Visual Culture and Slavery

2019 ◽  
pp. 56-90
Author(s):  
Carmen Fracchia
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Human Diversity ◽  
Legal Case ◽  
The Face ◽  
Art Production ◽  
Visual Discourses

I discuss the semiotic control imposed on the production of religious depictions after the Council of Trent (1563), achieved by the decree on sacred images and the monitoring of art production by a censor appointed by the Inquisition. I map out the visual discourses that offer representations of blackness, slavery and human diversity and I concentrate on ‘Black Sainthood’ promoted in black confraternities: Baltasar in the Adoration of the Magi, Benedict of Palermo from Sicily, Iphigenia, and Elesbaan from Ethiopia. I reveal the prohibition to members of the oldest black confraternity of participation in public processions and I provide the legal case against them. I consider the eighteenth-century legend of the miraculous blackening of the face of the sculpture of St Francis of Paula in La Habana, in Cuba, as a sign of support to the black brothers after the institution had been taken over by the white nobility.

Mechanisms for Unity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Black Death ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Church

This chapter investigates changes in mentalities after the Black Death, comparing practices never before analysed in this context—funerary and labour laws and processions to calm God’s anger. While processions were rare or conflictual as in Catania and Messina in 1348, these rituals during later plagues bound communities together in the face of disaster. The chapter then turns to another trend yet to be noticed by historians. Among the multitude of saints and blessed ones canonized from 1348 to the eighteenth century, the Church was deeply reluctant to honour, even name, any of the thousands who sacrificed their lives to succour plague victims, physically or spiritually, especially in 1348: the Church recognized no Black Death martyrs. By the sixteenth century, however, city-wide processions and other communal rituals bound communities together with charity for the poor, works of art, and charitable displays of thanksgiving to long-dead holy men and women.

Labor Productivity and Managerial Efficiency against a Static Technology: The Pennsylvania Iron Industry, 1750–1800

1980 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul F. Paskoff
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fuel Consumption ◽  
Labor Productivity ◽  
Learning By Doing ◽  
Iron Industry ◽  
Managerial Efficiency ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Consumption Rates ◽  
The Face

An increase in labor productivity and a reduction of fuel consumption rates were two notable and closely related achievements of the management of Hopewell Forge, an ironworks in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Significantly, these economies were realized in the face of technological stasis through learning by doing. The analysis of this accomplishment is cast in the larger context of the performance of the iron industry before and after 1800.

Jewish Art, Naturally

Images ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-28
Author(s):  
Carol Zemel
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Jewish Art ◽  
Erwin Panofsky ◽  
Art Production ◽  
Cultural Historiography ◽  
Aby Warburg

AbstractThis essay sets out an agenda for the study of modern Jewish visual culture. Topics and issues raised encompass questions of idolatry, the ethics of visuality and picturing the unrepresentable, nationalism in traditional cultural historiography, diasporic art production, and a suggested review of Jewish cultural issues in theorists such as Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and others of the interwar generation.

Making a Difference: Sartorial Practices and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century Sweden

Costume ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikael Alm
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Making A Difference ◽  
Primary Means

This article focuses on the seventy-three essays that were submitted to the Swedish Royal Patriotic Society in 1773, in response to a competition for the best essay on the advantages and disadvantages of a national dress. When presenting their thoughts on the design and realization of a national dress, the authors came to reflect on deeper issues of social order and sartorial culture, describing their views on society and its constituent parts, as well as the trappings of visual appearances. Clothes were an intricate part of the visual culture surrounding early modern social hierarchies; differentiation between groups and individuals were readily visualized through dress. Focusing on the three primary means for visual differentiation identified in the essays — colour, fabrics and forms — this article explores the governing notions of hierarchies in regards to sartorial appearance, and the sartorial practices for making the social order legible in late eighteenth-century Sweden.

scholarly journals Hofrituelen en koloniale recuperatie van de Oostendse Compagnie in 18de -eeuws Bengalen en China

1970 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 119-137
Author(s):  
Wim De Winter
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Intercultural Communication ◽  
Learning Process ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility

This article forms a critique on the formation ofa colonial historiography concerning theinteractions of the maritime 'Ostend Company' (GIC) in eighteenth century China andIndia. This historiography has ignored aspects of intercultural communication, whichprovided the conditions of possibility for any further interaction and exchange. The conceptualinfluence of colonialism on this discourse, and its recuperation of the OstendCompany's interactions in Bengal, are traced through its manifestations in historiographyas well as popular visual culture. This is contrasted with a source-based approach whichsheds new light on vital issues of courtly communication as a learning process involvingspecific acts and symbols.

‘Freeman stand, or freeman die’: liberty and slavery

2018 ◽  
pp. 194-216
Author(s):  
Alison Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Common Currency ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Thomas Gray ◽  
True State ◽  
Working People ◽  
The Face ◽  
English Nationalism

The words ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’ feature in forty-three poems in this collection, indicative of the centrality of this theme to the radical discourse of the day. In an era of almost unprecedented repression and the curtailment of rights, working people wished to rid themselves of their chains and reclaim their lost liberties, as a way of asserting English nationalism in the face of a ‘foreign’ monarchy. The twelve poems and songs in this section celebrate both the forthcoming return of liberty, presented as a goddess, and Henry Hunt as liberty’s human representative. The restoration of liberty as an end to slavery is a common trope within English radical discourse and poems often depict the radical patriot endeavouring to rescue his country from an imposed and unnatural tyranny and return it to its true state of liberty; however, this trope predates the era of revolution when such rhetoric was common currency and this section explores the prevalence of the theme of liberty in the mid-eighteenth century and the subsequent influence of William Collins and Thomas Gray on the poems in this collection. The introduction also seeks to explain the lack of references to the transatlantic slave trade in these poems at a time when the issue of rights was at the fore. It includes poems written by Samuel Bamford and the Spencean Robert Wedderburn.

Miss C——y’s Cabinet of Curiosities

The Closet ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 114-147
Author(s):  
Danielle Bobker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Partial Inclusion ◽  
The Face ◽  
The One ◽  
Cabinet Of Curiosities

This chapter points out, according to Anthony Hamilton and Jonathan Swift, how closets can still represent the highly circumscribed sociability associated with the face-to-face exchange of handwritten manuscripts. It talks about the hundreds of books that are designated as closets or cabinets that had been published in Britain by the end of the eighteenth century. As the authors and editors of these printed closets and cabinets nervously underscored their own close connections to courtly closets, prayer closets, and elite cabinets of curiosity, they implicitly positioned their readers as illegitimate intruders or spies. The chapter also reviews the complex dynamics of partial inclusion that are directly addressed in a particularly self-reflexive instance. It emphasizes that the one-way mode of visual intimacy channeled the excitement and social disorientation that accompanied the increasing accessibility of knowledge in the eighteenth century.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document