The Art of the Antipodes: Francisco de Hollanda and the Picturing of the Portuguese Empire

• In Event: Changing the Enemy, Visualizing the Other: Studies about Otherness in Early Modern Europe II

Abstract

Portuguese manuscript illuminator and art theorist, Francisco de Holanda offered an appraisal of “new world” arts and their makers in his 1540s treatise Da Pintura Antigua. This paper explores this textual “portrait” of others the Portuguese could only witness through their artistic productions in Portugal and through the prism of the cosmopolitanism of Portugal’s urban centers. I will consider how this portrait of otherness is articulated within the larger context of Holanda’s other pictures of empire which use the visual culture of Portuguese navigational science to naturalize and explain peoples incorporated into an empire reaching the antipodes.

Author

• Matthew Culler, UC Berkeley