Art History, Boundary Crossing, Making Worlds

Previous articleNext article FreeFields of the Future/Future of the FieldArt History, Boundary Crossing, Making WorldsBronwen WilsonBronwen WilsonUniversity of California, Los Angeles Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWonderful brilliance may be gained for human judgment by getting to know men. We are huddled and concentrated in ourselves, and our vision is reduced to the length of our nose. Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not “Athens,” but “The world.” … This great world … is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognize ourselves from the proper angle.1This short essay advocates boundary crossing as one direction for the future of Italian Renaissance art history, largely because it is an approach that emerges from engaging with phenomena that transgress traditional parameters of the field. These may be materials, formats, or people that cross geographical boundaries, unsettling familiar ground and inciting us to move in new directions. They may be global or transcultural things that challenge existing analytical frameworks. They may be practices or forms that refuse conventional historical periodization, categories, or terms of reference. As an approach, boundary crossing entails being receptive to unexpected forms of solicitation and to unpredictable paths and detours—to being open to what we do not know.That we learn from how the world looks back at us, as Michel de Montaigne observes above, has been demonstrated by the proliferation of studies and exhibitions on early modern art, global exchanges, and mobility that have provoked many of us to rethink familiar terrain.2 Since it is the case study that gives rise to new lines of inquiry, my purpose here is not to summarize. Instead, I use an example from my own research, somewhat allegorically, as a means of touching on a few of these themes and to introduce the Making Worlds project.As a departure point, then, and to exemplify artifacts and people on the move, consider an expansive vista of Aleppo (fig. 1). It is one of fifty pen and ink designs of sites, monuments, and curiosities that were made by Guillaume-Joseph Grelot during 1664–65 for the travel diary of Ambrosio Bembo, his young Venetian patron.3 Sheets of paper have been pasted together to create the wide format for the drawing of the Syrian cityscape that unfolds from Bembo’s manuscript. Pathways, fences, and city walls crisscross the middle ground and snake around the densely packed urban center that swells and crests with the undulating terrain. The horizon propels us into the distance where the sky meets the earth. There, at the limits of what we can see, the terrain slopes downward, directing us to the round plateau of the citadel, its shape accentuated by the curving form of the banderole that floats above. With its inscription, “La Citta di Aleppo,” the cartouche calls to mind the paper support of the design, thereby returning us to the picture plane and to the lower edge of the image where details vie for our attention. On the far left, an unfurled scroll presents a legend to some of the locations. On the right is a plinth bearing the Bembo coat of arms and a bust of a bearded man with a turban who faces us. Grelot is seated to the left (fig. 2), his back toward us as he observes the city from a vantage point that is identified in the legend. To the right, a standing figure and his horse gaze at the city, reiterating the artist’s perspective. Their poses direct us back to the horizon and to the citadel with its tower that rises above Aleppo like a beacon.Figure 1. Guillaume-Joseph Grelot, Aleppo, 1675, pen and ink on paper, 85.5 × 33 cm. From Ambrosio Bembo, Viaggio e giornale per parte dell’Asia di quattro anni incirca, University of Minnesota, TC Wilson Library Bell (1676 fBe) fol. r, between pp. 10 and 11.Figure 2. Detail. Guillaume-Joseph Grelot, Aleppo, 1675, pen and ink on paper, 85.5 × 33 cm. From Ambrosio Bembo, Viaggio e giornale per parte dell’Asia di quattro anni incirca, University of Minnesota, TC Wilson Library Bell (1676 fBe), fol. r, between pp. 10 and 11.The prospect thematizes moving between worlds. Topographical details contribute to our oscillation between close-up scrutiny and surveying from afar: flora in the foreground metamorphose into architectural structures. Roads, walls, and domes in the distance echo the winding draperies and forms of the turbans worn near the picture plane on the lower right. As formal resemblances urge us to move continuously between the horizon and the picture plane, they also synthesize the landscape. Grelot’s orientation and seated pose, akin to the diptych dial beside him with its compass, guides our view once again toward the citadel, its shape evoked by the crown and brim of his French hat. Calligraphic folds of the hem and sleeves of his jacket also emulate the animated edges of the paper on which he has delineated the city duplicated before us. The play between the body of the artist and his body of work conveys activities of making worlds and also of appropriating them.With its emphasis on observation and interpretation, the drawing and the artist can be used to conjure associations with the work of art history. The relation between the cityscape, its representation in the prospect we see, and the drawing in process on the artist’s lap, bears some resemblance to our efforts to translate subject matter and artwork into words (while also gesturing to their incommensurability). Grelot digests the foreign topography for us, his signature, together with the devices surrounding him, underscoring his instrumental role. The scenario—a European artist reporting on Islamic lands—is a reminder that the things we study implicate us and our analyses of them. It evokes how past and present violence, in light of the recent decimation of Aleppo and forced migrations of Syrians, impinge upon each other, and upon the future.4 Processes of creativity are historically connected with the devastation of worlds. In this way, the prospect is emblematic of many early modern artifacts that pivot between the world-making potential of mondialisation—not translatable into English—and the world-destroying nature of globalization.5Grelot’s designs also require contending with disciplinary borders. Drafted in pen and ink on paper of diverse sizes and pasted into a manuscript that was once envisioned as a printed book, the drawings fall outside, or intersect, art history, architectural history, history, history of the book, and urban geography. Art historians sometimes accuse historians of using visual images as illustrations, and yet one of the legacies of iconography’s hold on Renaissance art is anxiety about visual and material evidence.6 Accordingly, the imaginative aspects of such artifacts, the distinctive character of their forms, and the evidence they generate about the nature and transmission of early modern experiences and understandings of phenomena often remain subordinated to textual sources. To be clear, this is not a call for interdisciplinarity but rather for being attentive to disciplinary differences. Objects that traverse these borders are important for the future of art history precisely because they incite us to be more attentive to the skills we bring to the table.Furthering this point, Grelot’s designs for Bembo’s diary are also illustrative of artifacts that challenge our frameworks. While the prospect lends itself to art historical concerns with form and content as well as artistic intentions and patronage, it is one of myriad instances that eludes conventional approaches (iconography, biography), explanatory categories and terms of reference (style, periodization, oeuvre), and aesthetic hierarchies and judgments (materials, quality). For example, one scholar contends the drawings “are not works of great artistic finish or merit.”7 Instead, they have been considered as documents of architectural sites and assessed on the basis of their accuracy. One of the most persistent problems for Italian Renaissance art history remains adherence to theories rooted in Platonic and Kantian ideals. In the context of transcultural art history, Peter Sloterdijk’s ideas are apposite. Globes provided early moderns with a means to see the world from a distance, to grasp the world as a unity removed from history.8 To counter the globe as an ideal form, and to avoid being numbed by geometry, he advances terrestrial globalization and the “perceptual charms of the irregular.”9 A response to oceanic thinking, which yields the “time of the world,” terrestrial globalization is concerned with historical singularities.10 Sloterdijk’s call to engage with particularities—with the unruly character of surfaces and edges of things—is especially trenchant for objects produced outside of traditional artistic centers.To turn to the Making Worlds project, of which my study of early modern Mediterranean travel imagery is a part, we have been exploring how interactions were given impetus by an efflorescence of cosmopolitan spaces. These spaces are open to becoming something new, provisional instead of fixed in their form. They are neither inherently hierarchical nor merely commercial but inflected by global relations of power, spaces in which distance and presence are brought into contact with each other. These are cities—such as Venice, Isfahan, Goa, Aleppo—and also the ships, caravansaries, markets, and warehouses rendered by Grelot and described by the young Bembo in the manuscript. Bembo resided in Aleppo with his uncle, the Venetian consul, before continuing to Goa. On the return journey, he stopped in Isfahan where he met Grelot, then under a contract for designs for Jean Chardin, an Anglo-French agent and jewel merchant who was involved in negotiations with the shah. These are cities in which people of diverse ethnicities, faiths, and vocational interests came and went, which is expressed in the drawing of Aleppo by the thoroughfares, costumes, structures, and legend and through the roving lines created by the artist’s pen. Allowing for convergences, reorientations, and interconnections, cosmopolitan spaces propelled people and artifacts in unexpected directions, giving rise to new ways of thinking.11Since 2011, Angela Vanhaelen and I have been working with colleagues and graduate students in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom to investigate the imaginative and critical potential of creativity, broadly construed, generated by the dynamics of materiality and globalism.12 One aim has been to propose alternative approaches with which to account for inventive forms and practices that art history (and global histories) have passed over. Shifting the focus from governing regimes and institutions, Making Worlds instead directs analysis toward the flow of materials, artifacts, motifs, and expertise across borders and bodies of water. The mobility of things is not always conducive to models such as production and reception. Rethinking those concepts, the project has been to explore how digesting, translating, and inventing worlds have been central to their making and remaking. It attends to experimentation that activated and responded to this traffic in things; it investigates these interactions as constant, ongoing processes, thereby bringing innovation, ornamentation, improvisation, and sensation to the fore.13Student involvement has extended across all facets of the project: reading groups, museum visits, organizing and participating in conferences, researching critical methods and terms of analysis, and publishing. Since 2013, with “Early Modern Orientations,” a conference and workshop co-organized with colleagues at the University of East Anglia, we have held events at the University of Minnesota, at McGill University in Montreal, in Vancouver, and at UCLA. A conference at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in 2017 resulted in a special issue, called “Making Worlds: Art, Materiality, and Early Modern Globalization,” for the Journal of Early Modern History.14 Also at UCLA, in 2018–19 we pursued the interconnected themes of spaces, materials, and imagination in three conferences, “In Between Spaces,” “Material Flows,” and “Other Worlds,” as part of the core program for the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Developing a series of interrelated case studies of movement and migration, the conferences fostered discussion and debate with scholars working in diverse disciplines and geographical contexts.The Making Worlds symposium, held in conjunction with the final conference, was testimony of the potential of transcultural research for the field. A new generation of scholars, mostly art historians from Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, and the United States, have unearthed an array of materials, novel processes, and unexpected ventures. Granite, glass, beeswax, silver teapots, and pseudo-scripts, for instance, journeyed in myriad directions, horizontally and also vertically. Substances were excavated and cultivated, formed and reformed, mediated and remediated. The multifaceted character of materials, practices, skills, and global archives engendered persuasive and innovative approaches to environmental and temporal considerations.Confronting familiar geographical, chronological, and conceptual frameworks, boundary-crossing phenomena thwart efforts to reduce them to objects of knowledge. Their singular details set them apart, giving rise to new questions.15 As an approach, boundary crossing is diametrically opposed to accumulating objects into a canon. It infers multiple perspectives and entails acknowledging differences rather than assimilating them. It pursues the possibilities and limits of materials and formats, experimentation and failure. It requires grappling with what is unfamiliar and traveling in unpredictable directions. Instead of arriving at the meanings of works of art, it explores processes of making, unmaking, and remaking.I have been proposing that transcultural research still matters for the future partly because it forces us to contend with definitions of the field and with the limits of our knowledge.16 Recalling my earlier suggestion that we consider Grelot’s vista of Aleppo allegorically, I conclude by turning briefly to another urban prospect, Melchior Lorck’s expansive drawing of Constantinople (fig. 3). A Danish artist, he was dispatched by the Holy Roman emperor to join his ambassador, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, at the court of Sultan Sulëyman.17 The cosmopolitan character of Istanbul is suggested in the combination of ancient, early Christian, and Islamic architectural forms and in the vessels of foreign embassies that animate the crowded waterway, their calligraphic sails and contours accentuated by the artist.18 Italian and German sources for the design, its vantage point, and its information reverberate throughout the twenty-two sheets. The Golden Horn, the waterway that separates the ancient city from Galata, its European suburb, courses through the drawing, its horizontal movement emulating the format of what was once a long scroll measuring 11.5 meters. The turbaned figure holds the lid of an inkwell with his right hand and the base with his left, over which the artist has suspended his pen, a gesture that thematizes the flow it has set in motion. Lorck’s outstretched arms, seen in his self-portrait on the eleventh sheet, contribute to this impulse to move by directing us, like a semaphore, toward the left, where he turns his head, and to the right, where a seated Ottoman chaperone assists him. Their location in Galata, where foreign merchants resided, emphasizes the divide between East and West, furthered by the contrast between his minder’s monochromatic drapery and turban, and his own small cap, brocaded drape, and tailored sleeves. What can be noticed, by looking very closely at the yellow garment still covering his left shoulder, is that he has partially exposed his European costume from beneath an outer robe, perhaps a Turkish entari worn by travelers for protection. Revealing both his Ottoman disguise and his European attire, together with his outstretched arms and rotated pose, Lorck reaches out to the left, touching the lower edge of the scroll. His eyes are aligned with the top of the drawing board, as if admiring his drawing, purposefully looking away from the Islamic city on the horizon. With boundary crossing, I also mean to fasten onto edges, hinges, and places of articulation, to the border of the scroll Lorck caresses or the walls of the fortifications where he stands, or the edges of the book that Grelot grasps or the hinge of the diptych dial that echoes his pose (fig. 2). Perhaps Lorck’s pose is a reminder that it is to our detriment if we turn away from the world. For it is the edges of things that impinge upon us, that appeal to us to engage with the complexity of the world.Figure 3. Melchior Lorck, Prospect of Constantinople, 1559, pen and brown ink and some watercolor on paper, full prospect, 425 × 11,500 mm. (Leiden University Libraries BPL 1758.) Notes Contact Bronwen Wilson at University of California, Los Angeles ([email protected]).I am grateful to Jane Tylus for her extraordinary thoughtfulness and assistance.1. Michel de Montaigne, “Of the Education of Children,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA, 2002), 116.2. On canonical objects, see, e.g., Byron Ellsworth Hamann, “The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay,” Art Bulletin 92, no. 1/2 (2010): 6–35; Lauren Jacobi, “Reconsidering the World-System: The Agency and Material Geography of Gold,” in The Globalization of Renaissance Art, ed. Daniel Savoy (Leiden, 2017), 131–57; and David Young Kim, The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance: Geography, Mobility, and Style (New Haven, CT, 2014). For examples of recent scholarship, see Bronwen Wilson and Angela Vanhaelen, eds., “Making Worlds: Art, Materiality, and Early Modern Globalization,” special issue, Journal of Early Modern History 23, nos. 2–3 (May 2019); Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds., The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World (London, 2016); Daniela Bleichmar and Meredith Martin, eds., Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World (Oxford, 2016); Christine Göttler and Mia Mochizuki, eds., The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of World for Early Modern Religious Art (Leiden, 2017); Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500–1800 (New York, 2013); Alina Payne, ed., Mediterranean Art Histories, vol. 1, Dalmatia and the Mediterranean: Portable Archaeology and the Poetics of Influence (Leiden, 2013).3. On Grelot, see Bronwen Wilson, “The Itinerant Artist and the Islamic Urban Prospect: Guillaume-Joseph Grélot’s Self-Portraits in Ambrosio Bembo’s Travel Journal,” Artibus et Historiae, no. 76 (December 2017): 157–80.4. On the reopening of Aleppo after the Cretan War (1645–69), and on Grelot’s later appeal to Louis XIV to conquer Constantinople, see Wilson, “The Itinerant Artist.”5. For scholars working outside of Europe, is in the As we in our discussion of globalization and and the to and practices are central of the historical of Bronwen Wilson and Angela Vanhaelen, Making Worlds: Art, Materiality, and Early Modern Globalization,” in Wilson and Vanhaelen, “Making Worlds,” On the see The of the or Globalization on the to Globalization,” no. de in as the of a History of Art and the The of in The of Art in and out of History, ed. and in Ambrosio Bembo, The and Journal of Ambrosio Bembo, trans. ed. 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