This course explores the visual and material culture of the age of empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Select artistic developments and themes will be considered as a facet of geo-political shifts, cross-cultural interactions, and changing aesthetic tastes shaped by globalization. Artistic exchange and syncretism gained momentum as early modern empires expanded trade networks and acquired territory, resulting in diverse expressions of what has been termed "Global Baroque." The Islamic empires of the Mughals, Safavids, and Ottomans played a prominent role in this process. In China, the Qing Emperor Qianlong displayed a taste for European-style architecture and garden design, and collected and adapted Western painting and technological devices. The empires of Western Europe-Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French--colonized territories that lay as far away as the South Pacific and Austronesia. Chinese Muslim traders brought Islam and Sufism to Indonesia, where spectacular mosques combined Javanese, Chinese, and Persian architectural styles. In the Americas, Spanish conquistadors subjugated the wealthy Aztec and Inca empires and new art forms were created from exported natural materials such as gems, previously unknown in the Islamic lands and Europe. Under Spanish viceregal rule, indigenous peoples in the Americas translated Amerindian art forms into Christian art and architecture and built churches in an Islamicizing style known as Mudéjar. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade brought an estimated 12 million enslaved people from West Africa to the Americas to labor in the new lands. The ways in which Africans and Europeans visualized one another through art and architecture will be explored, as well as art forms expressing enslaved people. Special attention will be paid to the ways in which race and gender were visualized in the art of the early modern period.
- Teacher: Elizabeth Gittings