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- Convenor:
-
Isaac Land
(Indiana State University)
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- Location:
- Bloco 1, Sala 0.08
- Start time:
- 13 July, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Analysis of visuality and the coast has focused on the appreciation of the sea in art, or in leisure activities. However, a variety of trades, disciplines, and professions looked at the coast with a vocationally trained eye. The anthropologist Cristina Grasseni has called this "skilled vision."
Long Abstract:
Rocks, cliffs, and inlets were never just scenery. A naturalist might consider a bird-covered offshore rock as an instructive wildlife observation site, while to a foraging seafarer, spotting a guano-streaked cliff face in the distance might indicate a food source.
To navigators, of course, distinctively shaped outcroppings demanded attention for a different set of reasons, as hazards to shipping but also as reference points visible from great distances. Sketches of the coast in relief, and from various angles or prospects, formed an important complement to two-dimensional maps of the coast.
Scientific and imperialist expeditions employed artists as fieldworkers of a sort, although the instructions given to these sketching investigators varied considerably. Some artists combined coastal flora, fauna, and coast-dwelling humans in a single scene, depicting a kind of integrated ecology, while others disaggregated each component, drawing one isolated coastal specimen at a time.
As the science of vision grew more sophisticated and safety standards proliferated, new issues emerged, such as how to anticipate sensory limitations (whether color blindness or simply limits in distance vision). New medical and psychological insights informed the design of lighthouses and warning buoys, but also shaped the ways that skilled labor was deployed, managed, and regulated.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper will discuss the ship travel of Giovan Battista Confalonieri, from Civitavecchia to Barcelona and return (1593 and 1597) and his arrival to Lisbon by boat (1593).
Paper long abstract:
This paper will analyze the ship travel of Monsignor Giovan Battista Confalonieri (1561-1648), collettore apostolico to Portugal under Clement VIII Aldobrandini (1592-1605), from Civitavecchia to Barcelona (november 2, 1592-january 13, 1593) and return (june 11 to july 7, 1597), where he describes Genoa and Barcelona as well as many other villages and the climatic conditions of the time, and his arrival to Lisbon by boat (march 11, 1593), where he describes in great detail his experience of the river's gorge.
His impressions will be compared with printed and manuscript illuminated maps and topographic views of the time (Jocundus Hondius etc.) as well to contemporary geographic descriptions of the sites. His prose will be analyzed to understand what visual and scientific education sustained the experience of the unknown, for one of the most important Italian early modern travellers to Portugal.
This paper is part of a larger research project on Monsignor Confalonieri in Iberia by the proponent, who is currently editing the manuscript description for publication [Giovan Battista Confalonieri, Viaggio in Iberia (1592-1597), transcr. & intr. Sabina de Cavi (Madrid, Doce Calles, 2017)].
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I place maps, paintings, and literary texts in conversation with each other, to consider how geographic and ideological constructions of the Atlantic Ocean and its American coast were produced across a broad aesthetic field.
Paper long abstract:
In the eighteenth-century, innovations in technologies for charting the sea and the land allowed European empires to visualize their colonial territories with greater breadth and precision than ever before. In British North America, the large-scale surveying of the coast was undertaken simultaneously with the political transformation of the landscape through the American War of Independence. While often used as visual evidence, little attention has been paid to how maps employ a language of aesthetics to articulate the nature of empire, or the challenges posed to it in this period.
In this paper, I place maps and paintings in conversation with each other, to consider how hydrographic and ideological constructions of the Atlantic Ocean and its American coast were produced across a broad aesthetic field. When considered together, cartographic and artistic representations of the sea enrich our understanding of how Britons and Americans visualized the tensions and triumphs of the late-colonial British empire and the Revolutionary moment.
This paper analyzes The Atlantic Neptune—a magisterial collection of maps of the North American coast produced in the 1770s and '80s by the surveyor and colonial agent J.F.W. Des Barres—within the cultural and artistic landscape of the British eighteenth century. Playing at the edge between land and sea, these maps ask, what constitutes America in the British eye? I compare Des Barres's Atlantic perspective on the American continent to the work of artist John Singleton Copley in order to show how artists and map-makers represented the American coast as a key site in the making and unmaking of empire.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how three British artists on coastal itineraries in Britain and Australia deployed the picturesque gaze to approach natural history as well as human or moral history, resulting in a revealing yet incomplete portrait of the coast.
Paper long abstract:
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, spurred in part by new concepts in the sciences and also by innovations in publishing technology, artists undertook what Claudio Greppi has called "the Iconographic Inventory of the World." This paper examines three of these artists, almost exact contemporaries, who undertook long coastal itineraries in the 1810s. William Daniell walked the entire coastline of Britain, while William Westall and Charles Alexandre Lesueur circumnavigated the entire coast of Australia with the Flinders and Baudin expeditions respectively. The premise was to assemble a complete visual record of the coastline. In practice, these artists were highly selective and drew on the picturesque ideal which held that an interesting object is one that has complex contours and textures; it may be irregular, broken, or even in a state of decay. This aesthetic concept sometimes enhanced but sometimes conflicted with other imperatives, such as ideas associated with natural history, and Enlightenment theories about progress and human development. In Daniell's illustrated books, he devoted much space to his antiquarian interests and supposedly timeless scenery, but grew increasingly aware that economic and industrial change, and even environmental degradation, was changing the British landscape at a rapid pace. Westall and Lesueur sketched in radically different ways; the British expedition divided the artistic labor and produced Australian natural history as a series of isolated specimens with no sense of context, while the French artist drew humans, animals, plants, and landscape together, showing how Aborigines made use of their coastal setting.