Penned by Encounter: Visibility and Invisibility of the Cross-Cultural in Images from Early Modern Franciscan Missions in Central Africa and Central Mexico

This article considers a corpus of images created between 1650 and 1750 within Italian Capuchin missions to Kongo and Angola. It demonstrates how these visual creations, though European in form, craftsmanship, and intended audience, were in fact penned by encounter and the products of cross-cultural...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inRenaissance quarterly Vol. 75; no. 4; pp. 1221 - 1265
Main Author Fromont, Cécile
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01.12.2022
Subjects
Bantu languages
Christianity
Conformity
Cross cultural studies
Didacticism
Early modern period
Etching
Missionaries
Otherness
Religious orders
Spirituality
Italy
Mexico
Angola
Central Africa
Kongo
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Summary:This article considers a corpus of images created between 1650 and 1750 within Italian Capuchin missions to Kongo and Angola. It demonstrates how these visual creations, though European in form, craftsmanship, and intended audience, were in fact penned by encounter and the products of cross-cultural interactions. Contrasting the Central African images with two well-known and oft-studied Franciscan visual projects from early colonial Mexico, the article further reflects on the stakes of making visible the mixings present, but often overlooked or silenced, in early modern images born from encounters between Europeans and the people they considered their Others.
ISSN:0034-4338
1935-0236
DOI:10.1017/rqx.2022.331