SESSION: Transcultural Mobilities: People, Artifacts, Materials, 1300-1750 (FULL-DAY PART 1)

Art histories of the late medieval and early modern periods have witnessed a global turn in recent decades. This full-day session seeks to bring together case studies from a wide variety of geographies and time periods to investigate approaches to transcultural exchange, mobilities and encounters. The session focuses on the roles played by materials, artefacts, and people – whether artists, patrons, diplomats, merchants, missionaries or translators – as mediators of transregional interactions. What methods of analysis help us centre the mobilities of these agents? What roles do techniques and skills, as well as images, objects, and the built environment, play in these dynamics? What older narratives are challenged by these approaches, and what new narratives become possible? This session seeks to enhance dialogue between scholars working in different subfields of art history and encourage broader conversations about the future of the discipline.

Session Convenor:

Robert Brennan, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Part 1 Speakers:

Yupeng Wu, Yale University

From Khurasan to Khanbaliq: Persian ‘Cloth of Gold’ and the Mobility of Artisanal Knowledge

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, nasij, a sumptuous lampas woven with gold threads in the eastern Iranian world, travelled across Eurasia through trade and the movement of skilled weavers. This paper traces the eastward migration of nasij and the Persian weavers who produced it between Ilkhanid Iran and Yuan China, exploring how artisanal knowledge of weaving this luxury textile was transformed and institutionalised within Chinese imperial workshops.

Drawing on Yuan-period primary sources, including official histories such as the Yuan shi, literary anthologies such as Daoyuan xuegu lu, and technical treatises Cao muzi, I reconstruct the integration and reception of Persian nasij weaving in the Yuan court alongside surviving textile fragments. This paper addresses a significant gap in existing scholarship on Persianate art of the Ilkhanid and Timurid periods, which has privileged the sinicisation of Persian art while neglecting the reverse flow of techniques and materials. By reorienting the conversation towards this underexplored trajectory, this paper foregrounds Persia’s formative contributions to the shared material cultures of Eurasia during Pax Mongolica.

Following nasij from the weaving centres of Khurasan to the imperial ateliers of Khanbaliq, this paper demonstrates how a single textile technology mediated transcultural encounters and reshaped visual regimes far from its place of origin. The presence of Huihui (Islamicate) artisans in Yuan production bureaus and the incorporation of Persian compound-weave techniques reveal a process of material translation that complicates one-way narratives of cultural influence and highlights the mobility of knowledge at the heart of Mongol-era art.

Yassin Oulad Daoud, Columbia University

Cognitive portability in the work of a fifteenth-century master lapicida

The master stone carver was one of the most sought-after and itinerant craftsmen in fifteenth-century Europe and was largely responsible for the transcultural mediation of form in art and architecture. Despite this, their work has unfortunately received comparatively little critical and scholarly attention, falling disciplinarily somewhere between “sculpture” and “architecture” and geographically across both “Renaissance Italy” and more historiographically marginal regions of the Mediterranean. One such master was Juraj Dalmatinac / Giorgio da Sebenico—a Dalmatian who trained in Venice and executed some of the most important sculptural and architectural projects of the fifteenth-century Adriatic, including in Šibenik and Ancona. His relatively well-documented corpus makes for a good case study of how an individual negotiated the conditions of their trade—here, importantly, the migratory nature of the job, as well as material, technique, logistics, and communication—across a variety of contexts and project types. In focusing on these issues, this paper departs from the work of earlier “global turn” scholars who, using such concepts as “microarchitecture” and “portability,” emphasized the circulation of forms through moveable objects and across different media. Instead, it seeks to understand how the artistic conditions of a single medium informed artistic thought and the ability to execute larger-scale forms in a variety of cultural, urban, and architectural contexts—a kind of cognitive portability. By advancing this concept, I hope to retain the productive decentring of privileged geographies and media that the global turn offered while recovering the sense of mind and medium that it often effaced

Mary Thompson, Hunter College

Hemispheres of Faith: Mapping the Global Journey of an Ivory Rosary Bead at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hemispheres of Faith reattributes an ivory rosary bead in The Metropolitan Museum of Art from sixteenth-century Spain to eighteenth-century Quito. This paper reimagines the bead as a transcultural artefact born of the vast networks of exchange within the Spanish global empire, embodying the movement of people, materials, and artistic techniques across continents and cultures between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I propose that the ivory from which it was carved first arrived from Asia to Acapulco via the Manila Galleons, the maritime artery connecting the Philippines and New Spain. From there, the ivory travelled to Quito, Ecuador, where local artists transformed it into the style of the Quito School through carving, metalwork, rock crystal, and polychrome estofado techniques. Drawing on new provenance research and archival materials from the J.P. Morgan Jr. Papers, I trace the bead’s later trajectory into the twentieth century, culminating in its acquisition by financier J. Pierpont Morgan and entry into the Met’s collection. The bead’s layered materiality and mobility illuminate the entangled histories of faith, commerce, and craftsmanship that characterized early modern global exchange. Hemispheres of Faith demonstrates how artistic collaboration across the Spanish Empire generated new forms of material and spiritual expression. The rosary bead thus becomes a lens for rethinking art history’s boundaries, revealing how transcultural mobilities shaped artistic production, devotional experience, and the ‘social life’ of the bead.

Allison Caplan, Yale University

Transcultural Collaboration in the General History of the Things of New Spain

TThe early colonial Mexican General History of the Things of New Spain—an illustrated, bilingual Nahuatl-Spanish work on Nahua culture, begun ca. 1559 and best known from its 1575–1577 version, the Florentine Codex—has increasingly been recognized as a work of intercultural collaboration between the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, long credited as its sole author, and a team of Nahua scholars, scribes, artists, and translators. Generally presented as a way of recuperating Nahua contributors’ agency and voice, the shift to thinking of this manuscript as collaborative also raises key questions about the nature of transcultural collaboration in a colonial setting marked by intense difference and inequality, as well as how early modern Nahua and European practices of manuscript production shaped collaborators’ interactions. This presentation focuses on the General History’s little-studied preparatory drafts, written almost entirely in Nahuatl, which provide unique material traces of how contributors parsed, edited, and transformed each other’s contributions and the work as a whole. I ask both how we can use material traces to understand transcultural interactions between early modern writers and artists and how histories of collaboration should inform our interpretation of this colonial production. Bringing this case study into conversation with established concepts of hybridity and biculturality in colonial art enables us to ask how the interactions of complex individuals over time generate more nuanced understandings of the different modalities through which colonial collaborations occurred and how these can inform understandings of the cultural affinities of early modern colonial productions.