Objects In Motion In The Early Modern World

Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World presents a collection of twelve original essays that examine the circulation of objects across a variety of global regions and cultures from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries that reveal the importance of mobility for understanding the production, use, and meanings of early modern art. Individual essays trace the routes of an unusually wide range of cultural, geographical, and material examples -- including Persian silk textiles in Venice, Chinese porcelain along the Swahili Coast, exotic South Pacific bird specimens in Holland, and various European objects through India and Siam. The multiple mechanisms by which each of these objects were transported, translated, resisted, and consumed in the early modern period are carefully explored, as well as the various forms of mobility -- both physical and interpretive -- that each historical object experienced during this period. Collectively, essays reveal how mobility provides a vital means to reconsider traditional geographies and hierarchies associated with global exchange, particularly those that privilege Western Europe. Timely and provocative, Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World sheds important new light on the mobility of objects and cultural meaning in the early modern world -- and paves the way to a consideration of broader questions about art history and its disciplinary boundaries.

Daniela Bleichmar is Associate Professor of Art History and History at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (2012), and co-editor of Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World (2011) and Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (2009).

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Meredith Martin is Associate Professor of Art History at New York University and the Institute of Fine Arts. She is the author of Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie-Antoinette (2011), and co-author of?Period Eye: Karen Kilimnik’s Fancy Pictures (2007).?