Roberta and Richard Huber Colloquium, Fall 2021
Tuesday, November 16, 6:30pm
Transpacific Engagements: Transcultural Entanglements and Philippine Visual Culture
Florina H. Capistrano-Baker, Consulting Curator and Special Projects Consultant, the Ayala Museum (Philippines)
This talk attempts to illuminate the Philippines’ transcultural artistic heritage formed by centuries of maritime engagements with diverse cultures in Asia, the Americas, and Europe. The arrival of Spanish colonizers in the sixteenth century extended early trade networks in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, stretching these ancient routes across the Pacific to Latin America, thence to Europe. With Manila as the fulcrum of this early global exchange popularly known as the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade (1565-1815), local societies exchanged raw materials, finished products, art works, concepts, and language in multi-directional circulations of culture that mutated in myriad ways. I argue that defining Philippine art and identity is not simply a matter of peeling away cultural layers, for the essence of Filipino-ness is imbricated in the intertwined layers of external stimuli as Asian, European, and American empires successively and/or simultaneously attempted to draw the archipelago into their rival spheres, creating cultural entanglements that have become intrinsic to Philippine visual culture. Specifically, I discuss recently available archaeological gold objects that demonstrate close links to Hindu-Buddhist South and Southeast Asian neighbors before Spanish colonization and conversion to Christianity; and examine how these pre-colonial traditions gave way to Hispano-Filipino iterations of intersecting Indigenous concepts and newly introduced European ideas.
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Monday, November 8, 6:30pm
‘Bucaros de las Indias’: The European Craze for Burnished Pottery of the Americas
Margaret E. Connors McQuade, Deputy Director and Curator of Decorative Arts of The Hispanic Society Museum & Library
Búcaros de las Indias describes the burnished pottery traditions of Mexico, Panama, and Chile that were among the most highly prized ceramic wares of some of the great Europe noble collections during the 17th and 18th centuries. While similar Portuguese búcaros were also collected at this time, búcaros de las Indias were especially coveted for their exotic forms as well as their aromatic, evaporative, gastronomic, and medicinal qualities.
Búcaros appear in Spanish and viceregal 17th and 18th century paintings and are described by many contemporary writers. The Florentine scholar and scientist Lorenzo Magalotti (1637-1712) was perhaps the greatest admirer of the búcaros tradition, having spent years observing European collections and forming a collection of his own. His account, therefore, provides wonderful insight into the craze for the ceramic wares. This lecture will look at the production and circulation of the diverse wares and offer new insights through close analysis of the Hispanic Society collections as well as examples found in other museum collections and archaeological excavations.
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Wednesday, September 29, 6:30pm
Celebrating a New Book – Sublime Truth and the Senses: Titian’s Poesie for King Philip II of Spain
Marie Tanner, Independent Scholar
Between 1554 and 1562 Titian, the unequaled Venetian Renaissance painter, worked on his series called the Poesie – six paintings of mythological themes with deeply sensual content. They were commissioned by King Philip II of Spain and are now dispersed in museums in Europe and the United States. These works (currently together in an acclaimed exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) are key monuments of the Italian Renaissance and also served as inspiration for artists of later generations such as Peter Paul Rubens and Diego Velázquez. In her timely study, Marie Tanner offers a nuanced and often surprising reassessment of one of the great picture cycles of Western art.