Events

Past Event

University Seminar on the Renaissance: Maryanne Cline Horowitz (Occidental College) "Preaching across the Globe of Continents"

March 20, 2023
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
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Online

Based on site visits in Belgium and the Netherlands, this talk focuses on the sculpted portrayal of Africa, America, Asia, and Europe in four extant Jesuit pulpits at the end of the seventeenth century. The decor of the base of the pulpits echoes the Jesuit theme of global missionary endeavor evident in Jesuit engravings, as well as in Andrea Pozzo’s ceiling of S. Ignazio in Rome. We shall consider the rival impact of Ortelius’s title page which suggests a hierarchy from dress to undress in female personifications versus Jesuit engravings of well-clothed personifications with inclusion of male personifications. The issue of the cause of skin color, so different in Ortelius’s text than in his frontispiece and his commissioned poems, fades from significance as a distinguishing marker given that the material of the pulpit base is usually brown wood, darkened with age; therefore, the portrayals — sometimes around a globe—focus on physiognomy and costume.

This talk considers the pulpits in Church of St. Jacob, Bruges; Gourke Church, Tilbourg; and The Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp.  The examples of Hendrik Frans Verbruggen’s pulpit in the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Mechelen, Belgium, I shall feature as exhibiting the influence of the style of Artus Quellinus and Hubert Quellinus in their sculptured West tympanum of the Amsterdam Town Hall, analyzed in “Exotic Female (and Male) Continents: Early Modern Fourfold Division of Humanity” in Bodies and Maps: Early Modern Personifications of the Continents, Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 73 (Leiden: Brill Press, 2021). Particularly noteworthy in the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Mechelen, is the accompanying vegetative altar railing featuring ethnographic putti:  a European baptizes an East Asian amid a decor featuring American Indians bedecked with feather headdresses.

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Contact Information

Mackenzie Fox