This collection of essays arose from an unexpected source: the opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum. For Renaissance scholars, the museum is best known as the (putative) future home of the Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo, sold at a record-setting auction in 2017. In 2016, however, at New York University's Abu Dhabi campus, a conference was organized around the early modern roots of such universal collections, where objects from all over the globe are brought together by theme. In the essay that introduces this volume, Mia M. Mochizuki points to the long history of such projects, from Malraux's “imaginary museum” to the collections of Athanasius Kircher. She also explains the goal: to explore a “global republic of objects” (6) as a possible complement to the early modern republic of letters, with religious diffusion and devotion as unifying themes.
Both editors of this collection have published widely on international artistic exchange, and the nineteen essays brought together are exemplary for this burgeoning early modern field. The essays have been organized into five large sections: The World's ‘Idols,’ Parables of Contact, Material Alchemies, Relic Values, and ‘Netted’ Works. A more extended explanation of the categories’ meanings, especially the last one, might have been helpful, but many of the essays engage with several of these overlapping concepts. The essays range widely in focus and approach. Several are centered on histories connected to Northern Europe (a primary field for both editors), but others explore feather art from the Americas (Margit Kern), bezoar stones (Beate Fricke), the Florentine Codex (Jeannette Favrot Peterson), and jewels at the Mughal and Elizabethan courts (Christiane Hille). Most are case studies, often comparative: thus, Akira Akiyama compares the regalia of the Japanese and the Holy Roman Emperors, and a thoughtful essay by Jeffrey L. Collins and Meredith Martin looks at boat-shaped incense vessels, a European form, as they were adapted in the Siamese Kingdom, New Spain, Brazil, and along Africa's Atlantic coast.
The importance of material histories underpins many of the essays. Denise-Marie Teece looks at a fourteenth-century textile with garbled Arabic script, suggesting a possible Italian provenance based on physical and conservation analysis. Evonne Levy presents the intriguing case of paintings mass-produced by the Cuzco School on cheap and portable canvas, to be shipped widely and cut into separate images on arrival. Rose Marie San Juan notes that bone is one of the most primal materials; she explores how the cult of Saint Ursula and her companions interacted with the ceremonial display of skulls among Tupinamba communities in colonial Brazil.
Several authors emphasize the importance of cultural misunderstandings. Yoriko Kobayashi-Sato argues that Japanese viewers of European prints could not identify—or simply ignored—the Christian narratives presented. She illustrates an intriguing case where a Dutch Adoration of the Shepherds was made into a Revenge of the Ako Retainers, with the Virgin Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds transformed into some of the forty-seven Ronin. James Clifton's essay places Matteo Ricci's maps within a Chinese culture of woyou—literally, “traveling while reclining”—in a moment in Ming China when real travel was restricted. But Clifton also reminds us that Ricci's missionary goals were not always understood. Ralph Dekoninck and Walter S. Melion examine how a universal translation of cults and images was supposed to work in theory, while Tristan Weddingen's essay on the cult of Rose of Lima in Rome shows how this might fail in practice, and Dagmar Eichberger uses the cult of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin to stress how important powerful patronage networks were to the process. Urte Krass and Ines G. Županov concentrate on relic-presentation strategies, including the many types of objects used to house them, a focus in Fricke's essay also.
The criticism can be made that the notion of “world” in the book's title is left unexplored. Few authors take it up explicitly, although Mochizuki notes the Christian idea of mundus and evokes Serge Gruzinski's concept of mondialisation. But the quality of the essays makes up for the loose conceptual frame, especially as almost all include up-to-date and extensive bibliographies. This is exemplified in the opening and closing chapters: Göttler’s own exploration of objects classed as “Indian” idols and Dipti Khera's study of invitation scrolls (vijnaptipatra) from Western India as constructions of travel—including a 1677 example, almost five meters long, made in the city of Diu in the hopes of luring a Jain holy man there.
