Periodic Reporting for period 2 - COMCON (Communities of Concord: Building Contentment and Belonging through Emotional Images in Early Modern Europe and Beyond)
Reporting period: 2024-01-10 to 2025-01-09
The project uncovered case studies shedding light on how images represented European and Latin American identities and communities in the early modern age. It focused on visual and narrative paradigms—in paintings, prints, and illustrated books—devised in Catholic Iberian contexts between the 16th and 18th centuries and used to advance ideals, such as Concord and Perfection. The COMCON project selected and connected images (paintings and prints) and texts (political and religious treatises) produced in the territories ruled by the Habsburgs. COMCON embraced the conception of the Iberian global empire as a universe of constellations of kingdoms and viceroyalties, saints and cults, missionaries and painters, authorities and devotees. The project comprised the islands of Sardinia and Sicily, South Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, the Habsburg/Spanish Netherlands, the Viceroyalty of New Spain, and the Viceroyalty of Peru. Can disseminating the stylistic and iconographic models tell us something about political history / religious ideology? Does the distribution of specific and recurrent visual ideas reveal something significant beyond the mobility of commodities, objects, and beings? Can a state of mind or emotion incorporated in images help us understand the goals of the Catholic Monarchy and the ambitions of missionary orders? What was the role of print culture and illustrated books in transforming the faithful, legitimizing the sovereign, and protecting the empire from disruptive energies? The project offered significant contributions to understanding how images and texts promoted moral virtues and social emotions to propagate a compound idea of emotional community (normative and proactive about discipline and obedience), initially as part of Rome's response to the Protestant Reformation and later as a strategy to gain and control new believers/subjects in the Ibero-American Viceroyalties. The project explored how persuasive representations of Salvation/Triumph and Love/Mercy 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 explored the construction of compassionate imagery and militant sanctity in the Early Modern Iberian worlds. COMCON analyzed how paintings from the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru and political and spiritual treatises devised in Habsburg Catholic Europe functioned as propaganda tools distributing systems of ideal virtues, social emotions, and moral rules. The project connected distant areas and diverse works called upon to support the legitimacy and sovereignty of the imperial Habsburg Monarchy and its affiliated political authorities and religious hierarchies. CONCOM analyzed images (such as Marian miracle-working images, corporate portraits, sacred hearts, and emblems) devised to extoll Perfection and Concord, virtues considered essential for the Salvation of the faithful and the Empire. The MSCA fellow participated in symposia, panels, seminars, and colloquia (in 2022-2023: Dublin, Warwick, Florence, Zurich, San Juan-Puerto Rico, Puebla, Mexico City, Cusco, Lima, Chicago, Pisa; in 2024-2025: Chicago, Parma, Bologna, Rome, Quito, Boston) regarding the circulation of models, objects, painters, and missionaries between Europe and the Ibero-American viceroyalties; Global Renaissance/Baroque; methodological approaches; Habsburg Monarchy and Global Catholicism. The networking has involved collaborations and scientific exchanges with international research groups and centers: Spanish Italy and the Iberian Americas (Getty Foundation/Columbia University); ProJesArt (UAM); CIRIMA (UCM); GLOBECOSAL (UZH); Empires, Environments, Objects (Max-Planck Partner Group); ARTES: Iberian and Latin American Visual Cultural Group (UK); The Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies, Chicago; The Saint Louis University Center for Iberian Historical Studies; UCLA Center for Early Global Studies. The fellow created GEAMCH: Global Empires, Artistic Mobility and Connected Histories research group (UNIBO). COMCON focused on the collections of the Newberry Library (early modern illustrated books by Jesuits, missionaries, and Iberian authors), paintings created in the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, and connections between moral theology and viceregal paintings as well as between representations of emotions and political agendas. In addition to panels organized within the Renaissance Society of America meetings ("Representing Peace at War in the Early Modern Iberian Habsburg Worlds" 2023; "Moving Ideas in the Iberian Worlds" 2024; "Nature and Society in the Iberian Worlds" 2025), the Chicago colloquium/workshop "On Iberian Rhizomatic Worlds (1400s-1700s)", the Chicago symposium ("Social and Moral Communities in Early Modern Text and Image"), the Bologna conference ("Empire of Concord? Communities and Authority in the Early Modern Iberian Worlds"), and many seminars, focusing on the most pivotal issues of the MSCA project (Iberian empire, concord/dissents, social and moral communities/emotions, Global Catholicism), constituted crucial moments for discussing and disseminating the results of the COMCOM research.
Under Philip II, the Habsburg Empire reached a complex confederation across the globe that spanned the oceans and included high-tension European areas. Painters and missionaries traveled across the Catholic Monarchy. 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)–linked even long-distance areas (such as Latin America and the Philippines). 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 investigated and connected materials and interpretative perspectives, acknowledging the specificity of contexts, communities, agents, and local/itinerant/immigrant artists. COMCON moved beyond the state of the art, overcoming usually sectoral approaches and embracing a wide geographical area and diverse materials (Marian and pathos-infused images, illustrated books, devotional objects, and maps). COMCON corralled the history of ideas, emotions, and Jesuit studies, blending this knowledge with the history of style, iconography, and print culture. At the same time, in exploring the composite and vast Habsburg empire, the project went beyond the center/periphery dichotomy by experimenting with methodologies that focus on transnational circulation/mobility, constellations/connected histories, rhizomatic perspective, distributed agency, Global Catholicism, and visual exegesis. Through seminars/lectures, COMCON has brought Ibero-American and Global Southern Renaissance/Baroque painting into the Italian academic teaching program and has highlighted how fruitful the combined study of paintings and early modern illustrated books can prove to be in understanding the dissemination of political and religious ideas selected to keep together distant communities, as well as to control the cultural changes or stem potentially disintegrating energies and promote strategic moral and social ideals.