Iridescence & The Image: Material Thinking in the Early Modern Spanish World by Brendan C. McMahon

Author:Brendan C. McMahon [McMahon, Brendan C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Press
Published: 2025-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

46 Charles V (frontal view), early sixteenth century. Oil on canvas, 4 × 33 4⁄5 in. (10 × 86 cm). Cathedral of Palencia, Spain. Photo: Juan Herrezuelo.

47 Charles V (oblique view), early sixteenth century. Oil on canvas, 4 × 33 4⁄5 in. (10 × 86 cm). Cathedral of Palencia, Spain. Photo: Ángel Requena Fraile.

48 Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Peter, and Saint Francis of Paola (composite image of three views), Neapolitan or Spanish, seventeenth century. Oil on wood, 17 4⁄5 × 14 1⁄3 × 1 in. (45 × 36.5 × 2.5 cm). London, Wellcome Collection. Photo: Wellcome Collection.

In composing this contingent image from smaller depictions of vegetables, Arcimboldo engaged in a creative process that in some ways mirrored the techniques used by feather artists in Michoacán. That viewers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could have perceived these connections is suggested by the history of images like The Vegetable Gardener. Although born in Milan, Arcimboldo’s ambiguous composites were created in central Europe, where the artist worked for three successive generations of Hapsburg rulers.83 The last of these was Rudolph II (1552–1612), whose court in Prague contained a vast collection of natural and artificial objects from across the globe.84

In addition to paintings like this one by Arcimboldo, an inventory of the collection from the early seventeenth century contained no fewer than nine examples of colonial Mexican featherwork, a group that likely included an example now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, depicting the Archangel Saint Michael (figs. 51 and 52).85 Beyond their shared composite nature, Arcimboldo’s ambiguous images and Mexican feather mosaics both provided emphatically contingent viewing experiences, albeit through very different means. That this variability was a function of the angle at which such objects were perceived was underscored when the Boston example was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (November 2019 to March 2020) with a mirror affixed perpendicular to the wall just below it (fig. 53). Its reflection revealed the drastic changes that viewing angle could produce on the perceived hue of feather mosaics such as this one. Rudolph II’s collection, which also contained at least one turning picture, thus gave viewers the opportunity to make connections between these objects through the technical processes that resulted in their creation as well as their obvious variability.86

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.