Captured at Sea: Piracy, Prize and the Circulation of Art in Early Modern Europe Rebecca Earle
Event details
Alongside painters, patrons and dealers, privateers formed part of Europe’s early modern art world.
Rebecca Earle of the University of Warwick explores ‘capture at sea’ as a means through which paintings and other artworks moved into and around early modern Europe, offering an alternative perspective on the era’s expanding world of goods.
Scholars rightly stress early modernity’s growing interconnectedness, often using material culture to trace these interconnections. One significant form of material encounter took place on the very seas and oceans that enabled the increasing circulation of goods. During this period European piracy and warfare resulted in the capture of thousands of vessels and the seizure of millions of pounds of merchandise, including many works of art.
Looking particularly at Spanish American paintings in British collections, Rebecca will argue that mobility, the focus of much recent scholarship on early modern art, was due not only to trade and diplomacy but also to violent encounters at sea. By paying attention to the maritime mechanics of how images travelled, we better appreciate the significance of war in circulating art around the early modern world.
Annual Aylmer Lecture
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons/Nicholas Pocock/Malta, 1800
About the speaker
Rebecca Earle is a Professor in the University of Warwick’s Department of History, and a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Arts, and the Royal Historical Society. She is interested in the cultural history of Spanish America and early modern Europe. More specifically, she is interested in how everyday activities like eating or dressing can shed light on big historical processes such as colonialism or the emergence of racial categories, and her most recent book uses the history of the potato to trace out some of the key features of modernity. She has authored over 40 articles and book chapters, as well as five books, including Spain and the Independence of Colombia; The Return of the Native; The Body of the Conquistador; and Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato. Her work has been translated into Spanish and German, and has won prizes including the Conference on Latin American History’s Bolton-Johnson Prize, and the William & Mary Quarterly’s Douglas Adair Award.
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