45, 49–53, 56–58 Post, Frans, 9, 50–59 passim, 63; The Sugarmill, 56, 57 (ill.); View of Olinda, plate 3 Pratt, Mary Louise, 4, 12, 13, 140; “anti-conquest,” 140; Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 4; transculturation, 4, 12–13, 36 Primitive, 8, 14, 15, 156, 163, 177, 186–87 Primitivism, 3, 7, 9, 15 Pronk, Cornelis, 48 Pronkstilleven (rich display), 44 Protestant and Catholic Europe, 2, 48, 75–76, 98, 109; Calvinism, 108–9; Huguenots in, 97, 108 Quentin de La Tour, Maurice, 101–2 Recife, 51–52, 55, 57–58 Renaissance, 1, 5, 7–8, 13–15, 17–19, 24 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 145–46; Stairway in Algiers, 145 (ill.) Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 78 Rigaud, Hyacinthe, 104–8, 112; SelfPortrait, 104–8, 105 (ill.), 112 Ripa, Cesare, 75; Iconologia, 75 Rome, 3, 6, 9, 27, 76–89 passim, 98, 114, 127; Palazzo del Quirinale gardens, 89 Rosenthal, Nan, 172 Ruisdael, Jacob van, 53; Landscape with the Ruins of Castle Egmond, 53, 54 (ill.) Said, Edward, 11, 18, 123, 126 Sapi, 19, 23, 36 Schmalkalden, Caspar, 51, 53–54 Schuffenecker, Emil, 160 Scotland, 81–84; Highlands, 82–84 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 26 Slavery, 25–26, 56–63, 180 Smith, Joseph, 88 Solnit, Rebecca, 156, 167–68; A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 168

Sommavilla, Gogofredo, 184, 187 Sonoy, Diderick, 53 South Pacific, 166, 173 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 18 Spruit, Ruud, 56 Stanley, H. M., 166; Through the Dark Continent, 166 Stedman, John Gabriel, 62 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 167; Treasure Island, 167 Still life painting, 7, 44, 59, 63 Stolberg, Louise, countess of Albany, 84–86 Streek, Jurriaen van, 60; Moor with Nautilus Goblet, Porcelain, and Fruit, 59–60, 60 (ill.) Stuart, Charles Edward, 84–86 Sugar production, 43–44, 48–49, 56, 58, 60–61 Supervielle, Jules, 186 Suriname, 60–62 Syon House, 79 Tahiti, 14, 154–56, 162, 167, 170 Tangier, 124, 129, 135, 137, 143, 144 Tapisserie des Indes, 55 Taylor, Baron, 127, 130; Voyages pittoresques, 129–30, 137; Vue générale de la Ville de Rouen, prisé de clocher de Darnétal, 129 (ill.) Tempel, Abraham van, 59–61; Portrait of the seacaptain Jan van Amstel and his wife Anna Boxhoorn, 61 (ill.) Thomas, Nicolas, 22 Tiepolo, Giambattista, 73–75; The Four Continents, Würzburg, 73–75, 74 (ill.) Tlacuilos (scribes), 24 Togovnick, Marianna, 138 Townley, Charles, 80 Turban, 110, 113–14 Turc, 109 Turquerie, 10–11, 100–102

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Index Uffizi, Florence: gallery of self-portraits, 98, 102, 117–18; Tribune Gallery, 79–80 Uruguay, 177–99; black population of, 177–79, 185, 199; policies of on immigration, 178–79 Utopia, 14, 17, 24, 155, 159, 165–67, 170 Valadés, Diego, 29; De rhetorica christiana, 29, 31 (ill.), 34, 35 Valkenburg, Dirk, 61 Van Dyck, Antony, 86; Portrait of James Stuart, 86 Van Kley, Edwin J. 3–4; Asia in the Making of Europe, 3–4 Vanmour, Jean-Baptiste, 116; Reception of a French Ambassador at Constantinople, 116 Venice, 76–77, 87–88, 102 Viale, Pedro Blanes, 183–84; Remembering the Island of Madeira, 183 Vienna, 97–98, 101–2, 110, 117–18 Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company, or VOC), 45, 46, 64

Voltaire, 118 Wagener, Zacharias, 51, 58; Slave Market in the Jodenstraat in Mauritsstad, Brazil, 58–59, 59 (ill.); Thierbuch (Animal Book), 58 Walker, Kara, 166 Walpole, Horace, 86 West-Indische Compagnie (Dutch West Indian Company, or WIC), 49, 51, 56–58 Whiteness, concept of, 178–80, 195 Wunderkammer, 18–19, 24. See also Kunstkammer; Curiosities; Museums, ethnographic Würzburg, Residenz, 73–74 Zanden, Jan Luiten van, 62 Zoffany, Johann, 79–80; Charles Townley’s Library at Seven Park Street, Westminster, 80, plate 4; Tribune Gallery of the Uffizi with British Visitors, 79–80

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plate 1. Mass of St.€Gregory. Feather mosaic on wood, 1539. Convent School of Pedro de Gante, San Jose de los Naturales, Mexico City. Musée des Jacobins, Auch, France.

plate 2. Willem Kalf, Still Life with a Nautilus Cup and Other Objects. Oil on canvas, 1662. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid. ©Â€Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

plate 3. (Above) Frans Post, View of Olinda. Oil on canvas, 1662. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. plate 4. (Left) Johann Zoffany, Charles Townley’s Library at Seven Park Street, Westminster. Oil on canvas, 1781–83. Townley Hall Art Gallery and Museums, Burnley Borough Council. (Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N.Y.)

plate 5. Gianpaolo Panini, View of the Piazza del Popolo, Rome. Oil on canvas, 1741. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo. (Acquired through the generosity of an �anonymous donor, F79-3. Photography by Jamison Miller.)

plate 6. Jean-Etienne Liotard, Self-Portrait as the Turkish Painter. Pastel on paper, 1744. Uffizi, Florence, Italy. (Photo: Scala/Art Resource, N.Y.)

plate 7. Eugène Delacroix, Landscape between Tangiers and Meknès. Watercolor, light gouache highlights, traces of graphite, 1832. rf 4771. Louvre, Paris, France (photo by Michele Bellot). (Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y.)

plate 8. Eugène Delacroix, Albums of North Africa and Spain. Watercolor, pen and brown ink, 1832. RF 1712bis, f.23v–24r. Louvre, Paris, France (photo by Michele Bellot). (Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y.)

plate 9. Paul Gauguin, La petite rêve (Little Girl Dreaming). Oil on canvas, 1881. Ordrupgaard Collection, Copenhagen. (Photo by Pernille Klemp)

plate 10. Paul Gauguin, Clovis Asleep. 1884. Private collection.

plate 11. (Left) Paul Colin, Revue Negre au Musie-hall des Champs Elysees. Poster from the Negro Review, 1925. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France. (Photo: Snark/Art Resource, N.Y.) plate 12. (Below) Pedro Figari, Candombe (Women in red dresses, men in frock coats and spats). Private collection.