E R I N B E NAY
I TA LY B Y WAY O F
INDIA Translating Art and Devotion in the Early Modern World
harvey miller publishers
table of contents
3
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
5
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
9
INTRODUCTION
10 13
Translating Saints An Apostle in India
27
CHAPTER I. SAINT THOMAS AND THE MAKING OF CHRISTIANITY IN SOUTHERN INDIA
29
Re-situating Christianity in India Thomas, Builder of Churches The Cross and the Lotus Darśan in the Church The Reform of Thomas Christianity in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
31 36 38 45 59 63 78 95 98 101 105 114 122 129 131 135 138
CHAPTER II. INDIAN CHRISTIAN ART IN THE AGE OF COLONIALISM
Devotional Objects in Churches Devotional Objects for Domestic Use CHAPTER III. POSSESSING INDIA
Indian Things in Italy Shopping in India Putting Saint Thomas on the Map Bringing Saint Thomas’s India to Florence Experiencing Indian Objects in the Medici Collections CHAPTER IV. AN INDIAN SAINT IN ITALY
The Deaths of Saint Thomas First Translation Mistranslation
149
CONCLUSION
159
NOTES
181
BIBLIOGRAPHY
[]
introduction
W
ith his 1556 publication of the Navigationi et viaggi, a three-volume anthology of travel accounts, Giovanni Battista Ramusio did what no geographer or travel writer had done before him: he compiled and translated into Italian a number of sources written in multiple languages about destinations across the globe. Ramusio’s volumes were reprinted four times throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in print runs that averaged 1000 copies but could be as high as 2000-3000 copies.1 Ramusio’s compendium, which largely sought to lay out the geographic and cultural wonders of the Indies—both East and West—had gone viral. Although they contain few illustrations, Ramusio’s volumes include maps, which helped readers to visualize the distant lands described by the authors included in the books. The second volume is dedicated to travel in India, as indicated by a map at the front of the text. Dotted with tiny elephants, India’s important landmarks are labeled, including “S. Thomaso mailepur,” designated not only by the inscription but also by a small depiction of a church (FIG. 1) . The marker refers to the site of Saint Thomas the Apostle’s burial in Mylapore, a modern-day suburb of Chennai. Seemingly insignifi cant—a benign cartographic detail among many—this label conceals a complex and thorny history in which an apostolic saint initiated an ancient (and enduring) tradition of Thomas Christianity in a land better known in Europe for its luxurious and exportable commodities. Often eclipsed by the discovery of India Occidentale, or the New World, the India Orientale mapped by Ramusio and his authors nevertheless occupied a significant position within the cultural imagination of early modern Europeans.2 Frequently referred to simply as the Indies in textual sources, the disambiguation of Asia from the Americas arguably did not become a major project until the eighteenth century. Instead, in early modern Europe, and in Italy in particular, the integration of (mis)information about the Americas and Asia resulted in a geographical continuum now referred to as Amerasia.3 Although a sharp distinction between the two Indias may indeed be anachronistic,4 there were clear ways in which India Orientale differed from the New World, and its claims to an ancient form of Christianity was one of them. Neither new nor old, India was a world continuously in the process of being invented, possessed, and remade by its encounters with Europeans, and by its constantly shifting religious demographics. This book is about the mechanisms of translation and mistranslation that informed this process of becoming.
[]
INTRODUCTION
FIG. 1
Delle Navigationi et viaggi: raccolte da M. Gio. Battista Ramusio in tre volume divise, 1556, Venice.
Translating Saints Translation is generally understood in linguistic and sometimes in artistic or cultural terms. But during the medieval and early modern periods, translation had another very specific meaning: translatio referred to the physical transfer of a saint’s body or its parts, and to the narrative accounts of such relocation.5 Translation was a movement through space and through language. Textual and visual recollections of translations often focused on the saint’s ability to reveal his burial place of choice.6 By selecting their preferred sites of burial, saints continued to perform pivotal roles in the establishment of their own cults after death. The movement of Saint James from Jerusalem to Santiago de Compostela, or Saint Mark from Alexandria to Venice, for example, also inspired the formation of medieval pilgrimage routes. Retold by Jacobus de Voragine in the thirteenth-century Golden Legend and substantiated by artistic commissions, the return of a saint to his ‘rightful’ resting place was an event of civic and spiritual significance. By making visible these holy events, artists and patrons played a part in the construction of belief. Cities like Santiago de Compostela and Venice benefitted, and continue to benefit, both spiri tually and financially, from the corporeal presence of these apostolic saints. Indeed, in early modern terms, there could be no greater boon to urban and economic development than the miraculous transposition of a saint, though hagiographers certainly made no mention of these secondary
[ ]
introduction
FIG. 2
Location of Mylapore (Chennai), India.
pragmatic benefits.7 Like these two ninth-century examples, thirteenth-century legends of Saint Thomas the Apostle also claimed that the martyred saint had been miraculously transposed—in this case, from India to Italy. However, Thomas’s purported resting place in Ortona, Italy did not become a major stopping point on pilgrimage or exploration routes, nor did this event punctuate frescoed life cycles or become a subject for altarpieces. Instead, a remote Indian town garnered the sort of pilgrimage and artistic production typically reserved for European sites of miraculous translation (FIG. 2) . Saint Thomas’s martyrdom (c. 52 CE) in Mylapore catalyzed centuries of Chris tian devotion in the region and fostered the manufacture of objects that merge Christian and nonChristian iconographies in unexpected ways. The arrival of travelers from Italy and Portugal between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries further complicated the formation of so-called ‘Thomas Christianity’ in India, and their textual accounts shed light on a little-studied chapter in the history of saints’ cults.8
[ ]
INTRODUCTION
FIG. 3
Boucicaut Master, harvesting pepper in southern India, Livres des Merveilles, c. 1410, illumination, vellum, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Ms. FR. 2810, fol. 84r.
Missionaries describing Christians in southern India consistently noted the significant role of Saint Thomas for these populations. They often gave Thomas an authorial role in the conversion of an entire land, and European travelers coined the terms “Thomasan” or “Thomas Christians” for these communities. The compilation and collective analysis of these sources are crucial to establishing the sort of knowledge that was established about India and Thomas Christians in Italy from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. They enable a clear understanding of how such know ledge shifted perceptions of a Western pilgrimage site for Saint Thomas, and the ways in which his iconography was developed by early modern artists and patrons. What is known about early Thomasan devotions in the region derives primarily from the accounts of Portuguese merchants who arrived around 1498, and the descriptions of Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, whose arrival in Goa in 1542 marked the beginning of Roman Catholic domination of south Indian Christianity.17 Less known are notable Italian exceptions that offer crucial testimony of Thomas Christianity prior to its cooption by the Jesuits. In 1292, for instance, a Franciscan missionary named John de Montecorvino (1246-1328) was ordered by Pope Nicholas IV (r. 1288-1292) to explore routes to China via India.18 John stayed in Mylapore for a year, where he identified the tomb of Saint Thomas and noted that the church dedicated to the apostle was “filled with idols.”19 Other important Franciscan missionaries described a similarly “barbaric” form of Christianity in the region: in his Relatio (1330), Odoric de Pordenone (1286-1331) called the Indian Christians “vile and pestilent heretics” and described the idolatrous practices of Thomas Christians in particular.20 Chapter 18 of Odoric’s text, entitled “Concerning the kingdom of Mobar, where lieth the body of Saint Thomas,” recounted, among other idolatrous customs, an elaborate ritual of bodily mortification involving repeated prostration while moving en route to a “wonderful idol [… of Saint Thomas], commonly depicted by the painters, and it is entirely out of gold, seated on a great throne, which is also of gold. And around its neck it hath a collar of gems of im-
[ ]
CHAPTER II
FIG. 47
Christ as the Good Shepherd, 17th century, ivory, 17.4 × 6.8 × 5 cm, Goa, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, 71.324.
[ ]
INDIAN CHRISTIAN ART IN THE AGE OF COLONIALISM
FIG. 48
The Mount of the Good Shepherd, “Rockery,” c. 1650, ivory with traces of paint and gilding, 17.6 × 6 cm, Goa, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, A.27-1984.
[ ]
CHAPTER III
FIG. 86
Hans Burgkmair, Peoples of Africa and India, 1508, hand-colored woodcut, 28.5 × 230.6 cm. FIG. 87
Hans Burgkmair, Peoples of Africa and India, 1508, hand-colored woodcut, 28.5 × 230.6 cm. FIG. 88
Hans Burgkmair, Peoples of Africa and India, 1508, hand-colored woodcut, 28.5 × 230.6 cm.
[ ]
POSSESSING INDIA
FIG. 89
Albrecht Dürer, Rhinoceros, 1515, woodcut, 23.8 × 29.9 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of Junius Spencer Morgan, 1919, 19.73.159.
similar or agreeably ‘foreign’ in order to be consumed by European viewers. For early modern viewers of Burgkmair’s frieze there was no room to entertain the possibility that this band of tribal peoples also included indigenous Christians, because to do so would be a sort of blasphemy: it would imply a sacred framework for a scene that depends on its secularity for its articulation of cultural difference. Burgkmair’s print, like the textual account that it is loosely based on, is blasphemous in an additional sense: in the act of translating experience from text to image, the cultural tradition that might have been its basis is overwhelmed, its real-life subjects occluded.7 There is no metaphorical place for a pre-colonial Christian cult dedicated to Saint Thomas in images of India like this one, nor is there space (conceptual or otherwise) to represent the religious plurality that prevailed in southern India. Christianity is not a part of what makes India India in Burgkmair’s view. And yet, it is Burgkmair’s canonical image of the Peoples of India, and others that similarly depict Indians as scantily clad natives wearing topknots and loin cloths, that dominate scholarly accounts of “Europe’s India.” Although the term ‘exotic’ did not emerge until the late sixteenth century, its conceptual origins were arguably entrenched from a moment preceding its etymological origin. Benjamin Schmidt, for example, suggests that variety and miscellany (like that seen in Burgkmair’s print) are part and parcel of the agreeable aesthetic of the exotic for early modern Europeans.8 In this chapter, focusing especially on Italy, I ask how the collection of objects from foreign lands—and not just representations of their people—complicated the aesthetic of the “exotic.” Specifically, I am concerned with how things (as opposed to images or texts) from India nuanced the cultural imagination of Europeans. Referred to in texts and inventories as Indie Occidentali, or simply as gli indie, the Americas could be easily confused with India Orientale (India, Indie Orien tali, or the East Indies), and artifacts delle Indie (of the Indies) could indicate an eastern or western
[ ]
CHAPTER III
FIG. 100
Hans Domes, flagon, mid-16th century, lapis-lazuli, mounted in enameled gold and gilt bronze, Il Tesoro dei Granduchi, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, Inv. Gemme del 1921, n. 496.
[ ]