“The cow-pock – or – the wonderful effects of the new inoculation”
1802
London, England
James Gillray (1756-1815)
colored engraving, published by H. Humphrey
Library of Congress Continue reading Inoculation and Marginalization: How Smallpox Was Eradicated in Western Europe
Depicted here is a sketch from 1610-1615 of four figures in oriental dress made in Belgium by the Flemish artist, Peter Paul Rubens. The figure on the farthest right is the figure of interest, as it is the artist’s rendition of a woman wearing an Islamic veil. The significance of this image and this figure in particular is its representation of the detached and misinformed orientalist view which Europeans held of Eastern cultures in the 16thand 17thcenturies. The veil in the drawing does not remotely reflect the actual appearance of veils as staple articles of female apparel in the Ottoman empire that were observed and analyzed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Lady Montagu was a female letter writer in the 17thand 18thcenturies who traveled in Turkey and came to be known as an Enlightenment thinker because of her revolutionary descriptions of foreign culture. Montagu covered subjects such as the veil, introducing new perspectives on objects and ideas that were traditionally looked down upon until that point.
Before Montagu, Europeans generally considered the veil as a perfect symbol of female oppression, an interpretation which, although less common, is still prevalent today. Although the veil as a centerpiece of Islamic culture is clearly an imperfect and controversial item, Lady Montagu began to consider its redeeming qualities for the first time. She went so far as to describe it as a feminist symbol that made Turkish women the only free people in the empire. In her eyes, this freedom stemmed from the anonymity that came with wearing a veil, a power which allowed women to escape their gender role in society and engage in less tolerated activities. One of these activities in which Montagu appeared to have a particular interest was adultery, something which the veil would allow Turkish women to participate in without fear of repercussion. This opened the door to a new interpretation of other elements of sexuality, contributing to one of the major changes of the Enlightenment period which was a review of what was sexually appropriate.
Montagu’s descriptions of the veil also granted it importance as a purely cultural symbol and contributed to the Enlightenment movement away from the orientalist perception of the East. The mere existence of a positive defense and counterargument in favor of the veil introduced a new form of thought to Europe, placing an emphasis on tolerance and appreciation rather than disrespect and aggression when it came to foreign cultures. The first step towards acceptance of foreign culture provided a strong contrast to the approaches of earlier explorers such as Christopher Columbus who immediately resorted to reform and enslavement when encountered with a new culture. The effort to understand the cultures of the “Orient” through items such as the veil eventually evolved into the view of tolerance and validation which we hold today.
Bibliography
Behiery, Valerie. “A Short History of the (Muslim) Veil.” Implicit Religion16, no. 4 (2014). Accessed November 11, 2018. doi:10.1558/imre.v16i4.387.
Grenda, C. S. “Thinking Historically about Diversity: Religion, the Enlightenment, and the Construction of Civic Culture in Early America.” Journal of Church and State 48, no. 3 (2006): 567-600. Accessed November 28, 2018. doi:10.1093/jcs/48.3.567.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. “The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.” The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,Vol. 1: 1708-1720, 1965, All Pages. doi:10.1093/oseo/instance.00053479.
Murray, James C., Oliver Dunn, and James E. Kelley. “The Diario of Christopher Columbus’ First Voyage to America, 1492-1493.” Hispania74, no. 1 (1991): 72. doi:10.2307/344539.
Peter Paul Rubens. 1610-15. Four figures in Oriental dress, a Moorish warrior, two members of the Greek clergy, a lady with a facial veil. drawing. Place: British Museum, http://www.britishmuseum.org/.
Taylor, Barbara. “Feminism and the Enlightenment 1650-1850.” History Workshop Journal 47, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 261-72. Accessed November 28, 2018. doi:10.1093/hwj/1999.47.261.
One of the most captivating paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earringis a troniefeaturing a beautiful young woman wearing foreign dress, a blue and yellow turban, and an impossibly large pearl earring. As a tronie, the painting depicts an imaginary figure. She appears to be either turning away from or facing the viewer, at once foreign and intimate. Her luminescent pearl earring lends the painting an otherworldly quality and signals the broader Dutch obsession with pearls in the 17th century.
Vermeer was a technical master of light and reflections. His other paintings depict figures in enclosed spaces with singular sources of light. He included multiple layers of oil paint to produce a luminous sfumatoeffect, a hazy contour. Girl with a Pearl Earringembodies Vermeer’s artistic prowess. The massive pearl earring catches the light and refracts it across the woman’s beautiful face. Her slightly parted lips contain a sheen in the upper left corner, demonstrating how the pearl illuminates her sensuous face. The interplay of light and darkness creates an intimate atmosphere between the viewer and the painting’s enigmatic figure.
A famed painter of the Dutch Golden Age, Vermeer produced art at the peak of the Dutch maritime empire. The Dutch ended war with Spain in the 1648 Treaty of Münster, enabling the Dutch to operate freely in Eastern markets. Throughout the 17thcentury, the Dutch expanded trade through the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and gained a monopoly on the pearl trade in the East. Pearls became popular status symbols in the Netherlands, embodying the exotic beauty of the East. Just as the tulipmaniacraze saw Dutch elites paying exorbitant prices for tulips, the Dutch Golden Age saw elite similarly pining for pearls. Pearls contained a foreign mystique and were thus desirable objects. Vermeer often painted pearls in conjunction with women, drawing a parallel between the pearls’ milky beauty with the ideal woman’s moral purity.
Girl with a Pearl Earringis notable not only for its superb painting technique, but also for its reflection of European self-image. The woman’s turban, dress, and pearl earring are all symbols of foreignness to the European viewer, yet the woman’s beautiful European face is familiar. The figure in Girl with a Pearl Earringembodies Europe— specifically the Dutch— on the precipice of a new, globalist age. Conflating European standards of beauty with Eastern “exoticism,” the Europeans came to embrace foreign influences. Girl with a Pearl Earring’s tension between Eastern and Western beauty is what captivates viewers.
Sources:
Atlas of World History. Edited by Patrick K. O’Brien. New York: Oxford UP, 2002.
Brook, Timothy. Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2008.
Gifford, E. Melanie. “Painting Light: Recent Observations on Vermeer’s Technique.” In Vermeer Studies, edited by Ivan Gaskell and Michiel Jonker, 185- 199. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998.
Price, J.L. Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. Reaction Books, 2011.
Sluiter, Engel. “Dutch Maritime Power and the Colonial Status Quo, 1585- 1641.” Pacific Historical Review11, no. 1 (1942). Accessed November 29, 2018. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Journals/PacHR/11/1/Dutch_Maritime_power_and_the_Colonial_Status_Quo_1585_to_1641*.html.
Vermeer, Johannes. Girl with a Pearl Earring. 1665. Oil on canvas. Mauritshuis, the Hague. November, 13, 2018. https://www.mauritshuis.nl/en/discover/mauritshuis/masterpieces-from-the-mauritshuis/girl-with-a-pearl-earring-670/detailgegevens/.
As one of the only women to ever gain acceptance into the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, Vigée-Lebrun submitted “Peace Bring Back Abundance” in her application. As a portrait artist, an allegorical painting such as this was unusual for Lebrun. During the French Enlightenment, some genres of art, such as historical and allegorical paintings, were considered superior to other, such as still life and portraiture. Considering Lebrun’s profession in portraiture, and the fact that the large majority of applicants accepted into the Royal Academy were men, this compromise on Lebrun’s part is suitable. Additionally, Lebrun’s ties with the royal family, as Marie Antoinette’s favorite portrait artist, diminished Lebrun’s chances of acceptance even further, as the Academy wanted to remain an institution separated from the influences of the crown. In fact, Lebrun’s admittance would have been impossible without the interference of King Louis XVI.
There are many revolutionary qualities of “Peace Bring Back Abundance,” displaying the personified themes of peace and abundance during a time period riddled with poverty, famine, and uprise. Created in 1780, Lebrun portrayed this piece directly after the American Revolution and before the French Revolution. In fact, the use of allegory itself was revolutionary was this genre was largely associated with carrying “emblems of revolutionary power” through portrayal of the “incarnation of revolutionary values” (De Baecque, 111). The timing for this painting almost certainly suggests an incentive to create a political statement on behalf of Lebrun. If anything, it conveys the importance of foods such as wheat and fruits, to those who rebelled against their sovereigns. The French Revolution is largely remembered for events such as the Women’s March on Versailles, a demonstration held to call attention to the high prices and scarcity of bread. In fact, Marie Antoinette, a woman closely associated with Lebrun herself, is remembered for having allegedly said “Let them eat cake” in response to the bread riots spurring all over France. This painting, at the very least, indicates the idea that food supply and peace go hand in hand.
Vigée-Lebrun could also have been making a statement about gender roles during Enlightenment France. The painting depicts Peace, a woman draped in dark colors, holding an olive branch and gently leading forward Abundance, also embodied as a woman. Abundance contrasts Peace by wearing white clothing, exposing her breast, and holding wheat and grains as well as various fruits. Due to the contrast in colors, Peace can be interpreted as a male figure and Abundance as a female considering the “darker flesh tones and hair color traditionally used to indicate maleness, the pearly flesh and blonde hair to suggest femaleness” (Sheriff, 126). This indicates a broader theme about gender roles, as Abundance is sexualized through her lack of clothing, as well as her suggested virtue through innocence in her light color schemes and dependence on a male figure. Here, Lebrun’s attempts to insert feminist themes into a painting that would harbor a largely male audience.
Sources:
Image Vigee-Lebrun, Elisabeth Louise. “Peace Bring Back Abundance.” Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/638218.
De Baecque, Antoine “The Allegorical Image of France, 1750-1800: A Political Crisis of Representation” Representations, Vol. 47 (1994):111-43.
Sheriff, Mary D. 1996. The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
No. 4. De español y negra, nace mulata
Andrés de Islas, Mexico, 1774
Oil on canvas
75 x 54 cm
Museo de América, Madrid
de Islas, Andrés. No. 4. De español y negra, nace mulata (From Spaniard and Black, a Mulata is Born). 1774. Oil on canvas. Museo de América, Madrid. In Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, 116.
Andrés de Islas produced this painting in Mexico as part of a series of casta paintings that introduce the Black African-Spaniard lineage. Although the purpose for commissioning such paintings are not well understood, casta paintings are theorized to have served as a souvenir for wealthy European audiences. This enabled them to have a unique glimpse of colonial life. In effect, this painting would have been a part of a series that depicts the racial hierarchy of Latin America.
Islas introduces the concept of Black African-Spaniard lineage in this painting by depicting a violent domestic encounter between a Black African woman and a Spanish man. In this conflict, the Black African woman grabs the hair of a Spanish man and is about to strike him with a kitchen utensil. In response, the Spanish man expresses shock while protecting himself from getting injured. In the midst of this conflict, their mulatto daughter pushes on her mother’s leg. In the painting, Islas highlights the various exotic fruits and vegetables in Latin America by comparing them to the oddity of the Spaniard-Black African couple and their mulatto daughter.
In the seventeenth century, elite members of society exerted great power over those of African descent and enforced rigorous laws after Africans incited a mass riot in 1611. In the eighteenth century, the elite members of Latin American society saw that the categories of the Latin American caste system were deteriorating. However, they commissioned paintings which continued to illustrate a taxonomy of castas that was no longer functioning. Appealing to a foreign audience, Europeans and elite members of Latin American society may have commissioned a casta painting like this one to enforce the ideals of a deteriorating casta system and maintain exclusive economic privileges.
In doing so, they resisted the social advancement of Africans, who were acquiring the power to purchase whiteness and attain social mobility. Elite members of society responded in protest to this and complained that those of African descent were “people who in our houses one would not give a seat”.[1] To express their fear of those of African descent, the elite commissioned paintings that displayed them in unstable domestic settings. Moreover, to emphasize the debased social dynamic that a household with one of purely African blood could create, Islas juxtaposes this painting with more stable households characterized by familial members who produce children with fair skin.
[1] Ann Twinam, “Purchasing Whiteness,” in Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, ed. Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 152.
Sources:
Carrera, Magali. Imagining Identity in New Spain. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Katzew, Ilona. Casta Painting : Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Twinam, Ann, “Purchasing Whiteness,” in Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, ed. Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, 141-165.
De español y negra, mulato, 6. (detail)
José de Páez, Mexico, ca. 1770-1780
Oil on canvas
Private collection
de Páez, José. No. 4. De español y negra, nace mulata (From Spaniard and Black, a Mulata is Born). 1774. Oil on canvas. Museo de América, Madrid. In Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, 24.
This detail is a part of a casta painting produced by José de Páez in Mexico. In the painting, a woman of African descent is being depicted as a preparer of hot chocolate for her Spanish husband. This hot chocolate would be served in a jicara or chocolate cup that was used specifically for drinking hot chocolate. This detail is an example of how chocolate and the chocolate cup would become associated with women who were the common preparers of the beverage.
Hot chocolate was a beverage that was the most universally embraced by European settlers of the New World. Colonial writers almost unanimously praised the beverage and declared that it was “the healthiest and most sustaining food in the world”.[1] Since the consumption of chocolate constituted European’s first exposure to the caffeine, it is likely that Europeans thought chocolate was stimulating and beneficial to one’s health. Hot chocolate, in fact, became immensely popular to the point that it was considered a geographically appropriate substitute for wine.
In the mid-sixteenth century, chocolate consumption was widespread because there was a shortage of Spanish women in the New World. This shortage motivated settlers to depend on indigenous women for meal preparation. However, when colonial settlement was established for a few decades, chocolate was seen as a drink that was favored by women in particular. With this association, Europeans’ attitudes towards indigenous women as welcomed preparers of chocolate transformed into a fear of the power they could exert with the product.
For Europeans, their reliance on indigenous women to prepare, serve, and drink chocolate transforms into a fear of their spirituality. Chocolate became associated with sexual witchcraft and had aphrodisiac qualities that women took advantage of to exert power over the men in their lives. Women were therefore placed on Inquisition trials by the Church for preparing and using of chocolate as a mechanism for controlling men’s sexuality. While clergy members like the English priest Thomas Gage privately prepared and consumed chocolate for themselves, the Church fearfully condemned women’s use of chocolate in a contradictory manner.
[1] Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 131.
Sources:
Earle, Rebecca. The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Few, Martha. “Chocolate, Sex, and Disorderly Women in Late-Seventeenth- and Early-Eighteenth-Century Guatemala.” Ethnohistory, vol. 52, no. 4, Fall 2005.
Gage, Thomas. The English American: A New Survey of the West Indies, 1648. New York: Routledge, 1928. Accessed October 8, 2018. https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0429868251.
Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.
