The Annual Josephine Von Henneberg Lecture in Italian Art/Keynote Lecture of NERC 2021

Art, Art History and Film Department, Boston College

Friday, October 29, 2021, 5:00 p.m., 2101 Commonwealth Avenue (BC Conference Center, next to McMullen Museum), Room 111

Please register through the NERC registration form HERE!

Dr. Lia Markey, Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies, Newberry Library

“Binding the Globe: Race and Empire in Luxury Atlases from the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World”

Atlas production struggled to keep up with the changing world of the sixteenth century. With the explosion of cartography, travel writing, and cataloguing, luxury atlases developed out of the portolan chart with elaborate illustrations representing newly imagined people, flora, and fauna. This lecture marks the preliminary stages of a book project and will explore three case studies of magnificent atlases at the Newberry Library produced in the Mediterranean in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.  The large-scale Portuguese “Lopes atlas” from 1565 (Ayer MS 26) colorfully renders the world with bodies, coats-of-arms, ships, and cities.  The Ottoman Turkish Tarih hindi garbi from c. 1600 (Ayer MS 612) represents a hybrid atlas and travelogue, based on an Italian source about the Americas, with miniature paintings of abundant lands and monstrous people.  Finally, Robert Dudley’s Arcano del mare (Ayer 135.D8 1646), begun as early as 1595 and printed in 1646 in Florence, represents the first sea atlas to render the entire world, highlighting a failed Medici expedition to Brazil with the depiction of Indigenous bodies.  What was the purpose of these atlases? Who were their patrons and users? How do they reveal power dynamics in the early modern world?  Translation of image and/or text function in all three examples to define empire and race in the early modern world.