Ink and Image, 12th Edition

Spring 2020

Ink and Image

Cover image: 35mm film photograph by Emily Conklin, “Venice,� 2018.

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About the Editors Emily Conklin ‘20 is a double major in Urban Design and Architecture Studies and Journalism. Her interests in architecture and spatial philosophy drive her work in both the social implications and theory of architecture.

With a specialty in vernacular and working class spatialities, she will continue working with the poetics of space upon graduation.

Carola Reyes Benítez ’20 is an Art History major and Business Studies minor at the College of Arts and Sciences. Her study interests involve International Contemporary Art (mainly Latinxand Latin American) and the Art Market. She plans to start a career in the art world upon graduation and possibly continue her Art Historical studies, in the near future. She would like to thank the Art History department for being her second home throughout her four years at NYU. Xiaolu “Joy” Wu ‘20 is an art history major. Her research centers around Buddhist art in the East Asian context. She is particularly interested in SinoJapanese cross-cultural exchanges, recently completing her honors thesis in art history, titled “Simultaneously Zen and Literati: The Image of Su Shi in Muromachi Zen Buddhism.” Joy is also the Co-President of the NYU Fine Arts Society, a student-run organization of the Department of Art History.

Benjamin Poleretzky ‘21 is a Journalism and Political Science double major.

Although he is not a scholar of the arts, he has a lifelong passion for art and history, especially music history.

Amy Lenkiewicz ‘20 is an Art History major specializing in the Medieval arts and histories.

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Table of Contents Tracing Scientific Thought in Two Medieval Herbals Gia Chen.................................................................................................. 3

Trujillo Racial Politics: Depictions of Blackness in Dominican Art Marie Normand..................................................................................... 19

Restoring Integrity: How Kintsugi-ware Encapsulate the Vicissitudes of Time Mari Sophia ĹŒtsu ..................................................................................29

Tracing Scientific Thought in Two Medieval Herbals Gia Chen Herbals, as their name suggests, are guides to herbs and plants, compiled from illustrations, physical descriptions, and medicinal usages. The goal of most herbals is to provide a systematic framework in which to present medica materia, or medical materials, in an orderly, accessible manner. In other words, when a compiler organizes an herbal, he is acutely aware of its audience and how they will use and access it. Thus, the methods and ambitions of a compiler should be placed at the center of herbal analysis.

Despite the perhaps intuitive assumption that an image would provide the most immediate identification of plants, the first surviving herbals from the early Middle Ages were adaptations of medical texts, circulated largely without any accompanying images.2 The predominance of unillustrated texts implies that the task of identifying herbs was not assisted by illustrations and that, perhaps, those identifying the plants were in no need of assistance. If physicians and pharmacists originally identified plants without needing their images, then identification is likely not the sole purpose of the illustrations. What, then, are the reasons behind the herbal manuscripts that were profusely and vividly illustrated? This paper will compare the pictorial and organizational details of two illustrated herbals from southern Italy, Egerton 747 (c. 1280-1315) and Paris lat. 6823 (c. 1340), the latter a seemingly close copy of the former completed

by Manfredus de Monte Imperiale, in order to examine the ways that a compiler such as Manfredus might alter an existing herbal to make it suitable for serious medicinal study. Ultimately, this paper will argue that, despite the trend towards naturalization in herbal illustrations, the fascination with imaginary natural lore is not completely replaced by naturalistic exactness but is inextricable from the advancements in scientific thinking.

The two manuscripts belong to the tradition known as Tractatus de herbis, a particular style of herbal illustration characterized by unframed portraits of plants, often covering more than half a page and overlapping with the texts.

The plants are painted diagrammatically in semi-diaphanous watercolor, not unlike live, pressed specimens collected in a modern herbarium (hortus siccus) (fg. 1).3 The dissemination of this style has an impressive geographic extent – the eleven manuscripts of this type discussed in Minta Collins’ seminal work Medieval Herbals traveled from southern Italy to northern France.4 However, art historians, including Felix Baumann and Carmelia Opsomer, generally agree that Egerton 747 is the earliest surviving manuscript in the Tractatus tradition, produced most likely near Salerno, a southern Italian city near Naples renowned for its medical education.5 Though produced in southern Italy, Egerton 747 influenced the style and organization of what Baumann identifies as the two “families” of manuscripts, the northern Italian group and the French group.6 These two traditions seem to have developed independently after Egerton 747’s initial influence.

Before venturing into a comparison between the two manuscripts, it is important to note first the ambition and innovation in the Tractatus tradition itself. As historian Alain Toulaide has argued, Tractatus was an unprecedented compilation of ancient and contemporary medicinal knowledge.7 The bulk of the plants described in Tractatus came 2

Jean A. Givens, “Reading and Writing the Illustrated Tractatus de herbis, 1280-1526,” Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200-

1550, edited by Jean A. Givens, Karen M. Reeds, Alain Touwaide (Burlington: Ashgate 2006), pp. 117.

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For a brief summary of the history of botanical studies and herbals, see Chiara Nepi, “Botanical Collecting, Herbaria and the Understanding of Nature,” Changing Percetions of Nature, edited by Ian Convery and Perter Davis (Boydell and Brewer 2016), pp. 89-97.

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Minta Collins, Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Tradition (London: British Library 2000), pp. 239-240.

For the fame of Salerno, see for instance Kristeller, Paul Oskar. “The School of Salerno: Its Development and its Contribution to the History

of Learning,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 17, No. 2 (February 1945), pp. 138-194.

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Collins, pp. 239.

Alain Touwaide, Tractatus de herbis. Sloane MS 4016 (London: British Library 2013), pp. 20. Ctd. from Sarah R. Kyle, Medicine and Humanism in Late Medieval Italy: The Carrara Herbal in Padua (Routledge 2016), pp. 63.

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from the medicinal compendium Circa instans, written by a Mattheus Platearius (d. 1161), a Salernitan physician from a prominent medical family.8 Platearius’ treatise quickly became the essential guidebook for the acquisition of medicinal plants and the formulae of concoctions, and local authorities often demanded apothecaries to have a copy in their shop to ensure safe practices.9 Platearius included in his volume not only classical and Arabic works, translated in the eleventh century by Constantine the African (d. 1087), but also more recent writings such as Macer Floridus’s De virtutibus herbarum (c. late eleventh century) and the Egyptian physician Isaac Judaeus’ (c.832 - c.932) dietetic treatise, among others.10 In addition to Circa instans, Tractatus also contained more local influences, including other Salernitan texts such as Antidorium Nicolai (c. 12th century) and a quid pro quo, a guide for finding substitute simples, that is a single medicinal herb, for those currently inaccessible.

Platearius had access to this vast array of medical sources because of the vibrant medical studies already flourishing in Salerno. Though the local community of medical masters was never legally recognized as a “university” in the late thirteenth century, the city itself had been a meeting place for physicians and doctors since the tenth century. By the twelfth century,11 partly excited by the Aristotelian corpora newly translated from Arabic, the city experienced its growth in medical textbooks. The works which influenced Platearius’ herbal the most include the translations of Hippocrates and Galen by Constantine the African (d. 1087), a monk at the nearby Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino.12 The preexistent tradition of Greek and Arabic medicine and the medical texts from the local Jewish community also contributed to the development of medicinal practices.13 Just by observing the dialogue taking place between these texts from different centuries, languages, and cultures, we can observe the burgeoning enthusiasm for new scientific research and writings in the cultural environ of the two manuscripts.

The Italian cultural background from which the Tractatus manuscripts developed, which featured a growing preference for scientific and natural observations, helps explain Tractatus’ characteristic style. Though writers as early as Pliny the Elder (23/24-79 C.E.) had criticized illustrated herbals for the possibility that the desire to make beautifully stylized works would overwhelm the desire to craft accurate portraits of the plants.14 However, in the context in which this complaint was lodged, herbals had a largely different character than those made in Platearius’. Despite the fact that Pliny’s comments prove that there was an awareness of the possibility of “accurately” illustrated herbals, stylized versions predominated in the early medieval world. Herbals in the Latin West were largely copies of highly stylized and abstracted pictures, full of anecdotal folklore and mythological stories found in Apuleius Platonicus’s Herbarius, a 8 He is allegedly the son of the first female gynecologist, Truola. See John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1992) pp. 124-5.

9 “Medicine in Southern Italy, Twelfth to Fourteenth Centuries: Six Texts” from Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation, edited by Katherine L. Jansen, Joanna Drell, and Frances Andrews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania 2009), pp. 316. See also Peter Murray Jones, Medieval Medicine in Illuminated Manuscripts (London: British Library 1984), pp. 73.

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Givens, “Reading and Writing,” pp. 118; Collins, pp. 243.

Kristeller, pp. 176-8., 144-5 Ibid., pp. 151, 158.

Patricia Skinner, Health and Medicine in Early Medieval Southern Italy (Leiden: Brill 1997), pp. 142. Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1990), pp. 58. A fact which perhaps explain the occasional appearance of Arabic names for certain plants in the Tractatus, such as the use of the Arabic name suchar for Benedict’s thistle (Cnicus benedicus).

See Collins, A Medieval Herbal: A Fascimile of British Library Egerton MS. 747, pp. 12., pp. 15. The Arabic herbals were another rather well-developed yet understudied subjects, though their illustrations do not seem to have swayed the style of Tractatus as much as the renewed interest in Greek medicines and the natural world itself, as Collin argues. See Medieval Herbals, pp. 256-258.

14 Pinxere namque effigies herbarum atque ita subscripsere effectus. Verum et pictura fallax est coloribus tam numerosis, praesertim in aemulationem naturae, multumque degenerat transcribentium socordia. Praeterea parum est singulas earum aetates pingi, cum quadripertitis varietatibus anni faciem mutant (For indeed they [Greek authors] painted portraits of plants and thus wrote down the effects [of these plants]. But a picture is deceptive with its colors so various, especially in imitation of nature, and the inaptitude of the scribes causes [the quality of the pictures] to greatly deteriorate. Moreover, it is rare that the plants are painted in a single state of age, when they change their appearance at four different seasons of a year.) Pliny, Naturalis historia, 25.4, ctd. from Kyle, pp. 55. The translation is mine.

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popular fourth century encyclopedia of medicinal and magical plants.15 In all of these herbals, the images do not aim to provide specific guidelines for identification, and the texts themselves focused more on plants’ possible uses rather than on physical descriptions. Both the content and style place the reading experience in the realm of pleasure, rather than in the labor of pragmatic field studies. For instance, in one twelfth century Herbarius, Sloane 1975, the portrait of the plant vervain depicts a young man attacking a serpent while holding a disproportionately tall, stiff, almost treelike herb (fg. 2). Here the theatrical battle, albeit awkwardly posed, overshadows the hardy identifiable plant itself.

Thus Otto Pächt, in his oft-cited article “Early Italian Nature Studies” (1950), derides this preference for theatrics and the symbolic as “an ever-deepening corruption of the text and the lack of an agreed botanical terminology [which] added to the confusion[,] until the whole herbal, text and pictures, became quite useless as a practical manual.” 16 Pächt’s description for the herbal traditions predating Tractatus is likely distorted by his bias for humanism and naturalism. More recent scholars such as Sarah Kyle have defended these earlier herbals, calling attention to the pleasure in beholding the images and the cultural prestige they held in connection to the ancient world.17 It cannot be denied that simply by looking at a depiction of the same plant, the Tractatus tradition (fg. 1 and fg. 2) immediately evinces its affinity to naturalism – the slender, pinnatifid vervain of Egerton 747 (fg. 1) resembles a real-life specimen more than the vervain in Sloane 1975 (fg. 1b). However, as Jean Givens has cogently argued, we need to recognize the difference between scientific observation and naturalistic imitation:18 in fact, neither of the two herbal traditions utilize shading or perspective to convey the dimensions of a living plant—naturalism is the goal in neither—but Egerton does display a new attitude towards natural objects, which shifts the pleasure of reading from ancient stories to an active, scientific engagement with the natural world.

A question naturally arises from Tractatus’ seemingly stylistic ties to natural science: to what extent were treatises of this style actually useful for medical science and for the doctors of Salerno? Because Egerton 747, unlike regular medieval textbooks, contains no annotations nor sectional markings for scribes to make copies,19 the likelihood that the Egerton 747 manuscript was actually used by physicians—either for its text or its images—is often challenged.

20 Given that the unannotated Egerton 747 likely did not see heavy practical use, that most coeval medical textbooks were compiled without illustrations, and that physicians were not concerned with identifying and gathering the herbs themselves,21 we must consider the Tractatus works in a context other than the purely practical. It becomes pertinent to focus on what these illustrated treatises did for their readers: shift the herbals’ focus to a delight in observing and studying nature.

This interest in observational science seems to be the defining feature in the Tractatus tradition, particularly the first two manuscripts to which we can now turn our attention. Both manuscripts are written in Italian Gothic script in two columns, gathered in twelve quires of twelve folios. Both are roughly around the same size: Egerton 747 measures 360 x c.242 mm (after trimming) and Paris lat. 6823 measures 345 x 250 mm. Egerton 747 is written in a maximum of fifty-five lines per column and Paris lat. 6823 in around forty-six lines, both with ample margins. Furthermore, the penwork initials of both books alternate between blue and red inks, neatly marking the different sections for the texts written in brown ink. The Egerton 747 author draws commentaries from Isaac Judaeus, an Egyptian physician, on the different usages of each simple, or medicinal herb, in complicated medicaments, and he wrote them in a smaller script, usually next to the rubric heading. The contrast in the scripts’ sizes establishes a textual hierarchy that guides 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

For the genealogy of herbals and their provenance see Collins, Medieval Herbals, esp. pp. 148-220.

Pächt, pp. 27.

Kyle, pp. 23-60.

Jean A. Givens, Observation and Image-Making in Gothic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005), esp. pp.85-105.

Collins, A Medieval Herbal, pp. 21.

For instance, see Givens, “Reading and Writing,” pp. 117, and Collins, ibid., pp. 18-19.

The doctors and medical teachers at Salerno may have interacted with dry specimens of plants and other medicaments, since gathering herbs

was regarded as the task for the illiterate lower class. Givens, “Reading and Writing,” pp. 117.

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the readers to advance in their employment of each simple.22The table of contents in both books lists the simples in roughly alphabetical order, though the rule is not strictly observed after the initial letter.23 Both manuscripts are written with many abbreviations and few verbal descriptions of the plants themselves, suggesting that their targeted audiences were knowledgeable; however, the sectional divisions and the indexes also make sure the books, in addition to their aesthetic value, can still be an applicable and instructive manual for making medicines.

The differences between the two manuscripts are even more telling of the effort to convey explicit, practical knowledge and of the awareness of the local medical community and its fame. The author of Egerton 747 remains mysterious – no copies save for a 1458 copy of Tractatus testified to the signature Bartholomaeus Mini of Senis at the closing paragraph on fo. 106r (see fg. 3 for fo. 106r of Egerton 747).24 Even this name, as Otto Pächt first noted, seems to have been written by a later scribe over an erasure.25 Furthermore, the signature at the explicit only suggests that this Bartholomaeus, whoever he might be, was the scribe but not necessarily the sole artist of the manuscript.26 On the other hand, Paris lat. 6823, dated by Minta Collins to be the earliest copy of Egerton 747, was organized and designed by a single author, Manfredus de Monte Imperiale, though he only illustrated the herbal portion of the book and likely hired northern Italian artists for the human portraits and the border of the incipit page).27 As the incipit page states, “I, Manfredus de Monte Imperiali. . . wished to write this book by my own hand”,28 the author forcefully inserted his authorship and authority into the text. The existence of an identifiable author complicates Paris lat. 6823’s relationship to its “sister manuscript,” so-coined by Collins.29 Though Baumann places Paris lat. 6823 in the northern Italy group as it was catalogued in the collection of the Visconti family in northern Italian Pavia, Collins has argued that the manuscript was likely produced in Naples or Salerno, placing the manuscript even geographically closer to Egerton 747.30 The physical and temporal proximity between the two books suggest that the differences, particularly elaboration on pictorial and textual details, were not inevitable slippage from copying, but conscious choices of Manfredus, the author.

At first glance, Paris lat. 6823, with its 249 folios and larger tables of content, is simply expansion on Egerton 747 (149 folios). Manfredus’ copy, however, incorporates a more comprehensive glossary of synonyms for the name of each simple, using the Clavis sanationis of Simon of Genoa (post c. 1296). 31Most of the registered simples also have their names more clearly noted in rubric heading. The ambition of Manfredus can be shown more clearly in the additional prefatory bifolium that precedes the main corpus.32 The first page of the prefatory folia illustrates a fully bearded man 22 Givens, pp. 119-21.

23 Ibid.

24 Collins, A Medieval Herbal: A Facsimile of British Library Egerton MS. 747. (London: British Library 2003), pp. 4, pp. 21.

25 Otto Pächt, “Early Italian Nature Studies and the Early Calendar Landscape,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 13, No. ½ (1950), pp. 28.

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Explicit tractatus h[e]rbar[um] Diascorides & Platone adqu[e] Galienus & Macronem tra[n]slatate manu & intellectu bartholomei mini d[e] senis i[n] arte speciarie se[m]per i[n]fusus d[e]o gra[tia]s am[en]. (Here ends the treatise of herbs. Diascorides, Plato, Galen, and Macer were interpreted by the hand and mind of Bartholomaeus Mini of Senis, always involved in the art of spices. Thanks be to God. Amen.) Ctd. from Collins, A Medieval Herbal, pp.4. Translation is mine. Collins also mentions that from folio 106-109, a different artist might be involved, though the stylistic analysis cannot claim such conclusively; see ibid., pp. 15.

27 28

Collins, Medieval Herbals, pp. 272.

29 30

Ibid., pp. 270.

31 32

Collins, pp. 270.

Cum ego, Manfredus de Monte Imperiali, in artis speciarie semper optans scrire virtutes et cognoscere rerum proprietates, de simplicibus medicinis, ut recte cognate fuissent ab aliis et maxime a conficientibus medicinam, manu mea volui scribere librum et congregare omnes herbas et alia medicinalis secundum quod scripta inveni in multis libris autoribus (f. 3r).

Besides the images of the plants, most of the Tractatus herbals begin their main texts with an incipit page that contains a painted figured initial.

The predominantly pink and blue color palette of the initial and the abstract vegetal border of these incipits differ drastically from the plant portraits in the main corpus, indicating that the incipits were likely to have been commissioned and illustrated by different artists. Paris lat. 6823 also contains a bifolium of prefatory frontpiece, which, along with its incipit, resembles the style of Lippo Vanni, a Northern Italian artist working in Naples in the early 1340s, when Paris lat. 6823 was likely to have been made. See ibid., pp. 270-272.

Though Egerton 747 might have its own prefatory pages before they were lost, the frontpiece of Paris lat. 6823 does not seem to be following a

specific iconographic model, nor has it been emulated by later Tractatus manuscripts, and is uniquely revelatory for the identity of the author.

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sitting on a wooden chair, likely to be Manfredus himself (fg. 4). 33He holds a book in his right hand, while his left hand, in a gesture typically connotes speech, points to the plants held by a group of men in gowns usually associated with doctorate students. The two plants, betony (Stacys sylvatica L.) and feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium L.), are both painted in a flat, schematic style just as the “dry plants” style in the main corpus. Above the gathering is the hand of God at the right corner; it reaches over from a quartered blue sphere and points down towards the seated man, giving the precept for the making of this manuscript: omnia probate quod bonum est tenete (examine all things, hold what is good), a verse taken from Thessalonian 5:22.34 By placing himself at the front seat receiving God’s command, Manfredus presents himself as the representative of God, the ultimate creator/author of the entire universe, that begins this work divinely ordained, divinely supported.

This evocative religious inclusion gives strength to Manfredus’ own authority and to the scientific study he and his fellow scholars have conducted. The following pages show four pairs of doctors in conversation, each identified by an excerpt from their writing (fg. 5). Thus, Hippocrates is conversing with his Arabic translator Hunayn b. Ishak (Johannitu) in the upper left corner, and again with Galen in the bottom left. On the upper register of the recto page, an unidentifiable author, perhaps Yuhanna Ibn Masawayh (Mesue), converses with Bartolomeo of Salerno (fl. 1150-1180), while on the lower register, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) discusses intently with Poryphyry (234-ca. 305). As if in a convivium on the open facing page, the more contemporary commentators and their celebrated predecessors receive the same treatment and effectively the same seat of honor. The contemporary garments for the ancient authors further erase the difference between the two groups, perhaps even prioritizing the present uses and usefulness of classical works; the headgear which marks the Arabic identity of Johannitu, Averroes, and Mesue, also emphasizes the composite nature of knowledge. These details may suggest that Manfredus envisions that his herbal, as a work, was born under divine blessing and comes into shape from ancient traditions as well as from the contemporary achievements of local scholars; the information gathered in this text, just as the placement of these portraits of celebrated physicians and philosophers of natural science, is a amalgam of intellectual achievement without a hierarchical order – the ancients are fully integrated into the conversation of the modern scholars. Carefully improving the breadth and the clarity of the medicinal knowledge in Tractatus and fashioning himself as the author, Manfredus presents a book worthy of the prestige of his community.

One might assume that religion would have a peripheral presence in a treatise whose aim is to systematically improve the usability of its predecessor, in order to promote even closer scientific observation, but from the very beginning of the prefatory page, the hand of God interestingly complicates Manfredus’ attitude towards science. A closer look at the pictorial details and divergence between the two books demonstrates an elaboration on both practical tools as well as information not strictly scientific but no less exciting. It is important to note that Egerton 747 was first written, then illustrated, whereas Paris lat. 6823 first had its illustration painted before the text was added. Though the translucent green paint in Egerton 747’s illustrations do not interrupt its readability, images in a darker color can occasionally impede clear access to the text (e.g., fg. 5). In addition to rendering the text more legible, Paris lat. 6823’s procedural reversal also implies greater attention paid to planning and designing the images. Indeed, the manuscript contains more naturalistic figure portraits and more proportional plants. We can observe this by noting the different heights of watercress and dragonwort, which Manfredus shows more clearly by drawing the dragonwort flower in profile (see fg. 6). 35 Intriguingly, Paris lat. 6823 also seems to have explored the snake images in the marginalia of Egerton 747, transforming them into pointers to the text. These snakes slithering through the grassy herbs are not unfamiliar to herbal illustrations, as we have already seen them in the vervain of the Sloane Hebarius. Nevertheless, whenever the first Tractatus manuscript wishes to highlight the herb’s treatment of snake bites, the snakes are usually at the border of the text or image. Their slender, dark green, sometimes spotted bodies, their nimble, pliant, and twisted forms, and their well-portioned small heads resemble real garden snakes hissing with forked tongues. Though the illustrations of 33 34 35 7

Collins, pp. 270.

As noted by Kyle, pp. 50.

Ibid.

Egerton 747, in general, appear strictly concerned with vivid demonstrations rather than fanciful wordplay, in the entry of the dragonwort or Serpentaria (Arum dracunculus, L.), the illustrator seems to be unable to resist the wordplay and adds a snake encircling the plant’s stem (fg. 6).

In comparison, almost every snake in Paris lat. 6823 faces the text, and its tongue always points to a specific line.36 For instance, on the page on the dragonwort, though the illustration for the plant utilizes the profile perspective to convey a more naturalistic contrast between two herbs, the snake in Paris lat. 6823 has an unrealistically large head with a smile, almost like a human. Its body is in a wave-like shape, conveying movement, but the absence of an underbelly – a feature vividly drawn in Egerton 747 – makes the snake appear almost cartoonish. When the belly is portrayed in other snakes in the Paris manuscript, even the rigged white rings make the snake look more cartoonish than descriptive or naturalistic. The loss of naturalism nevertheless does not detract from Manfredus’ interest in using these snake “pointers” to promote greater engagement with the text. The manuscript was registered as part of the book collection of Francesco Sforza (1401-1466), the duke of Milan, though its prior ownership is yet unknown.37 However, its manicules markers in addition to the snake pointers, which also implies the private owner’s closer study, further proving that Paris lat. 6823 was a book used more “practically.”

Despite a generally more consistent and clearer organization that facilitates study, not all changes made in Paris lat.

6823 are strictly scientific. Many changes can be quickly challenged by observation and trial, even when we withhold the scrutiny of modern science. Already in Egerton 747, there are exotic plants such coconut, nutmeg, pepper, and nux vomica that, though drawn in descriptive detail, are, in fact, imaginations of the illustrator(s) who were unlikely to have seen any of these specimens in real life.38 If Egerton 747’s tendency to depict exotica “reasonably” still suggests its “realist” focus, Paris lat. 6823 gears towards the symbolic and the imaginary by depicting its plants with more fanciful details, despite its improvements on Egerton’s organization and clarity. Another good example is the latter’s recourse to a humanoid portrait of the mandrake root. Both manuscripts contain the entry for mandrakes (fg. 7), but Egerton 747 insists on downplaying their magical characteristics, rendering a naturalistic-seeming plant devoid of its legendary humanoid features. Paris lat. 6823, however, gives the mandrake a male human body covered with beardlike roots.

One of the most religiously evocative images in Paris lat. 6823 is found at the end of the first group of simples with the initial “A,” where instead of depicting the powder adarce, a type of salt that comes from reeds,39 the illustrator decides to draw a red circle labeled “caro manna” (lit. the flesh, manna). The word is possibly a corruption for cardamomum (cardamom).40 Though it is unclear why it is portrayed next to adarce—one interpretation of manna as white sap from ash trees comes to mind41—the illustrator employs strikingly religious iconography similar to a eucharist host – a circular red disk (fg. 8). Both manna and the host symbolize spiritual food for the faithful.42 While the Eucharistic bread is traditionally white, here its redness emphasizes the flesh and the suffering of Christ. The image of a reddish wafer can already be seen in the thirteenth century Old French Bible moralisée, where the manna and the eucharist host are compared directly.43 In any case, the image of the so-called “caro manna” does not resemble cardamom seeds at all. Therefore, its evocative circular shape suggests that the illustrator intended to borrow religious motifs to render 36 37 38 39

Collins aptly calls these depictions as “traditional snake ‘pointers’”, pp. 270.

40 41

Lynn Thorndike, “A Forgotten Botanist of the Thirteenth Century,” Isis, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Jul. 1932), pp. 69.

Collins, oo. 293.

Collins, pp. 252-3; Givens, Observation, pp. 92.

“Adarce seu Adarces, est une écume salée qui s’attache aux roseaux et à plusieurs autres plantes, et qui s’y endurcit en temps sec (Adarce, or Adarces, is a dry froth which attaches to the reed and to many other plants, and which hardens in dry climate)” Nicolas Lemery, Traité universel des drogues simples, Originally printed by Lurent d’Houry, 1723, Lyon Public Library, 2012, pp. 13.

Giovanni Cristofolini and Umberto Mossetti, “Interpretation of Plant Names in a Late Medieval Medical Treatise, Taxon, Vol. 47, No. 2 (May 1998), pp. 321. See also Lemery, pp. 524.

42

The iconography of manna also appears as disks such as that in the Bird’s Head Haggadah (c. 14th century). See also Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press 1996), pp. 85-7.

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See the image in Katherine H. Tachau, “God’s Compass and Vana Curiositas: Scientific Study in the Old French Bible Moralisée,” The Art

Bulletin, Vol. 80, No. 1 (Mar. 1998), pp. 11-13.

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medicinal lore, marking the folkloric as particularly significant and not to be discounted by the label “superstition.”

By performing a genealogy of the herbal manuscript tradition, we have seen a conscious break from the two Salernitan manuscripts that prioritize the observable nature and the efficacy in actual usage of the herbal manual. The divergences show that the later compiler, Manfredus, wishes to improve the clarity of the herbal for the use of his fellow doctors, though it remains difficult to answer to what extent these illustrations were really used in medicinal treatment, especially considering that the large size of both books would make carrying them to the field rather cumbersome.44 What Manfredus’ changes do show, however, is the vision of a medicinal study rooted in the natural world.

Despite these two herbals’ inclusion of materials that appear like pseudo-science to the modern viewer, their systematic organization and presentation engage the audience through natural objects, or, at least, what are rendered naturalistically. And yet, as this paper emphasizes consistently, the reoriented interest in more naturalistic resemblance does not equate to a sterile, unadulterated encyclopedia of information. To make such a teleological dichotomy between “real” and “imaginary” would be to overlook the coexisting, even symbiotic relationship between science and historical culture, both of which were crucial constituents in the life of a late medieval intellectual. The authors of these manuscripts and their audience continue to participate in a world whose natural material remains mysterious and potent.

44 9

As noted by Givens, “Reading and Writing,” pp. 117.

Appendix Fg. 1. Comparison between an image of vervein in Tractatus de herbis and a dry specimen of Aaronsohnia factorovskyi.

Detail of vervain. British Library, Egerton 747, fol. 16r. c.1280-1315, 360 x 242 mm.

Image of a type of Aaronsohnia factorovskyi. Collected by S. Collenette. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Herbarium Specimens #51.

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Fg. 2 Detail of an image of vervain. British Library, Sloane 1975, fol. 14v. c. 1190-1200, 295 x 196 mm.

Fg. 3 Detail of the explicit. Egerton 747, fol. 106r.

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Fg. 4 Bibliothèque nationale, Paris lat. 6823, fol. 1r. c. 1340, 345 x 247 mm.

Fg. 5 Bibliothèque nationale, Paris lat. 6823, fol. 1v.

12

Bibliothèque nationale, Paris lat. 6823, fol. 2r.

Fg. 6 Detail of an image of an amber whale. British Library, Egerton 747, fol. 7r.

13

6a. Detail of an image of an amber whale. Bibliothèque nationale, Paris lat. 6823, fol. 12r.

The dark brown color of the whale makes several words unrecognizable in Egerton 747, but by painting the image first and perhaps using a dark ink with higher contrast, the text remains legible despite the overlap in Paris lat. 6823.

Fg. 7 British Library, Egerton 747, fol. 93v.

14

7a. Bibliothèque nationale, Paris lat. 6823, fol. 143r.

Fg. 8 Detail of the mandrake. British Library, Egerton 747, fol. 61r.

15

Fg. 8a. Detail of the mandrake. Bibliothèque nationale, Paris lat. 6823, fol. 99r.

Fg. 9 Bibliothèque nationale, Paris lat. 6823, fol. 25r.

16

Bibliography Primary Sources Tractatus de herbis. Manuscript. British Library. Egerton 747, c. 1280-1315.

Tractatus de herbis. Manuscript. Bibliothèque Nationale. Paris lat. 6823, c. 1340.

Secondary Sources Ausecache, Mireille. « Manuscrits d’antidotaires médiévaux : quelques exemples du fonds latin de la Bibliothèqu nationale de France » Médiévale, No. 52 (Spring 2007), pp. 55-73.

Caciola, Nancy Mandeville. Afterlives: the Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages. New York: Cornell University Press, 2016.

Collins, Minta. Medieval Herbals: An Illustrative Tradition. London: British Library, 2000.

----------------- A Medieval Herbal: A Facsimile of British Library Egerton MS. 747. British Library, 2003.

Cristofolini, Giovanni and Umberto Mossetti. “Interpretation of Plant Names in a Late Medieval Medical Treatise.”

Taxon, Vol. 47, No. 2 (May 1998), pp. 305-319.

Givens, Jean A. Observation and Image-Making in Gothic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

------------------ Karen M. Reeds and Alain Touwaide. Editors. Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History.

Burlington: Ashgate, 2006.

Jones, Peter Murray. Medieval Medicine in Illuminated Manuscripts. London: British Library. 1998.

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. “The School of Salerno: Its Development and its Contribution to the History of Learning,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 17, No. 2 (February 1945), pp. 138-194.

Kyle, Sarah R. Medicine and Humanism in Late Medieval Italy: The Carrara Herbal in Padua. New York: Routledge, 2017.

Lemery, Nicolas. Traité universel des drogues simples. Originally printed by Lurent d’Houry, 1723. Lyon Public Library, 2012.

Lindberg, David. Editor. The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. II: Medieval Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Marcus, Ivan G. Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Pächt, Otto. “Early Italian Nature Studies and the Early Calendar Landscape.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 13, No. ½ (1950), pp. 13-47.

Jansen, Katherine L., Joanna Drell, and Frances Andrews. Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2009.

Olariu, Dominic. “The Misfortune of Philippus de Lignamine’s Herbal, or New Research Perspectives in Herbal Illustration from an Iconological Point of View.” Early Modern Print Culture in Central Europe. Edited by Stefan Kiedron, Anna-Maria Rimm. Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschite, Preprint 469, 2015, pp. 1-24.

Riddle, John M. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Skinner, Patricia. Health and Medicine in Early Medieval Southern Italy. Leiden: Brill, 1997.

Siraisi, Nancy. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Tachau, Katherine H. “God’s Compass and Vana Curiositas: Scientific Study in the Old French Bible Moralisée.”

The Art Bulletin, Vol. 80, No. 1 (Mar. 1998), pp. 7-33.

Thorndike, Lynn. “Rufinus: A Forgotten Botanist of the Thirteenth Century.” Isis, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Jul 1932), pp. 6372.

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Trujillo Racial Politics: Depictions of Blackness in Dominican Art (1930-1961) Marie Normand Introduction During the Era of Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican Republic developed a new racial and social identity. From his election to the presidency in 1931 until his assassination in 1960, Trujillo’s politics engendered a different set of social standards against which Dominicans measured themselves. Building upon pre-existing tensions at the border, Trujillo systematized the fear of Haitian people and their customs, erasing West African traditions to make way for a hierarchy in which Catholicism and its proximity to whiteness became markers of Dominicanidad​: Dominican national identity. Consequently, the emergence of modern art in the Dominican Republic must be understood through the lens of the political affairs of its people. Specifically, this paper will argue that the national identity formed in the Era of Trujillo influenced the conception of the black form in modernist painting.

This study reviews the social, political and historical context for the creation of Dominican art between 1930 and 1961, addressing the depiction of blackness when anti-black sentiment culminated. I will analyze appearances of the black form in the artistic careers of three modernist painters in the mid-twentieth century: Jaime Colson, Jose Vela Zanetti, and Celeste Woss y Gil. This list is by no means exhaustive and is instead meant to provide a glimpse of the varied ways in which the black population of the Dominican Republic was depicted at the time. Representations of blackness will be understood according to their responses, either direct or indirect, to the societal implications of Trujillo’s totalitarian regime and the actions instituted to police blackness on the island.

Voyeurism and Blackness It is important to note that all of the artists I will mention came from privileged backgrounds as white and upper-class individuals operating under an anti-black regime. This distinction undeniably separates the artists from their subjects. In this paper, I will analyze several problems that arise from this dichotomy.

I will discuss the idea of “elevating,” in which portraying an under-represented population in art raises it to the status of the white norm, several times throughout the essay. This is the language with which many art historians discuss depictions of the black body when portrayed by non-black artists. Painting black people with European aesthetic conventions places them within the visual context of the same people who possess power over them. The idea of black bodies being elevated in art through their proximity to whiteness is problematic, as it asserts that the black body needs a white savior (in this case, an artist) to raise it above the marginalized status imposed by European colonialism.

I will also argue that these depictions of the black body are not manifestations of blackness because their creators, white artists, lived an experience completely detached from that of the Afro-Dominicans that they depict.

White-passing artists, particularly in Trujillo’s anti-black and anti-Haitian national culture, had a level of accessibility not afforded to their mixed or black contemporaries. They were able to exhibit their art to greater audiences and were given opportunities to study in academic art schools outside of the country. Therefore, white-passing artists’ depictions of the Afro-descendant population of Hispaniola are interpretations of the artists’ own, outsider experiences of black culture, not authentic accounts of blackness during the Era of Trujillo. This distinction is critical in recognizing the potential for voyeuristic tendencies in their art. Are these images reducing the black form into a character for the consumption of white elites on the island? Or are they symbols of black resilience and solidarity against a government focused on their systematic erasure? These questions are complex, but this paper will attempt to address them.

19

Historical Background Critical to any discussion surrounding racial identity within the island of Hispaniola is the conception of race within the Dominican imagination, the synthetic product of European colonialism and the Dominican-Haitian dichotomy it imposed. The idea of Dominicanidad​​is fabricated through the collective history of its ethnic groups, as shaped by social, economic and political phenomena. However, it is crucial for modern readers to avoid the simplification that Dominican people are avid deniers of their African racial ancestry, asserting an unconditional love for their believed whiteness in opposition to “black” Haiti.2 The prevalence of anti-black and anti-Haitian sentiments is historically complex, and, particularly when analyzing Trujillo, we must note that the exaggerated prevalence of these sentiments has been crafted into a tool for the tyranny of totalitarian political programs.

Before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in December of 1492, the island was inhabited by an indigenous population, the Taínos.3 The conspicuous presence of gold interested the Spanish, who established commercial outposts to exploit new resources, terrorizing the Taínos into cultivating plantations and working in gold mines under exploitative conditions. The encomienda​system, legally sanctioned by the Spanish monarchs in late 1503, almost eradicated the indigenous population through policies like forced enslavement.4 The Taínos were vulnerable to hunger and disease, left in such desperate conditions that many committed suicide.5 The 1514 census revealed that they were on the verge of extinction, with just 26,334 Taínos remaining out of an estimated pre-Columbian population of 400,000.6 With the near extermination of the indigenous people of Hispaniola, the remaining population was left to earn a living in the face of depleted gold mines and a paucity of slave labor.

The diminishing Taíno population prompted the restructuring of the encomienda​system. Sugar plantations and cattle-raising became the foundations for this new economy, made possible by importing African slaves as the new labor force.7 The import of African slaves drastically changed the racial demographic of the island. The French occupation of the territory subsequently increased the mixed-race population, since the scarcity of white women resulted in a rise in coerced sex taking place between black female slaves and their white masters.8 For these women, concubinage with their owners facilitated the acquisition of their own liberty and that of their children.9 By 1789, the French Revolution had destabilized white French power in Saint-Domingue, present-day Santo Domingo, where mulattos, in attempts to rise above their imposed status as second-class citizens, began to assert their rights as legal inhabitants of the land. The island was divided for the next decade, with landowners, free men, mulattos and black slaves all fighting for their right to govern it. Toussaint L’Ouverture, a former slave, led a black revolt against Napoleon’s army in 1801.10 This event marked the first in an avalanche of subsequent battles with the French, until Haiti became independent in 1804.11 The events leading to Haiti’s independence devastated the eastern part of Hispaniola: years of war had decimated the population and made poverty universal, and the colonial elites, who had regarded themselves as white, Hispanic and Catholic, felt abandoned by the Spanish Crown.Thus, the Haitian Republic wished to unify the two separate, but interdependent, governments of Hispaniola. For the majority-mulatto population of the Spanish portion, a unified island promised liberation and land. However, the resulting Haitian occupation of 1822 again aggravated the anti-Haitian prejudice that had persisted since the Revolution; white landowners felt Haitian political economy privileged the black and mulatto proprietors.12 Opposition to the Haitian government culminated in Dominican revolts, and, ultimately, Haiti capitulated to the eastern half of the 2 Milagros Ricourt, The Dominican Racial Imaginary – Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola, (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press 2016), p. 3.

3 Frank Moya Pons, “Geography and the Aboriginal Population” in The Dominican Republic: A National History, (Princeton, New Jersey: First Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995), p. 13-28.

4 Ibid, 33.

5 Ibid, 34.

6 Ibid, 35.

7 Ibid, 37-38.

8 Ibid, 92.

9 Ibid, 93.

10 Ibid, 97.

11 Ibid, 98.

12

Ibid, 116-142.

20

island its political autonomy on February 27, 1844.13 Thus was born the Dominican Republic.

As its own sovereign nation, the Dominican Republic struggled during the latter half of the nineteenth century.14 Beginning in 1916, the U.S. military occupied the country, facilitating the rise of the country’s dictator, Rafael ​ Leónidas​Trujillo Molina.15 U.S. occupation set the stage culturally for Trujillo’s institutionalized racism; the US had already disseminated the idea of the Dominican Republic as a “mulatto republic” whose European ancestry facilitated its growth under the tutelage of foreign military officials. The 1920 census, the first national census of the modern era, declared the country predominantly “mestizo” rather than white or black. U.S. occupation also allowed for the easy transition from one authoritarian militant political figure to another. Trujillo quickly rose up the ranks of the American-instituted Dominican National Guard, and his promotion to army chief in 1927 gave him the power to amass wealth through illicit business transactions within the military.16 He began appointing his followers to key positions of power, slowly transforming the army into his personal machine for political ambition. Trujillo’s presidential campaign was promoted through violent terrorist acts and military intimidation. His terrorist group, La 42​​, was directed to assassinate his political opponents.17 The U.S. occupation had disarmed the Dominican public, who were left vulnerable and defenseless against Trujillo’s soldiers: the same soldiers that had been trained by the U.S. government. To further buttress his power, Trujillo built his regime on the complete economic control of every industry within the Dominican Republic, accruing a personal network of interdependent monopolies.18 Born in San Cristóbal in 1891 of mixed Spanish,​Creole and Haitian heritage, Rafael L ​ eónidas Trujillo Molina took office on August 16 of 1930, coming into power during the height of the border dispute between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.19 Following the wars between the two countries in the nineteenth century, Haitians had been immigrating and settling on abandoned agricultural lands on the eastern half of the border.20 These Haitian immigrants on the border were largely marginalized from the rest of Dominican society. With Haitian currency circulating in these immigrant communities, the border came to be seen as an extension of Haiti.21 Because Haitians were seen as “blacker” than the Dominicanidad ideal, Trujillo launched the genocide of all living Haitians in this region, sending his army to assassinate over twenty thousand Haitians in 1937. The government pushed for the “Dominicanization” of the frontier, establishing a Dominican identity protected through military force. It provided land incentives for Catholic Dominican families to settle at the border, bringing the former “barbaric” and voodoo territory associated with Haiti back to Christianity. A subsequent propaganda campaign hailed Trujillo as the nation’s savior, protecting the Dominican Republic from the illegal encroaching of Haitian thieves and restoring the nation’s Spanish and Catholic traditions.22 After a thirty-one-year-long reign of tyranny, Trujillo was finally assassinated by political conspirators in 1961.23 However, the effects of his rule penetrated the Dominican racial imagination and shaped the public’s perceptions of national identity. The racial warfare embedded in the border disputes encouraged Trujillo’s goal to build a national identity around the proximity to whiteness. To accomplish this, Trujillo promoted the idea that Dominicaniad​was contingent on its cultural connections to hispanidad​​, that is the Spanish “race.” International fairs emphasized the beauty of light-skinned Dominicans and Spanish immigrants.24 Trujillo expanded the term Indio​(literally meaning Indian or indigenous but colloquially used to refer to the brown- skinned people of mixed heritage) to represent the Dominican people. Even mulatto identity was discarded due to its implications of half-African heritage. Trujillo 13 Ibid, 152-153.

14 Ibid, 153-164.

15 Ibid, 317-324.

16 Ibid, 351.

17 Ibid, 356.

18 Ibid, 356.

19 Ibid, 358.

20 Ibid, 367.

21 Ibid, 368.

22 Ibid, 369-370.

23 Ibid, 373.

24 Kimberly Eison Simmons, Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida 2009), p. 26-29.

21

encouraged European immigration through government policies that explicitly promoted the whitening, or blanqueamiento​, ​of the nation. The Haitian Massacre of 1937 warped these sentiments into an anti-Haitian hispanidad​ nationalism by capitalizing on existing tensions. Haitians were the undesired immigrants responsible for the “darkening” of the country. As defined on national censuses, the category “black” became analogous to Haitian. Textbooks were reformatted to erase the presence and impact of West Africans.25 The erasure of Dominicans’ African past even extended to a regulation of cultural phenomena including the national music, merengue; I will return to this later in the artistic analysis.

Trujillo created imagery and categories that successfully fostered an appreciation of Spanish language and identity, while denigrating any association with blackness or Haiti. The government-controlled media and education system propagated a fear of both the black and Haitian identities and promoted the gradual whitening of a population that was predominantly non-white. The standard national identity became the Indio​​who valued Spanish ideals within a Taíno landscape. The following artists will be discussed in the ways in which they interacted with this standard.

Jaime Colson Born in 1901 in Puerto Plata, Jaime Colson was formally trained at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid.26 A frequent traveler, his works combine his lived experiences in Spain and the Dominican Republic with a color palette reminiscent of Mexican artists such as Diego Rivera. In 1938, in the then-capital, Trujillo City, Colson exhibited twenty of his paintings, sketches and watercolors.27 As he later wrote in his memoir, the exhibition came as an “enormous surprise for the restless youth, something disconcerting for the older people, and a tremendous show of disrespect in the very rigid minds of the elders.” Among the paintings exhibited was Colson’s Merengue​ (1938, oil on cardboard), an emblematic depiction of Dominicanidad​(Figure 1).28 The painting shows a gathering of people on a porch, many of whom are visibly dark and have African features, playing instruments and dancing.

The planar quality of Colson’s modeling isolates these figures in their own time and space, happily enjoying the music being played around them. The three musicians are playing the accordion, drum and güira: the defining instruments of merengue music. The architectural setting acts as a classical stage for its dancing actors. The work’s symmetrical arrangement is similarly classicizing; the central dancing couple acts as the central axis of the composition.

The scene presented here is undeniably Dominican, and simultaneously undeniably black. Colson is reinterpreting the neoclassical language of his European training into a Creole reality, through the visibility of mulatto and black individuals.

The title Merengue​is worth analyzing. Merengue and its dance became elements central to the Dominican identity during the era of Trujillo. Merengue itself is believed to have originated during the Haitian Revolution, when Haitians fleeing conflict brought over mereng​​, a dance-mélange of European and African elements.29 In the early twentieth century, it was a form of music strictly associated with the lower-class campecinos​​, meaning country people or rural farmers. Trujillo, who sought to elevate merengue’s status to that of Dominican Republic’s national music, appropriated its use for political propaganda through the erasure of its Afro-Haitian roots. By associating his regime with the country’s favorite pastime, Trujillo forged a commonality between his power and the culture of the people he sought to control.30 He promoted a merengue variation from the whitest region of the country, Cibao, eliminated “African” drum rhythms, and emphasized the prevalence of traditional Spanish poetry forms to assert merengue as a predominantly European musical genre.31 Merengue de orquesta​, which featured Spanish forms of poetry such as copla ​and décima​​, was the preferred version of the distinctively African merengue típico cibaeño​​in the upper-class salon.32 25 Ibid, 28-30.

26 Jaime Colson, Jaime Colson – Pinturas Peintures Paintings, (Coral Gables, Florida: Palette Publications 1996), p. 35-36.

27 Ibid, 52.

28 Museo Bellapart, Colson “La Vanguardia Trashumante”, (Santo Domingo: Colección Monografias de Arte del Centro Cultural de España, 2004), 11:p. 52-55.

29 Julie A. Sellers, Merengue and Dominican Identity, (Jefferson: McFarland & Company Inc, 2004), p. 61-63.

30 Ibid, 95.

31 Kimberly Eison Simmons, Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida 2009), 28.

32 Julie A. Sellers, Merengue and Dominican Identity (Jefferson: McFarland & Company Inc, 2004), p. 97.

22

While the style championed by Trujillo had undergone blanqueamiento​to appeal to the island’s white elite, making the music’s forced evolution a racial one, this innovation also divided merengue along class lines. Julie Sellers compares the modifications of merengue to the dictator himself, who, accustomed to lightening his skin with make-up, had done the same to the dance of the campesinos.33 The political context surrounding its creation marks Colson’s painting as a direct departure from the Trujillo’s merengue. Colson’s figures are visibly campecinos​engaging with the rhythmic traditions of an African-derived dance. Conceived and exhibited barely a year following the Haitian massacre at the border, the musicians and dancers evoke a sense of nostalgia for the black roots of the island. His painting reads as a declaration of love and nostalgia for the kinship broken by the genocides at the border. Colson left the island again shortly after the end of his exhibition and returned to Europe in 1939.34 In Paris, he integrated himself in the scene of European avant-garde painters, in particular, Pablo Picasso and Wifredo Lam.35 Upon his return to the Dominican Republic in 1950, his approach to the depiction of the black body largely lost its mixed-race and white supporting actors.36 With the visual language of European modes of abstraction, Colson’s later paintings evoke a new Dominicanidad​grounded in the spiritual reflections of an erased black and Haitian past. Examples of this later development include Geometría Negroide​(1955, oil on canvas) and the Haitian portrait series of 1958.

José Vela Zanetti José Vela Zanetti was a Spanish painter and muralist who worked in the Dominican Republic. Born in 1913 in Milagros, Vela Zanetti studied under Jose Ramon Zaragoza in Madrid.37 Vela Zanetti left Spain in exile following the end of the Spanish Civil War. 38His Spanish heritage made him an “appealing” immigrant in the totalitarian regime of the time, which praised Europeans, and he was hired to paint eighty-seven murals throughout the county.39 In his paintings, his depictions of the black form are most expressive and prominent.

Haitiana Peinándose, o ​ r Haitian Woman Combing Herself (​ 1944, oil on panel), is a three-quarter-view portrait of a black woman (Figure 2).​40 Her expression is grim and serious as she looks out beyond the panel. Her hair is shown mid-coiffure, with sections of her afro left unwrapped. The surrounding paint surface is broken into geometric panels of gradient colors, the modeling of which is not naturalistic. This type of patterning shows Vela Zanetti’s European training; the dissection of color and shape into sculptural planes recalls the work of Cezanne. However, most notably, the choice to portray the black woman in the act of grooming radically redefines contemporary attitudes about black beauty. The Era of Trujillo privileged white features as attractive; Trujillo’s blanqueamiento​​ campaigns prompted Dominicans to appeal to that European standard, as we observed with Trujillo’s use of makeup to lighten his complexion. Thus, Haitiana Peinándose, and especially its portrayal of black hair, can be read as a rejection of these imposed Eurocentric beauty ideals and as a reclamation of the beauty of African features.

In the contemporary discussions about hair, the promotion of the Hispanidad​and Indio​models encouraged two categories: pelo malo​ (bad hair) and pelo bueno​​ (good hair).41 Straight or straightened hair was established as pelo bueno and became a ​​significant marker of beauty for Dominican women who identified themselves as mixed descendants of the Taínos and Spanish. Pelo malo​ was identified as afro-textured hair and as “pelo de los negros” (hair of black people). The styling of afro hair further distinguished people, as natural, coarse curls were seen as differentiating Haitians from the self-proclaimed Indio Dominicans. ​​ The proudly unapologetic display of afro hair in Vela Zanetti’s painting had vast societal implications for a country fixed on the erasure of blackness and Haitian identity, espe33 Ibid.

34 Museo Bellapart, Colson “La Vanguardia Trashumante”, (Santo Domingo: Colección Monografias de Arte del Centro Cultural de España, 2004), 11: p. 79-99.

35 Ibid, 56-57.

36 Ibid, 79-83.

37 Antonio Viñayo et al., Vela Zanetti (1913-1999), (Madrid : Fundación Hullera Vasco-Leonesa 2000), p. 30.

38 Ibid. 28.

39 Ibid, 98.

40 Ibid 170.

41 Ana-Maurine Lara, “Cimmarronas, Ciguapas and Senoras: Hair, Beauty, and National Identity in the Dominican Republic,” in Blackberries and Redbones Critical Articulations of Black Hair/Body Politics in Africana Communities, (Cresskill: Hampton Press Inc, 2010), p. 120-121.

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cially because the widespread prescription of hair-straightening made straight hair into social capital necessary for accessing economic opportunities. Though Haitian identity was ostracized from Dominican society for its proximity to blackness, artistic depictions of Haitians, like this one, placed their identity proudly in view.

Celeste Woss y Gil Celeste Woss y Gil was born in Santo Domingo in 1890, daughter to the former president of the Dominican Republic.42 Her family left in exile, giving her the opportunity to study painting in the academies of Cuba and New York. Upon her return to the island in 1931, she decided to open her own art school in Santo Domingo called the Academia de Dibujo y Pintura. Her art academy proved highly influential in the development of modernist painting in the Dominican Republic, so much so that she assumed the position of director of the national school of visual arts in the country in 1942. 43As an artist, Woss y Gil made the mulatto the prime subject of her many portraits, stressing it as the image of the Dominican public.

Woss y Gil’s artistic training influenced her depiction of the black form. Having studied the European mode of classical painting, she was well-aware of the primary subject of the European tradition’s beloved nude: the white female. The quintessential nude portrait provided a voyeuristic portrayal of a white woman, as well as an opportunity for the study of the female form. European art of several centuries has been crowded with the visualization of pink tonal flesh and sensuous femininity. For this reason, Woss y Gil’s nude portraits of mulatto Dominican women were radically striking to an upper-class public that had grown accustomed to Trujillo’s blanqueamiento​​. These works struck chords of opposition and discontent during their exhibition in the capital.

An example of this work is Desnuda I o ​ r Woman Resting​from 1941 (oil on linen) (Figure 3). A nude woman is reclining, her arms raised above her head in state of repose. She is shown lying on a bed of pillows. Thick gestural marks make up her figure, where the brown skin contrasts with the bare walls behind her. The viewer is confronted by the image of a visibly mixed mulatta with dark skin and African features. The snapshot-like framing of the composition heightens this sense of realism. She has been situated where, in the European tradition, a white woman would have been depicted. Though not a depiction of a completely black body, the picture’s erasure of the white norm within the context of the nude heightens the viewer’s awareness of the mixed sitter’s proximity to blackness.

For Dominican women, who were prompted to aspire to a white standard on par with Trujillo’s blanqueamiento​​, Woss y Gil’s painting reads as a rejection of a European standard of beauty and as a reclamation, on behalf of a nonwhite majority, of the beauty of mulatto features.44 Woss y Gil’s position as a female artist undeniably affected her creative process. As a female creator, she was engaging in both the formation of her own aesthetic vocabulary and of societal values.45 These images of black and mulatta femininity differ from any of the previous examples in the confidence with which they establish intimacy with their audience.

Conclusion In forming the Dominican national identity, the Era of Trujillo dealt with several racial ideologies: the Taíno heritage of Dominican people, the erasure of a distinctively black past, its Catholic and Spanish colonial powers, and tensions with the neighboring French colony. The policies of Trujillo’s totalitarian regime instituted the widespread rejection of black and Haitian customs in its conception of the Dominicanidad​. The variety of work depicting the black population, here exemplified by Jaime Colson, Jose Vela Zanetti and Celeste Woss y Gil, underscores the diverse interpretations of the anti-black policies of the era. These depictions of blackness provide insight into aesthetic responses to his dictatorship. The comprehension of Dominican art within this context is necessary to gain a 42 Jeannette Miller, “Celeste Woss y Gil: vida y obra,” in Mujer Y Arte Dominicano Hoy Homenaje a Celeste Woss y Gil (Santo Domingo: Casa de Bastidas, 1995) p. 17-21.

43 Ibid.

44 Jeannette Miller, “Celeste Woss y Gil: vida y obra,” in Mujer Y Arte Dominicano Hoy Homenaje a Celeste Woss y Gll (Santo Domingo: Casa de Bastidas, 1995)p. 20.

45 Ada Balcácer, “El activism de la mujer en el arte dominicano” in Mujer Y Arte Domincano Hoy Homenahe a Celeste Woss y Gil (Santo Domingo: Casa de Bastidas, 1995)p. 50-51.

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deeper understanding of the concept of modernism on the island during the mid-twentieth century. Latin American art was, until recently, largely overlooked as a field of study in the rise of modern art, and the merit of the representation of blackness within Latin American art has been ignored to an even greater extent. In order to promote comprehensive studies on the art of the Caribbean, it is important to recognize these gaps, one of which this paper has aimed to help fill.

Appendix Figure 1

25

Figure 2

Figure 3

26

Bibliography Balcácer, Alda. “El activism de la mujer en el arte dominicano.” In Mujer Y Arte Dominicano Hoy; Homenaje a Celeste Woss y Gil. Santo Domingo: Casa de Bastidas, 1995. 49-52.

Colson, Jaime. Jaime Colson- Pinturas Peintures Paintings. Coral Gables, Florida: Palette Publications, 1996.

Deive, Carlos Esteban. Identidad y Racismo en la Republica Dominicana. Santo Domingo: Junta Municipal de Cultura, 1999.

Ferrer, Elizabeth and Edward J. Sullivan. Modern and Contemporary Art of the Dominican Republic. New York: Americas Society and the Spanish Institute, 1996.

Lara, Ana-Maurine. “Cimmarronas, Ciguapas and Senoras: Hair, Beauty, and National Identity in the Dominican Republic,” in Blackberries and Redbones Critical Articulations of Black Hair/Body Politics in Africana Communities.

Cresskill: Hampton Press Inc, 2010.

Mayes, April J. The Mulatto Republic – Class, Race, and the National Identity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014.

Miller, Jeannette. “Celeste Woss y Gil: vida y obra.” In Mujer Y Arte Dominicano Hoy; Homenaje a Celeste Woss y Gil. Santo Domingo: Casa de Bastidas, 1995. 17-21.

Moya Pons, Frank. The Dominican Republic: A National History. Princeton, New Jersey: First Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995.

Museo Bellapart. Colson “La Vanguardia Trashumante”. Vol 11. Santo Domingo: Colección Monografías de Arte del Centro Cultural de España, 2004.

Ricourt, Milagros. The Dominican Racial Imaginary – Surveying the landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola.

New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2016.

Sellers, Julie A. Merengue and the Dominican Identity. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc, 2004.

Simmons, Kimberly Eisons. Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009.

Suro, Dario. Arte Dominicano. Santo Domingo: Publicaciones Ahora! 1969.

Vinayo, Antonio et al. Vela Zanetti (1913-1999). Madrid: Fundación Hullera Vasco-Leonesa, 2000.

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Restoring Integrity: How Kintsugi-ware Encapsulate the Vicissitudes of Time Mari Sophia Ōtsu Introduction This essay is composed of four sections which shed light on the multivalence of kintsugi, the Japanese craft of mending broken ceramics with lacquer and decorative gold powder. Beginning with the methodological history of Japanese ceramic repair, the essay progresses to the relationship between kintsugi, the Japanese tea ceremony, and Zen Buddhist teachings. The essay concludes by examining the traumatic geological conditions of Japan, which may have given rise to the popularity of decorative ceramic mending. These various perspectives culminate in an interpretation of kintsugi that is rich, multifaceted, and that transcends any single analysis.

Urushi to Kintsugi: Prehistoric to Modern Kintsugi literally means “to patch with gold.” The term refers to the Japanese craft of mending broken ceramics with urushi – a viscid natural latex found in the sap of the Asian lacquer tree – and sprinkling the repaired lacuna(e) with decorative gold powder.2 Urushi comes from the sap of the Rhus vernicifera tree, a genus of sumac that grows in territories between southern China and Thailand, as well as Japan and Korea.3 A material possessing unusual chemical stability, urushi has an endurance which, to a certain degree, explains its extremely early presence in Japan’s archeological record. To date, the oldest documentation of urushi was found at the Kakinoshima B site in southern Hokkaido, dating to 7000 B.C.4 More recently, a cluster of encrusted pottery shards dating to the mid-first millennium B.C. was unearthed from the Korekawa ruins in northern Honshu. Conservators believe that these fragments were pieces of a craftsman’s painting kit. Moreover, from the late Nara Period (710 – 784 A.D.) onwards, urushi played an important role in sculptures, replacing bronze as the principal medium for Japanese Buddhist sculptures. Historically (beginning in the Nara period) and in modern times, urushi has also served as a protective and decorative coating for temple architecture, rivaling the durability of modern synthetic resins.

However, the exact origin of urushi’s unusual application in the context of kintsugi and the conservation of broken ceramics is unknown. Although no date can formally be assigned to the first use of gold in collaboration with urushi, the craft of kintsugi is uniquely Japanese, despite the lacquer tree’s accessibility in other regions of Asia. An urushi and gold restoration on a Korean or Chinese ware would indicate that it had been touched by Japanese hands.5 It is often surmised that ceramic repair using urushi and gold evolved under the influence of the Japanese tea ceremony, or chadō (the way of tea), and prominent tea masters, due to a number of 16th-century anecdotes describing warlords’ and tea masters’ fascination with broken and mended ceramics.

Figure 1 is an example of a kintsugi-mended teabowl that had three chips around the edges, each of which was repaired using red urushi, which complements the rich bronze tones of the piece by drawing attention to the three unevenly spaced patches around the edges. Notice how the juxtaposition of colors isn’t the only apparently contradictory element of the repair—the red urushi is smooth and highly reflective, in stark contrast to the rough, muted texture of the bowl. The chawan, or tea bowl, in Figure 1 is an example of a piece that required three different patches of putty to restore it to its original shape. Interrupted at three different points in its elliptical mouth, the repaired bowl conveys a sense of resilience and respect for the points at which it cracked, originally unintended demarcations whose lingering presence allow the bowl to be perceived anew. The craftsman’s choice to leave the red urushi mostly visible instead of covering it in gold powder creates a natural effect that enhances the subtle statement made by the thin 2 3 4

Charly Iten, Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics (Münster: Museum of Lacquer Art, 2008), 18.

Stuart Fleming, “Japanese Urushi: The Finishing Touch,” Archaeology 40, no. 4 (1987): 63.

Shuichi Noshiro, Mitsuo Suzuki, and Yuka Sasaki, “Importance of Rhus Vericiflua Stokes (Lacquer Tree) in Prehistoric Periods in Japan, De-

duced from Identification of Its Fossil Woods,” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 16, no. 5 (2007): 405.

5

Steven Weintraub, Kanya Tsujimoto, and Sadae Y. Walters. “Urushi and Conservation: The Use of Japanese Lacquer in the Restoration of

Japanese Art,” Ars Orientalis 11 (1979): 54.

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golden seam trickling modestly across its interior. This vein makes salient the tea bowl’s history of rupture by tracing the line, literally and figuratively, where a part of its old form was severed. This layered mending is unusual in that a line of gold powder is superimposed on the field of red lacquer; gold seems to transgress the field as if gravity pulls it toward the interior core of the bowl.

Through my experience learning kintsugi techniques from ceramic repair master Gen Saratani (the only craftsman in the United States who offers kintsugi repairs using entirely traditional methods), I am now aware of the exacting skill and meticulous effort that goes into mending a piece with a small chip as opposed to an object-splitting crack. The craftsman must first mix a putty made of whetstone powder, water, and urushi to fill the space of the chip with material that will later be painted with urushi.6 This is no easy feat—the proportion of the constituents must be precise so the putty is of a malleable, clay-like consistency; it cannot be too dry, yet it must be able to hold its own shape when applied to the damaged area. Attention to time is of crucial importance during the process of repair, just as it is a critical part of chadō and the interpretation of a mended ceramic piece. The putty must quickly be applied to the cavity in the piece, as anything with urushi in it is quick to dry. However, in order for the piece to dry through and through so that it can be sanded down and later used as a surface for painting with urushi, many days must pass. Thus, the dance with the fickle disposition of time is echoed in the repair process. From the abrupt incident that caused the piece to shatter to the steady elapsing of years as the multiple iterations of the vessel pass through many generations of owners and users, the temporal intricacies of kintsugi are evident in the body of the piece and the hands of the craftsman.

Kintsugi and the Japanese Tea Ceremony The development of kintsugi could be seen as part of the larger assimilation of Japanese aesthetic sensibilities – informed by the teachings of Zen Buddhism – into the tea ceremony. Although the roots of Japanese tea culture began during the Nara period (710 – 784 A.D.), it was not until the late Muromachi period (1336 – 1573 A.D.) that the great tea masters, notably Sen no Rikyū, elevated the art of tea drinking to a disciplined ritual.7 Teaism (a word coined by Kazuko Okakura in The Book of Tea) is a “religion of aestheticism,” founded upon collaborative practices both in the ritualistic interactions during the Japanese tea ceremony and in the personal histories of the dōgu: the collection of artifacts and utensils adorning the tea room.8 These utensils, besides performing functions related to making and sharing tea, serve as expressive tools that allow the tea practitioner to non-verbally communicate the theme of any particular gathering to the guests, thus creating a distinctive atmosphere through the careful selection of artifacts. The themes could be as broad as a season (e.g., a winter-themed tea ceremony) or as specific as an individual’s life transition (e.g., a tea ceremony held to commemorate a guest’s birthday). In his essay “Mending Ceramics — An Anthropological Context,” James-Henry Holland makes the distinction between public and private allusions in the Japanese tea ceremony: “Public allusions might refer to seasons, historic times, places, public figures, degrees of ritual formality, or even abstract concepts…A personal allusion, on the other hand, is the host’s attempt to evoke a personal memory in a particular guest. Any guest might be thrilled at solving a difficult public allusion, but the personal allusions are usually the most emotionally charged.”9 The meaningful deployment of utensils by the host in a way that inspires community and a sense of group membership among the guests in the tearoom is called toriawase. A host is also cognizant of the historical significance of each of his utensils and takes care to document the origins of his pieces and the many stories that they accrue over time.

Aware of the fragility of his own human existence in accordance with Buddhist teachings, a host expects his dōgu to outlive him. He hopes to be remembered and immortalized through the use of those utensils by coming generations, 6 7 8 9

Gen Saratani, “Kintsugi: Learn the Japanese Way of Ceramic Repair,” (class lecture, Long Island City, NY, December 19, 2018).

Mary Lou Heiss, Gastronomica 7, no. 4 (2007): 114.

Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea (New York: Dover Publications, 1964), 1.

James-Henry Holland, Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics (Münster: Museum of Lacquer Art, 2008), 15.

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so he handles them with respect and care. Some utensil owners even record notes in the wooden boxes in which their ceramic pieces are stored.

Figure 2 is an image of the box in which the teabowl is stored when not being used for a tea ceremony. Whereas many of the storage boxes for dōgu are used as receptacles for idiosyncratic memoirs pertaining to a specific gathering, the one pictured in Figure 2 is different in that it contains the inscription of a poem by ninth century poet Ariwara No Narihira (825-880): That is not the moon Nor is this The spring of years gone by I alone remain As I was before.10 The poem inscribed on the box bolsters the empathic sensitivity and emotional resonance that the chawan engenders in its viewers through its physical appearance; and how fitting that the calligraphy literally embraces the tea bowl as it rests in desuetude, only making itself visible as an inextricable part of the experience with the object every time it is brought out for use. Christy Bartlett, director of the Urasenke Foundation of San Francisco and scholar of Asian Art, speaks to the significance of the verse in her essay “A Tearoom View of Mended Ceramics,” noting that repaired ceramics synchronously capture a sense of discontinuity and continuity. By making a moment of rupture permanent and beautiful through golden mending, the ceramic piece becomes an object of inherent worth.11 The wistful, poignant tone of the poem attests to an illusion of “before” and a reality of “after,” without making explicit reference to the demarcation itself—or to the agent who occasioned the change. Allusions to nature are mentioned, making salient to the reader the fragility and cyclical disposition of life, and implied is a serene sense of loss and a heightened urge to honor that which remains. Imagine the experience of being the tea master who removes the chawan from the box in which it has been kept—your eyes initially alight upon the mossy, understated hue of the bowl, then simultaneously observe the fields of lacquer and the calligraphy inscribed on the box’s interior as you bring the bowl closer to your face. Because you are aesthetically impressionable, the significance you ascribe to the chawan only grows as you read the poem and further observe the way the kintsugi craftsman chose to integrate the old with the new, the before with the after, in each of his deliberate color and arrangement choices. The material idiosyncrasies of the object conjoin with its vibrant, immaterial stories, sparking conversation among the guests present at your tea ceremony.

Buddhist Philosophy and Anecdotal Evidence In order to understand the political, social, and cultural history of 16th-century Japan, it is necessary to understand the enmeshed nature of Zen Buddhist philosophy, aesthetic ideals, political power, economic wealth, and social practices such as chadō, in which the practice of kintsugi is rooted.12 In the 1989 publication Tea in Japan: Essays on the History of Chanoyu, Haga Kōshirō is the first scholar to discuss the interdependence of chadō and Japanese cultural history.13 Evidence exists cataloguing urushi-based ceramic mending as a repair craft. In Japan, prior to the 16th century, repair using urushi served a function that dovetailed with the Japanese philosophy mottainai (the sensation of regret experienced with waste), but kintsugi transcends function in that it is a transformative ceramic restoration, one that highlights the damaged area of the piece, bringing it into high relief. As opposed to basic types of repair involving transparent or invisible glue, which seek to shroud a damaged object’s shameful history of imperfection to maxi10 11 12 13 31

Thomas William Hare. Zeami’s Style: The Noh Plays of Seami Motokiyo (Stanford University Press, 1986), 281.

Christy Bartlett, Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics (Münster: Museum of Lacquer Art, 2008), 12.

Morgan Pitelka, “Warriors, Tea, and Art in Premodern Japan,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 88, no. ¼ (2014): 21.

Paul Varley and Kumakura Isao, Tea in Japan: Essays on the History of Chanoyu (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 195.

mize pristine aesthetic appeal, kintsugi aims to emphasize an object’s flaws, thus making tangibly engaging and philosophically meaningful its fractures and splits and emotionally imbuing the ceramic article with multidimensional significance—including a philosophical play between an ideal and the perfection of the “real world.” Promoting the profound implications that this intentional embrace of fragmentation and apparent misfortune had symbolically were the 16th-century aesthetes, warlords, and tea masters, who were intent upon integrating Buddhist tradition and poetic ideals into the tea ceremony.14 One notion in particular proved especially germane to chadō and, subsequently, kintsugi.

Wabi-sabi, the Japanese Buddhist worldview of the appreciation of beauty in the transient, fleeting nature of all things, gave rise to a perception of rupture as an opportunity for metamorphosis and rebirth psychologically, socially, and culturally. Wabi signifies understated grace, austere dignity, rustic elegance, and spiritual solitude.15 Furthermore, it refers to unforeseen idiosyncrasies and quirks that emerge during the creation or evolution of an object or being.

Sabi connotes the beauty and tranquility that are revealed with the vicissitudes of time, like the accumulation of rusty desert varnish on tuff in an arid climate, the dull patina on a church steeple, or the delicate dermal seams around an old woman’s eyes accrued from decades of mirth and Duchenne laughter.16 The conjunction of these two disyllabic words in wabi-sabi evokes the sense of a certain yielding, an inevitable surrender to the capricious character of time.17 Moreover, the concept embraces the Buddhist teaching that impermanence is not only an inevitable and natural part of life but also a truth that should be understood, appreciated, and even revered. Each entity on earth erodes and decays, only to cyclically resurrect itself in a new embodiment: every year the leaves grow, transform in hue and texture, fall and perish with the seasons.

The goal is that once an individual has internalized wabi-sabi and humbly accepted his fate, his lot, the poignant realities guiding his existence, community and selflessness are far easier to come by, for the senses have been rejuvenated by empathy. The Japanese have a locution for this as well—mono no aware, the sensitive pathos of ephemera, the wistful empathy for all things.18 Sen no Rikyū, the revered tea master who most influenced the evolution of chadō into the ritualistic art form of the modern day, proliferated the emphasis on Buddhist teachings in the tea ceremony.

Thus, a profusion of anecdotes concerning chadō that were documented during the Azuchi-Momoyama period in the late 16th century attests to a fascination with shattered and restored ceramic pieces for reasons that go beyond aesthetic appeal.

Most notable is the story of daimyō (Japanese feudal lord) Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s cherished Ido-style tea bowl, known now as “Tsutsui Zutsu.” The sturdy-walled, loquat-hued bowl was bestowed upon Hideyoshi by fellow daimyō Tsutsui Junkei, and it was treasured by the preeminent warrior (Bartlett 8). It was said to possess a “commanding presence,” not unlike the disposition of Hideyoshi himself. One day, during a gathering of feudal lords, a lowly page in Hideyoshi’s entourage fumbled the prized apricot-glazed bowl, causing it to plunge to the ground and smash into five pieces.

In the deafening hush that ensued, those present could hear the blood pounding in the temples of the errand boy, for it was widely known that Hideyoshi was despotic and ill-tempered, and the company feared for the poor child’s life.

Bracing themselves for an inevitable tornado of wrath, the lords were astonished when the first to shatter the paralyzed silence was not Hideyoshi, but his guest Hosokawa Yusai, who extemporized a playful and witty poem based on a verse in The Tales of Ise (a famous collection of poetry from the Heian period): Tsutsui’s well curb Became split into five Alas for that well-deep bowl All of the blame It seems to have been mine.

14 15

Ibid, 195.

Steve Odin, “Artistic Detachment in Japanese Aesthetics,” in Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West: Psychic Distance in Comparative

Aesthetics (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 99.

16 Ibid, 135.

17 Ibid, 166.

18 Ibid, 165.

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Tsutsui zutsu Itsutsu ni wareshi Idojawan To ka oba ware ni Ohi ni kerashina19

Yusai’s clever poetic incorporation of the former owner’s name (Tsutsui), the style of the bowl (“well curb” and “welldeep” both indicate the sturdiness and structural integrity of the clay body), the incident itself, and the five segments (five fragments / five lines of verse) into which the bowl shattered induced laughter from everyone present at the gathering, including Hideyoshi himself. A potentially catastrophic event was averted by Yusai’s shrewd intervention, and from that day onward, the bowl came to be referred to as “Tsutsui Zutsu” in homage to the event that could have been its demise but came instead to represent its rebirth. In fact, the unspoken yet firmly established social rules allowed both a young man’s life and a humiliating social situation to be saved by the swift mind of a brilliant poet-scholar.

The true life of “Tsutsui Zutsu” began the moment it was fumbled, which allowed for the poem to be improvised.

One could say that an apparently “broken” situation was “mended” and thus buttressed by the power of Yusai’s poem under the watchful eyes of all those present. Like a life-altering traumatic event, a nation-fracturing act of terrorism, or a devastating natural disaster, the mutually experienced accident allowed those affected by it to come together in a moment of fellowship and healing because of the application of artistic vision and skill. “Tsutsui Zutsu” thus became imbued with a sense of resilience, camaraderie, and vivacity once it was mended, its hairline fissures a tangible portrayal of the social and metaphysical factors that became entwined with its essence. The restored bowl, with its striking chasms, affirms that even the tensest social blunders, when cleverly-handled, present an opportunity to fuse individuals into communities. After the incident, for generations to come, “Tsutsui Zutsu” would continue to be used and treasured, with each of its owners verbally passing-down the anecdote of short-tempered Hideyoshi, the clumsy errand boy, and Hosokawa Yusai’s heroic improvisation while physically passing-down the material bowl. Today, “Tsutsui Zutsu” is protected under the national designation “Important Cultural Property.”20 Less well-known is the tale of “Unzan Katatsuki,” a Chinese Song Dynasty (960-1279) chaire, or thick tea jar.21 One day, a Sakai tea man made the fortuitous discovery of a spectacular tea jar of beautiful shape and rare color. Intoxicated and astonished by his find, he swiftly made arrangements to receive Sen no Rikyū, among other guests, for the inauguration of the chaire. Eagerly anticipating the attention which he was certain the magnificent stoneware would receive, the Sakai man was dumbfounded when the long-awaited hour of the tea ceremony arrived and his chaire went completely unnoticed by Rikyū. In a moment of resentment and frustration that stemmed from the vast discrepancy between his high expectations for validation and his unpraised reality, the tea man petulantly launched his beloved jar against an iron trivet, causing it to fracture into many small pieces. A few of the remaining guests salvaged the broken pieces and mended the chaire with urushi. They then invited Rikyū to a tea ceremony of their own, and the moment that the fabric in which the jar was stored parted to reveal the chaire’s fractures and splits, Rikyū declared, “Now, the piece is magnificent.”22 Unlike “Tsutsui Zutsu,” “Unzan Katatsuki” is an example of an object that had been cherished and admired by its owner but went utterly unappreciated by other aficionados. Only after its unflawed appearance had been obliterated and redefined with kintsugi did it engender considerable acclaim. Rikyū is later quoted as having said, “It is good for 19

20 21

Iguchi Kaisen et. al, Genshoku chado daijiten (Kyoto: Tankosha, 1974), 626.

Bartlett, The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics, 8.

Daisetz Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture, 323, and the exhibition catalogue, The Aesthetics of Mended Ceramics, 9, both make reference to

this same chaire as “Unzan Katatsuki” but fail to explain how it acquired its name. Perhaps unlike “Tsutsui Zutzu,” the name of the vessel had less to do with the historical/philosophical interpretation of the material object and thus the significance was lost throughout the years, but I can only speculate.

22

33

Bartlett, The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics, 9.

the utensils of a small room to be lacking…though the use of cracked Raku ware is problematic, suitable utensils such as Song Dynasty tea jars that have been repaired with lacquer become all the more fit for use.”23 The worldview of wabi-sabi is evident in the appeal of these mended tea room utensils, as those that succumb to a seemingly unkind fate only become imbued with greater significance and thus exude a palpable resilience and idiosyncratic character, as well as a tangible moral lesson that all things can break, and that what matters is what one does in response to the inevitability.

Geo-Cultural Conditions of Kintsugi Just as kintsugi-ware is a product of Japan’s cultural context, so too is it a result of Japan’s geological context. The Japanese archipelago is situated in a volcanic zone on the Pacific Ring of Fire, where 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes occur.24 In his paper, “The Geo-Cultural Conditions of Kintsugi,” Guy Keulemans explains the technique of kintsugi as a culturally and ecologically grounded response to the frequent earthquakes that Japan experiences and a process that allows material objects to evoke visceral, affective reactions in their viewers. Keulemans uses concepts of affect originating in the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to develop his argument. These concepts state that affects are not emotions or sensations themselves but are characterized by their capacity to elicit emotional responses and to provoke new perspectives, reflections, and actions in their experiencers. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “art is the language of sensations”; from their perspective, the visual expressions encoded in the aesthetic elements of kintsugi-ware are, first and foremost, communicative.25 Keulemans contends that it is no coincidence that a ceramic restoration technique is popular in a country that regularly undergoes earthquakes—not only because the Japanese people are presumably accustomed to rectifying damage as a result of their geographical locale, but perhaps more prosaically because cherished ceramic objects themselves are often broken during tremors, thus warranting a direct need for ceramic repair. Furthermore, he notes that a meaningful correlation was found between the number of documented earthquakes during the Edo period and the development of kintsugi. Though this correlation does not necessarily demonstrate increased frequency of seismic activity, it indicates a heightened awareness of this natural disaster within Japanese society. Recently, it has also been proposed that the Tōhoku earthquake of 2011, one of the biggest earthquakes recorded globally in the last 100 years, initiated a 21st-century resurgence in the popularity of kintsugi.26

In Figure 3, the mending is purposely imprecise in many respects, most strikingly in the mismatch between adjacent fragments that is apparent due to the abrupt change in glaze pattern and subtle shifts in angle between disparate pieces. Upon initial inspection, the dish gives the impression of paying homage to a geological phenomenon: the tenuous parallel lines running organically around the circumference of the zara (dish) give the piece a banded effect, reminiscent of the markings found in transversely cut agates and geodes. A geode develops over thousands of years, as mineral-flush rainwater slowly infiltrates a cavity in an igneous rock through microscopic pores and ossifies into layers of crystals. Only when it is cut in half is its beautiful pattern revealed, each layer of crystal a new testament to the metamorphic process through time to which it has been subjected. One does not have to be an expert in geology to appreciate the captivating, alluring effect that geological designs such as the one in Figure 3 exert on the human mind.

The Japanese worldview of wabi-sabi encapsulates this appreciation for the inevitable but gradual metamorphosis that only time can produce and that is most readily visible in natural phenomena. A certain nostalgia is immediately evoked upon encountering the zara in Figure 3 because of the visual allusion it makes, through its geological appearance, to the theme of time. We see this especially in its graceful – yet deliberately interrupted with restoration – taupe and sepia ripples.

23 Ibid, 10.

24 O. Alan Weltzien, “Three Stations along the Ring of Fire,” in Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time, edited by Lynch Tom, Maher Susan Naramore, Wall Drucilla, and Weltzien O. Alan (Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 22.

25 26

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 34.

Masatomo Umitsu, “Tsunami Flow and Geo-Environment of the Pacific Coastal Region of Tohoku,” in Japan after 3/11: Global Perspectives

on the Earthquake, Tsunami, and Fukushima Meltdown, edited by Karan Pradyumna P. and Suganuma Unryu, by Gilbreath Richard (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2016), 104.

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The repairer’s decision to leave the slight dip in the lip of the dish as it is, without filling it with putty (in the photograph, this feature is visible at “10:00”), also contributes to the distinctive character of the piece. Red urushi is used to fill a long but thin chip on the mouth of the zara, and thick strata of gold powder extend like a spiderweb over the broken portion of the bowl in a crescent shape. The confident angularity of the thick golden striations is in stark contrast to the gentle flow of the banded, earthy undulations of glaze. Another impression of this piece, one that goes hand in hand with the geological association, is that of shifting tectonic plates. This interpretation is buttressed by the viewer’s immediate observation that the broken pieces obviously do not fit together in the same way that they originally did: the glaze pattern is discontinuous and interrupted by pronounced chasms of gold. However, instead of being unsightly or disturbing, this adds to the object’s beauty.

Keulemans believes that forces of affect move through material such as earth, clay, glaze, and lacquer, and make themselves especially evident through cracks: “A crack is a diagram of the flow of applied force moving through [a] ceramic at the time of impact.” Thus, because kintsugi-ware has experienced a profusion of varying pressures throughout its life—even more than the average ceramic vessel—it serves as an especially germane example of how affect is visually expressed. Starting as a ball of wet clay, shaped expertly by the hands of its potter, painted thoughtfully with glaze, then exposed to the heat that hardens and colors it during its firing, kintsugi-ware at this stage has yet to undergo the transformative forces that will later distinguish it as distinct from other pieces of pottery. When the concussive force that causes breakage is applied to the ceramic, despite often being prosaic, mundane, or domestic in nature (whether the result of an askew elbow or a child’s moist palms), it is necessarily related to all other fragmenting forces, no matter the circumstances that induced it.

Keulemans contends that ceramic-cracking forces are inextricably related to external forces that cause analogous cracks on a much larger scale: “So, just as cracks in a bowl may illustrate concussive force moving through ceramic at the point of impact, the cracks of earthquakes in the ground illustrate the breaking force of tectonic energy moving through the earth.”27 This surrendering and being physically vulnerable to unpredictable natural forces on the part of the clay object itself is reminiscent not only of the forces that govern the very earth that anchors us in the physical world but also the vulnerability of infancy and, more extensively, the plight of the human condition in general.

Within a Deleuzian-Guattarian framework of affect, the crack that testifies to the point of impact is termed a “compound of sensations,” and it is this force-expression, an “affect of shattering forces” that kintsugi objects and earthquake damage share.28 This articulation of a relationship between a small object and large-scale, geo-ecological phenomena is not foreign to the tea ceremony, Keulemans notes, citing Toshimitsu Hasumi’s “Zen in Japanese Art: A Way of Spiritual Experience: “The tea experience is a miniature world-experience taking place in the tea room…In the noise of the boiling water we hear the living strength of the sea; in the steam rising from the tea we catch the scent of pines on a distant hill.”29 In Figure 8, the force of the 2018 Osaka earthquake is visible in the damage it inflicted in asphalt, splitting open layers of concrete and tar to lay bare the earth that had been supporting them. Attracted to the area of fracture are many people, some with cameras for documentation, all intent upon surveying the damage. Though potentially lethal, natural disasters are both fascinating to humans and provide motivation for them to come together within communities.

This notion that kintsugi has broader sociocultural ramifications is especially provocative and hopeful during its process of repair, when broken pieces are pulled together by urushi, which fittingly comes exclusively from the sap of the Asian lacquer tree, thus precipitating the ongoing connection with nature, both destructive and constructive. In Keulemans’ reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s compounds of sensations, the two philosophers designated the expression the “clinch” to illustrate a certain binding or embracing sensation. Keulemans argues that when the fragmented material is drawn together by urushi (a natural and very durable glue), then decorated with gold (a dense, heavy metal 27 28 29 35

Ibid, 23.

Ibid, 22.

Toshimitsu Hasumi, Zen in Japanese Art: A Way of Spiritual Experience (Routledge Kegan Paul, 1962), 85.

known for its qualities of immutability and resilience), the affect of shattering forces is softened and reduced, moderated by the repair.

The affective sensation associated with the “clinch,” the coming together, is communicated more than once—first, during the physical process of mending, then again every time the mended object is looked upon by a viewer: “Therefore, [the clinch of kintsugi] binds material, but also binds to the sensation of becoming bound…[it] manifests and potentializes perceptions of community bonding via affects of becoming bound, and the cracks…manifest and potentialize sensitivity to the calamitous potential of life.”30 Thus, by encapsulating expressions of shattering and of repair, kintsugi-ware contains a dichotomous sense of omen and solace, all the while fitting in the palm of one’s hand.

The zara in Figure 3 is especially representative of these affective sensations, as its parts obviously do not fit together as they once did, eliciting a bittersweet feeling consisting of nostalgic yearning, uneasy premonition, and communal intimacy.

In her essay “Matrices of Time, Space, and Text: Intertextuality and Trauma in Two 3.11 Narratives,” Linda Flores analyzes two novels through the lens of intertextuality, exploring how they processed the trauma of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake. Calling special attention to the relationship between temporality and trauma, Flores writes: “3.11 signifies for many a violent temporal rupture. Time is a salient topic within the field of trauma studies…Trauma is inherently anachronistic…an unclaimed experience.”31 Putting Flores’ scholarship in dialogue with Keulemans’, the clinch of kintsugi, the becoming amidst the patient act of mending, can be read as reclaiming traumatic experience, recuperating losses, and restoring lacunae. Kin in Japanese means “gold,” and tsugi means “mend.” However, tsugi also means “successor” or “lineage,” which can be used to describe the connection between generations, implying a prevailing sense of continuity and compassion despite external hardships and the passage of time.32 Together, kin and tsugi have come to signify an artistic development that built upon the millennia-old use of urushi, integrating its functional use with the philosophies of wabi-sabi and mono no aware (informed by Buddhist ideas) in the context of chadō. Japanese ceramic restoration yields a corrective ending to a traumatic event, altering the emotional impact of the moment in which a piece shatters by allowing that same moment to be psychologically reconceptualized. Kintsugi-ware encodes its history on itself, offering itself as impetus for both social cohesion and philosophical reflection. The restored ceramic bowl, with its hairline fissures and/or other “imperfections,” exists as talismanic affirmation that the imagination and the social situation have the power to make meaning by allowing for reflection and integration; its golden seams are a tangible portrayal of the social and metaphysical factors that became entwined with its essence. The worldview of wabi-sabi is evident in the appeal of kintsugi-ware, as ceramics that succumb to a seemingly unkind fate only become imbued with greater significance after the repair and thus exude a palpable resilience and idiosyncratic character, as well as a tangible moral lesson that breakage can be an opportunity for beauty.

Conclusion Viewed in context, kintsugi reveals itself to be a multifaceted artistic process, informed by the Japanese tea ceremony, Zen Buddhist teachings, and the geology of Japan. Perhaps most important, kintsugi-ware is a visual representation of healing, integration, and the reclamation of traumatic experience. It also fiercely attests to the inherent worth of functional ceramic objects. As both a process and product, kintsugi(-ware) clearly has much to teach us about the relationships between rupture and resiliency, nature and ritual, representation and reality, and mending and time.

30 Keulemans, “The Geo-Cultural Conditions of Kintsugi,” 25.

31 Linda Flores, “Matrices of Time, Space, and Text: Intertextuality and Trauma in Two 3.11 Narratives,” Japan Review, no. 31 (2017): 148.

32 Takie Sugiyama Lebra, “Self in Cosmology and Aesthetics,” in The Japanese Self in Cultural Logic (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 236.

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Works Cited Charly Iten, Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics (Münster: Museum of Lacquer Art, 2008), 12, 18.

Stuart Fleming, “Japanese Urushi: The Finishing Touch,” Archaeology 40, no. 4 (1987): 63.

Shuichi Noshiro, Mitsuo Suzuki, and Yuka Sasaki, “Importance of Rhus Vericiflua Stokes (Lacquer Tree) in Prehistoric Periods in Japan, Deduced from Identification of Its Fossil Woods,” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 16, no. 5 (2007): 405.

Steven Weintraub, Kanya Tsujimoto, and Sadae Y. Walters. “Urushi and Conservation: The Use of Japanese Lacquer in the Restoration of Japanese Art,” Ars Orientalis 11 (1979): 54.

Gen Saratani, “Kintsugi: Learn the Japanese Way of Ceramic Repair,” (class lecture, Long Island City, NY, December 19, 2018).

Mary Lou Heiss, Gastronomica 7, no. 4 (2007): 114.

Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea (New York: Dover Publications, 1964), 1.

James-Henry Holland, Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics (Münster: Museum of Lacquer Art, 2008), 15.

Thomas William Hare. Zeami’s Style: The Noh Plays of Seami Motokiyo (Stanford University Press, 1986), 281.

Morgan Pitelka, “Warriors, Tea, and Art in Premodern Japan,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 88, no. ¼ (2014): 21.

Paul Varley and Kumakura Isao, Tea in Japan: Essays on the History of Chanoyu (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 195.

Steve Odin, “Artistic Detachment in Japanese Aesthetics,” in Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West: Psychic Distance in Comparative Aesthetics (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 99.

Iguchi Kaisen et. al, Genshoku chado daijiten (Kyoto: Tankosha, 1974), 626.

Bartlett, The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics, 8-9.

Daisetz Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture, 323.

O. Alan Weltzien, “Three Stations along the Ring of Fire,” in Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time, edited by Lynch Tom, Maher Susan Naramore, Wall Drucilla, and Weltzien O. Alan (Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 22.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 34.

Masatomo Umitsu, “Tsunami Flow and Geo-Environment of the Pacific Coastal Region of Tohoku,” in Japan after 3/11: Global Perspectives on the Earthquake, Tsunami, and Fukushima Meltdown, edited by Karan Pradyumna P. 39

and Suganuma Unryu, by Gilbreath Richard (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2016), 104.

Toshimitsu Hasumi, Zen in Japanese Art: A Way of Spiritual Experience (Routledge Kegan Paul, 1962), 85.

Keulemans, “The Geo-Cultural Conditions of Kintsugi,” 25.

Linda Flores, “Matrices of Time, Space, and Text: Intertextuality and Trauma in Two 3.11 Narratives,” Japan Review, no. 31 (2017): 148.

Takie Sugiyama Lebra, “Self in Cosmology and Aesthetics,” in The Japanese Self in Cultural Logic (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 236.

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