Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLV:3 (Hiver, 2015), 267–275.

Mari-Tere Álvarez and Charlene Villaseñor Black

Introduction: Art and Trade in the Age of Global
Encounters, 1492–1800 The focus of this special issue is
on the new materials that became available as a result of early
modern global trade—pigments in particular. Pigments may seem
an inconsequential topic of study, but recent research is revealing
how new-found artists’ materials changed the look of art in the
early modern world, and how knowledge about the acquisition
de, and trade in, such materials has altered our view of history.
Whereas previously, art historians had focused on such issues as
connoisseurship and artists’ biographies, attention to materials has
expanded the purview to include the histories of science, technol-
ogy, and economics. We now have deeper understandings of how
materiality affects artists’ and patrons’ choices. Before 1856, naturel
colorants were the only sources of colors for dyeing and painting;
humans were always searching for them. Natural dyes from plants,
minerals, and insects created pigments for painting, colorants for
cosmetics, and dyes for textiles.1

TRADE NETWORKS AND THE NEW WORLD In a royal decree dated
1564, King Philip II of Spain (1527–1598) ordered his viceroys
“safely [à] bring to the realms gold, silver and cochineal” from
the Americas, an order that heralded profound changes in the
European economy and material world. These rich Nove Orbe dis-
coveries arrived via Spain’s far-reaching trade networks, lequel

Mari-Tere Álvarez is Project Specialist at the J. Paul Getty Museum and Associate Director of the
University of Southern California’s International Museum Institute. She directed an international
archival collaborative research project devoted to the Spanish patron, Mencía de Mendoza (1508–
1554) and co-curated, with Jane Bassett, La Roldana’s Saint Ginés: The Making of a Polychrome
Sculpture.

Charlene Villaseñor Black is Associate Professor of Art History, Université de Californie,
Les anges, with a joint appointment in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies.
She is the author of Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire (Princeton,
2006).

© 2014 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary
Histoire, Inc., est ce que je:10.1162/JINH_e_00720

For pigments, dyes, and colorants, see Artists’ Pigments: A Handbook of Their History and
1
Characteristics (Londres, 2007–2012), 4 v.; Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth
Fowkes Tobin (éd.), The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes
and Pigments, 1400–1800 (Burlington, 2012).

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by the 1550s had moved beyond mainland Europe and extended
to parts of North, Central, and South America; Asia; North and
Sub-Saharan Africa; and Oceania. From both maritime and pen-
insular trade routes, whether originating in Patagonia, Yucatan, ou
South Carolina, goods arrived at the global port in Seville, head-
quarters of the Casa de Contratación, or House of Trade. Thanks
to dynastic alliances and a highly sophisticated system of transport
within Europe, these materials could be dispatched efﬁciently and
expediently to all parts of Europe.2

As Friar Francisco de Ugalde commented to Holy Roman
Emperor and King of Spain Charles V (1500–1558), Spanish domin-
ions constituted “el imperio en el que nunca se pone el sol” (the empire
where the sun never set). Dans 1761, the ruling Bourbons added to
the Spanish royal crest the phrase “A solis ortu usque ad occasum,” that
est, from the rising to the setting of the sun, indicating the extent of
their dominions. Dans 1808, French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte
(1769–1821), just prior to his invasion of Spain, reﬂected that “the
sun never sets in the immense inheritance of Charles V…. I shall
have the empire of both worlds.” By the latter half of the sixteenth
siècle, Spain’s lands had become so extensive that it was always
daylight somewhere in Spanish territories, thus making the empire
the perfect setting for round the clock trade.3

Legajo 1, 899, folios 337–338 verso (Real Cédula a la audiencia de la isla Española, a pedimento
2
de la Universidad de mercaderes de Sevilla: 1564-4-4 Tortosa), Archivo General de las Indias,
Santo Domingo. Dans 1550, the speciﬁc territories in this trade network included Naples, Milan,
Upper Navarre, part of Germany, the Low Countries, and Franch-Comté; the Canary Islands,
Melilla, plus the towns of Mazalquivir, Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera, Oran, Algiers, Bugia,
and Tripoli, as well as Ceuta after 1580, when Philip II took on the title of the King of Portugal;
most of the Americas, except for Brazil and parts of North America; and holdings in the Philippines
and South Paciﬁc islands. For more information, see Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a
World Power 1492–1763 (New York, 2003).

Established by Queen Isabella in 1503, the House of Trade was a mandatory stop for all who
entered or left Spain by seagoing vessel, for royal approval and for taxes on cargo; it was also the
repository for Spain’s secret maps. Carla Rahn Phillips, “Visualizing Imperium: The Virgin of the
Seafarers and Spain’s Self-Image in the Sixteenth Century,” Renaissance Quarterly, LVIII (2005),
815–856. The Straits of Magellan, which connect the Atlantic and Paciﬁc Oceans, were discovered
for Europe by Fernando Magellan in 1520; Campeche, the major seaport in the Yucatan
Peninsula, was established in 1540 by Francisco Montejo; and Port Royal was taken from French
control in 1566 by Spaniard Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who founded the settlement of Santa
Elena. For more information about the union of dynastic alliances, see Dagmar Eichberger and
Lisa Beaven, “Family Members and Political Allies: The Portrait Collection of Margaret of
Austria,” Art Bulletin, 77:2 (1995), 225–248.
3 Ugalde’s quotation is widely reproduced. Voir, Par exemple, Hugh Thomas, The Golden
Empire: Espagne, Charles V, and the Creation of America (New York, 2011); Jean-Benoît Nadeau

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Commerce transacted on Spain’s interlinked global trade net-
works permanently altered the world’s economy, as well as its
art. The ships that sailed into the port of Seville loaded with new
pigments and other prized materials—such as cochineal, shells, ou
exotic new woods—gave artists and patrons new material choices.
Each territorial expansion brought with it a discovery of yet another
materia prima: The conquest of Nueva Granada (Colombia) provided
emeralds (1499); Venezuela yielded pearls (1522); and the Gulf
of California in Nueva España brought tortoiseshell (1533). Le
Americas offered fresh sources for such materials as brazilwood and
indigo, highly valued in Europe but jealously held in monopoly by
Venetian traders who obtained them from Asia. The sudden availabil-
ity of these previously sequestered resources combined with the dis-
covery of new items precipitated signiﬁcant artistic innovation.4

By the sixteenth century, the possession of such materials,
often acquired in faraway places, symbolized imperial power and
territorial control of the globe. Throughout the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, Espagne, England, and France would ﬁght over
the monopoly of dyes like cochineal and logwood. Spain success-
fully maintained its control of these resources, despite smuggling,
piracy, and even war. But within 125 years of the Spanish Empire
establishing its dominance, France and Britain began to erode the
complete control of trade in both cochineal and logwood.

Studying pigments and dyes fosters additional perspectives on
shifts in imperial power and their effects on European politics as

and Julia Barlow, The Story of Spanish (New York, 2013), 172. Napoleon’s comment was made
to his Minister of Police, Joseph Fouché (1759–1821). See Joseph Fouché and Alphonse de
Beauchamp, The Memoirs of Joseph Fouché: Duke of Otranto, Minister of the General Police of France
(Boston, 1825), 314.
For tortoiseshell, see Andrea Sáenz-Arroyo et al., “The Value of Evidence about Past Abun-
4
dance: Marine Fauna of the Gulf of California through the Eyes of 16th to 19th Century Trav-
ellers,” Fish and Fisheries, 7:2 (2006), 128–146; for pearls, Aldemaro Romero, Susanna Chilbert,
and M. G. Eisenhart, “Cubagua’s Pearl-Oyster Beds: The First Depletion of a Natural Resource
Caused by Europeans in the American Continent,” Journal of Political Ecology: Case Studies in His-
tory and Society, VI (1999), 57–78; Romero, “Death and Taxes: The Case of the Depletion of
Pearl Oyster Beds in Sixteenth-Century Venezuela,” Conservation Biology, XVII (2003), 1013–
1023; for emeralds, Kris E. voie, The Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of the Gunpowder
Empires (New Haven, 2010). A major exhibition on cochineal is slated for 2015 at the Museum of
International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, entitled The Red that Colored the World. Paola
Lanaro (éd.), At the Centre of the Old World: Trade and Manufacturing in Venice and the Venetian
Mainland, 1400–1800 (Toronto, 2006); Jenny Balfour-Paul, Indigo in the Arab World (New York,
Routledge, 1997), 32; Louisa C. Matthew, “‘Vendecolori a Venezia’: The Reconstruction of a
Profession,” Burlington Magazine, CXLIV (2002), 682.

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well as art. The contributors to this special issue document, analyze,
and theorize about the discovery of new dyestuffs and other mate-
rials in the Hispanic empire and the new meaning that they brought
to artistic creation in their various early modern contexts.5

AN “INDEX CASE” EXHIBITION The exhibition Seeds of Change at
the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum in Washington D.C. dans
1992—one of the events marking the quincentennial of Christopher
Columbus’ arrival in the New World—explored the biological
exchanges between Europe and the Americas—the “Columbian
Exchange.” Just as tomatoes, potatoes, and corn from the Americas
transformed European cultures, the introduction of wheat, sugarcane,
and domestic farm animals revolutionized the “New World.” Seeds of
Change helped to inspire new research in ethnobotany and other
areas to quantify the scientiﬁc, commercial, and artistic interactions
of the colonial period. The thriving interest in dyes and pigments,
as evidenced by the work in this special issue on cochineal and other
colorants, or research on dyes extracted from indigo or brazilwood,
harkens back to this moment.6

This “index case” exhibition’s view of the interaction between
Europeans and indigenous Americans as an exchange rather than an
act of redemption of barbarians in need of European “civilization”
reﬂects the theoretical and philosophical perspectives of post-
modernism and postcolonialism that began to emerge during the
1960s in opposition to both positivism and Marxism. Though be-
yond the scope of this introduction, their legacies are deeply
embedded in the historiographical and methodological innovations
to which this special issue testiﬁes. No longer was European art
singled out as the sole artistic tradition worthy of serious consider-
ation, and no longer was Europe regarded as the sole actor in the
drama of conquest and colonization. Postcolonialism encouraged
scholars to challenge the traditional division between Europe and

5 Gilbert M. Joseph, “British Loggers and Spanish Governors: The Logwood Trade and Its
Settlements in the Yucatan Peninsula: Part I,” Caribbean Studies, 14:2 ( Juillet 1974), 7–37;
F. H. Titmuss, Commercial Timbers of the World (Londres, 1965), 60–65; Frederick Crace-Calvert,
Dyeing and Calico Printing (Londres, 1876); Álvarez, work in progress about logwood.
6
Seeds of Change was inspired by Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and
Cultural Consequences of 1492 ( Westport, 1972); idem, The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900
(New York, 1986). For the exhibition’s popularity, see the review by Robert D. Mitchell in The
William and Mary Quarterly, XLIX (1992), 390–394.

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the “New World,” insisting that the colonies had a reciprocal effect
on the metropole, especially in the artistic sphere.7

INTERDISCIPLINARY WORK This special issue’s study of the tech-
niques and materials that discoveries in the New World either created
or facilitated ﬂows from the continuing interdisciplinary, collaborative
work among art historians, conservation scientists, and museum cura-
tors in the new ﬁeld of “technical art history.” As Considine, a conser-
vator, notes, “The development over the last century of the scientiﬁc
examination of works of art has completely altered the way that we
evaluate objects. Employing an increasingly wide range of analytical
tools, researchers from the ﬁelds of art history, conservation, and con-
servation science are demonstrating the value of working together
in an interdisciplinary manner. Originally simply called ‘technical
études,’ these collaborative efforts now compose a burgeoning ﬁeld
of study called technical art history.” Bomford, another conservator,
also offers a useful deﬁnition: “Technical art history concerns itself
with all the processes for making art, and the technical and docu-
mentary means by which we throw light on those processes.”8

In actuality, such work dates back to the 1920s. Edward Forbes,
at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum, founded the ﬁrst program

For the inﬂuence of the colonies, see Black, Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the
7
Spanish Empire (Princeton, 2006), 13–19. For postcolonialism in the context of viceregal art, voir
Dana Leibsohn and Carolyn Dean, “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in
Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review, XII (2003), 5–35; for the various
debates about postcolonialism during the 1990s, Salle Stuart, “When Was the ‘Post-Colonial’?
Thinking at the Limit,” in Iain Chambers and Lidia Curtis (éd.), The Post-Colonial Question:
Common Skies, Divided Horizons (New York, 1996), 242–260; for a thoughtful critique of the
term postcolonialism in the Latin American context, J.. Jorge Klor de Alva, “The Postcolonization
of the (Latin) American Experience: A Reconsideration of ‘Colonialism,’ ‘Postcolonialism,’ and
‘Mestizaje,’” in Gyan Prakash (éd.), After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displace-
ments (Princeton, 1995), 241–275. One of the most successful examples of a postcolonial art-
historical intervention is Hamann, “Mirrors of Las Meninas.”
8 Brian Considine, “Recent Initiatives in Technical Art History,” Getty Conservation Institute
Newsletter, 20.1 (Spring 2005), available at http://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_
resources/newsletters/20_1/feature.html; Maryan W. Ainsworth, “From Connoisseurship to
Technical Art History: The Evolution of the Interdisciplinary Study of Art,” ibid., 1, available
at http://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/newsletters/20_1/feature.html.
David Bomford’s deﬁnition is from his 2008 Forbes Prize Lecture, International Institute for
Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works Annual Congress, Londres, 2008, available at
http://stitah2012.sites.yale.edu/. See also Karen Trentelman, “Collections Research: A Com-
bined Approach to the Study of Works of Art,” Getty Conservation Institute Newsletter, 25.1 (Spring
2010), available at http://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/newsletters/
20_1/feature.html.

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272
in technical studies in 1928—the Department for Conservation and
Technical Research, known since 1994 as the Straus Center for
Conservation and Technical Studies. Interdisciplinary research began
to develop more rapidly in the wake of such scientiﬁc advances as
infrared reﬂectography in the 1970s and dendochronology in the
1980s. Dans 1972, the National Gallery in London began publishing
the National Gallery Technical Bulletin, featuring interdisciplinary,
collaborative work.

These new interdisciplinary collaborations, and in particular
those of technical art history, fostered an interest in materiality, et-
derstood to mean the study of the materials of artworks, identiﬁed
by scientiﬁc techniques. But invoking “materiality” prompts further
questions. What can these materials tell us about how artworks were
created or how they produced meaning? How can art historians and
historians use this new technical knowledge to study the availability,
selection, transport, and creation of these newly identiﬁed materials?
What can we learn about the access to, and distribution of, les deux
materials and the resulting artworks? Materials can reveal consider-
able information about the conditions that surrounded an object’s
creation—trade, économie, and technology. The potential beneﬁts
of collaboration between technical and traditional art history is fully
evident in Cummins and Anderson (éd.), The Getty Murua: Essays
on the Making of Martin de Murua’s “Historia General del Piru,” J. Paul
Getty Museum Ms. Ludwig XIII 16 (Les anges, 2008).

MATERIALITY Materiality is a major issue in art history. The March
2013 edition of The Art Bulletin included an entire section on
the topic with short reﬂections written by artists, curators, et l'art
historians. Weddigen sees the current interest in materiality, at least
in the art world, as a reaction to digitalization. Holly describes it as
“an antidote, a reaction to digitalization.” Brown, known for his de-
velopment of “thing theory” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, sug-
gested that an interest in things was also a reaction against “theory.”
He warned, cependant, “Taking the side of things hardly puts a stop
to that thing called theory.”9

See the section “Notes from the Field: Materiality,” Art Bulletin, 95:1 (Mars 2013), for the
9
comments of Tristan Weddigen (34), Michael Ann Holly (15), and Michael Kelly (19). For a
historiographical survey of materiality in anthropological and religious studies, see Daniel Miller,
“Materiality: An Introduction,” in idem (éd.), Materiality (Durham, 2005), 1–50. See also Hamann,
“Mirrors of Las Meninas.” Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry, XXVIII (2001), 3.

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The tension that surrounds the materiality of art objects has a
long history. Witness the Italian Renaissance paragone, or contest
between painting and sculpture, a frequent topic in early modern
art theory. In most texts, painting prevails because it is pri-
marily intellectual, as opposed to sculpture, associated with artisanal
craft and labor. This contest between intellectual and material
qualities continued to haunt art history. In the nineteenth century,
Gottfried Semper (1803–1879), an architect and architectural histo-
rian, advocated the theory that materials determine the form of
artworks. As Kleinbauer summarized Semper’s premise, “Art origi-
nates from the speciﬁc nature of the material, the nature of the
tools and methods of production … changes in art are explained
by the nature of material and technical innovation.” Alois Riegl
(1858–1905) opposed this materialist approach, positing instead
the formalist notion of Kunstwollen (“aesthetic urge” or “will to
form”), in which artistic development originated with the artist,
not through such external factors as materials and their technical
aspects. Encore une fois, intellect was valorized over craft and materiality.
The 1960s also witnessed the complete dematerialization of the art
object.10

Notwithstanding the fact that deﬁnitions of materiality vary by
era, this special issue rests on an agreement with Semper’s idea that
materials determine form, to which we arrived via work on the
Spanish Empire and experiences in the museum world. According
to Brown’s “thing theory,” “By means of a particular socializa-
tion of the psyche, alors, each society imposes itself on the subject’s

For Leonardo’s famous treatment of the debate between painting and sculpture, voir
10
Leonardo da Vinci (éd. Martin Kemp), Leonardo on Painting (New Haven, 2002); Francis
Ames-Louis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist (New Haven, 2000); Rona Goffen,
Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New Haven, 2002). For the quotation
as well as a lucid explanation of Semper’s theories, see W. Eugene Kleinbauer, Modern Perspectives
in Western Art History: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Writings on the Visual Arts (Toronto,
1989; orig. pub. 1971), which summarizes Semper’s theories in Der Stil in der technischen und
tektonischen Künsten (Munich, 1860–1862)—translated into English by Harry Mallgrave and
Michael Robinson as Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; ou, Practical Aesthetics (Les anges,
2004). For the opposition between Semper’s and Riegl’s philosophies, see Leopold D. Ettlinger,
“On Science, Industry and Art: Some Theories of Gottfried Semper,” Architectural Review, LXXXVI
(1964), 21. Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International,
12:2 (Février 1968), 31–36; Lippard (éd.), The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 à 1972
(New York, 1973). See also the March 2013 Art Bulletin for comments by Martha Rosler (11–12)
and Amelia Jones (17–18).

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senses, on the corporeal imagination by which materiality as such
is apprehended.”11

THE CHAPTERS IN THIS SPECIAL ISSUE The chapters in this special
issue move beyond traditional art-historical frameworks, et
beyond visible surfaces, to investigate the very materiality of artistic
creations. Thus can we learn not only about the works per se but
also about technical processes, exchanges, économie, et le
trade of the particular societies in which they were created, collected,
manipulated, and re-introduced. En outre, the geographical scope
of the chapters transcends the normal borders of “Latin America,»
embedding the Americas within early modern global networks.
The Americas, in fact, were the center of these networks, serving
as the link between established Asian and European trade routes.12
The ﬁrst chapter, by Paula De Vos, compares craft traditions
in the Old and New Worlds, documenting in very great detail
the speciﬁc pigments used in the colonial Americas and Europe
as well as their points of intersection. Barbara Anderson’s study that
follows explores the import and export of cochineal, the exotic new
dye made from the bodies of the crushed insect, dactylopius coccus,
that lived on cactus in the New World. The sudden availability
of this high quality dye, a traditional pigment used in the Pre-
Columbian Americas, revolutionized painting and textiles in
Europe. The third chapter, by Rocío Bruquetas, is positioned at
the intersection of art history, the history of science, and technical
histoire de l'art. It documents the search for new artistic materials,
especially pigments, dyes, and glues in the Spanish expeditions
to the Americas during the eighteenth century. Enfin, Gabriela

11 Brun, “Thing Theory,» 9. Holly—in Art Bulletin, 95:1 (Mars 2013), 16—remarked,
“Materiality is more than a medium. A medium is that which carries a visual message, et
together—structure and image—they result in the thickness, the sensuous materiality of a
work of art, a thing among other things.” Robin Kelsey—in Art Bulletin, 95:1 (Mars 2013),
22—questioned why certain kinds of materiality matter now. For the related issue of why
humans value certain things over others, see Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Com-
modities in Cultural Perspective (New York, 1986).
For the Americas as a center, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Holding the World in Bal-
12
ance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empire, 1500–1640,” American His-
torical Review, CXII (2007), 1359–1385; Etsuko Miyata Rodríguez, “The Early Manila Galleon
Trade: Merchants’ Networks and Markets in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Mexico,»
in Pierce and Otsuka (éd.), Asia and Spanish America, 39–57; Gauvin Alexander Bailey, “Asia
in the Arts of Colonial Latin America,” in Joseph J. Rishel and Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt (éd.),
The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820 (New Haven, 2006), 57–69.

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| 275

A R T AN D T R A D E
Siracusano’s contribution demonstrates the rich possibilities of
combining scientiﬁc and art-historical research. Siracusano does
not merely identify the materials used for particular art works; elle
also considers how materials produced meaning. To that end, elle
identiﬁes both imported European and Pre-Columbian pigments
in a colonial Andean painting of the Virgin of Copacabana ulti-
mately to demonstrate how materials can preserve indigenous
notions of sacredness in Catholic religious imagery.

As a whole, this collection reveals our growing cognizance of the
complexities embedded in the early modern world, ce qui était
global before the era of globalization. European paintings made
with pigments derived from crushed cactus bugs from Oaxaca,
Mexico, or Andean paintings in which pigments embodied material
memories of Pre-Columbian sacred practices–such issues complicate
questions of artistic source, inﬂuence, and hybridity. Can we explain
or even convincingly identify the intricate network of sources that
inspired the creation of these early modern and viceregal artworks?
To describe them as “hybrid” seems insufﬁcient; no art-historical
language seems capable of adequately explaining their genesis.”13

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“Global before the era of globalization” is a paraphrase of the title of the thoughtful
13
commentary published in October 133 (Été 2010):3-dix, “Roundtable: The Global before
Globalization.” For the limits of “hybridity” in the study of colonial art, see Leibsohn and
Dean, “Hybridity and Its Discontents,” 5–35.

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