Italy by Way of India
Translating Art and Devotion in the Early Modern World
By (author) Erin Benay
Italy by Way of India recovers peripheral narratives of image-making from the margins of cultural exchange between India and Italy during early modernity and promotes indigenous artists as central to the construction of Christian art in India and to the representation of India in Europe.
The return of a saint’s body to its rightful resting place was an event of civic and spiritual significance retold in Medieval sources and substantiated by artistic commissions. Legends of Saint Thomas Apostle, for instance, claimed that the martyred saint had been miraculously transported from India to Italy during the thirteenth century. However, Saint Thomas’s purported resting place in Ortona, Italy did not become a major stopping point on pilgrimage or exploration routes, nor did this event punctuate frescoed life cycles or become a subject for Renaissance altarpieces as one would expect. Instead, the site of the apostle’s burial in Chennai, India has flourished as a terminus of religious pilgrimage, where a multifaceted visual tradition emerged, and where a vibrant local cult of ‘Thomas Christians’ remains to this day. An unlikely destination on the edge of the ‘known’ world thus became a surprising source of early modern Christian piety. By studying the art and texts associated with this little-known cult, this book disrupts assumptions about how knowledge of Asia took shape during the Renaissance and challenges art historical paradigms in which art was crafted by locals merely to be exported, collected, and consumed by curious European patrons. In so doing, Italy by Way of India proposes that we redefine the parameters of early modern visual culture to account for the ways that global mobility and the circulation of objects profoundly influence how cultures see and know each other as well as themselves.
- By (author) Erin Benay
Other Titles in this Series
Bringing the Holy Land Home
The Crusades, Chertsey Abbey, and the Reconstruction of a Medieval Masterpiece
Volume 3
The Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela
A Critical Edition: Volume I, The Manuscripts and Volume II, The Text
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Late Gothic Sculpture in Northern Italy
Andrea da Giona and I Maestri Caronesi: An Addition to the Pantheon of Venetian Sculptors
The Architectural Drawings of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and His Circle
Vol. III: Antiquity and Theory
The Making and Meaning of the Liber Floridus
A Study of the Original Manuscript, Ghent, University Library, MS 92
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