European Art and the Wider World 1350–1550

By Manchester University Press

European art and the wider world 1350–1550 considers select examples of European art and material culture through the lens of global connections. Through close examination of a wide array of objects such as altarpieces, ceramics and featherwork, it explores European visual culture during the 'age of exploration'. It considers the reception in Europe of objects from Asia, America and Africa and examines works of art as an insight into cultural encounter and conflict in a wide variety of contexts, including Venice, Al-Andalus and Goa. The book is animated by art-historical approaches that have recently transformed the study of the art of this era. It re-casts works that have long featured in a history of a quintessentially Western 'Renaissance' in the light of travel, trade and cultural encounters, and broadens the traditional focus of interest to include material culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781526122919

Book preview

Preface

This is the first of four books in the series Art and its Global Histories, which together form the main texts of an Open University Level 3 module of the same name. Each book is also designed to be read independently by the general reader. The series as a whole offers an accessible introduction to the ways in which the history of Western art from the fourteenth century to the present day has been bound up with cross-cultural exchanges and global forces.

Each book in the series explores a distinct period of this long history, apart from the third, which focuses on the art and visual culture of the British Empire, with particular reference to India. The present book, European Art and the Wider World 1350–1550, examines European art and material culture in the ‘age of exploration’ through the lens of expanding global connections and conflicts. Chapter 4 is a revised and updated version of Paul Wood, ‘Art in fifteenth-century Venice: an aesthetic of diversity’, from the book Locating Renaissance Art produced for the Open University module Renaissance art reconsidered (AA315).

All of the books in the series include teaching elements. To encourage the reader to reflect on the material presented, each chapter contains short exercises in the form of questions printed in bold type. They are followed by discursive sections, the end of which is marked by .

The four books in the series are:

European Art and the Wider World 1350–1550, edited by Kathleen Christian and Leah R. Clark

Art, Commerce and Colonialism 1600–1800, edited by Emma Barker

Empire and Art: British India, edited by Renate Dohmen

Art after Empire: From Colonialism to Globalisation, edited by Warren Carter.

There is also a companion reader:

Art and its Global Histories: A Reader, edited by Diana Newall.

Introduction

Kathleen Christian and Leah R. Clark

This book examines select examples of European art and visual culture made between c.1350 and 1550, asking how art and objects from this period can be read as the products of global connections. It is concerned with the ties that joined Europe to the wider world at a time when commodities, ideas, designs and technologies circulated over long distances, crossed boundaries and travelled between cultures, with significant consequences for the visual arts. This period in European history is traditionally understood as ‘the Renaissance’, which is often celebrated as a high point in the European tradition, and associated with new inventions inspired by the revival of an indigenous classical past. Recently, however, the Renaissance has become globalised, as alternative readings of the art of the period take into account the interdependencies that bound Europe with the rest of the world.

It has long been recognised that the Renaissance was a time of remarkable transformation, when many genres and conventions that would come to define European art were invented or re-energised. Looking at the engraving of Adam and Eve by the German artist Albrecht Dürer (Plate 0.1), the artistic priorities characteristic of this era become apparent: attention to the idealised human body and the natural world, for example, or the meticulous use of shading to create the illusion of volume. Dürer’s image is a print on paper made from an engraved copper plate, a technique developed in the fifteenth century which first made it possible for artists to disseminate their visual inventions widely. From Jan van Eyck’s mastery of the oil painting technique, to Filippo Brunelleschi’s or Leon Battista Alberti’s inventive reinterpretation of antique architecture, to the landscapes of Albrecht Altdorfer in Germany, to painting on canvas and the rise of portraiture and self-portraiture, the Renaissance established new techniques and modes of visual representation that would endure for centuries.

Plate 0.1 Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve, 1504, engraving, 25 × 19 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, object number RP-P-OB-1155.

European Renaissance art favoured realism, an emphasis on the human figure, naturalism and the perspectival or illusionistic representation of pictorial space. On the surface, one might therefore have the impression that the arts of Renaissance Europe are fundamentally different and separate from contemporary visual traditions in other parts of the world. It is often mistakenly asserted, for example, that European Renaissance art is figural while Islamic art is iconoclastic or shuns all form of figural representation, when in fact there is a rich tradition of figurative representation in the Islamic secular arts. Rather than focusing on oppositions and one-to-one comparisons, however, the approach of global art history is instead to search for commonalities, interdependencies, overlaps and dialogues between Europe and the wider world. Such approaches are transforming the study of the Renaissance by recasting a period long positioned at the centre of a European canon as culturally diverse and intertwined.

On the whole, the importation of non-European art did not bring about fundamental shifts in the dominant modes of representation prevailing in Europe during this period. What did deeply affect European art, however, was the vast movement of materials, objects, ideas and technologies which circulated globally in this era. This was a time when Chinese porcelain dishes could be found in merchants’ houses in Florence or on the Swahili coast of Africa;¹ when the edges of garments worn by figures of Christian saints in Italian Renaissance paintings were decorated with an imitation Arabic script (Chapter 1, Plate 1.10); and when the leading Venetian artist Gentile Bellini worked as a court painter for the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror (r.1444–46 and 1451–81) in Constantinople (Chapter 4, Plate 4.8). As will be explored in Chapter 2 of this book, more than 700 years of Muslim rule established a lasting tradition of Islamic crafts, art and architecture on the Iberian peninsula. These select examples underline the extent to which European visual culture is the product of multiple traditions and perspectives, to a greater degree than has been recognised in the history of art.

Throughout this period, world powers exchanged valuable goods as diplomatic gifts and Europeans imported objects from around the globe: textiles from different, sometimes very distant parts of Asia; ivories carved in Africa for Portuguese traders; Mamluk brassware from Syria and Egypt; and featherwork from Meso-America.² In the Renaissance the high aesthetic and cultural value accorded to refined imported or gifted goods represents the continuation of a long-lived hierarchy, whereby many of the most prized things known in Europe were imported from Asia.³ For Europeans the ‘East’ had been – since the ancient origins of the long-distance trade networks later known as the Silk Road – a source of colourful, glittering, aromatic things: silk, spices such as pepper and saffron, porcelain, jewels, ointments, perfumes and pigments.⁴ Desire for these luxuries only increased in the Renaissance, and access to them was a coup that, at different points in time, gave Venice, Lisbon, Antwerp or other places vast cultural and economic advantages (Plate 0.2). Goods, technologies and ideas arrived from elsewhere, even if Europeans usually had only a vague awareness of where they had originated or how they had travelled. Significantly, what have been called the ‘four great inventions’ – gunpowder, paper, movable type used in printing and the compass – originated in China and passed directly to Europe through contact with the Mongols or indirectly via Islamic cultures that had adopted and developed them (Plate 0.3).⁵

Taking a global perspective on this period entails re-examining the circumstances that gave rise to the period known as the Renaissance. After the end of the ancient Roman Empire, western Europe was a loose conglomeration of different political authorities. On the periphery of the Eurasian continent, it was cut off from the vibrant, wealthy cities of the Byzantine Empire or western and central Asia, which were connected to the silk roads. Around the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, however, Europe was catching up with those, more prosperous parts of the world. First, during what has been called the ‘commercial revolution’ which began in the twelfth century, there were improvements in trade, infrastructure and banking systems, as well as in industry and crafts.⁶ Artisans developed an aptitude for imitating imported goods and using them as a basis for local products that could compete with the originals.⁷ Then the fifteenth century brought new prosperity and further innovation in the arts and sciences, with the invention of the printing press (1440s) as well as expanded participation in global trade.⁸ By the end of the fifteenth century, Iberian powers claimed major victories in the global competition to control the highly profitable spice trade by navigating new overseas routes. At a time when the Mamluks and the Ottoman Empire dominated much of the Mediterranean, the Portuguese reached Asia by sailing around Africa. By 1511 they had established outposts across the west and east coasts of Africa and in Brazil, Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, Goa on the west coast of India and Malacca on the Malay Peninsula. In 1492, Columbus sailed west on behalf of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon (r.1474/75–1504) in the hopes of finding a new passage to Asia but, as was understood only later, reached a previously unknown continent. By skilful navigation and cartography, by means of military force, slavery and religious conversion, Europe entered into entangled relationships with the wider world. Still, Europe was not dominant on a global scale; this would only occur after c.1800 when western Europe became industrialised. In an earlier era, European kingdoms and states competed with many intertwined global powers, which rose and fell in rivalry for access to the same goods and resources.

Plate 0.2 Europe c.1500.

Plate 0.3 Navigation routes and areas of Spanish and Portuguese trade and colonisation c.1430–1550.

Traditionally, the Renaissance has not been seen in terms of global connections, but as an isolated and uniquely European phenomenon born of a selfsustaining revival of an indigenous classical past. A concept of rebirth was already present in sixteenth-century European, particularly Italian rhetoric, as when the artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari referred to a rinascita (rebirth) of the arts. Yet it was only in the 1800s that the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt first used the term Renaissance to denote the rebirth of classical culture in Italy and the rise of individualism which, he believed, opened up new possibilities for human creativity.⁹ It is important in this context to remember that the nineteenth century was a time when many European nations were colonial powers and when Europe was conceived as the most ‘modern’ and ‘advanced’ part of the globe. It post-dates what has been termed the ‘great divergence’, the process of division between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries that separated western Europe from the rest of Eurasia, in terms of its industrialisation, wealth, colonial possessions and military might.¹⁰ In the nineteenth century, the Renaissance was imagined as the highly creative, inspired period that initiated innovations in the arts and sciences, leading Europe towards global hegemony. To tell the story of the rise of the West, antiquity, Renaissance and modernity were imagined as stepping stones in a progressive path. Karl Marx closely associated the Renaissance with the birth of capitalism in western Europe, while arguing that ‘Oriental despotism’ supposedly kept Asia stagnant and blocked it from further advance.¹¹

The nineteenth century – when the field of art history took shape – was a time of nationalism, when efforts were being made to define and celebrate national (Italian, French, Spanish, German) cultures. Art history played a significant role in this task. From the outset it conceived of separate, national artistic traditions which could influence one another or be compared side by side, yet were inherently coherent and distinct.¹² Art history established a normative point of reference – the western European nation – which gave shape to the discipline’s vocabulary, institutions, canons and periodisation. Eurocentrism, colonialism and nationalism became embedded into art-historical research, museum displays, textbooks and university courses. Traditionally non-European visual culture or objects that exist between different cultures, or across cultures, fit awkwardly, at best, into this system.¹³ Consider, for example, the usually strict separation of objects in museums into galleries devoted to European national schools (such as Italian, or Netherlandish), on the one hand, and the whole of Asian art or Islamic art on the other, setting up vast asymmetries and making connections very difficult to imagine.

There are many complex historical, economic and cultural factors that have kept Renaissance art isolated from a global and intercultural context. Increasingly vocal critiques have, however, questioned past assumptions, for example the classic opposition between West and East, which unreasonably balances a relatively small West against an exceedingly large and diverse East. While some art historians had been selectively engaged with dialogues between Europe and the wider world,¹⁴ a pronounced shift occurred in the 1990s, when the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to America helped inspire a rethinking of the ‘age of exploration’.¹⁵ An important book edited by Claire Farago in 1995 broke a general silence among Renaissance art historians on ‘the contribution of non-European cultures to Western aesthetics’.¹⁶ Since then art history and other disciplines have often looked back to methods pioneered in the 1940s by the French historian and founder of the Annales School, Fernand Braudel. Braudel wrote a monumental study of the Mediterranean, which envisioned the Christian and Islamic cultures bordering it as part of a single history, given their common geography and economic codependence.¹⁷ He followed this up with a global history of trade and commerce.¹⁸ His work presents a model of a global, ‘total history’ that has offered an appealing alternative to national history. More recently post-colonial studies have expanded and added nuance to what have been called connected, crossed, braided or transcultural concepts of history. Borrowing from colonial terms used to denote racial mixing, historians and art historians have at times invoked the idea of mestizo, creole or hybrid cultures, as an alternative model to supposedly ‘pure’ national cultures.¹⁹

These discussions and methodological debates have also inspired the question of whether the Renaissance in Europe was an exceptional or unique historical event.²⁰ The anthropologist Jack Goody has asked in a recent book whether there were Renaissances (meaning, for him, a revival of the past that leads to cultural advance) in other parts of the world, for example in China under the Song dynasty (960–1279).²¹ This book will not be concerned, however, with comparisons between European and other cultures. Instead, it will focus on the arts of Europe (western Europe as distinguished from eastern Europe and Byzantium) through the selective exploration of two themes. One is the interdependency of the world brought about by global trade during the Renaissance, allowing economic, technical and artistic achievements to emerge in Europe from crossed cultures and vivid connections. The second is the insight which images, particularly in the form of visual representations of ‘the Other’, offer into European cultural perceptions in this era. Europeans developed complex attitudes towards non-Christians and non-Europeans in places of coexisting cultures and religions – in the Iberian peninsula and the Mediterranean, for example – or through images and texts related to direct contacts brought about by expanded trade and exploration. The first contacts made between Europe and other parts of the globe in this era are of almost unimaginable significance. While Norsemen had explored the North Atlantic from the tenth century, European voyages to the Americas in the fifteenth ushered in a new era of interconnection between two biospheres previously separated by a great ocean. People, places and a great diversity of cultures, objects and ideas came together for the first time. In Europe, the vast majority of new encounters were not direct, but filtered through imaginative texts and images; direct and indirect knowledge of the wider world continued to be mediated by a vast inheritance of stereotypes and prejudices, myths and religious beliefs.

The four chapters that follow will consider the histories of canonical European works of art and of objects which crossed the borders of Europe, Asia, Africa and America. The topic of discussion remains the art of Europe in a book written by specialists in this field; as such its outlook on global connections in the period has its clear limitations. Interactions between Europe and the wider world were certainly not one-sided, and history can be seen from many different perspectives; historians of European art risk appropriating, even recolonising other cultures, if their terminology, methods and aesthetic canons are imposed upon other, distinctive visual traditions.²² Aware of these challenges, the goal here has been to re-examine the subject traditionally defined as ‘Art of Renaissance Europe’, testing its assumptions, rediscovering the significance of the non-European and non-Christian within it, and expanding its scope. To this end, Chapter 1 focuses on the altarpiece, a major genre of Renaissance art which developed in connection with the wider world, rather than in isolation. Chapter 2 considers art in the encounter between the diverse cultures and religions of Spain – al-Andalus (the Islamic territories of what is now Spain) and the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon – and between the Christian Spanish and the indigenous peoples of the New World. Chapter 3 examines European collections of non-European objects as wide ranging as Meso-American featherwork and Turkish costume to Chinese porcelain and Afro-Portuguese ivories. Chapter 4 explores Venice as the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa. This Italian republic was until the sixteenth century the principal European gateway for global goods, whose cultural connections can be read in the work of local painters. While Chapters 1 and 3 consider the relationship between European visual culture and imported objects – rarities and luxuries from distant parts of the globe – Chapters 2 and 4 are focused more specifically on works of art made in the contact zones of the Iberian peninsula and Venice, where diverse religions and cultures came together. Artistic encounters discussed in Chapters 1 and 3 are generally indirect, while those in Chapters 2 and 4 emerge out of situations involving cohabitation and competition or a more directly shared material and visual culture.

1 Questions and debates

The topics and case studies selected for inclusion in this book emerge out of lively debates that have accelerated since the 1990s and 2000s, when numerous publications, conferences and exhibitions addressed the ‘global’ dimensions of European Renaissance art. The shift occurred within a time which has seen the rise of global political and economic powers outside Europe, as well as a sharpening of public debate around issues of trade, consumption and globalisation.

A significant increase of interest in ‘material culture’, as well, has opened up the study of objects and images that in the past were overlooked in favour of ‘fine art’ (painting, sculpture and architecture) and were infrequently studied in their own right.²³ Material culture in its broadest sense includes any physical traces of the past, but in this book it will generally refer to the so-called decorative arts: ceramics, textiles and objects. Refined examples of foreign craftsmanship were greatly prized and seamlessly integrated with fine art in this period. And it is in this realm that one can most clearly read the direct impact of imports from Asia, Africa and America on many different artistic, technical and commercial aspects of the European Renaissance. Objects and goods imported from around the world – or which arrived via diplomatic gift-giving – inspired admiration, imitation and creative response among European artists and craftsmen. This phenomenon has been studied particularly in the context of Italy, the most important European port of entry for global goods in the fifteenth century.²⁴ Of late, however, the scope of interest in Europe’s globalised material culture has broadened to other parts of Europe, for example to Antwerp, which grew into a major hub of global trade in the first half of the sixteenth century, or to Portugal and particularly Lisbon, which from the end of the fifteenth century rapidly emerged as the centre of a vast commercial empire and colonial enterprise.²⁵

Numerous museum exhibitions have begun to showcase objects and works of art which speak of the interconnected relationships that bound Europe together with the wider world.²⁶ The exhibition Bellini and the East (2005–06), for example, joined a number of groundbreaking studies on the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Venice.²⁷ Within the field of Italian Renaissance art history, Venice – given its close political and economic ties with the Mamluk Sultanate and Ottoman Empire – was the first point of departure for discussions about cultural exchange. The topic was brought to the fore in Deborah Howard’s book, Venice and the East (2000), on the impact of the Islamic world on Venetian architecture.²⁸ Since then historians and art historians have continued to focus attention on the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, arguing for example that the Ottomans should be considered not as an entity posited against Europe, but as an integral part of Renaissance history and art history.²⁹ Others have stressed the common cultural heritage of the Mediterranean and the ethnic, linguistic, religious and political diversity that constitutes its very identity.³⁰ It has become increasingly clear, however, that Europe’s global connections stretched far beyond the Mediterranean, and attention has also turned to other networks and nodes of trade such as the Indian Ocean, the Baltic Sea and the Persian Gulf.

While recent approaches are by no means singular or congruent, all of them have sought alternatives to the histories of nations or monolithic, isolated cultures. Attention is given instead to the complexity of cultural relationships, as well as to the inequalities built into these relationships, which in some cases make terms such as ‘cultural encounter’ or ‘cultural exchange’ seem too neutral, simple or benign. Among the concepts that are now widely used, though still much debated, are ‘cultural transfer’ and ‘hybridity’.

Cultural transfer was a concept developed in the 1980s to break down the rigid separation of national histories and the historical model of comparing cultures one to one, stressing instead cross-cultural communication and shared ideas, travel and a sense of mutual curiosity.³¹ It describes something more than the simple movement of objects, ideas or technologies from one place to another, but instead focuses on how, why and under what conditions cultural goods cross boundaries and acquire new identities.³² To take an example, paper was invented in China, likely by the second century BCE. After it was adopted and perfected by Islamic cultures in central Asia, it reached Islamic North Africa and Spain, where artists began to use it to make patterns, draw sketches or create illustrated books. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, paper was transferred from Islamic to Christian Europe. It then brought about revolutionary cultural change when in the 1450s Johannes Gutenberg first began to print books on paper with his printing press.³³ It became, furthermore, an important agent of artistic innovation, as reproductive images printed on paper vastly increased the movement of visual ideas