Museums and Culture

The following blog post is about my experience at the Becoming Global: The Renaissance and the World conference.  Organized by Clare Carroll (my Renaissance Comparative Literature professor, as well as my Arts in NYC Professor), James Saslow (the Art History advisor and professor at Queens College), and Quiñones Keber, the conference was meant to enlighten those who attended about what was happening in other areas of the globe during the time of the European Renaissance.  How did the Europeans, affected by their own rebirth of culture, interact with the different communities that shared the globe with them?  In the class taught by Professor Carroll, we are studying just this.

Dutch Global Horizons with Larry Silver (Art History professor at University of Pennsylvania)

What exactly led the Dutch to interact with a myriad of civilizations?  Mostly due to economic and military competition with other European powers, mainly Spain and Portugal, and because of the mercantile interests of the Dutch East India Company, the Netherlands interacted with communities across the globe.  That being said, their main focus was East Asia, or the Indian sub-continent and China.  This interaction made the Dutch the leading cartographers and travel writers of Europe at the time.  Many of the first modern atlases were created in Holland – the first being made in Antwerp in 1570.

Dutch travelers, such as Blaeu, also created topographic and ethnographic maps of the regions in which they traveled.  With these, cartographers were able to create more than just a navigational tool, but a learning tool for people who didn’t travel – “armchair traveling” as Silver put it.  The Dutch had an obvious bias towards which civilizations they believed to be superior to others.  In reality, the Dutch believed that Asia was the only possible competition for the Europeans.  Such attitude can be seen in the way that Dutch travel illustrators depict the natives of different lands. Very often, the African or American native will be dressed scantily while a Chinese native will be dressed in actual clothing.  It can be interpreted that these Dutch artists were making a moral criticism of the different cultures, perhaps condemning the “barbarity” of the peoples in Africa and the Americas.  According to Silver, there was also a lot of interest and focus on punishment rituals, again, another moral criticism.

Perhaps the most telling of Dutch attitude towards the indigenous peoples of the world is the Amsterdam Civic Hall.  The rear pediment depicts Europe (particularly Amsterdam), Asia, the Americas, and Africa.  Europe stands front and center with Asia on either side of her – on the left are the Middle Eastern parts of Asia, and on the right is the far east.  As the pediment reaches outwards, we see Africa and the Americas crouched down, conforming to the shape of the triangle.  If anything, this just shows how powerful the Dutch believed these two continents to be – not very powerful at all!

Reading Chinese Maps in the Early Modern World with Timothy Brook (History professor at the University of British Columbia)

This second speaker, I believe, spoke more to the interaction between different parts of the world – connecting more closely to what my class is focusing on.  I have never really been an avid map collector or reader, so it was interesting to hear about the history of map making in the Early Modern world and the names of their different styles.

Notice the personification of Europe (top), Asia (left), Africa (right), and the Americas (bottom).

The Ptolemaic view of the world was the most popular perspective for the longest time.  Pretty much, these cartographic images were based on the description that Ptolemy gave of the world.

The cylindrical map, made popular by Waldseemüller, was known for attempting to include earth’s curve in its depiction. Waldseemüller is also the first cartographer to include a mention of the Americas in his map.  These maps were created because of a navigational need.  The Ptolemaic map wasn’t extremely useful in the new world of exploration.

The portolan chart is the next type of map, and differs from the others in that it relies solely on compass directions for navigation.  Unlike Waldseemüller, these maps neglected to make any reference to the earth’s curved surface.

The Ortelius map, which was the most popular of the time, took the earth’s curve into consideration, like the cylindrical map, but was more mathematically precise.  This later lead to the creation of the spherical depiction of the earth.

Don’t worry, the interesting information doesn’t end here!  When Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit from Italy, traveled to China in 1582, he brought along all of this knowledge of map making from the West.  The maps he brought, as well as the maps he created himself, were translated into Chinese.  Often these maps seemed to be a bit confusing in translation, but ultimately it brought a piece of Europe to the Eastern part of the world.

In China, they believed the earth to be square.  Because of this, their maps tended to be very square in shape.  Their ethnocentricity also lead to the creation of maps without a European presence – Asia was the world.  That being said, as time went on, more bodies of water were added to their map.  The Atlantic Ocean could only have been introduced to them with European help.  Very often, as Western dwellers, we believe that we have had an impact on indigenous peoples, for we were the conquerors, and that these conquered peoples have had no effect on us.  But this is far from the case.  In the first place, without Chinese and other Asian navigators, the Europeans would have never found their way in the Asian waters.  Map makers in Europe were also influenced by the square maps in China.  John Speed for instance, in creating a map of the world, depicted China and the Indian sub-continent in a very Asian and boxy manner.

It was the last topic that Timothy Brook brought up that fascinated me and connected most with the book of his that I’m reading now, Vermeer’s Hat, which discusses how the artwork of Vermeer, with its various foreign objects, is actually a window through which we can see the larger picture of global expansion.  In a San Francisco museum resides a Zhangzhou bowl, from around the year 1620.  On this bowl, which looks to be made of porcelain, is depicted a Chinese compass, a European ship, and a flying fish.  The first thing that I would love to mention about this piece of art is that it is combining European as well as Asian elements!  During the Q&A afterwards, it came to our attention that the flying fish was a European symbol and had appeared on other depictions of maps during the same time, specifically in Peru.  The second thing that fascinated me about this bowl was that it was meant for export and was most likely designed for a European audience.  If this is the case, the bowl is physical evidence of the transference of objects between Asia and Europe, and is similar to many of the objects depicted in Vermeer’s works.

Becoming Global: The Renaissance and The World
The Graduate Center
March 15, 2013

Marina B. Nebro