SESSION: Transcultural Mobilities: People, Artifacts, Materials, 1300-1750 (FULL-DAY PART 2)

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 2 Speakers:

Grace Fannon, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Turning outward to look inward: Transcultural encounter and national identity in English delftware

English tin-glazed earthenware, known as delftware, sits at the intersection of early modern transregional encounters. In material, form, and decoration, it encompasses influences from East Asian porcelain, Middle Eastern earthenware, Turkish Iznik ware, Italian maiolica, Spanish earthenware, German stoneware, and Dutch delftware. Exported overseas to colonial outposts, English delftware was consequently interwoven into a nascent seventeenth-century Atlantic empire that expanded across Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean. Using examples from British, Irish, and American collections, this paper interrogates how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English delftware – in its production, movement, and functionality – mediated and retrospectively narrates the accelerated rates of transcultural mobility that define the concept of ‘early modern’. Scrutinising the international context in which delftware emerged and circulated recentres its cultural hybridity and mobility. The second half of the paper analyses how delftware became an agent in the visualisation and communication of a newly conceived British national identity, characterised, as David Armitage has argued, by commercialism, imperial maritime power, and Protestantism (or, more specifically, anti-Catholicism). This identity was born partly out of a process of schismogenesis – Britishness defined through opposition to what it was not. Encoded with its international origins, yet also embodying a distinctly British zeitgeist, delftware represents the paradigm between increased global encounter and a burgeoning self-reflective awareness of the national in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Britain. The paper consequently offers a case study for how material culture provoked and mediated transcultural encounters in the early modern world, and how those encounters shaped understandings of the self.

Zifeng Zhao, University of Cambridge

The Rickshaw Motif in Chinoiserie: Objects and Mobilities in Early Eighteenth-Century Europe

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Eurasia was connected through expanding trade, diplomatic, and missionary networks that circulated visual, material, and intellectual cultures. Through their portability and adaptability, artefacts such as porcelain, lacquerware, prints, and textiles acted as vehicles of transcultural exchange, generating new aesthetic and cultural phenomena. Among these, chinoiserie emerged at European courts as a style that adapted, imitated, and evoked East Asian motifs, materials, and techniques across the decorative arts, architecture, painting, and gardens. Printed geographies, Jesuit travel accounts, and popular literature also contributed to its development and appeal.

This paper focuses on a single chinoiserie motif: the rickshaw, or wheeled furniture for transporting people, whose prototype appears in Chinese art as early as the sixth century. It traces the motif’s mobility across media, including, among other examples, lacquered screens from the Berlin Palace and L’Audience (c. 1700) from the Beauvais tapestry series Première tenture chinoise. I examine how images of this form of transport were translated, recontextualised, and adapted to European courtly display. Read alongside geography books that described and illustrated Asian rickshaws, this case demonstrates how the motif conveyed ideas of movement, hierarchy, and display. Rather than a simple diffusion of “exotic” imagery, its European adaptations reveal selective appropriation shaped by object design and spatial arrangement. Reconstructing the networks, materials, and skills through which this motif travelled, the paper reconsiders one-way influence models between East and West and recentres the mobilities of people, artefacts, and objects in early modern art history.

Ziyi Shao, SOAS University of London

Universal Monarch, Transcultural Tomb: Qianlong, Tibetan Buddhism, and the Politics of the Imperial Afterlife

Constructed in 1743, the Qianlong tomb (Yuling) is one of the most distinctive imperial mausoleums of the Ming and Qing dynasties. While its overall layout and architectural design continue the traditional Chinese model established in the Ming, the tomb’s interior is extraordinary in being fully inscribed with Tibetan and Lantsa scripts accompanied by Buddhist imagery. Recent scholarship has begun to identify these inscriptions as ritual texts associated with purification and protection.

This raises crucial questions about the meanings embodied in the tomb. If the Tibetan inscriptions were intended to provide protection and purification, how did these practices interact with Chinese funerary traditions entered on ancestral veneration, geomancy, and moral exemplarity? What do they reveal about the negotiation between distinct ritual systems within the imperial afterlife? More broadly, how do they reflect the Qianlong emperor’s complex religious identity, as both a Confucian ruler and a Buddhist patron presenting himself as a universal monarch across his multi-ethnic empire?

By situating the Qianlong tomb within the broader religious practices of the Qing court, this paper examines how Tibetan Buddhist elements were translated and integrated into a fundamentally Chinese funerary framework. Attention will be given to comparing the tomb’s program with other Tibetan Buddhist shrines commissioned by Qianlong, highlighting the emperor’s role in adapting and relocating ritual practices across architectural and cultural settings. In doing so, the study considers how Qianlong’s engagement with Tibetan Buddhism articulated his Manchu identity, his vision of rulership, and his beliefs about culture, religion, death, and eternity.

Juan Pablo Rodriguez Jimenez, National Museums Scotland

Friedericke Voigt, National Museums Scotland

Encounters at the Crossroads of Cultures and Disciplines: A Multidisciplinary Project to Analyse Indian Paintings at National Museums Scotland (NMS)

How can art historians better incorporate the implications of everyday life into their understanding and interpretation of artworks? This paper presents a case study to demonstrate that collaborative research can be crucial to efforts to change the interpretative narrative of artworks. In an ongoing pilot study, a multidisciplinary team at NMS is re-evaluating a rare group of mid-eighteenth-century Indian paintings. Formerly interpreted as physically coherent works, our study has found evidence that they are, in fact, composites, likely shaped during cultural exchange between European customers and Indian artisans.

The paintings were brought to Scotland in 1766 by Archibald Swinton (1731–1804), a captain in the East India Company’s army in Bengal. For several decades, Swinton had them displayed on the walls of his stately dining room at Kimmerghame (Duns) as a memory of his time in India. Visual observation shows a similar pattern of physical and pictorial alterations across several of these paintings. If it were possible to demonstrate, for example, that they date to the time of creation of the paintings, they would suggest that local Indian artisans worked to Swinton’s brief.

To test hypotheses such as this, we established a multidisciplinary team drawing on expertise in paper and artefact conservation, photography, analytical and heritage science and art history. The team uses primary source analysis, visual analytical techniques, and scientific analytical methods, such as x-ray fluorescence, radiography, and hyperspectral imaging, to reconstruct, in an iterative process, the trajectory of these paintings.