Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COMCON (Communities of Concord: Building Contentment and Belonging through Emotional Images in Early Modern Europe and Beyond)
Reporting period: 2022-01-10 to 2024-01-09
The project aims to uncover case studies and connections that shed light on how images represented European identities in the early modern period. It focuses on visual and narrative paradigms/patterns—in paintings, prints, and illustrated books—devised in Catholic Iberian contexts between the 16th and 18th centuries and used to advance community ideals, such as Cohesion, Enthusiasm, and Concord. The COMCON project gathers images (paintings and prints) and texts (political and religious treatises) made/published in the territories governed by the Habsburgs. We embrace the idea of empire as a constellation of kingdoms and viceroyalties, saints and cults, missionaries and painters. The project ranges from the islands of Sardinia and Sicily during the Spanish period, across the Mediterranean to the Habsburg Netherlands, all the way to the Viceroyalty of New Spain and the Viceroyalty of Peru. Could the spread of stylistic and iconographic patterns tell us something about political history/ideology? Is it possible that the circulation—or rather, the distribution of—specific and recurrent compositional models representing social dignity and religious discipline reveals something significant beyond the commercial vitality and the mobility of goods, ideas, and people? Can a frame of mind, captured in images, help us understand the moral vision of the Catholic Monarchy? Can this also be extended to illustrated books, which aimed to transform the faithful, legitimize the sovereign, and, ultimately, protect the empire from break-up? By analyzing how artistic (and social) patterns were applied and re-elaborated in new transatlantic borderlands and inner zones, the project can offer significant contributions to scholarship on how images and texts selected the European imagery and projected its values to promote a particular idea of ‘emotional community’, initially as part of Rome's response to the Protestant Reformation and later as a strategy to gain new believers and subjects in the Ibero-American Viceroyalties. The project explores how persuasive representations of Salvation, Perfection, and Contentment were employed— and are still used in some cases—in the politics of evangelization, conversion, and allegiance to forge, transmit, and dictate ideal (and convenient) social characteristics of communities.
The project has explored the construction of compassionate imagery in the Early Modern Iberian worlds. Subjects painted in the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru and political and spiritual treatises devised in Habsburg Catholic Europe functioned as significant but subtle propaganda for a system of ideal virtues. The project has connected distant areas and different objects called upon to disseminate sacred allegories and ideas about the moral superiority of imperial Habsburg sovereignty and its affiliated hierarchies. The scholar has studied images deploying ideas of a zealous and militant monarchy to extoll perfection and concord, both considered essential for the salvation of the faithful and the preservation of the empire. She has joined, attended, and participated in conferences, round tables, symposia, panels, seminars, and colloquia (in 2022 and 2023: Dublin, Warwick, Florence, Zurich, Puerto Rico, Puebla, Mexico City, Cusco, Lima, Chicago, Pisa) regarding the circulation of models, painters, and missionaries between Europe, the Mediterranean kingdoms, and the Ibero-American viceroyalties; Global Renaissance/Baroque; methodological approaches; morality and social groups in the Habsburg Catholic Monarchy. The networking has involved collaborations and scientific exchanges with international research groups and centers: SIIA. Spanish Italy and the Iberian Americas (Getty Foundation/Columbia University); PROJESART (UAM); CIRIMA (UCM); GLOBECOSAL (UZH); GEAMCH (UNIBO); ARTES. Iberian and Latin American Visual Cultural Group (UK), Center for Iberian Historical Studies, Saint Louis University, UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. The research has so far focused on the holdings of the Newberry Library: illustrated books from the early modern age and manuscripts related to emblematic culture, written by Jesuits and missionaries during the colonial period in the Iberian Americas; paintings created in the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru; connections between illustrated books (printed in Spanish Rome and Spanish Netherlands) and viceregal paintings. In addition to panels organized within the Renaissance Society of America conferences (Representing Peace at War in the Early Modern Iberian Habsburg Worlds 2023; Moving Ideas in the Iberian Worlds 2024) and the colloquium On Iberian Rhizomatic Worlds (1400s-1700s), the Chicago symposium (Social and Moral Communities in Early Modern Text and Image) and the Bologna conference (Empire of Concord? Communities and Authority in the Early Modern Iberian Worlds), both focusing on the most pivotal aspects of the MSCA project (empire/Catholic Monarchy, concord, social and moral communities, rare books, propaganda, and missionaries), will constitute crucial moments for discussing the topics and disseminating the results of the ongoing research.
Under Philip II, the Habsburg Empire reached across the globe a complex confederation that spanned the Oceans and included high-tension European areas. Painters and missionaries travelled across the Catholic Monarchy, while images and cults shared across diverse geographies (the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, the Mediterranean and Spanish Italy, the Spanish Netherlands, and the Iberian Peninsula) connected even long-distance areas. The circulation of models, the promotion of ideas (aimed at universal evangelization and imperialism), and the Global Renaissance/Baroque have favored the conception of an empire understood as all-encompassing, polycentric, or even without a center. The project has investigated and connected materials and interpretative approaches, acknowledging the specificity of contexts, agents, and local/itinerant/immigrant artists. The project moves beyond the state of the art in that it overcomes usually sectoral approaches and embraces a wide geographical area and diverse materials (Marian and pathos-infused images, prints, illustrated books, and maps). The history of ideas, emotions, and missions meets the history of style, iconography, and print culture. At the same time, in exploring the complex and vast Habsburg empire, the project goes beyond the center/periphery dichotomy by experimenting with methodologies that focus on circulation/mobility, constellations/connected histories, composite/polycentric/rhizomatic monarchy, and distributed agency. The project would bring knowledge of Ibero-American and Global Southern Renaissance/Baroque painting into the academic teaching courses and highlight how fruitful the blended study of paintings and early modern illustrated books could be in understanding the persuasive dissemination of ideas selected to keep together distant communities, as well as to control the cultural changes and promote strategic moral ideals.