Encompassing the Globe... A Review
Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries
"Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries" relates European works of art to those from Africa, Brazil and Asia.
Levenson, Jay A. (ed.), et al. Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries (exh. cat.). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2007.
Rare books, manuscripts, maps, paintings, sculptures and textiles are among some 280 fascinating objects described, to some degree, in Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries. This catalogue was produced for a large-scale exhibition at Washington, D.C.'s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the adjoining National Museum of African Art (June 24-September 16, 2007). The show subsequently appeared at Brussels' Centre for Fine Arts (November 3, 2007-February 3, 2008).
The distorted World Map from "Insularum Illustratum" (ca. 1489) of Renaissance Florence's cartographer Henricus Martellus (act. 1480-1496) illustrates late-medieval man's limited knowledge of world geography. More accurate maps were drawn after the rounding of Africa's southern Cabo da Boa Esperança (Cape of Good Hope) in 1488 by Bartolomeu Dias (ca. 1450-1500). His maritime trade route to the East, intended to satisfy the imperial aspirations of Portugal's King João II (r. 1477, 1481-1495), encouraged artistic exchange among European, African, Near Eastern, Asian and Native American cultures.
The Portuguese seafarers' ships were conduits of information about flora, fauna and peoples foreign to the European continent. The galleons' highly prized exotica (natural and man-made "curiosities" from faraway lands) made their way into the royal and aristocratic Kunst- und Wunderkammers (chambers of art and wonders) of Renaissance and Baroque Europe. A Sloth (?) (ca. 1591-1596), executed by the self-taught Flemish artist and mapmaker Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1601), illustrates a tree-dwelling mammal from South America, probably transported by an Iberian vessel to 16th-century Europe.
Encompassing the Globe... explains Renaissance man's knowledge about Earth's then-uncharted regions as transmitted to Western Europe by pioneering Portuguese explorers and their crews. The 386-page catalogue, mostly color-illustrated, begins with three well-written essays. The oversized volume, divided into chapters devoted to cartography, ethnographica, Africa, Brazil, Asia, trade and warfare, concludes with a thorough bibliography.
Unfortunately, the Smithsonian Institution chose to devote more energy to the objects' replication in print than to their much-needed detailed description. While the general reader may be impressed by the book's handsome appearance, specialists of the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance will be left expecting more in terms of its content.
Source:
- Levenson, Jay A. (ed.), et al. Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration (exh. cat.). New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991.
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