In seventeenth-century Cartagena de Indias, a portcity in today's Colombia, enslaved Africans recently disembarked from the Middle Passage faced a Jesuit-designed multisensory catechesis. The process involved listening to translations of the Christian doctrine delivered by African interpreter-catechists enslaved by the Jesuits, often in conjunction with images. Hell featured prominently in this oral and visual catechesis. This essay analyses the violent confrontation between infernal imagery and survivors of the Middle Passage from regions in and around Kongo and Angola by unfolding a strategically oblique approach to the lacunar, biased records about this critical moment. It examines the vast Atlantic linguistic, spiritual, and visual ramifications of the catechesis to highlight the affective response of enslaved men and women to their captivity and displacement as subjects in history, viewers of works of art, and actors in the dramatic events of enslavement. It brings new, documented, historically situated, and culturally elucidated insights to the study of the transatlantic slave trade.
{"title":"From Hell to Hell: Central Africans and Catholic Visual Catechesis in the Early Modern Atlantic Slave Trade","authors":"Larissa Brewer-García, Cécile Fromont","doi":"10.1111/1467-8365.12753","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12753","url":null,"abstract":"In seventeenth-century Cartagena de Indias, a portcity in today's Colombia, enslaved Africans recently disembarked from the Middle Passage faced a Jesuit-designed multisensory catechesis. The process involved listening to translations of the Christian doctrine delivered by African interpreter-catechists enslaved by the Jesuits, often in conjunction with images. Hell featured prominently in this oral and visual catechesis. This essay analyses the violent confrontation between infernal imagery and survivors of the Middle Passage from regions in and around Kongo and Angola by unfolding a strategically oblique approach to the lacunar, biased records about this critical moment. It examines the vast Atlantic linguistic, spiritual, and visual ramifications of the catechesis to highlight the affective response of enslaved men and women to their captivity and displacement as subjects in history, viewers of works of art, and actors in the dramatic events of enslavement. It brings new, documented, historically situated, and culturally elucidated insights to the study of the transatlantic slave trade.","PeriodicalId":8456,"journal":{"name":"Art History","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139910089","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay focuses on a British-made coin commissioned in 1811 by the first king of the northern part of the newly independent Haiti, Henry Christophe (1767–1820). The coin potently encapsulates the Kingdom of Hayti's central claims of racial equality, sovereignty and international recognition articulated in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. Here it is considered as the product of early nineteenth-century Anglo-Haitian relations, as an expression of Christophe's kingly ambitions, and as a striking entrant into the wider field of circum-Atlantic numismatics that can help illuminate the paradoxes of the postrevolutionary kingdom's aesthetic regime. Christophe's numismatic image both depends upon and overwrites conventional forms and meanings of European coins, medals, and cameos. At the same time, it demands interpretation in relation to distinctively Caribbean interpretations of Black kingship.
{"title":"The Aesthetics of Postrevolutionary Haiti: Currency, Kingship, and Circum-Atlantic Numismatics","authors":"Esther Chadwick","doi":"10.1111/1467-8365.12758","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12758","url":null,"abstract":"This essay focuses on a British-made coin commissioned in 1811 by the first king of the northern part of the newly independent Haiti, Henry Christophe (1767–1820). The coin potently encapsulates the Kingdom of Hayti's central claims of racial equality, sovereignty and international recognition articulated in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. Here it is considered as the product of early nineteenth-century Anglo-Haitian relations, as an expression of Christophe's kingly ambitions, and as a striking entrant into the wider field of circum-Atlantic numismatics that can help illuminate the paradoxes of the postrevolutionary kingdom's aesthetic regime. Christophe's numismatic image both depends upon and overwrites conventional forms and meanings of European coins, medals, and cameos. At the same time, it demands interpretation in relation to distinctively Caribbean interpretations of Black kingship.","PeriodicalId":8456,"journal":{"name":"Art History","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139910544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The essay focuses on the material culture of the signares, that is, the objects and representations of an exceptional Eurafrican female community in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, composed of mixed-race women from Saint-Louis du Sénégal and the island of Gorée. Through their matrimonial alliances with European merchants, signares formed a commercial and political elite. The essay identifies the transcultural technique of self-fashioning which they pursued so that they would be identified as powerful women. It addresses their practices as a way of discussing contemporary European theories of ornament, juxtaposing Caty Louet's and Anna Colas's invention in the domains of fabrics, headdresses and architecture with Gottfried Semper's and Charles Blanc's grammars of adornment. In a renewed and broadened conception of Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic, the essay confronts theories of art in this vast geographical space as they were embedded – and can be unveiled – in texts as much as in practices.
{"title":"The Self-Fashioning of the Signares: A Case for Decentring Artistic Modernity","authors":"Anne Lafont","doi":"10.1111/1467-8365.12759","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12759","url":null,"abstract":"The essay focuses on the material culture of the <i>signare</i>s, that is, the objects and representations of an exceptional Eurafrican female community in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, composed of mixed-race women from Saint-Louis du Sénégal and the island of Gorée. Through their matrimonial alliances with European merchants, <i>signare</i>s formed a commercial and political elite. The essay identifies the transcultural technique of self-fashioning which they pursued so that they would be identified as powerful women. It addresses their practices as a way of discussing contemporary European theories of ornament, juxtaposing Caty Louet's and Anna Colas's invention in the domains of fabrics, headdresses and architecture with Gottfried Semper's and Charles Blanc's grammars of adornment. In a renewed and broadened conception of Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic, the essay confronts theories of art in this vast geographical space as they were embedded – and can be unveiled – in texts as much as in practices.","PeriodicalId":8456,"journal":{"name":"Art History","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139910588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Published in 1579 in Perugia, Diego Valadés's Rhetorica christiana is best known today as the first illustrated publication to show evangelisation efforts in the Americas to audiences across the Atlantic. Yet too often the Rhetorica's status in the history of art is that of exotica, a book seen as rare and valuable due to its American subject matter and its presumed mestizo authorship. This essay argues that these persistent miscategorisations exemplify a systemic failure to look beyond the images' representational content and account for the book's specific production history. The etched illustration programme of the Rhetorica not only details European proselytising efforts and Indigenous customs, but the book's facture also repositions colonial experience as central to artistic ambition and innovation in Europe, prompting a reassessment of print cultures of the early modern transatlantic world.
{"title":"Foul Biting, or Diego Valadés and the Medium of Print","authors":"Stephanie Porras","doi":"10.1111/1467-8365.12757","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12757","url":null,"abstract":"Published in 1579 in Perugia, Diego Valadés's <i>Rhetorica christiana</i> is best known today as the first illustrated publication to show evangelisation efforts in the Americas to audiences across the Atlantic. Yet too often the <i>Rhetorica</i>'s status in the history of art is that of <i>exotica</i>, a book seen as rare and valuable due to its American subject matter and its presumed <i>mestizo</i> authorship. This essay argues that these persistent miscategorisations exemplify a systemic failure to look beyond the images' representational content and account for the book's specific production history. The etched illustration programme of the <i>Rhetorica</i> not only details European proselytising efforts and Indigenous customs, but the book's facture also repositions colonial experience as central to artistic ambition and innovation in Europe, prompting a reassessment of print cultures of the early modern transatlantic world.","PeriodicalId":8456,"journal":{"name":"Art History","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139910387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A delftware dish, made in London between approximately 1670 and 1690, depicts the arms of the Worshipful Company of Tobacco Pipe Makers. The three Black women who gaze out from the dish can be viewed as representations of the enslaved women whose agricultural and reproductive labour enabled the transatlantic tobacco trade. The white, male Pipe Makers would have viewed the dish through the symbolic languages of heraldry and racialised and gendered Black and Indigenous figures who populated tobacco advertising and the English racial imagination. This essay examines the dish's entangled material and representational contexts in the late seventeenth century and asks: what do the women on the dish demand from their viewers? And how should twenty-first-century viewers meet their gaze? The coat of arms of the Tobacco Pipe Makers endures amidst present-day struggles with the visual legacies of slavery. Yet this symbol – and the seventeenth-century dish that bears its image – also offers possibilities of liberation.
{"title":"The Metamorphosis of Tobacco: The Tobacco Pipe Makers' Arms","authors":"Carla Cevasco","doi":"10.1111/1467-8365.12754","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12754","url":null,"abstract":"A delftware dish, made in London between approximately 1670 and 1690, depicts the arms of the Worshipful Company of Tobacco Pipe Makers. The three Black women who gaze out from the dish can be viewed as representations of the enslaved women whose agricultural and reproductive labour enabled the transatlantic tobacco trade. The white, male Pipe Makers would have viewed the dish through the symbolic languages of heraldry and racialised and gendered Black and Indigenous figures who populated tobacco advertising and the English racial imagination. This essay examines the dish's entangled material and representational contexts in the late seventeenth century and asks: what do the women on the dish demand from their viewers? And how should twenty-first-century viewers meet their gaze? The coat of arms of the Tobacco Pipe Makers endures amidst present-day struggles with the visual legacies of slavery. Yet this symbol – and the seventeenth-century dish that bears its image – also offers possibilities of liberation.","PeriodicalId":8456,"journal":{"name":"Art History","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139910097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Moods, Monsoons, and the Art of Place-Making","authors":"Holly Shaffer","doi":"10.1111/1467-8365.12749","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12749","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":8456,"journal":{"name":"Art History","volume":"46 4","pages":"827-832"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138578084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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