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152

Maria Berbara

RENAISSANCE ART FROM A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

Athanadoros, Hagesandros, Polydoros of Rhodes, “Laocoön and His Sons,” ca. 27 BCE–CE 68

Athanadoros, Hagesandros, Polydoros of Rhodes, “Laocoön and His Sons,” ca. 27 BCE–CE 68

In many disciplines, current research approaches are rethinking the conventional narratives and definitions of various epochs by applying a global perspective. The term “Global Renaissance,” for instance, situates the Renaissance within the globalized world to argue that trade, commodities, patronage, overseas conflict, and cultural exchange were all key to the intellectual and cultural developments in the early modern period. As this cultural exchange was, of course, based on asymmetrical power dynamics between Europe and the rest of the world, art historian Maria Berbara addresses the question of whether this concept of a “Global Renaissance” can be considered a useful historical concept or historiographical tool.

As it has been developed over the centuries, the concept of the Renaissance is, essentially, cross-cultural. European artists, political figures, and intellectuals of the early modern period were aware of how far, in both time and space, their visual and rhetorical sources had often traveled. [1]

A turn back to Greco-Roman culture, in its multiple conceptions and variations, lies at the root of some of the Renaissance’s greatest achievements – though the ways in which Renaissance artists received and resignified the past have been the topic of complex historiographic debates since at least the 19th century. To quote but two examples, the facial features of the Trojan priest Laocoön, as presented in the venerated 1st-century CE statue, can be traced in the 16th-century Roman-Florentine iconography of Christ, [2] and German art historian Aby Warburg famously detected the pathos of a Greek nymph in Ghirlandaio’s representation of the birth of Saint John the Baptist. [3]

In the same years that Michelangelo painted the dizzying ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and ­Raphael conceived the serene yet magnificent philosophical dialogue between ancients and moderns in his School of Athens fresco right next door at the Vatican, European ships were sailing to the Americas, Africa, and Asia in search of commodities and riches. The economic, cultural, and religious expansion of European political entities in the early modern period coincided with the Renaissance. In this moment, the flux and reflux of cultural models intermingling different temporalities and geographies became truly global.

In spite of these wide chronological and geographic arcs, the concept of a “Global Renaissance” is relatively recent: it can be traced back, broadly speaking, to the beginning of the 21st century, when scholarship became increasingly aware of the cultural, artistic, and literary cross-pollination between the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe in early modernity. [4] The study of the emulation of classical antiquity’s formal paradigms and of the artistic production of the so-called great masters of Europe ceased to be considered as the default approach to investigate the Renaissance. In some instances, the term Renaissance started to be replaced by early modernity in an attempt to release this phase of European history – roughly speaking, between the 15th and early 17th centuries – from being conceived exclusively in terms of an internal recuperation of the Hellenic world.

Illustration from André Thevet, “Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique,” 1558

Illustration from André Thevet, “Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique,” 1558

Studies of the Global Renaissance – or of the Renaissance from a global perspective – focus on the transit of discourses, images, and ideas around the world in early modernity. Jesuits preaching in Portuguese America had been trained in classical rhetoric in Rome, and artists seeking to illustrate the letters and chronicles written from the so-called New World often based their creations on Greco-Roman styles and their revivals over time. The same Laocoön group that had inspired the visual representation of Christian sacrifice, for example, is hinted at in a wood engraving, reproduced in André Thevet’s Les singularitez de la France antarctique, in which a group of Tupinambás try to heal a sick man by sucking the painful parts of his body. Hans Staden, a German gunman who had been captured by the Tupinambás and spent months living with them as a captive before being freed and then returning to Europe, wrote of his adventures in a book that would be reedited and translated many times during the Renaissance. The illustrations accompanying his lively and highly entertaining travelogue, as well as later European illustrated maps of Brazil, would be the sources of woodblock hand-colored prints produced for commercial Japanese maps in the 17th century, such as the Bankoku junbutsu sozu, now in Kyushu.

If these few examples can help to explain the new, expanded transit of visual and rhetorical values during the early modern period, they also signal the challenges and contradictions of conceptualizing a Global Renaissance in at least two ways:

First, they centralize Europe as the mediator of these values. Although, as indicated by a number of important studies, European regions also assimilated art, knowledge, and culture flowing from the Americas, Asia, and Africa, the colossal imbalance of the colonial structures imposed by European political and commercial entities upon other regions – including slavery, religious conversion, and ecological devastation, among others – inevitably produced a pronounced asymmetry in the cultural, linguistic, and artistic spheres. Yes, Asian porcelain brought by the East India Company (VOC) was fashionable in 17th-century Amsterdam, but it remained confined to the living rooms of the nascent bourgeoisie and never ceased to be considered a luxury good. [5] European collections overflowed with objects pertaining to Native American societies – including, among others, stunning Tupi feather art – but such objects were not systematically incorporated into Western iconography. Christianity – as well as the understanding of what it meant to be Christian – changed dramatically during the Reformation and its aftermath, but it seemed impermeable to concepts, images, and spiritual constructions deriving from other religious systems.

Second, the Renaissance is, in essence, a European concept. It embraces a certain kind of Otherness – the classical tradition, or the Other within – but it does so from an internal narrative construed a posteriori. The Italian historian and poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) conceived its central idea: while previous historiography divided history as being either before or after the birth of Christ, Petrarch considered the fall of the Western Roman Empire its greatest turning point. The ancient splendor of magnificent architecture, wise philosophers, and outstanding poetry had faded, according to Petrarch, after the Empire’s conversion and political decadence, but he could sense that a new era was about to begin. The scheme according to which a long intermediary period divides the greatness of the ancient and its rebirth – an image that would later be elaborated by other humanists, such as Falvio Biondo – defined European early modern Weltanschauung and, in various ways, later historical constructions. The idea of the Renaissance as the term for a historical period, and of the Italian Renaissance, in particular, as a European civilizational model, was firmly consolidated in the 19th century against the background of Europe’s nationalistic rivalries. Jacob Burckhardt, most prominently, but also Jules Michelet and other 19th-century historians played a crucial role in the creation and consolidation of these views. [6]

As seen from this perspective, the Renaissance is conceived more in terms of the recuperation of a lost sameness than of the assimilation of alterity. The ancient past is understood as part of one’s own dormant identity. Speaking of a Global Renaissance, in this sense, may seem a contradiction in terms: more than Eurocentric, this appears to be an Italocentric conception of the world and its history.

Bankoku sozu, Japanese world map, 1671

Bankoku sozu, Japanese world map, 1671

On the other hand, the term Global Renaissance may serve to remind us of the relations between European cultural achievements and colonial expansion during early modernity, and of how interconnected these two spheres were. The exploitation of commodities and trade – as well as slavery, which was largely conceived as a regular form of commerce – made European nations, political entities, and private companies immensely rich from the 16th century onward, inaugurating a global order that has defined the world up to the present. Postcolonial studies, in fact, has been reminding us of the historical continuities between the rise of early modern empires and contemporary global economic inequality, migration conflicts, racism, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and ecological degradation, the origins of which can be traced back to predatory extractivism. The historical foundations of capitalism are linked not only to the economic accumulation fueled by European colonization but also to the conceptualization of humanity that emerged in the 16th century. European maps, illustrated books, and discourses sought to establish ontological differences between peoples living in different parts of the world; these differences would serve to consolidate the machinery of imperial colonization, including slavery. Christianity – a religion that would very soon become hegemonic on the American continent – informed some of the most wonderful iconographic programs of the Renaissance, but it was also the basis for justifying the classification and hierarchization of humankind.

In view of these considerations, the main question seems to be if the idea of a Global Renaissance, both as a historical concept and as a historiographical tool, is useful. My view is that it can be, as long as we frame it critically and not as the expression of a totalizing, and ultimately Eurocentric, understanding of art, culture, or civilization. The Renaissance was not universal; it was a European phenomenon. Understanding it from a global perspective, however, can serve many purposes: illuminating the continuity between early modern globalism and present-day conflicts and sociocultural imbalances; understanding Renaissance art in the context of intercultural exchange and, therefore, undermining notions of European and Christian exceptionalism; and problematizing absolute notions of center and periphery, Old and New World, and thereby acknowledging the existence of multicentric networks of material and immaterial interchange. Once we recognize that the traditional vision of the Renaissance that we have inherited – that of an exceptional moment of history characterized by the Italian recovery of Greco-Roman art and culture and the subsequent export of this recuperated legacy to other European nations and their colonies – is a 19th- and 20th-century Western construct, we can navigate more freely through the complex cultural, scientific, and literary cross-pollinations between, for example, Muslim Spain, Ottoman Turkey, the Mughal Empire, Persia, and Japan.

Studying the Renaissance from a global perspective means a shift away from the narratives of internal European or American histories in favor of an interrelated vision of early modern historical narratives and their aftermath. It also brings social awareness to the field of Renaissance studies – which, not quite unjustly, has often been considered an elitist, Eurocentric niche subject dissociated from other aspects of history, including economic history.

As our own times are resuscitating 19th- and 20th-century (ultra)nationalistic discourses and images, it seems essential to remember that, in the last decades of the 16th century, Michel de Montaigne spoke with Tupinambás in France before elaborating some of his most powerful and influential essays on human nature, [7] and that Albrecht Dürer, when visiting Brussels in 1520, marveled at displays of Moctezuma’s treasure. [8] The early modern world was much more culturally fluid than 19th-century historiography would lead us to believe, and focusing on the cross-pollination of art, (material) culture, religious systems, and ideologies both inside and outside Europe can serve as a potent antidote to nationalistic, exceptionalist, and exclusivist constructions of history.

Maria Berbara is a professor of art history at Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. She received her PhD from Universität Hamburg and specializes in Italian and Iberian art produced between the 15th and 17th centuries, as well as in cultural history, early modern globalism, and intellectual interchange in the Atlantic world.

Image credit: 1. Musei Vaticani, public domain; 2. Public domain; 3. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.de;

Notes

[1]There are considerable variations among scholars who employ the term Renaissance with regard to what marks both its beginning and end. Here, I am generally referring to the period from the mid-15th century to the mid-17th century.
[2]Maria Berbara, “Images of Heroism and Martyrdom: Borrowings from the Vatican Laocoon during the Early Modern Period,” in The Challenge of the object / Die Herausforderung des Objekts, Proceedings of the 33rd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art, Nuremberg, 2013 (Nuremberg: Verlag des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 2013), 231–35.
[3]Karl Enenkel and Anita Traninger, introduction to The Figure of the Nymph in Early Modern Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
[4]There were, to be sure, fundamental 20th-century precursors of this geographic, chronological, and disciplinary expansion of Renaissance studies, including Aby Warburg’s now-famous lecture “Images from the Region of the ­Pueblo Indians of North America,” delivered in 1923; ­Rudolf Wittkower’s Allegory and the Migration of Symbols, which was published in 1977 but brought together essays written over three decades; and, more recently, Claire Farago’s Reframing the Renaissance, published in 1995.
[5]Some Dutch artists, however, did get inspiration from these objects. See Karina H. Corrigan, Jan van Campen, and Femke Diercks, eds., Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age (Amsterdam: Peabody Essex Museum and the Rijksmuseum, 2015).
[6]Claire Farago, “Vision Itself Has Its History: Race, Nation, and Renaissance Art History,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 67–88.
[7]See, especially, Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals” and also “On Cruelty” (both from 1580).
[8]Peter Hess, “Marvelous Encounters: Albrecht Dürer and Early Sixteenth-Century German Perceptions of Aztec Culture,” Daphnis 33, nos. 1–2 (May 2004): 161–86.