Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia [1 ed.] 9789048553303

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C O N N E C T E D H I S T O R I E S I N T H E E A R LY M O D E R N W O R L D

Anna Grasskamp

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Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia Shells, Bodies, and Materiality

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Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia

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Connected Histories in the Early Modern World Connected Histories in the Early Modern World contributes to our growing understanding of the connectedness of the world during a period in history when an unprecedented number of people—Africans, Asians, Americans, and Europeans—made transoceanic or other long distance journeys. Inspired by Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s innovative approach to early modern historical scholarship, it explores topics that highlight the cultural impact of the movement of people, animals, and objects at a global scale. The series editors welcome proposals for monographs and collections of essays in English from literary critics, art historians, and cultural historians that address the changes and cross-fertilizations of cultural practices of specific societies. General topics may concern, among other possibilities: cultural confluences, objects in motion, appropriations of material cultures, cross-cultural exoticization, transcultural identities, religious practices, translations and mistranslations, cultural impacts of trade, discourses of dislocation, globalism in literary/visual arts, and cultural histories of lesser studied regions (such as the Philippines, Macau, African societies).

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Series editors Christina Lee, Princeton University Julia Schleck, University of Nebraska, Lincoln Advisory Board Serge Gruzinski, CNRS, Paris Michael Laffan, Princeton University Ricardo Padron, University of Virginia Elizabeth Rodini, American Academy in Rome Kaya Sahin, Indiana University, Bloomington

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Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia Shells, Bodies, and Materiality

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Anna Grasskamp

Amsterdam University Press

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The publication of this book is made possible by funding support from the Hong Kong Baptist University Research Committee.

Cover illustration: Anonymous, Plate, ca. 1680–90, Delft. Delftware, tin-glazed earthenware. Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln, E3783. Photo: Karl Tobias Friedrich.

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Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Layout: Crius Group, Hulshout 978 94 6372 115 8 isbn e-isbn 978 90 4855 330 3 doi 10.5117/9789463721158 nur 654 © A. Grasskamp / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

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1 Shell Connections: The Exoticization and Eroticization of Asian Maritime Material Culture From Guangzhou to Florence: Parrot Cups as “Actors” Layers of Exoticization: Chinese and European Shell Surfaces Surfaces and Skins: The European Eroticization of Asian Shells Conclusion – Shell Connections

7

23 25 33 50 58

2 Shell Bodies: The Creative Agency of Molluscs across Cultures Clever Objects Shell Agency Clam Creations Female Features Bird Bodies Cultured Connections Conclusion

67 69 74 82 91 94 98 101

3 Shell Worlds: Maritime Microcosms in EurAsian Art and Material Culture Shells in Flux Coralscapes Conclusion

109 110 128 139

4 Woman with a Shell: Transcultural Exchange, Female Bodies and Maritime Matters Women on Shells Women in Shells Women with Shells Women with EurAsian Shells Conclusion – Woman with a Shell

147 149 156 166 173 178

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183

Cited Primary and Secondary Sources

193

Acknowledgments

213

Index

215

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Conclusion

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Introduction Abstract Laying the groundwork for a study of Sino-European exchanges in art and maritime material culture between 1500 and 1700, the introduction outlines the framework in which the book positions itself. As the early modern interest in shells and pearls was rooted in material, aesthetic, artisanal, sensual and scientific interests, the introduction highlights relevant scholarship in the fields of ecology, art history, animal studies, anthropology, gender studies, political science and the history of science that engage with the conceptualization of EurAsian matter and situates the monograph within the interdisciplinary field of material culture studies.

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Keywords: material culture studies, art history, history of science, gender studies, EurAsian matters, maritime material culture

In 1705, the first treatise on Asian shells and molluscs was published posthumously. Its author was a man known as Rumphius (1627–1702), who was of German origin and had worked for the Dutch East India Company and spent many years in Indonesia studying maritime material culture and marine organisms.1 Rumphius’s work marked the beginning of the transcultural and systematic study of Asian molluscs before which the collecting and study of conches had been the preserve of emperors and merchants, artists and artisans, and naturalists and amateurs in China as well as Europe.2 This book focuses mainly on Asian shells in early modern artefacts and paintings before 1705, considering them “things that talk,”3 and takes shells as a point of departure for transcultural “object lessons” in the study of art and material culture that teach us about aesthetics, craftsmanship and ecology in early modern Eurasia.

1 Rumphius, D’Amboinsche Rariteitkamer. 2 Before Rumphius, Martin Lister (1639–1712) and his daughters had also already published on molluscs but with a focus on local specimens. See Roos, Martin Lister. 3 Daston, Things That Talk.

Grasskamp, A., Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia. Shells, Bodies, and Materiality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463721158_intro

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Research on the material culture of the early modern world has taken approaches that do justice to the period’s globalized networks of mercantile and artistic exchange.4 Historians have written about the “global lives of things,”5 adding culture as one of the defining agents in the conceptualization of an object’s “social life.”6 Early modern Europe has been conceptualized as a space whose object worlds were as “European” as they were “creole,”7 while the transcultural dimensions of Ming and Qing dynasty material culture have been widely acknowledged.8 Recently, historians of science have taken the idea of “material complexes” to investigate the entanglement and transfer of matter and knowledge across Eurasia,9 while art historians have started to think with and through transcultural things using the notion of EurAsian matters and objects.10 All of these approaches allow scholars to refrain from qualifying artefacts as essentially “European” or “Asian” according to their geographical origins, or in terms of historical attributes that could be read as characteristics of particular styles or representing individual “cultures.”11 The study of things such as shells, whose importance during the early modern period was rooted in their commercial as well as aesthetic, sensual and scientific values, stands at the intersection of the histories of art and science, whose boundaries have become porous in the study of EurAsian objects, matter and materiality.12 In the interdisciplinary field of globalized material culture studies, research on the relations between aesthetic practices and the collecting of shells and pearls has been undertaken by scholars of art history, English literature, science and the history of science, as well as other disciplines.13 In addition, museum work has contributed significantly to the field through the online publication of object files, 4 The literature on early modern material culture in a global context is growing and includes but is by no means limited to: Jardine and Brotton, Global Interests; Findlen, Early Modern Things; Cook, Matters of Exchange; Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism; Smith and Findlen, eds. Merchants and Marvels; Bronsen and Vanhaelen, “Introduction”; Thomas, Entangled Objects; Um and Clark, “Introduction.” 5 Gerritsen and Riello, eds. The Global Lives of Things. 6 Appadurai, The Social Life of Things. 7 Pinney, “Creole Europe.” 8 Clunas, “Connected Material Histories”; Clunas et al, eds. Ming; Wang, “A Global Perspective”; Gerritsen, The City of Blue and White, esp. 195–215; Pierson, “The Movement of Chinese Ceramics”; Shih, Riyue Guanghua; Shih, “Shiba shiji dongxi jiaoliu de jianzheng”; Shih, “The Wooden Hundred-Layered Goblet from the Western Ocean”; Shih, “Unknown Transcultural Objects”; Shih, “Xiangya qiu suojian zhi gongyi jishu jiaoliu”; Shih, “‘Xuanzi’ ji ‘zhuanyi’.” 9 Smith, ed. Entangled Itineraries; Smith, “Itineraries of materials and knowledge.” 10 Grasskamp and Juneja, eds. EurAsian Matters, esp. 12; Grasskamp, “EurAsian Layers,” esp. 363. 11 Juneja and Grasskamp, “Introduction,” 12, with reference to Pinney, “Things Happen,” esp. 266. 12 Grasskamp and Juneja, eds. EurAsian Matters, esp. 12; Smith, ed. Entangled Itineraries. 13 See for example Allsen, The Steppe and the Sea; Leonhard, “Shell Collecting”; Pointon, “Something Rich and Strange”; Kelley, “Shells, Pericles, and the Fantasy of Shell-Dwelling”; Smeesters, “The Secretion of a Pearl”; Van de Roemer, “Neat Nature”; Spary, “Scientific Symmetries”; Dietz, “Mobile Objects”; Duncan

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as well as exhibitions and accompanying publications.14 Among all the scholarly and curatorial contributors to the field, historians of Netherlandish art and culture have played an important role through their research into objects imported by the seventeenth-century Dutch East and West India Companies, which supplied much of Europe with shells from Africa, India, Indonesia, and the Moluccas via Amsterdam.15 Before Dutch domination of world trade in the seventeenth century, Asian shells had reached Europe on board Portuguese vessels.16 From Lisbon and later other harbour cities, most importantly Amsterdam, Asian shells were traded and exchanged as gifts across Europe and appear in a number of early modern treatises on natural history published in Italy, France and Germany and translated into a number of European languages.17 Asian shells have also been researched in the context of Northern European cabinets of curiosity, Kunstkammer or konstkamer, using, for example, inventories and period correspondence as source materials, and discussed in relation to collecting and gift exchange practices associated with Italian collections.18 In European collections, unpolished and untreated Asian shells were included for display and handling, but some, especially those of the nautilus and turbo types, were further processed by goldsmiths who transformed them into precious drinking cups.19 While Asian shells were considered rarities in Europe and some of them were pricey luxury objects embellished with gold mounts, in Chinese harbour cities such as Guangzhou, nautilus and turbo snail shells among others were widely available and considered “rather cheap” and Ghys, “Shells as Collector’s Items”; Kisluk-Grosheide, “Dirck van Rijswijck (1596–1679)”; Ritchie, Shell Carving. 14 An excellent example of museum research made accessible online is provided by The British Museum’s web page on a shell cup: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_WB-114 (accessed 11.1.2021). Exhibition catalogues dedicated to shells include: Möller, ed. Schimmern aus der Tiefe. Numerous shells are also discussed in the exhibition catalogues Corrigan et al, eds. Asia in Amsterdam, Seipel, ed. Die Entdeckung der Natur and Bergvelt and Kistemaker, eds. De wereld binnen handbereik. Nederlandse kunst- en raritenverzamelingen, 1585–1735. Catalogus; Bergvelt and Kistemaker, eds. De wereld binnen handbereik: Nederlandse kunst- en raritenverzamelingen, 1585–1735. Essays. 15 Van der Veen, “Dit klain Vertrek”; Van der Veen, “East Indies Shops in Amsterdam”; Coomans, “Schelpenverzamelingen”; Roelofs, “Painting Asia”; Bergvelt and Kistemaker, eds. De wereld binnen handbereik: Nederlandse kunst- en raritenverzamelingen, 1585–1735. Essays; de Jongh, “Pearls of Virtue and Pearls of Vice”; De Girolami Cheney, “The Oyster in Dutch Genre Paintings.” 16 Lightbown, “Oriental Art”: 240; Mette, Der Nautiluspokal, 35. 17 Early examples include Aldrovandi, De reliquis animalibus; Belon, L’histoire naturelle des estranges poisons marins; Lonitzer, Naturalis historiae opus nuvom; Gesner, Icones animalium; Guillaume Rondelet, Universae aquatilium historiae pars altera. For more examples see Leonhard, “Shell Collecting,” 188–96. 18 See for example: Rijks, “A Painter, a Collector, and a Horseshoe Crab,” 344–45; Gigante, “Medici Patronage and Exotic Collectibles,” 58–61. 19 Mette, Der Nautiluspokal; Kehoe, “The Nautilus Cup”; Zuroski, “Nautilus Cups and Unstill Life.”

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according to a source from 1388. 20 Consequently, the majority of research on maritime material culture in early modern China does not focus on patterns of elite collecting, but investigates the attribution of meanings to marine matter through the study of treatises on materia medica, geography, marine organisms and “sea oddities.”21 An exception is scholarship on coral, which not only studies maritime material culture in global trade networks, but also considers aspects of elite collecting including the use of Mediterranean coral in the workshops of early modern Guangzhou and its presence in the imperial collections of Ming and Qing dynasty Beijing.22 Research on the historical perception of molluscs and their ability to produce pearls has also been undertaken within transcultural frameworks. Adding to studies that mention the transcultural genesis of tales on pearls’ origins in shells, recent scholarship has contributed global stories of pearl cultivation and human exploitation in a postcolonial attempt to decentre history and do justice to the labour involved in the processes of grafting and biomineralization in shells.23 In addition, comparative studies can draw on extant literature in Asia and Europe, using works that discuss giant clams in Chinese treatises and studies of gastropods, univalves and bivalves in seventeenth-century Britain respectively.24 The growing field of animal studies has not only changed our understanding of transcultural connections in trade and gift exchanges during the early modern period, but has also transformed art history by enabling non-anthropocentric approaches, for example through the study of “animal portraits.”25 Similarly, in recent years, art history has been impacted by non-anthropocentric approaches that focus on matter and its potential to have, carry or exert agency. Informed by anthropological approaches, historians have started to see paintings, sculptures and artefacts “in performative terms as systems of actions, intended to 20 Cao, Gegu yaolun, 34b–35a, also discussed in chapter 1. Hsieh, “Yingwubei jiqi ta.” The entry on “parrot shell cups” is included in the first version of the Gegu yaolun from 1388 (and was not added by a later editor) according to a facsimile of the 1388 version in David, Chinese Connoisseurship, 311, 34b. On the dating of the treatise’s publication and a discussion of its later editions see David, Chinese Connoisseurship, xliii–lx. 21 Li, Bencao gangmu; Nie, Haicuo tu; Wu, “Haicuo tu”; Anonymous, Haiguai tu; Greenberg, “Weird Science”; Ptak, “Riesenmuscheln”; Ptak, “References to the Coral Islands.” 22 Lacey, “The Coral Network”; Grasskamp, “Branches and Bones”; Grasskamp, “Kuangjia ziran”; Grasskamp, Objects in Frames, 127–62; Raveux, “Du corail de Méditerranée pour l’Asie”; Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers; Trivellato, “From Livorno to Goa and Back.” 23 Donkin, Beyond Price; Warsh, American Baroque; Domínguez-Torres, “Pearl Fishing in the Caribbean”; Machado, Mullins, and Christensen, eds, Pearls, People and Power. 24 Ptak, “Riesenmuscheln”; Roos, Martin Lister und His Remarkable Daugthers. 25 Liscomb, “How the Giraffe Became a Qilin”; Lai, “Domesticating the Global and Materializing the Unknown”; Lai, “Images, Knowledge and Empire”; Greenberg, “Weird Science”; Wu, “Haicuo tu”; Groom, Exotic Animals; Jordan Gschwend, The Story of Süleyman.

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Introduction 

change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it.”26 In addition, the study of early modern craftsmanship has drawn on anthropological research that sees matter and objects as “active not because they are imbued with agency but because of ways in which they are caught up in … currents of the lifeworld.”27 “New Materialism” and the perception that matter can be understood as “vibrant” have further informed the repositioning of the human among non-human actants in the study of art and ecology in historical and contemporary contexts.28 Of particular relevance to the understanding of the early modern period are studies on nature as a productive agent whose potential to shape matter was perceived as comparable to the agency of craftsmen.29 Anthropological approaches have also inspired the art historical shift towards studies that do justice to the human body and its senses. Scholars have discussed the human capacity for erotic response to objects that “think materially” with the body of the early modern collector and studied the sense of touch in and through early modern art.30 The haptic encounter with shells is also central to philosophers’ reflections on shells, which conclude that in order to explain shells, we need to “remake their form in thought.”31 “Thinking through craft,”32 natural objects such as shells were studied and understood by artisans, whose bodies, especially their hands, were essential in the study, appropriation and imitation of matter.33 This book adds to literature in the field by tracing Sino-European “shell connections,” for example, through a detailed discussion of Chinese shell cups in Germany and Italy in chapter 1 and the analysis of European shell imagery in Qing dynasty Guangzhou in chapter 4. In addition to its transcultural approach, which focuses on material entanglements and aspects of technological and artistic exchange, the chapters also use comparison as methodology, for example in discussing locally defined understandings of the relationships between matter, its natural transformation through craftsmanship and its agency in chapter 2. Drawing on artworks and artefacts, collection inventories, correspondence, and travel records, as well as natural history treatises that address aspects of oceanic and subterranean 26 van Eck, “Living Statues,” 644, which refers to Alfred Gell’s posthumously published Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, 1998; van Kessel, The Lives of Paintings; Kuechler, Return to the Object. 27 Ingold, “Materials against Materiality”; Ajmar, “Mechanical Disegno”; Smith, “Nodes of Convergence.” 28 Benett, Vibrant Matter; Bachelard, Water and Dreams; Smith, “New Bachelards?”; Baader, Wolf and Ray, eds. Ecologies, Aesthetics and Histories of Art. 29 Daston, “Nature by Design”; Goldgar, “Nature as Art”; Findlen, “Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge”; Kemp, “‘Wrought by No Man’s Hand’”; Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature; Schäfer, “Things (Wu)”; Schafer, “The Idea”; Shalem, “Treasures of the Sea.” 30 Hay, Sensuous Surfaces; Harvey, ed. Sensible Flesh; Pollaki and Hub, eds. Images of Sex and Desire. 31 Valéry, L’homme et la coquille; Bachelard, “Shells.” 32 Adamson, Thinking through Craft. 33 Smith, Body of the Artisan. Smith, “Giving Voice to Hands.”

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exploitation, the book connects microhistory with macrohistory, for example in chapter 3, which discusses selected pictorial representations of shells as entangled with networks of European colonization and Chinese tributary systems. Defining China and Europe as spaces entangled with South and Southeast Asian sites of knowledge production and trade between 1500 and 1700, the book understands oceanic goods and networks as transcending and subverting territorial and topographical divisions. In other words, the book studies Asian mollusc products such as shells and pearls and their representations in early modern EurAsian exchange with a focus on their artistic, technological and ecological implications, linking the study of globally connected port cities to local ecologies of oceanic exploitation and art histories. Chapter 1, titled Shell Connections, maps the geography of EurAsian trade connections in maritime material culture and discusses shells, in particular nautilus shells, in relation to the bodies of early modern artisans and collectors. It addresses period associations of shells with ceramics and examines how motifs from Chinese porcelain and engraved Asian shells inspired European craftsmen. The chapter argues that knowledge of shell carving technologies travelled from Asia to Europe, changed the physical manipulation of materials by craftsmen through non-verbal means, and resulted in the exoticization and eroticization of shells across Eurasia where they were fundamental to the intersection of material collecting and visual fantasies of oceans and foreign spaces in both cultures. Chapter 2, Shell Bodies, considers the creative agency of those organisms that create shells – molluscs – as reflected in European and Chinese thought, art, and material cultures. It discusses shells, in particular those of sea snails, as “clever” and “difficult objects,”34 whose complex inner structures inspired the invention of games and “taught” mathematicians and artisans alike. Early modern craftsmen engaged with natural objects, not informed by the modern dichotomies between the natural and the artificial, the animate and the inanimate, but attributing them with a certain sense of agency; imitating ocean objects in clay, artisans were thinking with shells through craft. Period treatises on marine creatures presented shells and molluscs as artisan-like organisms and active participants in the shaping of matter that could even, under certain circumstances, appropriate political meanings in the context of early modern globalization. In Europe and Asia, clams were considered human-like in their abilities to design and construct proto-architectural geometric shapes. Likewise, striking images of birds hatching from shells feature prominently in sources from both cultures before 1700, evoking associations between the materiality of shells and eggshells, and between molluscs 34 Rothstein, “Making Trouble”; Rothstein, The Shape of Difficulty; Rothstein, “Visual Difficulty as a Cultural System”; Hunter and Lucchini, “The Clever Object.”

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Introduction 

that can craft their own houses and birds that can build their own nests. Against the background of transcultural narratives on the generation of pearls throughout Chinese, Middle Eastern and European period sources, which attribute molluscs with female features, chapter 2 argues for a shared ecological understanding of shells throughout Eurasia that conceptualizes them as “birthplaces” and “houses” equivalent to women’s wombs and birds’ eggs and nests. As early modern texts and images show, clams were also thought to contain parallel miniature universes inhabited by beautiful women and monstrous creatures. Accordingly, chapter 3, Shell Worlds, discusses Chinese and European visual and sculptural representations of underwater microcosms and argues that, in both cultures, shells were imagined as gateways to maritime worlds full of unknown rarities. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Asian shells were highly desired by collectors in early modern Europe, while coral from the Mediterranean was eagerly sought after in Asia. In both locations, artists and artisans created EurAsian objectscapes that placed maritime material appropriated from abroad alongside local matter. Such painted and crafted shell and coralscapes were highly ambiguous, belonging to oceanic and terrestrial, global and local, commodified and sacred realms, but they unambiguously materialized ideas on the generation and transformation of matter. Hand-sized pieces of mineral or metal ore (Handstein) found in German mines, for example, decorated with fragments of maritime material culture such as coral and shells to represent miniature landscapes, were included in early modern courtly collections. Likewise, numerous Chinese miniature landscapes (penjing) employed rocks as miniature mountains and coral pieces as trees. These artefacts connect to early modern Chinese and European texts that feature descriptions of diving and fishing for maritime goods that hold terminological and conceptual equivalences to descriptions of digging and mining. Such texts present the ocean as a treasury and a nautical counterpart to subterranean spaces full of riches. Investigating the connections between ocean objects and mined minerals, underwaterscapes and islands, and natural and artificial landscapes from a transcultural perspective, chapter 3 compares the cosmological ideas and material constituents that underlie artistic maritime microcosms and shows how shells and coral resonated with the material mapping of foreign spaces in the frameworks of European colonialism and Chinese tributary systems. Despite the association of shells and coral with culturally specific tropes found in Greek mythology and Christian writings on the one hand and Daoist and Buddhist belief systems on the other, the chapter argues that across Eurasia maritime material culture not only formed a gateway to imaginary foreign worlds full of collectable rarities, but also to unusual creatures, including women of great beauty. Representations of women on, in and alongside shells are at the heart of chapter 4, Woman with a Shell. While some of the works discussed, for example Sandro Botticelli’s

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The Birth of Venus of 1485–1486 and Jan Gossaert’s Neptune and Amphitrite/Venus of 1516, are well-known representations of the goddess of love surrounded by sexualized objectscapes, the chapter adds less familiar works such as Saint Mary inside a scallop shell carved out of ivory and an earthenware plaque of Caritas framed by shells. It also presents little-known images of women in shells painted in early modern China, for example in two Buddhist scroll paintings, each of which depicts a female figure – half woman, half animal – emerging from an enormous bivalve shell, and images of Galatea on her shell-shaped vehicle painted in eighteenth-century Guangzhou. Regardless of whether we look at representations of Venus or a shell-woman in a Buddhist underwater world, at depictions of Galatea or Bodhisattva Guanyin, the shells that are paired with these female figures’ bodies are all of gigantic size – snail shells and giant clams native neither to Europe nor to China. In addition to aspects of materiality and corporality, objectification and sexual agency, the subjects of intimacy and distance in both physical and geographical senses are central to the painterly negotiation of images of women with shells across Eurasia, which all link a woman’s body to an object of foreign material culture. Building on the previous chapters, chapter 4 argues that images of women with shells are visual and material reflections of foreign (underwater) spaces full of riches, paradise-like realms that not only promise material affluence but also erotic fulfilment. Rooted in the interdisciplinary field of material culture studies, the chapters draw on art historical methods in their analysis of images and objects in a global context, but equally on the history of science as the early modern engagement with shells was rooted in aesthetic, sensual and scientific interests. Furthermore, studies on ecology have shaped this text, especially discussions on the agency of matter to which anthropologists and political scientists have contributed. Informed by work on the correlations between artificial and natural objects in early modern Europe, the book’s understanding of objects in relation to human bodies is also enabled by recent studies on art and sensuality. Within these frameworks and in line with recent volumes on the global lives of things and EurAsian matters, the chapters examine the relationships between artists, collectors, materiality, and thingness in the transculturally connected art worlds and ecologies of the early modern period, with a special focus on maritime material culture and the female body.

Cited Primary and Secondary Sources Adamson, Glenn. Thinking through Craft. Oxford: Berg, 2007. Ajmar, Marta. “The Renaissance in Material Culture. Material Mimesis as Force and Evidence of Globalization.” In The Routledge Handbook of Globalization and Archaeology, edited by Tamar Hodos, 669–686. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.

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–––. “Mechanical Disegno.” RIHA Journal 84 (2014): n. p. Aldrovandi, Ulisse. De reliquis animalibus. Bologna: Ioannem Baptistam Bellagambam, 1606. Allsen, Thomas. The Steppe and the Sea: Pearls in the Mongol Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Anonymous, Haiguai tu 還怪圖 [Manual of Sea Oddities], 1688. National Palace Museum, Taipei. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Baader, Hannah, Gerhard Wolf and Sugata Ray, eds. Ecologies, Aesthetics and Histories of Art. Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming 2021. Bachelard, Gaston. “shells.” In The Poetics of Space, 104–235. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. –––. Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, 3rd edition. Dallas: Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1999. Belon, Pierre. L’histoire naturelle des estranges poisons marins, avec la vraie peincture & description du daulphin, & de plusiers autres de son espece. Paris: Regnaud Chaudiere, 1551. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Bergvelt, Ellinoor, and Renée Kistemaker, eds. De wereld binnen handbereik. Nederlandse kunst- en raritenverzamelingen, 1585–1735. Catalogus. Zwolle: Waanders; Amsterdam: Amsterdams Historisch Museum, 1992. –––, eds. De wereld binnen handbereik: Nederlandse kunst- en raritenverzamelingen, 1585–1735. Essays. Zwolle: Waanders; Amsterdam: Amsterdams Historisch Museum, 1992. Cao Zhao 曹昭, Gegu yaolun 格古要論 [Essential Criteria of Antiquities], 1388, facsimile reproduced and translated in Sir Percival David, Chinese Connoisseurship: The Essential Criteria of Antiquities, Being a Translation of the Ko Ku Yao Lun, 295–344. New York: Praeger, 1971. Included in a later edition in Wenyuange sikuquanshu 文淵閣四庫全 書, [The Wenyuange {Palace} Edition of the Complete Library in Four Branches of Literature] (Beijing 1773–1782). Clunas, Craig. “Connected Material Histories: A Response.” Modern Asian Studies 50 (2016): 61–74. Clunas, Craig, Jessica Harrison-Hall and Luk Yu-ping, eds. Ming: Courts and Contacts. London: The British Museum, 2016. Cook, Harold. Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven: Yale University Press: 2008. Coomans, H. E. “Schelpenverzamelingen.” In De wereld binnen handbereik. Nederlandse kunst- en raritenverzamelingen, 1585–1735. Essays, edited by Ellinoor Bergvelt and Renée Kistemaker, 192–203. Zwolle: Waanders; Amsterdam: Amsterdams Historisch Museum, 1992. Corrigan, Karina, Jan van Campen, and Femke Diercks, eds. Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Dutch Golden Age. Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum; Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2015.

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Daston, Lorraine. “Nature by Design.” In Picturing Science, Producing Art, edited by Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison, 232–252. New York: Routledge, 1998. –––, ed. Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature. New York: Zone Books, 1998. David, Sir Percival. Chinese Connoisseurship: The Essential Criteria of Antiquities, Being a Translation of the Ko Ku Yao Lun, New York: Praeger, 1971. De Girolami Cheney, Liana. “The Oyster in Dutch Genre Paintings: Moral or Erotic Symbolism.” Artibus et Historiae 8, 15 (1987): 135–158. Dietz, Bettina. “Mobile Objects. The Space of Shells in 18th-Century France.” British Journal for the History of Science 39, 3 (2006): 363–382. Domínguez Torres, Monica. “Pearl Fishing in the Caribbean: Early Images of Slavery and Forced Migration in the Americas.” In African Diaspora in the Cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States, edited by Persephone Braham, 73–82. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015. Donkin, Robin A. Beyond Price: Pearls and Pearl Fishing: Origins to the Age of Discoveries. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1998. Duncan, Peter, and Arne Ghys. “Shells as Collector’s Items.” In Goods and Services of Marine Bivalves, edited by Aad C. Smaal et al., 381–411. Cham: Springer, 2018. van Eck, Caroline. “Living Statues: Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency, Living Presence Response and the Sublime,” Art History 33, 4 (2010): 642–659. Findlen, Paula, ed. Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500–1800. London: Routledge, 2012. –––. “Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe.” Renaissance Quarterly 43, 2 (1990): 292–331. Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Gerritsen, Anne. The City of Blue and White. Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Gerritsen, Anne, and Giorgio Riello, eds. The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World. London: Routledge, 2016. Gesner, Conrad. Icones animalium. Zurich: Froschauer, 1553. Gigante, Federica. “Medici Patronage and Exotic Collectibles in the Seventeenth Century: The Cospi Collection.” In Art, Mobility, and Exchange in Early Modern Tuscany and Eurasia, edited by Francesco Freddolini and Marco Musillo, 48–66. London: Routledge, 2020. Goldgar, Anne. “Nature as Art: The Case of the Tulip.” In Merchants and Marvels: Commerce and the Representation of Nature in Early Modern Europe, edited by Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen, 324–346. New York: Routledge, 2002.

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Grasskamp, Anna. “Branches and Bones: The Transformative Matter of Coral in Ming Dynasty China.” In Gems in the Early Modern World: Materials, Knowledge, and Global Trade, 1450–1800, edited by Sven Dupré and Michael Bycroft, 118–147. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018. Grasskamp, Anna. “EurAsian Layers: Netherlandish Surfaces and Early Modern Chinese Artefacts.” The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 63, 4 (2015): 363–398. –––. “Kuangjia ziran: Cong Qinggong zhong de san jian shanhu yishupin lunqi框架自然： 從清宮中的三件珊瑚藝術品論起 [Framing Nature: Three Coral Objects from the Qing Imperial Collections in Context],” Gugong Wenwu Yuekan 399 (2016): 108–117. Grasskamp, Anna, and Monica Juneja, eds. EurAsian Matters: China, Europe and the Transcultural Object, 1600–1800. Cham: Springer, 2018. Greenberg, Daniel. “Weird Science: European Origins of the Fantastic Creatures in the Qing Court Painting, the Manual of Sea Oddities.” In The Zoomorphic Imagination in Chinese Art and Culture, edited by Jerome Silbergeld and Eugene Y. Wang, 379–400. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2016. Groom, Angelika. Exotic Animals in the Art and Culture of the Medici Court in Florence. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Harvey, Elizabeth D., ed. Sensible Flesh. On Touch in Early Modern Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Hay, Jonathan. Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China. London: Reaktion, 2010. Hsieh Ming-Liang 謝明良. “Yingwubei jiqi ta” 鸚鵡杯及其他 [Parrot Cups, etc.] Gugong Wenwu Yuekan 358 (2013): 64–77. Hunter, Matthew C., and Francesco Lucchini. “The Clever Object: Three Pavilions, Three Loggias, and a Planetarium.” Art History 36 (2013): 474–497. Ingold, Tim. “Materials against Materiality.” Archaeological Dialogues 14, 1 (2007): 1–16. Jardine, Lisa, and Jerry Brotton. Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East & West. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Jordan Gschwend, Annemarie. The Story of Süleyman: Celebrity Elephants and Other Exotica in Renaissance Portugal. Philadelphia: Pachyderm, 2010. de Jongh, Eddie. “Pearls of Virtue and Pearls of Vice.” Simiolous 8, 2 (1974/75): 69–97. Juneja, Monica, and Anna Grasskamp. “‘EurAsian Matters: An Introduction.’” In EurAsian Matters: China, Europe and the Transcultural Object, 1600–1800, edited by Anna Grasskamp and Monica Juneja, 3–33. Cham: Springer, 2018. Kehoe, Marsely L. “The Nautilus Cup between Foreign and Domestic in the Dutch Golden Age.” Dutch Crossing 35, 3 (2011): 275–285. Kelley, Shannon. “Shells, Pericles, and the Fantasy of Shell-Dwelling.” In The Shakespearean International Yearbook. 15: Special Section: Shakespeare and the Human, edited by Tiffany Jo Werth, 167–183. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.

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Kemp, Martin. “‘Wrought by No Artist’s Hand’: The Natural, Artificial and Exotic in Some Artefacts from the Sixteenth Century.” In Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, edited by Claire Farago, 177–196. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. van Kessel, Elsje. The Lives of Paintings: Presence, Agency and Likeness in Venetian Art of the Sixteenth Century. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. Kisluk-Grosheide, Daniëlle. “Dirck van Rijswijck (1596–1679), a Master of Mother-of-Pearl.” Oud Holland 111, 2 (1997): 77–94. Kuechler, Susanne, and Timothy Carroll. A Return to the Object. Alfred Gell, Art, and Social Theory. London: Routledge, 2020. Lacey, Pippa. “The Coral Network: The Trade of Red Coral to the Qing Imperial Court in the Eighteenth Century.” In The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, edited by Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, 81–102. London: Routledge, 2015. Lai Yu-chih. “Domesticating the Global and Materializing the Unknown: A Study of the Album of Beasts at the Qianlong Court.” In EurAsian Matters: China, Europe, and the Transcultural Object, 1600–1800, edited by Anna Grasskamp and Monica Juneja, 125–171. Cham: Springer, 2018. –––. “Images, Knowledge and Empire: Depicting Cassowaries in the Qing Court.” Transcultural Studies 1 (2013): 7–100. Leonhard, Karin. “Shell Collecting: On 17th-Century Conchology, Curiosity Cabinets and Still Life Painting.” In Early Modern Zoology: The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts, edited by Karl A. E. Enenkel and Paul J. Smith, 177– 214. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Li Shizhen 李時珍, Bencao gangmu 本草綱目, 1596, published in Wenyuange sikuquanshu 文淵閣四庫全書, [The Wenyuange {Palace} Edition of the Complete Library in Four Branches of Literature]. Beijing, 1773–1782. Lightbown, Ronald W. “Oriental Art and the Orient in Late Renaissance and Baroque Italy.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969): 228–279. Liscomb, Kathlyn. “How the Giraffe Became a Qilin: Intercultural Signification in Ming Dynasty Arts.” In The Zoomorphic Imagination in Chinese Art and Culture, edited by Jerome Silbergeld and Eugene Y. Wang, 341–378. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017. Lonitzer, Adam. Naturalis historiae opus nuvom. Frankfurt: Christopher Egenolff, 1551. Machado, Pedro, Steve Mullins and Joseph Christensen, eds. Pearls, People and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2020. Mette, Hanns-Ulrich. Der Nautiluspokal: Wie Kunst und Natur miteinander spielen. Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1995. Möller, Karin Annette, ed. Schimmern aus der Tiefe: Muscheln, Perlen, Nautilus. Petersberg: Imhof, 2013.

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Introduction 

Nie Huang 聶璜. Haicuo tu 海錯圖 [Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures], 1698, 3 vol. Palace Museum, Beijing. Pierson, Stacey. “The Movement of Chinese Ceramics: Appropriation in Global History.” Journal of World History 23, 1 (2012): 9–39. Pinney, Christopher. “Creole Europe: The Reflection of a Reflection.” Journal of New Zealand Literature 20 (2002): 125–160. –––. “Things Happen: Or, From Which Moment Does That Object Come?” In Materiality: An Introduction, edited by Daniel Miller, 256–272. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Pointon, Marcia. “Something Rich and Strange.” In Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery, 107–144. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. Pollali, Angeliki, and Berthold Hub, eds. Images of Sex and Desire in Renaissance Art and Modern Historiography. New York: Routledge, 2018. Ptak, Roderich. “Notes on the Word ‘Shanhu’ and Chinese Coral Imports from Maritime Asia, c. 1250–1600.” Archipel 39 (1990): 65–80. –––. “Riesenmuscheln: Notizen zur Bezeichnung chequ.” In Marine Animals in Traditional China: Studies in Cultural History/Meerestiere im traditionellen China, edited by Roderich Ptak, 121–144. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010. –––. “References to the Coral Islands in Huang Zhong’s Hai yu 海語.” Ming Qing Yanjiu 23,1 (2019): 39–72. Raveux, Olivier. “Du corail de Méditerranée pour l’Asie. Les ventes du marchand marseillais François Garnier à Smyrne vers 1680.” In La mer en partage. Sociétés littorales et économies maritimes (XVIe–XIXe siècle). Études offertes à Gilbert Buti, edited by Xavier Daumalin, Daniel Faget and Olivier Raveux, 343–359. Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2016. Rijks, Marlise. “‘Unusual Excrescences of Nature’: Collected Coral and the Study of Petrified Luxury in Seventeenth-Century Antwerp.” Dutch Crossing 41.2 (2017): 1– 29. Ritchie, Carson I.A. Shell Carving: History and Techniques. South Brunswick: A.S. Barnes, 1974. Roelofs, Pieter. “Painting Asia: Oriental Luxury Goods and Exotic Curiosities in Dutch Paintings.” In Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age, exhibition catalogue, edited by Karina H. Corrigan, Jan van Campen and Femke Diercks, with Janet C. Blyberg, 229–244. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. van de Roemer, Bert. “Neat Nature. The Relation between Nature and Art in a Dutch Cabinet of Curiosities from the Early Eighteenth Century.” History of Science 42 (2004): 47– 84. Rondelet, Guillaume. Universae aquatilium historiae pars altera. Lyon: Bonhomme, 1555. Roos, Anna Marie. Martin Lister and His Remarkable Daughters: The Art of Science in the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Bodleian Library/Oxford University, 2019. Rothstein, Bret. “Making Trouble: Strange Wooden Objects and the Pursuit of Difficulty ca. 1596.” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 13, 1 (2013): 96–129.

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–––. The Shape of Difficulty: A Fan Letter to Unruly Objects. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019. –––. “Visual Diff iculty as a Cultural System.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 65/66 (2014/2015): 332–347. Rumphius, Georgius. D’Amboinsche rariteitenkamer. Amsterdam: François Halma, 1705. 2nd ed., 1711. Schäfer, Dagmar. “Things (Wu) and Their Transformations (Zaowu) in the Late Ming Dynasty: Song Yingxing’s and Huang Cheng’s Approaches to Mobilizing Craft Knowledge.” In Entangled Itineraries. Materials, Practices, and Knowledge across Eurasia, edited by Pamela Smith, 63–78. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. Schafer, Edward. “The Idea of Created Nature in T’ang Literature.” Philosophy East & West 15, 2 (1965): 153–160. Schmidt, Benjamin. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Seipel, Wilfried, ed. Die Entdeckung der Natur. Naturalien in den Kunstkammern des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, exhibition catalogue. Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, 2006. Shalem, Avinoam. “Treasures of the Sea: Art Before Craft. An Introduction,” in Espacio, Tiempo y Forma: Serie VII. Historia del Arte 5 (2017): 15–34. Shih Ching-fei. Riyue guanghua: Qinggong huafalang [Radiant Luminance: The Painted Enamelware of the Qing Imperial Court]. Taipei: National Palace Museum, 2012. –––. “Shiba shiji dongxi jiaoliu de jianzheng: Qinggong huafalang zhizuo zai Kangxi chao de jianli [Evidence of East–West Exchange in the Eighteenth Century: The Establishment of Painted Enamel Art at the Qing Court in the Reign of Emperor Kangxi].” Gugong xueshu jikan 24, 3 (2007): 45–95. –––. “Unknown Transcultural Objects: Turned Ivory Works by the European Rose Engine Lathe in the Eighteenth-Century Qing Court.” In EurAsian Matters: China, Europe, and the Transcultural Object, 1600–1800, edited by Anna Grasskamp and Monica Juneja, 57–76. Cham: Springer, 2018. –––. “The Wooden Hundred-Layered Goblet from the Western Ocean.” Orientations 48, 4 (2015), 60–64. –––. “Xiangya qiu suojian zhi gongyi jishu jiaoliu: Guangdong, qinggong yu shensheng luoma diguo [Concentric Ivory Spheres and the Exchange of Craft Techniques: Canton, the Ch’ing Court and the Holy Roman Empire].” Gugong xueshu jikan 25, 2 (2007): 87–138. –––. “‘Xuanzi’ ji ‘zhuanyi’: quanqiushi shiye xia de ‘xiyang’ duo ceng mu tao bei [Global Visual Studies Perspectives on Multi-Layered Wooden Cups from the “Western Ocean”].” Yishuxue Yanjiu 21 (2017): 1–76. Spary, Emma. “Scientific Symmetries.” History of Science 62 (2004): 1–46. Smeesters, Aline. “The Secretion of a Pearl as a Symbol for the Birth of a Prince.” In Emblems and the Natural World, edited by Karl Enekel and Paul Smith, 454–472. Leiden: Brill, 2017.

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Introduction 

Smith, James L. “New Bachelards? Reveries, Elements and Twenty-First Century Materialism.” Altre Modernità/Otras modernidades/Autres modernités/Other Modernities (2012): 156–167. Smith, Pamela H. The Body of the Artisan. Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. –––, ed. Entangled Itineraries: Materials, Practices, and Knowledge across Eurasia. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. –––. “Giving Voice to Hands: The Articulation of Material Literacy in the Sixteenth Century.” In Popular Literacy: Studies in Cultural Practices and Poetics, edited by John Trimbur, 74–93. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. –––. “Itineraries of materials and knowledge in the early modern world.” In The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, edited by Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, 31–61. London: Routledge, 2015. Smith, Pamela, and Paula Findlen, eds. Merchants and Marvels. Early Modern Merchants as Collectors. London: Routledge, 2001. Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Trivellato, Francesca. The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. –––. “From Livorno to Goa and Back: Merchant Networks and the Coral-Diamond Trade in the Early Eighteenth Century.” Portuguese Studies 16 (2000): 193–217. Um, Nancy, and Leah R. Clark. “Introduction. The Art of Embassy: Situating Objects and Images in the Early Modern Diplomatic Encounter.” Journal of Early Modern History 20, 1 (2016): 3–18. Valéry, Paul. L’homme et la coquille. Paris: Gallimard, 1937. Translated as “Man and the Sea Shell.” In Paul Valéry: An Anthology, selected, with an introduction by James R. Lawler, 108–135. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. van der Veen, Jaap. “Dit klain Vertrek bevat een Wereld vol gewoel. Negentig Amsterdammers en hun kabinetten.” In De wereld binnen handbereik: Nederlandse kunst- en raritenverzamelingen, 1585–1735. Essays, edited by Ellinoor Bergvelt and Renée Kistemaker, 232–258. Zwolle: Waanders; Amsterdam: Amsterdams Historisch Museum, 1992. –––. “East Indies shops in Amsterdam.” In Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age, exhibition catalogue, edited by Karina H. Corrigan, Jan van Campen and Femke Diercks, with Janet C. Blyberg, 134–141. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Wang, Cheng-hua. “A Global Perspective on Eighteenth Century Chinese Art and Visual Culture.” The Art Bulletin 96, 4: 379–94. Warsh, Molly A. American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

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Wu Song-feng 吳誦芬, “Haicuo tu 海錯圖,” Gugong wenwu yuekan 363 (2013): 66–73. Wilson, Bronwen, and Angela Vanhaelen. “Introduction: Making Worlds: Art, Materiality, and Early Modern Globalization.” Journal of Early Modern History 23, 2–3 (2019): 103–120. Zuroski, Eugenia. “Nautilus Cups and Unstill Life.” Journal18 3 (2017): http://www.journal18. org/1493.

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Shell Connections: The Exoticization and Eroticization of Asian Maritime Material Culture Abstract New knowledge of shell-carving techniques practiced in China changed the way materials were physically manipulated by craftsmen in Europe, a process that contributed to the appropriation but also the exoticisation and eroticisation of collectible shells across Eurasia. Mapping the geography of transcultural connections in maritime material culture, this chapter discusses shells, in particular nautilus shells, in relation to the bodies of early modern artisans and collectors in China and Europe. Examining concepts of material agency and considering objects as ‘actors’, it argues that Guangzhou-carved conches changed early modern European craftsmanship through non-verbal means and shows how shells were perceived in both cultures as gendered objects at the intersection of material collecting and visual fantasies of oceans and foreign spaces.

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Keywords: shells, craftsmanship, Eurasia, collecting, material agency, gender

When the Dutch East India Company ship Witte Leeuw sank in 1613 to the west of Africa, it was carrying a variety of Indonesian, Filipino and African shells. (Fig. 1.1) Its cargo also included Asian spices, Chinese ceramics, gemstones and jewellery.1 The vessel, which was on its way from Bantam, Indonesia, to Amsterdam, was one of many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ships that took Asian shells to Europe where they entered elite collections and played an important role in European networks of humanist friendships.2 In addition to natural and polished 1 Sténuit, “De ‘Witte Leeuw’,” 173, 176, 178. The excavated shells and ceramics were acquired by the Rijksmuseum in 1977. 2 Dance, Shell Collecting, Barten, Die Muschel, Leonhard, “Shell-Collecting,” Mauriès, Shell Shock, Möller, Schimmern aus der Tiefe, Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells. On exchanges among humanists see Prosperetti, “‘Conchas legere’.”

Grasskamp, A., Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia. Shells, Bodies, and Materiality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463721158_ch01

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nautilus shells, highly-prized nautilus shells whose surfaces had been carved with figurative scenes and botanical patterns by Chinese craftsmen were also imported. These were often characterized as “Indian” (indianisch) in European correspondence, travel records and collection inventories between c. 1500 and c. 1700.3 Mentioning a nautilus in his treatise on “the relics of bloodless animals,” the Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), for example, identifies the shell as coming from “the Indies” (ab Indis).4 At times, the treatise specifically refers to the “West Indies” (Occidentalia India/India Occidentalis), but overall uses the generic term “India” to denote Asia as well as the Americas. In his World Book of 1534, the German humanist Sebastian Franck (1499–1543) explains that there were three different regions called “India.” He writes: “The first, anterior India, reaches from the Persians to the River Indus. The other, inner or middle India, reaches from the River Indus to the River Ganges. The third, outer India, has no end.”5 While nautilus shells were readily available throughout places in “India,” such as Southern China and South East Asia, they were comparatively rare in Europe where they became luxury collectables.6 This chapter considers Southern Chinese traditions of shell craftsmanship using descriptions in a collector’s manual published in 1388, and extant objects from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), as well as earlier examples as sources. It goes on to focus on transcultural transfer in technological and artistic exchange using evidence from shells with Chinese decorations in European collections. Nautilus shells had, to a certain degree, already been exoticized in Southern China through the incizing of non-Chinese animal and botanical motifs on their surfaces before their reception in Europe where, like other Asian objects, they were rare, new and other, and their multi-layered “foreignness” was reinforced by merchants, collectors, and goldsmiths who reframed the “Indian” items – materializing new aesthetic, cultural and social frameworks through the addition of sculpted metal mounts. Many such mounts embodied “wild,” fish-tailed or other “foreign” women, suggesting the projection of an erotically defined “other” onto “foreign” Asian objects being one of many indicators of the eroticization of shells 3 The countless examples include a mother-of-pearl vessel crafted in Asia described by Augsburg art agent Philipp Hainhofer (1578–1647) as “Indian,” and a shell cup given as a gift to Dutch admiral Piet Hein (1577–1629) referred to as polished “by the Indians.” See Grasskamp, “Frames of Reflection,” 76. The use of the term “Indian” in relation to artefacts and natural objects from China is discussed in more depth in Grasskamp, “Unpacking Foreign Ingenuity.” 4 Aldrovandi, De reliquis animalibus, 266. 5 das erst oder forder India reychet von den Persiern biß and den flusß Indum / das ander / inner or mittel India von dem flusß Indo / biß an den fluß Gan=gen / das dritt oder eüsserst India hat kein end. Franck, Weltbuch, Res/2 Geo.u. 25 b, Bavarian State Library, Munich, 191, brought to my attention by Dharampal-Frick, Indien im Spiegel, 112. 6 Mette, Der Nautiluspokal, Kehoe, “The Nautilus Cup,” Zuroski, “Nautilus Cups.”

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Fig. 1.1 Nautilus pompilius shell from the shipwreck of the Witte Leeuw. Before 1613, 6.5 × 6.5 × 3.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, NG-1977-218-W.

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in Europe, where they were perceived as shaped like female body parts, their shiny surfaces inviting the collector’s imagination, gaze and touch.7 Discussing shells in relation to the (male) bodies of early modern artisans and collectors, this chapter argues that knowledge of shell carving technologies travelled from Asia to Europe, changed the physical manipulation of materials by craftsmen by non-verbal means, and reinforced an exoticization and eroticization of Asian shells across cultures.

From Guangzhou to Florence: Parrot Cups as “Actors” Before Asian shells entered sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European cabinets of curiosity, they moved on board Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch vessels. As they commonly travelled unrecorded by ships’ inventories,8 underwater archaeology is a crucial tool in understanding the “social life”9 of such shells at sea. The findings 7 Grasskamp, “Spirals and Shells.” 8 On the Witte Leeuw ship inventories see: Sténuit, “De ‘Witte Leeuw’,” 176. On the shells on board the Portuguese vessel Madre de Deus that do not show in the main freight records, see van Kessel, “The inventories of the Madre de Deus,” esp. 9. 9 Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things.”

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from the shipwreck of the Witte Leeuw have revealed that nautilus conches, as well as other Indonesian, Filipino and African shells, travelled with gemstones, jewellery and bezoar stones in a section of the vessel that held other natural objects silenced in the ship’s inventories, such as ostrich or cassowary eggs, alongside Asian spices and Chinese ceramics.10 The pairing of shells with Ming dynasty porcelain vessels on board such ships endured even after the precious goods from Asia were unloaded in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, where artisans experimented with both the imitation of Chinese ceramics and shell carving techniques. The close connection between clay vessels and nautilus conches is illustrated by Dutch still life paintings and representations of early modern European cabinets of curiosity, which frequently show Chinese porcelain objects in immediate proximity to Asian shells.11 In the eye of early modern collectors, their shared provenance as well as their etymological, alchemical, material and visual commonalities connected shells to ceramics. The 1298 account of The Travels of Marco Polo is the first text to employ the term porcellane to refer not only to cowry shells but also to porcelain.12 By 1551, the French naturalist Pierre Belon (1517?–1564) explained that the dual meaning of the term Porcelaine to denote shells as well as ancient vessels was no longer “modern,” a clear indicator that in early modern French the term still carried connotations of both shells and ceramics.13 Sixteenth-century scholars such as Julius Scaliger (1448–1558), who tried to solve the mystery of Asian ceramic production, incorrectly believed that the Chinese produced porcelain from ground-up shells.14 This belief persisted, as illustrated by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher’s (1602–1680) account on East Asia, China Illustrata, of 1677, which mentions “the incredible rumor” that Asian ceramic vases in Europe “are made from crushed seashells or crushed egg shells laid away for centuries by grandparents for their grandchildren,” which Kircher judges as “ridiculous and unacceptable fabrications,” but nevertheless f inds worth addressing.15 In addition to their shared provenance on board ships, their common etymology and assumed alchemical connections, a fourth link between conches and ceramics 10 Sténuit, “De ‘Witte Leeuw’,” 176. 11 Examples include: Joseph Arnold, The Wholesaler and Ironmonger Dimpfel Family Curiosity Cabinet, gouache heightened with punched gold on parchment, 1668. 14.9 cm x 19.1 cm. Ulmer Museum, 1952.2611; Frans Francken II, An Art and Curio Cabinet, 1620–1625, oil on wood, 74 × 78 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, inv. no. GG 1048, and ibid., A Collector’s Cabinet, 1625, oil on panel, 53.2 cm x 73 cm, sold at art fair, May 2000, London. 12 Finlay, The Pilgrim Art, 70. 13 Belon, L’histoire naturelle, 53. 14 Scaliger, Exotericarum exercitationum, 135v–136r, quoted in Lightbown, “Oriental Art and the Orient,” 231. See Hwang Degenhardt, “Cracking the Mysteries,” 153–56. 15 Kircher, China Illustrata, 200.

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lay in their similar decorative motifs featuring dragons, foliage, flowers and long-tailed birds. In China, the connection between maritime material culture and items made of clay can be traced to ancient times when the earliest earthenware sea snail conches and ceramic cowry shells were made.16 Clams made from jade or metal, which archaeologists have discovered in Chinese tombs dating to the Tang dynasty (618–906), add to the panorama of artefacts crafted in imitation of ocean objects.17 Different f inancial values and functional uses were attributed to different shell specimens: cowry shells and objects that resembled them served as currency in ancient China, 18 while brush washers in the shape of snail shells added to the display of aesthetic ref inement on scholars’ desks, and metal clams were used as cosmetic containers during the Tang dynasty.19 Long before Europeans developed the kind of nautilus cup that has become a symbol of Renaissance collecting, 20 metal-mounted nautilus shells were used as cups in China.21 The earliest material evidence of a metal-mounted nautilus shell is provided by an example dated to the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317–420 CE). The shell was mounted with two metal handles next to its metal-rimmed mouth, which is attached to the shell’s body through two metal bands. It was found near Nanjing in a tomb by a member of the Langye Wang family who died in 356 CE.22 As we have no written records of its use, we can only speculate on whether this early metal-mounted shell was used for ritual purposes. In premodern and modern Chinese, nautilus shell cups are referred to as “parrot cups” (yingwu bei). The term was used, for example, in an appraisal of a vessel for the consumption of alcohol by Tang dynasty poet Li Bai (701–762).23 The expression does not denote 16 On “clay cowrie shell money” (ni bei bi) see: Yang, “The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells.” Examples of conches made from earthenware include: Snail Shell/Water Pot, Tang dynasty, earthenware with sancai glaze, University Museum and Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong, HKU.C.1957.0211; other Tang dynasty ceramic conches with sancai glaze are published in Du Boulay, Christie’s Pictorial History, 35, and Hsieh, “Yingwubei jiqi ta,” 65; for an in-depth discussion of this type of artefact see chapter 2. 17 Examples of jade shells include: Ornament in the Form of a Shell, jade (nephrite), Han dynasty, 206 BCE–220 CE, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery S1987.770; Figure in the Form of a Conch Shell (Luo), Tang dynasty, 7th–8th century, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery S1987.818. Examples of metal-made shells include: Hinged cosmetic box in the form of a clam’s shell with birds and floral scrolls, silver, Tang dynasty, Freer Gallery of Art F1930.50a–b. 18 Yang, “The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells.” 19 Qi, “Beike yu beike xinghe.” 20 Zuroski, “Nautilus Cups and Unstill Life.” 21 Hsieh, “Yingwubei jiqi ta.” 22 Tomb of Wang Xingzhi and his wife Song Hezhi, published in Nanjingshi wenwu baoguan weiyuanhui, “Nanjing Rentaishan,” 28, 29, 34. 23 Hsieh, “Yingwubei jiqi ta.”

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Fig. 1.2A Anonymous, Parrot cup, Tang dynasty, 618–907. Made in China. Xing ware, white glaze, width 14.5 cm. Bonham’s Hong Kong, 9.10.2014, lot 140. Courtesy of Bonhams 1793.

Fig. 1.2B Anonymous, Parrot cup, Tang Dynasty, 618–907. Made in China. Stoneware, ochre glaze, length 13 cm. Bonhams, 20.2.2003, lot 14. Courtesy of Bonhams 1793.

shell vessels in all contexts and can also refer to ceramic containers and gem cups in the shapes of birds that resemble shells. (Fig. 1.2A, Fig. 1.2B) This is further illustrated by the inventory of a Ming dynasty collection of 1562 that lists jade vessels as “parrot cups,” in addition to “sea snail shell cups” of various sizes, some of them possibly nautilus conches. While the fourth-century tomb, the appraisal

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of the eighth-century poet and the sixteenth-century inventory evidence the continuous role of “parrot cups” in the material culture of the Chinese elite, the only known written account of the actual making of such cups is an entry in a Chinese collector’s manual published in 1388.24 It specifies “parrot cups” as being made out of “a kind of conch shell to be found in the south of Guangdong. The inhabitants carve it in the shape of a parrot, or set it in silver to make a wine cup … [they] are quite cheap.”25 One such nautilus conch that was carved “in the shape of a parrot” by craftsmen in Ming dynasty Guangzhou survives today in a European collection. (Fig. 1.3) As the Chinese manual informs us, the carved shell was considered “quite cheap” in Guangzhou, but in Germany it was among a number of rare collectables considered deserving of further aesthetic, f inancial and social enhancement through the addition of precious metal mounts.26 In this case, the mounts partly hide the motifs engraved on the nautilus’ sides. They show a tall bird whose form derives directly from the shell’s shape, whose hookbill, short feet and long tail of slightly curved feathers identify it as parrot. Additional motifs incized into the surfaces of each side of the shell are a flower and a creature, which, according to its hooves, bushy tail and densely patterned skin, can be identified as a qilin – a mythical creature whose rare appearance was considered a good omen. The bird, flower and qilin are surrounded by foliage and scrolls on a background of wave patterns. “Parrot cups” from Guangzhou were collected and set in mounts, but they also informed European craftsmanship. This is evident in the unusual shapes of the vessels that emerged from the gem-cutting workshops of the Miseroni family in sixteenth-century Milan. (Fig. 1.4A, Fig. 1.4B) Sculpted out of lapis lazuli, the illustrated cup is one of many vessels resembling shells that were produced in the Miseroni workshops.27 By the sixteenth century, gem-cutters from Milan had gained a Europe-wide reputation for their skillful treatment of crystals and hard stones from India that remained unmatched by artisans 24 Cao, Gegu Yaolun, 34b-35a. The entry on “parrot shell cups” is included in the f irst version of the Gegu yaolun from 1388 (and was not added by a later editor) according to a facsimile of the 1388 version in David, Chinese Connoisseurship, 311, 34b. In the original of 1388 as well as an amended and reorganized version of the text completed in 1462 the cups are preceded by an entry on diamonds from the “Western Barbarian Countries” and followed by descriptions of “devil-carved stones,” multi-layered ivory balls and items found in nature that resemble the images of sacred creatures and goddesses. 25 鸚鵡杯：即海螺出廣南土人雕磨類鸚鵡或用銀相足作酒杯故謂之鸚鵡杯鸕鷀杓亦海螺俱不甚 直錢. Cao, Gegu Yaolun, 34b-35a, translation quoted from David, Chinese Connoisseurship, 132. 26 Grasskamp, “Frames of Appropriation,” and Grasskamp, Objects in Frames, 25–51. 27 See Distelberger, “Beobachtungen,” 80–85. Additional examples include: Workshop of Girolamo Miseroni, Shell-Shaped Cup, late sixteenth century, Württembergisches Landesmuseum, Stuttgart.

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Fig. 1.3 Master of Schwerin, Nautilus cup. Nautilus shell incised in China, before 1618, gilded silver mounts made in Cologne, ca. 1618, 29.3 × 16.8 × 9.5 cm. Staatliche Schlösser, Gärten und Kunstsammlungen Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Schloss Güstrow, KH 884.

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Fig. 1.4A Gasparo Miseroni, Lapis lazuli cup, before 1563. Enamel, gold, lapis lazuli, 13.7 × 21.5 cm. Museo di Mineralogia, Florence, 1947: 13683/647.

Fig. 1.4B Gasparo Miseroni, Cup with turtle foot, ca. 1560/70. Enamel, gold, lapis lazuli, 16 × 18 × 11 cm. Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart, KK grün 126. Photo: Hendrik Zwietasch.

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North of the Alps.28 As has been previously overlooked, the cup’s combination of a shell-like form with a f igurative head is similar to a Chinese parrot cup, as both consist of a small creature’s head attached to a shell-like hollow body. Head-like elements in Miseroni shell cups have till now been interpreted as belonging to monsters or as examples of a mascaron, 29 a type of “decorative grotesque mask”30 found in object and architecture ornamentation of the period. To sixteenth-century European beholders, who were largely unfamiliar with species of Asian birds,31 the “grotesque” heads that appear on Chinese parrot cups must have indeed qualif ied as mascaron-type decorations. Embodying shell-shaped creatures with mascaron-like heads, long feathered tails and clawed feet, we can assume that the Asian cups evoked associations with dragons and other foreign monsters, whose images could be found on the surfaces of Chinese ceramics and shells in the Medici collections in Florence.32 The figurative head in the Miseroni cup is therefore a mascaron in line with period ornaments, but it can be simultaneously interpreted as an Italian version of the Chinese parrot’s head in a cup. Although the actual parrot cups that the Miseroni workshops took as their source of inspiration have vanished, the shape of the extant lapis lazuli vessels prove the presence of the Chinese objects in sixteenth-century Italy alongside a wide range of other Asian items available to elite collectors and the craftsmen who worked for them. Northern Italian workshops experimented with several types of Chinese artefacts: ceramicists affiliated to the Medici court succeeded in the creation of the so-called “Medici porcelain” by copying Chinese ceramic vessels’ materials, shapes and decorations,33 Venetian artisans enquired into the material and visual properties of Asian lacquerware objects,34 and Chinese textiles served as models for Italian 28 Lietzmann, Valentin Drausch, 95. On the trade in stones from India to the Medici court see Karl, “‘Galanterie di cose rare …’,” on the meanings and uses of lapis lazuli in the Medici workshops see Baader “Livorno, Lapis Lazuli, Geology.” 29 Distelberger, “Beobachtungen.” 30 Clark, The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 153. 31 Only a few elite collectors possessed birds of extra-European origin, among them the Fuggers in sixteenth-century Augsburg, who owned a turkey from America. Parrots were particularly popular as is illustrated by period portraits such as Francesco Melzi’s Portrait of a Man with Parrot of 1525 and their inclusion in religious imagery by artists such as Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506). 32 On Chinese porcelain in the Medici collections see: Spallanzani, Ceramiche orientali, Spallanzani, Ceramiche alla corte dei Medici. On Chinese porcelain in other Italian collections see for example: Clark, “The Peregrinations of Porcelain.” On shells in the Medici collections see: Lightbown, “Oriental Art and the Orient,” 239–40, Gigante, “Medici Patronage and Exotic Collectibles,” 58–61. 33 Spallanzani, Ceramiche orientali; Spallanzani, Ceramiche alla corte dei Medici. 34 Ajmar, “The Renaissance in Material Culture,” 678–81.

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craftsmen “to develop new patterns and techniques.”35 This artisanal context in which inspiration was drawn from Chinese porcelain, lacquerware works and clothing adds further weight to the idea that the Miseroni, too, were relying on Asian artefacts in some of their creations. To overcome dichotomies between original and copy, active invention and passive reproduction, historians of art have discussed the “transformative power”36 of the creative copy and the use of foreign models in terms of “material mimesis”37 rather than artistic influence or stylistic impact. Accordingly, “f ifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian lacquer and colour-glazed pottery” objects, including those made in imitation of Chinese wares, can be interpreted as “signif icant actors within global processes of material, technological, and epistemological interconnectedness.”38 They are transculturally connected to other artefacts “not just as commodities in motion but as technological compounds relying on material mimesis”39 or, in other words, through the cognitive imitation of ancient and foreign artworks by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian craftsmen by material and technological means. Craftsmen created “Medici porcelain” by successfully copying Asian ceramics and, in a similar vein, but henceforward overlooked, they experimented with parrot cup shapes, as the Miseroni artefacts reveal. Chinese cups sculpted in the shape of shells were “actors” and among many objects that were pivotal in the process of early modern material, design and technological transfer across EurAsian boundaries. 40

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Layers of Exoticization: Chinese and European Shell Surfaces By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Northern Italy was one of Europe’s most important centres of craftsmanship and collecting, but Asian conches, parrot-shaped shells and ceramics also informed experiments with materials and designs in the workshops of artisans throughout Germany and the Netherlands. Central to these experiments were conches that had been carved in China – like the cup with the parrot and qilin decorations discussed previously – and were set in artfully-crafted mounts that can be dated and attributed to specific goldsmiths. Hanns-Ulrich Mette has compiled a systematic review of more than thirty extant 35 Karl, “‘Galanterie di cose rare …’,” 36 36 Forberg and Stockhammer, eds. The Transformative Power of the Copy. 37 Ajmar, “The Renaissance in Material Culture,” 684. 38 Ajmar, “The Renaissance in Material Culture,” 684. 39 Ajmar, “The Renaissance in Material Culture,” 684. 40 For other examples see Smith, ed. Entangled Itineraries, Gerritsen and Riello, eds. The Global Lives of Things, Grasskamp and Juneja, eds. EurAsian Matters.

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Fig. 1.5 Anonymous, Hinged cosmetic box in the form of a clam’s shell with birds and floral scrolls, late 7th–early 8th century. Made in China, Shaanxi province, probably Xi’an. Silver, 4.6 × 9.3 × 8.2 cm. The Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., F1930.50a-b.

examples decorated in what he, drawing on period terminology, refers to as the “Indian” manner. 41 The dating of the mounts attached to these shells indicates that most of them had entered Europe by the late sixteenth-century. 42 Imported in increasing numbers, the value of the nautilus shells had declined by this period and Mette attributes some of the carvings to seafarers, who, inspired by porcelain decorations, attempted to enhance the shells’ prices. 43 Evidence in the following contradicts Mette’s theory and proposes that most of the shells were indeed decorated by Chinese craftsmen.

41 Mette, Der Nautiluspokal, 82–84. 42 Mette, Der Nautiluspokal, 84. 43 Mette, Der Nautiluspokal, 84.

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Metal clam shells, which served as cosmetic containers during the Sui (581–618 CE) and the Tang dynasties, have been found preserved in the tombs of female members of the Chinese social elite. 44 Many of them are engraved with foliage, scrolls, birds and flowers, motifs that also appear on the more than thirty late sixteenth-century nautilus shells that survive in European collections. Despite hundreds of years between their making, some Tang dynasty and Ming dynasty items have linear decorations in the shape of waves in common. (Fig. 1.3, Fig. 1.5, Fig. 1.6, Fig. 1.10, Fig. 1.11, Fig. 1.12, Fig. 1.13) While Mette has interpreted the line pattern as a representation of fish scales, 45 Chinese painting conventions, according to which the ocean’s surface can be represented as a dense network of semi-abstract linear patterns, 46 suggest an alternative reading of the “scales” as waves. This interpretation is further supported by the illustrated example of an incized shell that shows dragons in their natural habitat, the element of water. (Fig. 1.6) The shell has mounts of circa 1550 and displays a pair of dragons with a “pearl”47 on each side, while its spine is incized with floral elements and foliage. The decorations at the top of the shell show two cranes among the clouds, framed by a pair of kingfishers. Both species nest close to water. The kingfisher’s ancient Greek name, halcyon, suggests that it nests on the open sea, while Tang dynasty poetry refers to its natural habitat as shared with kraken and dragons. 48 The birds’ aquatic connections and the fact that kingfishers and cranes are attributed with auspicious meanings connect them to the dragon pairs on each side of the shell. The previously mentioned collector’s guidebook specifies shells carved in the shape of a parrot, but does not mention any decorated with dragons, cranes or kingf ishers. They, therefore, may have been less common, but the intricacy of the dragon shell’s carving is of equal quality to that of the “parrot cup” in German mounts discussed above and clearly shows the expertise of the Guangzhou craftsmen. In addition to conf irming the Chinese making of the dragon shell, the comparison with the “parrot shell” offers other insights. The motifs on both include creatures whose presence was considered auspicious and which evoked associations with foreign lands. The “parrot shell” combines the image of a parrot with a qilin, which, like the dragon, was attributed with miraculous powers and often represented walking on water. Like dragons and qilin, parrots too possessed extraordinary characteristics including the striking colours of their 44 Qi Dongfang, “Beike yu beike xinghe.” 45 Mette, Der Nautiluspokal, 83. 46 Maeda, “The ‘Water’ Theme in Chinese Painting.” 47 The image of two dragons incorporates equivalences between pearl and moon as well as pearl and egg, further discussed in chapter 2. 48 Kroll, “The Image of the Halcyon Kingfisher,” 237, 249.

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Fig. 1.6 The British Museum, Technical drawing of a mounted shell cup. Mounts made in Padua (?) late 15th– early 16th century, shell carved in China. London, British Museum, object nr. WB.114.

feathers and their ability to “speak” by imitating the sound of the human voice. Qilins and parrots were both associated with non-Chinese spaces. For example, a Chinese travel record of 1433 refers to qilins in Saudi Arabia, while an African giraffe acquired by Chinese envoys in India during the f ifteenth century was identif ied as a qilin. 49 Although some parrots were native to Southern China, larger and more strikingly coloured kinds were imported from South East Asia. During the reign of the Song dynasty Emperor Huizong (1100–1125), the appearance of a f ive-coloured parakeet was interpreted as an auspicious sign, while the 49 Liscomb, “How the Giraffe”; Ma, Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan, 128.

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Ming dynasty appearance of the giraffe (identified as a qilin) was seen as a sign from heaven.50 The kingf ishers on the dragon shell were native to China and associated predominantly with its Southern parts, yet most kingfisher feathers, which played an important role in Ming dynasty craftsmanship, were imported from Cambodia and later also Indonesia, Borneo and Vietnam.51 The parrot and the dragon shells’ decorations look different at first sight, but in fact have much in common: they present visions of foreign creatures with special powers – parrots and halcyons – in front of large bodies of water inhabited by dragons and walked on by qilins. Their wave patterns signify the oceans that connected China to South East Asia (whence parrots and kingfisher feathers were imported) and India (through which the African giraffe arrived). In this context, the foliage on both shells evokes associations with the lush vegetation of jungles. The decorations enforce geographic associations connected to nautilus shells that – like parrots and kingfishers – could be found on Southern Chinese shores but were far more common throughout South East Asia. Some of the motifs that the parrot and the dragon shells share appear on other nautilus conches extant in European Renaissance collections. These can be divided into two main groups: a majority that feature birds and botanical elements and a significantly smaller group of shells incized with figurative scenes. Examples of the first group are represented in period paintings and graphic representations.52 Among them, the best-known image is a nautilus shell “from the Indies into whose outer surface various images are carved” described and depicted in Ulisse Aldrovandi’s De Reliquis Animalibus of 1606. (Fig. 1.7A, Fig. 1.7B)53 Birds, peonies, foliage and scrolls similar to those illustrated in the treatise appear on at least six extant shells.54 (Fig. 1.6, Fig. 1.8, Fig. 1.9, Fig. 1.10) The illustrated examples, whose mounts are attributed to German goldsmiths of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, all share strikingly similar decorations of flowers surrounding a pair of birds on each side. They closely resemble the shell in the Aldrovandi image.

50 Sturman, “Cranes above Kaifeng”; Liscomb, “How the Giraffe.” 51 Wong, “Kingfisher Blue in Ming Arts”; Ptak, “Eisvögel und Eisvogelfedern in China.” 52 Valentini, Museum museorum, 58–59, fig. 3, Juan Bantista Maíno, Adoration of the Magi, 1612–1614, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. For an engraving of a nautilus shell of this type of 1708 see Mette, Der Nautiluspokal, 197. 53 Natuilus ab indis varijs imaginibus extimo cortice insculpt. Aldrovandi, De reliquis animalibus, 266. 54 Another example with incized decorations of botanical motifs and birds that closely resemble those on the illustrated four shells is: Nicolaas de Grebber, Nautilus Cup, dated to 1592, Museum Prinsenhof, Delft.

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Fig. 1.7A Ulisse Aldrovandi, De reliquis animalibus exanguibus libri quatuor, post mortem eius editi: nempe de mollibus, crustaceis, testaceis, et zoophytis, Bologna: Joannes Baptista Bellagamba, 1606, 266. Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Biblioteca del BiGeA, Bologna.

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Fig. 1.7B Christoph Lederlein known as Cristoforo Coriolano, Printing block for Ulisse Aldrovandi’s De reliquis animalibus exanguibus, 1606, 266, 1550 (?)/after 1603. Carved pear wood, 11.4 × 13.9 × 2.3 cm. Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, BUB 012-266.

On closer scrutiny, however, significant differences can be detected among the surviving shells. Despite shared key features, the bird-and-flower carvings on most of the shells, such as those mounted by Bartel Jamnitzer (1548–1596) and Marx Kornblum (active 1570–1591), are much more intricate than the decorations on a cup from the Dresden collections (Fig. 1.9) whose carvings were made using a different technique. Cut into a half-polished nautilus they differ from the carvings on the Jamnitzer and Kornblum shells whose mother-of-pearl layers had been fully exposed before the incision of decorations and display conspicuous differences in subtleness and degrees of polishing. The addition of a fish motif, on the shell’s unillustrated side, which is not found in other bird-flower shells of this type, is another indication that the Dresden shell is likely to be a local imitation of goods imported from Asia. It is not an exception, as further possible copies of Asian shell designs in German collections of the late sixteenth century reveal.55 55 The free-floating dragon motif on one shell and the somewhat clumsily arranged birds on another one in a pair of nautilus shells mounted by Bartel Jamnitzer might have been carved by a European rather than

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Fig. 1.8 Bartel Jamnitzer, Nautilus cup. Incised nautilus shell probably made in China before 1590, gilded silver mounts made in Nuremberg, ca. 1590, 22 × 15.3 × 8.4 cm. Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart, KK hellblau 10. Photo: Hendrik Zwietasch.

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Fig. 1.9 Anonymous, Nautilus cup, undated. Nautilus pompilius, silver mounts perhaps made in Magdeburg. Bpk / Grünes Gewölbe, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, III 196, PS D7/33. Photo: Paul Kuchel.

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Fig. 1.10 Marx Kornblum, Nautilus cup, ca. 1580–1590. Nautilus pompilius, gilded and enameled silver, 27.8 × 8.5 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, KK 1063.

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Fig. 1.11 Anonymous, Incised nautilus shell, undated. Grünes Gewölbe, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, III 130. Photo: Bildarchiv Grünes Gewölbe.

Fig. 1.12 Anonymous, Incised nautilus shell, undated. Grünes Gewölbe, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, III 130. Photo: Anna Grasskamp.

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Returning to Italy, where parrot cups informed Miseroni workshop productions and Chinese ceramics were for the first time systematically imitated by European craftsmen, the carved nautilus shells kept by the Medici provide good examples for comparison with eight carved nautilus shells in the collections of the court at Dresden, out of which one example will be discussed in detail. One motif appears on a nautilus conch in both collections: a man and his servant who carries a parasol, both dressed in Chinese robes and hats, depicted alongside a long-legged bird against a background of wave patterns, cloud shapes, foliage, lotus blossoms and lotus leaves. (Fig. 1.11) While the Medici shell shows almost identical renderings of the same motif on both sides, (Fig. 1.13) the Dresden shell shows two strikingly different designs: on one side we see the Medici shell’s figurative scene, but the other features a bird in flight, a flower blossom and a pair of cartouches that frame two men in “Chinese” attire riding donkeys. (Fig. 1.12) Their side saddle position is untypical of Ming dynasty imagery, which usually shows riders with parted legs. Only Zhang Guolao, one of the Daoist Eight Immortals, is commonly depicted riding his white mule side saddle (in fact sitting on it backwards).56 Zhang loved wine and could survive without food if he had a sufficient supply of alcohol, making his image an excellent motif for the decoration of a wine cup. As such, the decoration is in line with the nautilus shells set in silver that the connoisseur Cao Zhao described as for the consumption of spirits in his treatise completed by the early Ming dynasty and republished in Ming and Qing editions. Yet, Zhang is not usually represented with a servant who copies his unusual riding position and the shell’s carvings are of inferior quality. While all the other decorations mentioned previously feature similar imagery on both sides of one shell, the Dresden example does not. These three points – the illogical pairing of Zhang Guolao with another man riding side saddle, the inferiority of the carvings and the unusual difference between the decorations on each side – indicate that, despite the “Chineseness” of its motifs, this shell was carved by a European artisan. The close resemblance between the carvings on the Dresden and Florentine shells allows the possibility that both were executed at the Medici workshops. Material exchanges between the Dresden and Florentine courts took place regularly.57 By 1590, two samples of polished Asian shells had reached Dresden as part of a large

a Chinese artisan. Bartel Jamnitzer, Pair of Nautilus Cups with Male Figures, 1588, Sammlung Angewandte Kunst, Staatliche Museen Kassel im Hessischen Landesmuseum, Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, KP B II.72. 56 See for example: Wang Yuanxun, Zhang Guolao Riding on a Donkey, ink and colour on paper, before 1807, Princeton University Art Museum. 57 Barbara Marx, “Künstlermigration und Kulturkonsum”; Barbara Marx, “Medici Gifts to the Court of Dresden.”

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Fig. 1.13 Anonymous, Double nautilus with gilded floral engravings and silver. Shells engraved in China before 1550–1599, gilded silver mounts made in Flanders 1550–1599. Height 26 cm. Palazzo Pitti, Museo degli Argenti, Florence, Inv. Bargello (V) n. 23 (1917). © 2021, DeAgostini Picture Library/Scala, Florence.

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donation by the Grand Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici of Tuscany (1549–1609).58 The gift also contained numerous porcelain items with Chinese provenance.59 It is possible that the shell, whose carvings are of European authorship, was among the goods that reached Dresden from Florence in 1587 and 1590. Although Mette’s suggestion that sailors carved shells in imitation of ceramic decorations on their way from Asia to Europe is plausible, it is more likely that trained local craftsmen, skilled in working with wood and ivory, were involved in the imitation of foreign carving techniques. At the Medici workshops, the imitation of Chinese carving techniques would have been in line with other experiments in which artisans coloured a shell that had been carved with Chinese motifs and painted another with Chinese-style dragons.60 (Fig. 1.14) In the seventeenth-century Netherlands, where shells were imported in large quantities by the Dutch East India Company and widely available, the art of decorating nautilus and other shells was mastered by artisans, prominent among whom were members of the Bellekin family.61 Although the motifs and techniques with which Dutch craftsmen decorated shells differ largely from those used in Guangzhou, a shell from the second half of the seventeenth century decorated by Cornelis Bellekin (1625?–before 1711) features remarkable similarities to the floral and botanical decorations of the Chinese artefacts mentioned previously. (Fig. 1.15) In addition to those shells in German collections discussed above that show imitations of Chinese carving techniques and motifs, others have survived that are more loosely based on Asian designs.62 (Fig. 1.16) The illustrated example appropriates the wave pattern from the previously discussed Guangzhou objects, but uses it to represent the scales of large fish. It features mascarons alongside a depiction of the mythological figures Romulus and Remus. Several figures in Chinese-style dress are represented underneath a palm and other trees, one equipped with a fan, another holding a parasol and a third operating a plough. These images were modelled after European pictorial sources on Asia, among which Athanasius Kircher’s China Monumentis of 1667 was the most important and widely available. Its illustrations feature figures dressed similarly to those on the shell, 58 Listed as Perlenmutter schneckenhäuser in the 1619 inventory of the Dresden Kunstkammer. Syndram and Minning, eds. Das Inventar von 1619, fol. 15. 59 Ströber, “Porzellan als Geschenk.” 60 Grasskamp, “Frames of Reflection,” especially 77–78. The gaudily painted shell on one side shows two ladies in a pavilion, one of them dabbing her eyes. The women look in the direction of a rider on his mount, waving goodbye to them; the rider is accompanied by a servant with a parasol and a man with a staff, who leads them. Paintings, but perhaps also artefacts, with this motif would have been “a suitable present for an official departing to take up his next assignment.” Laing, “Problems in Reconstructing,” 74. 61 Seters, “Oud–Nederlandse Parelmoerkunst.” 62 Grasskamp “Unpacking Foreign Ingenuity.”

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Fig. 1.14 François Crevecueur, Shell cup. Shell incised in China before 1567, mounts made in France before 1567. Gallerie degli Uffizi, Tresoro dei Granduchi di Palazzo Pitti, Florence, Inv. Bargello Conchiglie 20 (1917).

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Fig. 1.15 Cornelis Bellekin, Nautilus shell with floral decorations, 1650–1700. Width 8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, BK-1957-18.

including a man from the Chinese province of Sichuan operating a plough.63 The shell carver combined pictorial elements with a clear Asian connection with motifs of mythological and fantastical origin in the decoration of a single object. Such combinations of references to mythological and foreign realms underlie the foundations of the Kunstkammer itself, in which, according to an important period source, “ingenious objects, worthy of admiration either owing to their rarity or to the distance of space or time from their point of origin” were collected.64 The South Asian shell in the illustrated example embodied all of these attributes, not least through the pictorial information with which it was incized that referenced its geographically-distant origin in Asia and portrayed mythological scenes from distant times. The shell frames figures in Chinese dress as representatives of a civilization that was as far removed from seventeenth-century Germany as the foundation of ancient Rome by Romulus and Remus. The added layers of carved

63 Kircher, China Monumentis, 112–13. 64 Quiccheberg, Inscriptiones, fol. 4v, cited from Meadow with Robertson, The First Treatise, 64.

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Fig. 1.16 Anonymous, Carved Turbo marmoratus, seventeenth century. Made in Germany, 9.5 × 16 × 11.5 cm. Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Braunschweig, Kos 623. Photo: B.P. Keiser.

decorations further exoticized Asian people by making them as far removed from reality as mythological figures. As we have seen, a certain degree of exoticization was inherent in Guangzhoucarved nautilus conches before they arrived in Europe: featuring references to the lush vegetation of South East Asian jungles, rare birds and wide ocean spaces, the shell decorations evoked flora and fauna that were foreign in the Chinese context of their making. Furthermore, the mythological motifs added to the shells’ surfaces linked them to otherworldly realms inhabited by mythological creatures and Daoist Immortals. A Chinese viewer would have recognized the birds with conspicuously long legs on some of the shells as cranes that were believed to populate the Daoist Immortals’ island of Penglai, a secluded space that could only be reached by ocean travel. However, this symbolism remained obscure to European beholders to whom the birds must have appeared as exotic as the parrots. Similarly, Kunstkammer collectors were not familiar with the drinking habits of Daoist Immortals that made them especially f itting motifs for the decoration

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of cups. Not fully understanding the pictorial, mythological and material logic behind Chinese decorations, European craftsmen made objects that, due to a certain degree of visual illegibility, were already exotic to them even more so by adding another layer of decoration in the form of figurative mounts featuring gigantic snails, mermaids and other sea creatures. In this way, many nautilus shells received two different kinds of “framings”: first, carved decorations and second, layers of metallic mounts. Both equipped the conches for use as drinking cups, but also charged natural objects with new meanings, reframing them materially and conceptually.

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Surfaces and Skins: The European Eroticization of Asian Shells Chinese as well as European metalsmiths provided nautilus shells with handles and rims by adding metal mounts. As the previously cited collector’s manual by Cao Zhao explains, in Guangzhou, where the shells were carved, silver mounts were applied “to transform them into cups.” While, in both cultures, one of the purposes of fitting natural objects in precious metals was for practical use, the mounts also changed the haptic and aesthetic experience of the shells. While handles can be understood as an invitation to touch and handle a particular item bridging the gap between collectable and collector, object and subject,65 the mounts can be conceptualized as frames that simultaneously highlight and obscure the complex imagery on the shells’ surfaces.66 Period terminology indicates that there were different kinds of frames. Contrasting with the silver mounts applied to the “rather cheap” nautilus shells in China, more valuable objects such as ostrich eggs, tusks, horns, fragrant woods and turtle shells would receive mounts made of gold.67 These were called “encasings” (xiang), a term that indicates elaborately-designed metal frames applied to natural objects, while the expression “feet” (zu) used for the silver mounts stresses the functional aspect of the object support, and made shells fit for use as utensils. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, selected shells and numerous Chinese porcelain items were provided with precious metal mounts. Further enforcing the commonalities between the conceptualizations of shells and porcelain, the mounts applied to both materials shared a common function as marginal by-works – in Greek, parerga. The application of these by-works of sculpted rims, feet and handles to imported natural objects like shells and porcelain Europeanized 65 Simmel, “Der Henkel.” 66 Grasskamp, Objects in Frames, 25–51. 67 Grasskamp, Objects in Frames, 44–47.

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the haptic engagement with foreign materiality.68 In other words, in Europe these additions amounted to an act of cultural appropriation. European mounts often added a panorama of maritime motifs to early modern porcelain vessels and shell cups. These included metallic sculptural renderings of fish-tailed men and women, dolphins and other aquatic creatures. The mounts applied to the shell cup in Figure Ten combine f ish-tailed mythological creatures and sea animals with an oceanscape engraved on its gilt silver foot. One would visually and physically grasp this and other vessels by their metallic frames. At the same time, these framing elements would not have hindered collectors from directly engaging with the smooth surfaces of the ceramics and shells themselves. If anything, such frameworks may have even encouraged a comparison of the haptic experiences of touching metal versus ceramics or shells and further demonstrated the similarities and contrasts between the different materials. Adding another layer of motifs to those incized on the shells’ surfaces, the mounts also materialized European fantasies of the foreign. Such fantasies blurred the boundaries between mythological realms and faraway spaces with some European Renaissance artists’ depictions of foreign oceans and their shores, where pearls, shells, and coral branches could allegedly be harvested in abundance, as erotic paradises. Take Jacopo Zucchi’s Coral Fishers, created in 1585/ca.1560 for the studiolo of Francesco I de’ Medici in Florence, in which fair-skinned mythological goddesses mingle with men and women of colour, for example. (Fig. 1.17) The painting places the practices of shell, coral and pearl fishing within a realm where foreign treasures are gathered by foreign bodies: both mythological figures and men of colour alike. Two African men are conspicuous; equipped with bows, they are represented as hunters of animals rather than of Kunstkammer collectables. The posture in which one of them holds a parrot is reminiscent of early modern representations of huntsmen with their falcons. The other bowman directs his arrow into the water. Surrounded by more than fifty figures engaged in the exploitation of the sea, the man’s arrow functions as a pointer, hinting at the treasures to be found in the deep. Through the figures of the two bowmen, the activities of coral fishing, pearl diving and shell collecting are represented as the aquatic equivalent of hunting on land. The painting’s foreground displays the prey, inviting viewers to engage in a treasure hunt of their own: rare shells alongside pearls, coral fragments and extra-European animals. Within this allegory of desire and possession, the shiny surfaces of shells are closely entangled with the bodies of foreign and mythological figures.69 68 Grasskamp, Objects in Frames, 25–51. 69 Grasskamp, Objects in Frames, 121–23.

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Fig. 1.17 Jacopo Zucchi, The Treasures of the Sea (Coral Fishers), ca. 1560. Oil on copper, 52 × 42 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome, 292. © 2021, Photo SCALA, Florence.

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In addition to paintings in Northern European Kunstkammer and Italian studiolo collections that blur the boundary between mythological realms and extra-European spaces, Renaissance illustrations in travelogues pictured inhabitants of “the Indies” – where nautilus conches and porcelain came from – as scarcely covered or entirely naked. (Fig. 1.18) The nakedness of the “Indians” made them comparable to mermaids and mermen, believed by European collectors to populate the oceans that connected local seas to the rest of the world. Sixteenth-century texts on extra-European spaces and their inhabitants used the rhetoric of sexualization and commodification in their descriptions of foreign people and contained an abundance of narratives featuring “sexually overactive” non-European men and women.70 The “native body as such” became a fetishized object in early modern culture and a primary signifier of difference.71 The woodcut shown in Figure 18 served to illustrate a (fictive) travel report on the New World in letters attributed to Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512).72 It depicts an imagined encounter between “Indian” women and a European explorer, the latter distinguished by his clothing and feathered hat. As three “Indian” women use their seductive charms to distract the foreigner, a fourth approaches from behind to attack him. These themes of sexual seduction and hidden danger also appear on Marx Kornblum’s cup in Figure Ten.73 It contains at its core a nautilus shell stripped of its natural brown-white surface exposing layers of mother-of-pearl that have been incized with curved lines and the images of foliage and long-tailed birds like those discussed above. Carefully crafted mounts of gilded silver frame the shell above and below. The lower pedestal takes the form of a mermaid balancing the shell upon her crown. At the shell’s summit, a nude figure with the combined attributes of Fortuna and Venus, the goddesses of good fortune and love, stands triumphant.74 Two gilded silver snails were originally affixed on either side of the cup, one of which has survived in its original position.75 The nautilus shell that separates the mermaid below from the Venus-Fortuna on top is an indicator of geographic space: its surface is engraved with pictorial references to the ocean in the form of lines suggesting waves, much like early modern maps that showed fish-tailed creatures against a backdrop of wavy lines indicating extra-European waters. The golden snail attached to one side of the nautilus swims in these waters, like the mermaid herself. Although Ulisse Aldrovandi correctly asserted (based on Aristotle) that nautilus 70 Mason, Deconstructing America, 173. 71 Stevens, “New World Contacts.” 72 Scholars hold different opinions on the letters’ authorship, the authenticity of their contents and other aspects of their interpretation. See, for example, Roukema, “The Mythical ‘First Voyage.’” 73 Grasskamp, “Shells, Bodies, and the Collector’s Cabinet.” 74 See chapter 4 for an in-depth analysis of the Venus-Fortuna motif. 75 List, “Wiener Goldschmiede und ihre Beziehungen zum kaiserlichen Hofe,” 292.

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Fig. 1.18. Amerigo Vespucci, Diß Büchlin saget, wie die zwen durchlüchtigsten Herren Her Fernandus K. Zu Castilien und Herr Emanuel K. zu Portugal haben das weyte Mör ersuchet und funden vil Insulen unnd ein nüwe Welt … vormals unbekant, 1509, 24b. Woodcut. Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg i. Br., J 4672,m*.

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shells were produced by animals closely related to squid, nautilus and turbon shells were generally associated with snail-like creatures believed to inhabit foreign oceans.76 (Fig. 1.19A) The early modern idea of gigantic snails that produced large shells also stood in line with medieval reports on Sri Lanka that were published in a number of European languages from the late fourteenth century onwards.77 (Fig. 1.19B) Snails carried strong sexual connotations. Their shells were likened to female genitalia in German encyclopedic writings of the period in which “the water of the seas of this world” symbolizes “the bitter waters of mundane lust” and sexual ecstasy.78 By reminding viewers that the nautilus shell is the product of a slimy mollusc, the small detail of the gold snail makes explicit the sexual symbolism that underlies the entire cup. Venus-Fortuna’s flawless beauty stands in contrast to the image of the mermaid at the foot of the cup. While the nudity of the goddess above is portrayed as “innocent” and “natural,” the mermaid has seductively embellished her body with jewellery. A sparkling necklace draws the viewer’s gaze to her breasts. Both Venus-Fortuna and the mermaid belong to the sea, but they occupy different domains. One sails aboard a Mediterranean cockle or scallop shell, while the other reigns over an underwater empire that extends to non-European spaces. The mermaid bears some resemblance to the mythological Nereid Galatea, whose name can be translated as “milk white” and who was referred to as “the milk-white one” or “the one who has milk-white skin.”79 Precious materials that were whitish in colour such as alabaster and ivory were often compared to the skin of seductive women in early modern writings.80 Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a major source of inspiration for Kunstkammer artefacts, also frequently compares skin to the surfaces of objects. Ovid described Galatea as “more radiant than crystal, smoother than shells,” but also as “wilder than an untamed heifer, … more truculent than a pregnant bear, … crueller than a trodden snake.”81 In serving as the inspiration for a number of sixteenth-century 76 For a representation of an octopus-like creature in a nautilus shell, see Aldrovandi, De reliquis animalibus, 260; for the image of a large foreign sea snail opposite depictions of local specimens, see Aldrovandi, De reliquis animalibus, 390f. The motif is copied in later treatises such as Buonanni, Ricreatione dell’occhio, fig. 32. 77 See chapter 3 for further discussion of this subject in different editions of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville of 1356/71. 78 Albertinus, Der Welt Tummel- und Schaw-Platz, cited from Grasskamp, “Spirals and Shells,” 152. For an in-depth discussion of the relationships between snails, sexuality and the female body see chapter 4. 79 Daly and Rengel, eds. Greek and Roman Mythology, 59. 80 For period references to poetic associations between female skin and white ivory, see Vickers, “Diana Described,” 266; Yandell, “Iconography and Iconoclasm,” 549. The German poet Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau’s “Description of Immaculate Beauty” (Beschreibung vollkommener Schönheit) published in 1670 employs the metaphor of alabaster to refer to the skin of a dangerously seductive woman. 81 Ovid, Metamorphoses 13, 791–92

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Fig. 1.19A Ulisse Aldrovandi, De reliquis animalibus exanguibus libri quatuor, post mortem eius editi: nempe de mollibus, crustaceis, testaceis, et zoophytis, Bologna: Joannes Baptista Bellagamba, 1606, 391. Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Biblioteca del BiGeA, Bologna.

Fig. 1.19B John Mandeville, Von der erfarün[g] des strengen Ritter[s] johannes von montauille, trans. Otto von Diemeringen, Straßburg: Bartholomäus Kistler, 1499, fol. 39 v. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Rar. 982.

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Fig. 1.20 Jacques II. de Gheyn, Neptune, Amphitrite and Cupid with a Nautilus Shell, early 17th century. Oil on canvas, 103.5 × 137 cm. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne, WRM 1792. Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Cologne, Meier, Wolfgang F., rba_d000095.

Kunstkammer artefacts, Galatea offered one of many examples of females who hid their power beneath an erotically charged “radiant” and “smooth” appearance.82 Galatea and her sisters were commonly represented in eroticized settings. This is illustrated by a painting that shows Amphitrite surrounded by highly suggestive shells that represent her and Neptune’s genitals alongside Cupid, the god of erotic love and desire, whose finger penetrates a nautilus conch, an explicit reference to sexual intercourse.83 (Fig. 1.20) As seductive as Galatea, but also as dangerous, the “Indian” women in Figure 18, as well as the mermaid queen on Kornblum’s cup, likewise hide their “wild” natures behind attractive appearances. In the rapidly expanding territory of the seafaring kingdom of England, but arguably also in early modern Europe as a whole, the mermaid functioned as a symbol of the unfamiliar, and the enticement and the danger of the European “desire for the ‘strange’ and

82 Grasskamp, “Spirals and Shells,” 151. 83 Mette, Der Nautiluspokal, 68.

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‘exotic’ body.”84 Accordingly, Kornblum’s cup contrasts a local shell’s symmetrical proportions and the ideal beauty of the porcelain-skinned Venus-Fortuna above with the “dangerously” seductive foreign bodies of an Asian shell and a Galatea-like mermaid below. The vessel rendered the skin of an elusive queen and the surface of an item from her maritime kingdom touchable, bringing exoticized and eroticized foreign bodies and objects within reach of the armchair-travelling Kunstkammer collector. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sculpted mounts often added the motif of the mermaid to nautilus shells that were perceived to be as “smooth” and “radiant” as the skin of Galatea and her sisters.85 As the two almost identical hybrid female figures on each side of Bartel Jamnitzer’s cup show (Fig. 1.8), caryatids with female torsos and lower bodies comprizing fish tails and mascarons were integrated as sculptural shell supports, but also formed part of the intricate design of cast components consisting of ornamented metal bands, clasps, lids and handles. Mermaid handles were available as readymade elements to attach to porcelain vessels, shells and other foreign items in combination with individually sculpted elements.86 Shared features, such as mermaid handles, could aesthetically unite a set of individual objects and unify vessels different in size and decoration through a common, partially standardized type of metal frame. United in one collection, mounts with cast components made the different foreign vessels they enclosed similar to each other. Their shared frames further exoticized the objects by separating them from others in the collection and added or reinforced erotic connotations through the addition of mermaid mounts.

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Conclusion – Shell Connections Asian shells carved in Guangzhou formed part of a transcultural network of technological and artistic exchange between China and Europe. Artefacts, such as a parrot cup from Southern China set in European metal mounts, that materialize a combination of Asian and European technological and artistic knowledge can 84 Pedersen, Mermaids, 27. 85 See Grasskamp, “Spirals and Shells.” 86 Grasskamp, Objects in Frames, 37. This is evidenced by a set of mounted ceramics provided with mermaid handles, among them the so-called Burghley Ewer and the Trenchard Bowl appear in the mounts of three other porcelain bowls (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 44.14.3, 44.14.4, 44.14.5), Avery (1944), Glanville (1990), 346. The Burghley Ewer and one of the bowls in the set of objects were mounted by the same workshop. Glanville (1990), 274. For cast components from the same provider as used by Elias Lencker (master 1562–1591) and Elias Geyer (master 1589–1634) see Hernmarck, Die Kunst der europäischen Gold- und Silberschmiede, 19 ff and 24.

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be conceptualized as EurAsian.87 Equally, shells carved in imitation of Chinese designs by Italian and German artisans qualify as EurAsian as they materialize a combination of European and Asian skills and design ideas. If we understand artefacts “in performative terms as systems of actions, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it,”88 parrot cups made the bodies of European shell carvers (especially their fingers) move in imitation of the performance of Chinese craftsmen. The shells thereby prompted an active non-verbal communication on visual and material matters between designers from different cultures. In this sense, a nautilus conch carved in Guangzhou that reached sixteenth-century Florence where an Italian artisan imitated the motifs incized on its surface, had an agency that changed the world of European craftsmanship. In a slightly different reading of the same objects, we could also say that the shells “are active not because they are imbued with agency but because of ways in which they are caught up in … currents of the lifeworld,” where the forms of things are generated “within the fluxes of materials across the interface between substances and the medium that surrounds them.”89 In other words, the properties of the shells that the early modern artisans engaged with are not fixed attributes of matter, they are processual – subject to constant change – and relational. The human modifications of natural objects that underlay the design of shell cups developed “within a physical environment from the interconnection of human action and materials.”90 In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China and Europe, conches and ceramics were perceived as related in terms of their materiality, surface qualities, designs and potential use as cups, but interpretations of both types of objects differed between cultures. While in the workshops of Chinese craftsmen nautilus conches were framed as bird-like objects, European artists perceived the same items as similar to human body parts in terms of their colour, shape and texture. This cannot merely be explained on the basis of their material properties or through ideas on material agency and active matter. The strikingly different sets of meanings attributed to shells were informed by culturally defined engagements with fragments of foreign nature. In China, the earliest known metal-mounted nautilus shell cup dates back to the fourth century and references to “parrot cups” can be traced back to Tang dynasty poetry. In Europe, mother-of-pearl carving was a well-established technique by medieval times,91 but it was the later influx of sixteenth-century conches with 87 On the usage of the term “EurAsian” see Grasskamp, “EurAsian Layers,” 363, also used in Grasskamp and Juneja, eds. EurAsian Matters. 88 Grasskamp, “EurAsian Layers,” 374, citing van Eck, “Living Statues,” 644, which refers to Alfred Gell’s posthumously published Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, 1998. 89 Ingold, “Materials against Materiality.” 90 Ajmar, “Mechanical Disegno,” 27. 91 See for example Fricke, “Matter and Meaning.”

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Chinese carvings that initiated changes and innovations in local craftsmanship. While nautilus shells were readily available in Southern China during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in Europe they were rare, treasured goods from faraway regions that very few Europeans had access to or comprehensive knowledge of. While the Chinese craftsmen were based in the port city of Guangzhou, which was China’s most important maritime connection to its outlying South East Asian neighbours and tributary states, the fastest way in which Europeans could reach Asia was by crossing oceans that early modern maps depict as filled with extraordinary creatures, sea monsters and mermaids, who also appear prominently on the elaborate mounts that Northern European goldsmiths added to some shells. While the Guangzhou artisans decorated shells with jungle motifs associated with South East Asia and ocean spaces inhabited by mythological beasts, in early modern Europe, the oceanic world was a site loaded with sexual connotations. Much Renaissance imagery depicted inhabitants of “the Indies,” where shells and porcelain originated, as partially or entirely naked. This nakedness made them comparable in the European imagination to mermaids and mermen, who were believed to populate the spaces between Europe and the Indies, as well as to mythological creatures like the seductive, dangerous Galatea. Ocean fantasies formed part of a neatly woven web of symbolic meanings and metaphorical implications that tied nudity and foreignness to shells and informed the decorative framing that European craftsmen added to them in early modern Kunstkammer collecting. Despite differences in the degrees of exoticization and eroticization of nautilus shells, in both cultures shells stood squarely at the intersection of material collecting and visual fantasies of oceans and foreign spaces.

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Cited Primary and Secondary Sources Ajmar, Marta. “The Renaissance in Material Culture. Material Mimesis as Force and Evidence of Globalization.” In The Routledge Handbook of Globalization and Archaeology, edited by Tamar Hodos, 669–686. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. –––. “Mechanical Disegno.” RIHA Journal 84 (2014): n. p. Albertinus, Aegidius. Der Welt Tummel- und Schaw- Platz. Augsburg: Johann Krüger, 1612. Aldrovandi, Ulisse. De reliquis animalibus. Bologna: Ioannem Baptistam Bellagambam, 1606. Avery, Louise. “Chinese Porcelain in English Mounts,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 2 (1944): 266–272. Baader, Hannah. “Livorno, Lapis Lazuli, Geology, and the Treasures of the Sea in 1604.” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma: Serie VII. Historia del Arte 5 (2017), edited by Avinoam Shalem: 141–167.

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Barten, Sigrid. Die Muschel in der Kunst: von der Renaissance bis zur Gegenwart. Zurich: Museum Bellerive, 1985. Belon, Pierre. L’histoire naturelle des estranges poisons marins, avec la vraie peincture & description du daulphin, & de plusiers autres de son espece. Paris: Regnaud Chaudiere, 1551. Buonanni, Filippo. Ricreatione dell’occhio e della mente nell’osseruation delle chiocciole. Rome: il Varese, a spesi di Felice Cesaretti, 1681. Cao Zhao 曹昭, Gegu yaolun 格古要論 [Essential Criteria of Antiquities], 1388, facsimile reproduced in Sir Percival David, Chinese Connoisseurship: The Essential Criteria of Antiquities, Being a Translation of the Ko Ku Yao Lun, 295–344. New York: Praeger, 1971. Included in a later edition in Wenyuange sikuquanshu 文淵閣四庫全書, [The Wenyuange {Palace} Edition of the Complete Library in Four Branches of Literature] Beijing 1773–1782. Clark, Leah. “The peregrinations of porcelain: The collections of Duchess Eleonora d’Aragona of Ferrara.” Journal of the History of Collections 32, 2 (2020): 275–288. Clarke, Michael. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Daly, Kathleen N. and Marian Rengel, eds. Greek and Roman mythology A to Z. 3rd ed., revized by Marian Rengel. New York: Chelsea House, 2009. Dance, Peter S. ​A History of Shell Collecting​. Leiden: Brill, 1986. David, Sir Percival. Chinese Connoisseurship: The Essential Criteria of Antiquities, Being a Translation of the Ko Ku Yao Lun, New York: Praeger, 1971. Dharampal-Frick, Gita. Indien im Spiegel deutscher Quellen der Frühen Neuzeit (1500–1750). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1994. Distelberger, Rudolf. “Beobachtungen zu den Steinschneidewerkstätten der Miseroni in Mailand und Prag.” In Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen 74 (1978): 79–152. Du Boulay, Anthony. Christie’s Pictorial History of Chinese Ceramics. Oxford: Phaidon, 1984. van Eck, Caroline. “Living Statues: Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency, Living Presence Response and the Sublime.” Art History 33, 4 (2010): 642–659. Finlay, Robert. The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Forberg, Corinna, and Philipp W. Stockhammer, eds. The Transformative Power of the Copy: A Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Approach. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Press, 2017. Franck, Sebastian. Weltbüch: Spiegel vn bildeniß des gantzen erdbodens … . Tübingen: Morhart, 1534. Fricke, Beate. “Matter and Meaning of Mother-of-Pearl: The Origins of Allegory in the Spheres of Things.” Gesta 51, 1 (2012): 235–253. Gell, Alfred, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Gerritsen, Anne, and Giorgio Riello, eds. The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World. London: Routledge, 2016.

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Gigante, Federica. “Medici Patronage and Exotic Collectibles in the Seventeenth Century: The Cospi Collection.” In Art, Mobility, and Exchange in Early Modern Tuscany and Eurasia, edited by Francesco Freddolini and Marco Musillo, 48–66. London: Routledge, 2020. Glanville, Philippa. Silver in Tudor and Early Stuart England: A Social History and Catalogue of the National Collection 1480–1660. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1990. Grasskamp, Anna, and Monica Juneja, eds. EurAsian Matters: China, Europe and the Transcultural Object, 1600–1800. Cham: Springer, 2018. –––. EurAsian Layers: Netherlandish Surfaces and Early Modern Chinese Artefacts.” The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 63, 4 (2015): 363–98. –––. Frames of Appropriation: Foreign Artifacts on Display in Early Modern Europe and China.” In Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West, edited by Petra ten Doesschate Chu and Ding Ning, 29–42. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2015. –––. “The Frames of Reflection: ‘Indian’ Shell Surfaces and European Collecting, 1550–1650.” In Objets frontière, edited by Sabine du Crest, 69–83. Paris: Boccard, 2018. –––. “Metamorphose in Rot: Die Inszenierung von Korallenfragmenten in Kunstkammern des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts.” Tierstudien 4 (2013): 13–24. –––. Objects in Frames: Displaying Foreign Collectibles in Early Modern China and Europe. Berlin: Reimer, 2019. –––. “Shells, Bodies, and the Collector’s Cabinet,” in Marisa Bass, Anne Goldgar, Hanneke Grootenboer and Claudia Swan, eds. Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2021. –––. “Spirals and Shells: Breasted Vessels in Sixteenth-Century Nuremberg.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 67–68 (2016/17): 146–163. –––. “Unpacking Foreign Ingenuity: The German Conquest of Artful Objects with ‘Indian’ Provenance.” In Ingenuity in the Making: Matter and Technique in Early Modern Europe, edited by Richard Oosterhoff, José R. Marcaida and Alexander Marr. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, forthcoming 2021. Hernmarck, Carl. Die Kunst der europäischen Gold- und Silberschmiede von 1450–1830. Munich: Beck, 1978. Hsieh Ming-Liang 謝明良. “Yingwubei jiqi ta” 鸚鵡杯及其他 [Parrot Cups, etc.] Gugong Wenwu Yuekan 358 (2013): 64–77. Hwang Degenhardt, Jane. “Cracking the Mysteries of ‘China’: China(ware) in the Early Modern Imagination.” Studies in Philology 110, 1 (2013): 132–167. Ingold, Tim. “Materials against Materiality.” Archaeological Dialogues 14, 1 (2007): 1–16. Karl, Barbara. “‘Galanterie di cose rare…’: Filippo Sassetti’s Indian Shopping List for the Medici Grand Duke.” Itinerario 32, 3 (2008): 23–41. Kehoe, Marsely L. “The Nautilus Cup Between Foreign and Domestic in the Dutch Golden Age.” Dutch Crossing 35.3 (2011): 275–285. van Kessel, Elsje. “The inventories of the Madre de Deus: Tracing Asian material culture in early modern England.” Journal of the History of Collections 32, 2 (2020): 207–223.

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Kircher, Athanasius. China illustrata, 1677. Translated by Charles D. van Tuyl, Muskogee, Okla.: Bacone Indian University Press, 1987. –––. China illustrata, Amsterdam: Joannes Jansson à Waesberge and Elizeum Weyerstraet, 1667. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Kroll, Paul W. “The Image of the Halcyon Kingfisher in Medieval Chinese Poetry.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 104, 2 (1984): 237–251. Laing, Ellen Johnston. “Problems in Reconstructing the Life of Qiu Ying.” Ars Orientalis 29 (1999): 69–89. Leonhard, Karin. “Shell-Collecting: On 17th-Century Conchology, Curiosity Cabinets and Still Life Painting.” In Early Modern Zoology: The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts, edited by Karl A.E. Enenkel and Paul J. Smith, 177–204. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Lietzmann, Hilda. Valentin Drausch und Herzog Wilhelm V. von Bayern: Ein Edelsteinschneider der Spätrenaissance und sein Auftraggeber. Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1998. Lightbown, Ronald W. “Oriental Art and the Orient in Late Renaissance and Baroque Italy.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969): 228–279. Liscomb, Kathlyn. “How the Giraffe Became a Qilin: Intercultural Signification in Ming Dynasty Arts.” In The Zoomorphic Imagination in Chinese Art and Culture, edited by Jerome Silbergeld and Eugene Y. Wang, 341–378. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017. List, Camillo. “Wiener Goldschmiede und ihre Beziehungen zum kaiserlichen Hofe.” In Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 17 (1896): 291–306. Ma Huan, Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan: The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores (1433). Translated by J.V.G. Mills. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1970. Maeda, Robert J. “The ‘Water’ Theme in Chinese Painting.” Artibus Asiae 33, 4 (1971): 247–290. Mancall, Peter C., ed. Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Manning Stevens, Scott. “New World Contacts and the Trope of the ‘Naked Savage.’” In Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, edited by Elizabeth D. Harvey, 125–140. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Marx, Barbara. “Künstlermigration und Kulturkonsum. Die Florentiner Kulturpolitik im 16. Jahrhundert und die Formierung Dresdens als Elbflorenz.” In Deutschland und Italien in ihren wechselseitigen Beziehungen während der Renaissance, edited by Bodo Guthmüller, 286–290. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000. –––. “Medici Gifts to the Court of Dresden.” Studies in the Decorative Arts 15, 1 (2007): 46–82 Mason, Peter. Deconstructing America: Representations of the Other. London: Routledge, 1990.

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Mauriès, Patrick. Shell Shock: Conchological Curiosities. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1994. Meadow, Mark, with Bruce Robertson. The First Treatise on Museums: Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptions of 1565. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013. Mette, Hanns-Ulrich. Der Nautiluspokal: Wie Kunst und Natur miteinander spielen. Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1995. Möller, Karin Annette, ed. Schimmern aus der Tiefe: Muscheln, Perlen, Nautilus. Petersberg: Imhof, 2013. Nanjingshi wenwu baoguan weiyuanhui. “Nanjing ren Taishan Dongjin Wang Xingzhi fufumu fajue baogao 南京人台山東晉王興之夫婦墓發掘報告 [Excavation Reports of the Tombs of Wang Xingzhi and his wife from the Eastern Jin Dynasty at Taishan].” Wenwu 6 (1965): 26–33. Ovid. Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Translated by Anthony S. Kline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pedersen, Tara. Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Prosperetti, Leopoldine. “‘Conchas legere’: Shells as Trophies of Repose in Northern European Humanism.” Art History 29, 3 (2006): 387–413. Ptak, Roderich. “Eisvögel und Eisvogelfedern in China: Beschreibungen und Einfuhr aus maritimen Ländern (ca. 500–1500).” Saeculum 55, 2 (2004): 291–322. –––. Exotische Vögel: Chinesische Beschreibungen und Importe. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006. Qi Dongfang 齐东方. “Beike yu beike xinghe 贝壳与贝壳形盒 [Shells and Shell-Shaped Containers].” Huaxia Kaogu 華夏考古 3 (2007): 83–91. Quiccheberg, Samuel. Inscriptiones vel tituli theatri amplisimi … . Munich: Berg, 1565. Roukema, E. “The Mythical ‘First Voyage’ of the Soderini Letter.” Imago Mundi 16 (1962): 70–75. Scaliger, Julius C. Exotericarum exercitationum liber quintus decimus. Paris: Michael Vascosan, 1557. van Seters, Wouter Hendrik. “Oud-Nederlandse Parelmoerkunst: Het Werk van Leden der Familie Belquin, Parelmoergraveurs en Schilders in de 17e Eeuw.” Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 9 (1958): 173– 238. Simmel, Georg. “Der Henkel.” In Philosophische Kultur: Gesammelte Essais, 116–24. Leipzig: W. Klinkhardt, 1911. Smith, Pamela, ed. Entangled Itineraries: Materials, Practices, and Knowledge across Eurasia. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. Spallanzani, Marco. Ceramiche alla corte dei Medici nel cinquecento. Modena: Panini, 1994. –––. Ceramiche orientali a Firenze nel Rinascimento. Florence: Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, 1978. Sténuit, Robert. “De ‘Witte Leeuw’. De Schipbreuk Van Een Schip Van De V.o.c. in 1613 En Het Onderwateronderzoek Naar Het Wrak in 1976.” Bulletin Van Het Rijksmuseum 25, 4 (1977): 163–178.

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Ströber, Eva. “Porzellan als Geschenk des Großherzogs Ferdinando I. de’ Medici aus dem Jahre 1590.” In Giambologna in Dresden. Die Geschenke der Medici, edited by Dirk Syndram et al., 103–110. Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 2006. Sturman, Peter S. “Cranes above Kaifeng. The Auspicious Image at the Court of Huizong.” Ars Orientalis 20 (1990): 33–68. Tobin, Beth Fowkes. The Duchess’s Shells: Natural History Collecting in the Age of Cook’ s Voyages. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Syndram, Dirk, and Martina Minning, eds. Die Inventare der kurfürstlich-sächsischen Kunstkammer in Dresden/Das Inventar von 1619, vol. 3. Dresden: Sandstein, 2010. Valentini, Michael Bernhard and Johann Daniel Major. Museum museorum, oder, Vollständige Schau Bühne aller Materialien und Specereyen … . 2nd edition. Frankfurt: Johann David Zunners Sel. Erben and Johann Adam Jungen, 1714. Vickers, Nancy J. “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265–279. Wong, Aida Yuen. “Kingfisher Blue in Ming Arts: Status Symbol, Material Invention an Intercultural Connections.” In Colour Histories. Science, Art, and Technology in the 17th and 18th Centuries, edited by Magdalena Bushart and Friedrich Steinle, 145–157. Munich: De Gruyter, 2015. Yang, Bin. “The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells: The Asian Story.” Journal of World History 22, 1 (2011): 1–25. Yandell, Cathy. “Iconography and Iconoclasm: The Female Breast in French Renaissance Culture.” French Review 83, 3 (2010): 540–558. Zuroski, Eugenia. “Nautilus Cups and Unstill Life.” Journal18 3 (2017). https://www.journal18. org/1493.

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Shell Bodies: The Creative Agency of Molluscs across Cultures Abstract In early modern China and Europe, shell-building organisms were considered human-like in their abilities to design and construct proto-architectural geometric shapes. Likewise, images of birds hatching from shells feature prominently in sources from both cultures, evoking associations between shells and eggshells, molluscs that craft their own houses and birds that build their own nests. This chapter considers the creative agency of molluscs as reflected in Eurasian thought, art, and material culture, conceptualizing shells as ‘clever’ objects that informed artisanal and scientif ic practices across cultures. Against the background of transcultural narratives on the generation of pearls that attribute molluscs with female features, the chapter presents evidence of a shared ecological understanding of the material agency of shells across early modern Eurasia.

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Keywords: molluscs, ecology, Eurasia, pearls, material agency, gender

Shells shelter the organisms that build them. As external skeletons (exoskeletons), they serve as homes, supporting and protecting the bodies inside them and, in fact, forming part of them. In English, the inner parts of snail shells are called chambers, from the Latin camerae; contemporary Chinese refers to them as “rooms” (shi) and labels the horizontal compartments ceng, a term that is used to denote layers of various kinds, most commonly the floors of a building. Furthermore, contemporary Chinese uses le, which translates as “ribs,” to denote the vertical parts of the shell structure, marking them as bone-like. The creative agency of molluscs as architects of their own homes is not unparalleled in nature. Birds, for example, design and construct temporary shelters in the form of nests. What makes some molluscs unique, however, is their ability to produce pearls through a process of biomineralization around a nucleus formed of a parasite, a grain of sand or any other particle that enters the shell.

Grasskamp, A., Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia. Shells, Bodies, and Materiality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463721158_ch02

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Early modern scholars and artisans in Europe and China recognized the exceptional agency of organisms housed in shells to create matter and fashion it in aesthetically appealing ways. As this chapter shows, in both cultures shell-building organisms were even considered human-like in their abilities to design and construct proto-architectural geometric shapes. Striking images of birds hatching from shells feature in Chinese and European sources from the early modern period, evoking associations between the materiality of shells and eggshells and between molluscs and birds that both craft their own shelters. As texts and images crossed cultural boundaries, early modern knowledge about marine creatures was transferred, creating a shared ecological understanding of shells throughout Eurasia in which they were conceptualized as molluscs’ “houses” and “birthplaces,” equivalent not only to birds’ nests and eggs, but also to women’s wombs. This chapter considers the creative agency of molluscs as reflected in European and Chinese textual, visual and material records from the early modern period. It begins by considering the molluscs’ exoskeletons themselves as “clever objects” in line with period understandings of the complex inner structures of shells, the ways they informed early modern mathematics and how they were used playfully in different kinds of games. It goes on to consider how such shells inspired artisans to imitate their forms in clay and explores how historical, as well as contemporary, understandings of matter as “vital” help us to see craftsmanship as part of the process of material transformation in which humans are not the only actors. “Thinking through craft,”1 early modern artisans engaged with matter not informed by the modern dichotomies between the natural and the artificial, the animate and the inanimate, but attributing it with a certain sense of agency. In addition, the chapter examines treatises on marine creatures that present shells and molluscs as artisan-like organisms and active participants in the shaping of matter. The Tang dynasty idea that clams create mirages and construct cities and castles did not traverse cultures, but the notion that molluscs “conceive” pearls at night was reported in Chinese, Middle Eastern and European texts alike. While the concept of pearl-bearing shells as female spread across Eurasia through transcultural itineraries, the idea that molluscs’ bodies were similar to those of birds emerged independently in a number of places. As painting albums and illustrated treatises made for the emperors of the Qing dynasty show, the artistic representation of marine creatures and maritime matter could, under certain circumstances, even appropriate political meanings in the context of early modern globalization. Through the lens of contemporary frameworks of “clever objecthood” and “vibrant materialism,” the chapter moves from natural shells to clay shells and discusses

1 Adamson, Thinking through Craft.

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travelogues and treatises on natural history to argue that molluscs were considered as makers across early modern Eurasia.

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Clever Objects In early modern Europe, Asian nautilus shells, as discussed in chapter 1, evoked a multiplicity of meanings. Physically, they contain an intricate arrangement of geometrical forms in the shape of a spiral that defines the shell’s core. The object’s “clever” structure was not only acknowledged by sixteenth-century naturalists such as Ulysse Aldrovandi (Fig. 1.7A in chapter 1), but the close investigation of a nautilus shell led to the sixteenth-century discovery of the principle behind the mathematical construction of a logarithmic spiral.2 Accordingly, Asian nautilus and turbo shells not only played a crucial role in learned discourses among humanists,3 but also figured prominently in a treatise on geometry. A geometric drawing of a spiralshaped object with the characteristics of an Asian turbo shell with spikes (Turbo cornutus) appears in a Nuremberg treatise on perspective from 1596 surrounded by other “smart objects.” (Fig. 2.1) The shell-like thing in the image oscillates between a real item and a mathematical drawing on paper;4 it is one among many “smart objects” in a book filled with abstract constructions and ingenious creations of the mind, few of which were closely modelled after nature. In sixteenth-century Nuremberg, goldsmiths such as Wenzel Jamnitzer (1507/8–1585) and Nikolaus Schmidt (1550/55–1609) artfully integrated the shells of Asian sea snails and other kinds of molluscs into their work. Through the drawing and crafting of vessels in which shells (and the spirals contained in their outer and inner shapes) represented the “ideal” proportions of female breasts, the Nuremberg artisans negotiated erotic desires and fears.5 This is particularly well illustrated by the “breasted vessel” in an ornamental print by Erasmus Hornick (1524/27–1583) that shows a plump, idealized female breast and an emaciated, sagging one attached to a snail shell’s spiral on the left half of the vessel. (Fig. 2.2) The suggestion of 2 As Hans-Ullrich Mette has argued, although the f irst treatise on logarithmic calculations was published by John Napier in 1614, as early as 1587/88 Jost Bürgi developed the mathematical principle of logarithms in part by examining a nautilus shell in Kassel. Mette, Der Nautiluspokal, 44–57. 3 Prosperetti, “‘Conchas legere’.” 4 The illustrated image, which shows a snail shell supported by a pyramid and topped by a star, features in Johannes Lencker’s Perspectiva Literaria, which appeared in 1567. A flattened abstract spiral shape appears twice in conjunction with a star in the Augsburg treatise Geometria et Perspectiva by Lorenz Stöer published in 1567. The connection between star and shell in Lencker’s treatise seems to be related to the pairing of star and spiral in the one by Stöer. 5 Grasskamp, “Spirals and Shells.”

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Fig. 2.1 Mathis Zündt after Hans Lencker, A perspective of a faceted snail shell balanced on a pyramid, Nuremberg 1567. Etching on laid paper, plate 23.6 × 25.2 cm, sheet 26.7 × 28.4 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 2014.66.2.

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Fig. 2.2 Erasmus Hornick, Ewer, 1565. Engraving on paper, 14.5 × 8.5 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek, OS 907,4. Photo: Dietmar Katz.

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equivalence between shell, spiral and bosom, however, was exclusive neither to the Nuremberg circle nor to the medium of print, but commonplace in early modern Europe. To return to the example of Jacob II de Gheyn’s painting of Amphitrite discussed in chapter 1 (Fig. 1.20 in chapter 1), the turb0 shell with its pointed tip positioned in front of the sea goddess echoes the shape of her breasts and erect nipples, while representing an idealized female breast shape found in nature that was constructed on the basis of a spiral. A shell embodied an abstract shape, a mathematical ideal created by nature. As such it was a smart object that eventually “taught” humans how to draw a logarithmic spiral. From drawing and sculpting spirals, artisans went on to develop equivalences between them and the proportions of the human body. The object here served as teacher of the human mind. Shells can therefore be considered as one of many “clever objects” that seem to “guide, subvert and even entrap their makers, beholders and interpreters alike.”6 They belong with those objects that are “more clever” and “more ingenious than the subject.”7 In addition to their role as “teachers,” nautilus and turbo shells qualify as smart objects through the ways in which they engage with matter, most notably liquids of all kinds. If one fills a snail shell, for example a Trochus niloticus, with water it will not easily release this water due to its system of inner chambers. Shells need to be handled and manipulated in a number of ways to make them release their contents. This takes time, like a puzzle that needs to be solved by the interpretative faculties of the hand in collaboration with the mind, for shells are “difficult objects”8 whose labyrinthine inner structures remain enigmatic. Like one of the many table fountains whose hidden mechanical constructions for the manipulation of water fascinated early modern European collectors, the shell seems to have its own inner life, releasing liquids (or not) while creating the subtle sound of burbling water, activities that indicate its own inner machinations. In these scenarios the shell is a “smart” object, somewhere between “witty” toys and “ingenious” mechanical devices.9 As such, its place was not in the kitchen among all kinds of commonplace containers and vessels, but at the dinner table where intricate automatons used for drinking and other “joke cups” (Scherzbecher) provided an interactive kind of entertainment. Joke cups played an important role in Schauessen, court banquets that served to show off material wealth and technological advancement as well as artistic achievements that included the display of wit. The drinking part of such conspicuous meals was a bonding event, a moment 6 Hunter and Lucchini, “The Clever Object,” 476. 7 Baudrillard, Les stratégies fatales, 259–60, cited in Hunter and Lucchini, “The Clever Object,” 476. 8 Rothstein, The Shape of Difficulty, and Rothstein, “Making Trouble.” 9 On the etymology of terms such as “witty” and “ingenious” in relation to objects in early modern Europe see Marr, Garrod, Marcaida Lopez, Oosterhoff, Logodaedalus.

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when potential allies would connect over alcohol and jokes. The special effects of drinking automatons relied on hidden machinations that could, for example, move a ship-shaped drinking vessel across a dining table towards the person who would subsequently have to empty it. Shell cups were entertaining due to the workings of their inner chamber systems that released the liquid inconsistently and could make drinkers look ridiculous as they attempted to extract the liquid without spilling it. When used as drinking vessels, shells perceived as complex, intricate and difficult objects formed entertaining components in an objectscape of witty things at the dinner table. In China, ninth-century textual records and archaeological excavations reveal that shells also served as dice shakers during drinking games.10 The shell’s system of inner chambers channelled the dice in a seemingly arbitrary way, functioning as both a “smart” and unpredictable decision maker on who would empty the next cup. Furthermore, the use of shells as drinking cups was recorded by the famous Tang dynasty poets Li Bai (701–762) and Yuan Zhen (779–831). The writings of the first praise “parrot cups” made of, or in imitation of, nautilus shells, while those of the latter mention “shallow red sea snail cups” that “could not be emptied in one gulp,”11 a feature that made them especially suitable for use in Chinese drinking games. The connection between shells and drinking was further reinforced by Southern Chinese craftsmen, who, as discussed in chapter 1, decorated nautilus conches with images of the notoriously drunk Daoist Immortals, whose insobriety and aloofness elite drinkers of the Tang dynasty and later periods idealized and tried to replicate.12 The workings of shells’ inner structures informed the playful engagement of “homo ludens”13 with alcohol in Asian as well as European contexts. The “game” of shell cups, therefore, entertained on two levels, one defined by the “smart” but also unruly shapes of the shells, the other inspired by sophisticated shell cup designs, which could evoke witty references to drinkers in mythology, for example Bacchus and the Daoist Immortals, and well-known drinkers in history such as Li Bai, who had praised the use of parrot cups. Drinking games, as well as educated conversations over drinks, inevitably entailed aspects of rivalry and competition. Winners would, however, gain their rank not through the use of force. In drinking games, they needed to be favoured by chance according to the machinations of a drinking automaton or a shell used as a dice shaker; in conversation, wit was a 10 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Institute of Archaeology, “Yanshi Xingyuan cun,” figure 42,5. 11 Hsieh, “Yingwubei jiqi ta,” 65. 12 This is exemplified, for example, in the poem by Du Fu (712–770) “Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup,” which fashions Tang dynasty poets, among them Li Bai, as drunk immortals. The expression became famous and the motif enjoyed popularity also during later periods. 13 Huizinga, Homo ludens.

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helpful tool. Within the otherwise hierarchical settings of courtly dinners and the daily rituals of Chinese men studying to become officials, drinking cups provided an opportunity to engage in playfulness that could break with etiquette and subvert social norms. Shells were crucial constituents of the material culture of these early modern games, which was a highly “serious” one in many regards,14 and in terms of matter, design and symbolic implications, they functioned as smart social objects to the men who handled them.

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Shell Agency In both cultures, artisans also took inspiration from shells in the production of ceramic vessels. As findings from Tang dynasty tombs reveal, Chinese potters appropriated the material and physical features of sea snail shells in the creation of stoneware vessels.15 (Fig. 2.3) The rationale behind their making might have been that shell cups and dice shakers could only survive as burial objects (mingqi) if their organic materials were replicated in clay. Resembling natural objects in their design, the stoneware shells were, however, different in their colour. The process of their production was, therefore, not an exercise in the achievement of life-likeness but negotiated the limitations of natural and artificial matters through the medium of clay. During the Tang dynasty, some scholars believed that rare and remarkable shapes, including those of sea snail shells, had been created by a supernatural entity out of qi.16 The notoriously untranslatable expression qi can be understood as “a universally circulating fluid, consumed by living things, and dispersed on their death,”17 or, in other words, as material energy or life force, vapour or pneuma that flows through all creatures and things (including plants). The “fashioner of creations” (zaowuzhe), who was believed to be involved in the transformation of qi, can be understood as the “moulder of the ‘myriad creatures’ (wanwu), or source of the ‘myriad mutations’ (wanhua)” and “stood for the agency which changed liquid into crystal, pupa into imago, plant into animal.”18 This agency, personified as a 14 Gombrich, “The High Seriousness.” 15 Examples of conches made from earthenware include: Snail Shell/Water Pot, Tang dynasty, earthenware with sancai glaze, University Museum and Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong, HKU.C.1957.0211; a “sancai conch-shaped washer Tang dynasty” was auctioned as Lot 358 together with a jar by Sotheby’s Hong Kong in May 2019, https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/lot.358.html/2019/chineseart-hk0876 (accessed December 20, 2020); other Tang dynasty ceramic conches with sancai glaze are published in Du Boulay, Christie’s Pictorial History, 35, and Hsieh, “Yingwubei jiqi ta,” 65. 16 Schafer, “The Idea,” 154. Kubin, Der durchsichtige Berg, 264. 17 Schafer, “The Idea,” 157n18. 18 Schafer, “The Idea,” 154.

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Fig. 2.3 Anonymous, Water pot, Tang dynasty (618–907). Stoneware, sancai glaze, 11 × 5 cm. University Museum and Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, HKU.C.1957.0211.

“fashioner of creations,” was in turn described as an “artisan.”19 The transformative powers of the “fashioner of creations” and the creative agency of craftsmen would both be understood under the term zaowu, which labels the natural forces engaged in the metamorphosis of matter including those of human agents. In Tang dynasty writings, the “fashioner of creations” was mentioned most often in relation to the appearance of unusual creatures or shapes in remote places but could also emerge in descriptions of snow flurries or musical tunes. The clay that the Tang craftsmen used for their stoneware shells evokes the creation of life on earth itself, when, according to myth, the goddess Nü Wa modelled the first human beings from clay or, according to alternative sources, from the soil under her feet. In his reflections on the elements of earth and water in relation to creativity, Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) described paste as “the basic component of materiality,” perceiving the “notion of matter” as “closely bound up with it.”20 Bachelard imagined the working hand, kneading and moulding “an exact mixture of water and earth in order to realize fully what constitutes matter capable of form, substance capable of life.”21 Looking at the Tang dynasty stoneware shells, we can imagine the 19 Schafer, “The Idea,” 154–55. 20 Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 13. 21 Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 13.

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hands of the artisan exploring the cavities, surfaces and geometric composition of a natural shell before replicating it in water and clay. In this scenario the shell possesses agency, as it informs the craftsman’s body how to move and mould its form. If we look at the Tang dynasty stoneware shells, we therefore see the hand of the artisan manifested in the mythologically-loaded matter of clay, but also the fingerprint of the “fashioner of creations.” While it remains unclear what purposes shell-shaped ceramics served outside of tombs during the Tang dynasty, burial objects could enter the collections of Ming and Qing dynasty collectors assuming new functions. Tang shells might have, for example, served as “brush washers” on a scholar’s desk. This is indicated by shell-shaped jade objects made for this purpose during the Qing dynasty.22 They were intended to imitate nature, but were often also clearly marked as artefacts, as the example of a Qing dynasty celadon washer from the Qianlong reign (1736–1795) illustrates, revealing a four-character seal on its base.23 In addition to shell-shaped brush washers, Emperor Qianlong possessed another type of shell–ceramic hybrid, a celadon bowl encrusted with oyster shells, which has been dated to the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1278). (Fig. 2.4) The object reveals striking similarities to early modern vessels excavated by contemporary underwater archaeologists from shipwrecks in the South China Sea.24 It, too, was found in or close to a body of saltwater and had presumably travelled on board a ship that sank or lost its freight at sea. The ceramic vessel and the oyster shells had once formed a symbiosis in which living molluscs made active use of the artefact as a breeding ground, forming a “living, throbbing confederation” of “vibrant matters.”25 Since the passing of those who made the bowl and the molluscs who crafted the shells, the object forms an “assemblage”26 in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s sense, materializing human and oyster agency. The manmade shape of the vessel, which was created to hold 22 Examples include: Conch-shell shaped water pot, Qing dynasty, Qianlong period (1736–1795), Lot 1910, Christie’s Hong Kong, auctioned on 29.5.2013, https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/a-rare-celadonglazed-conch-shell-shaped-water-pot-5689677-details.aspx, accessed December 20, 2020; A white jade conch-shell form washer, Qing dynasty, eighteenth century, Lot 3045, Christie’s Hong Kong, auctioned on 30.5.2018, https://www.christies.com/lotf inder/Lot/a-white-jade-conch-shell-form-washer-qing6147363-details.aspx, accessed December 20, 2020; A white and russet jade conch-form washer, Qing dynasty eighteenth to nineteenth century, Lot670, Sotheby’s Hong Kong, November 2019, https://www.sothebys. com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2019/chinese-art-hk0906/lot.670.html, accessed December 20, 2020. 23 Conch-shell shaped water pot, Qing dynasty, Qianlong period (1736–1795), Lot 1910, Christie’s Hong Kong, auctioned on 29.5.2013, https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/a-rare-celadon-glazed-conchshell-shaped-water-pot-5689677-details.aspx, accessed December 20, 2020. 24 For examples see Zha and Wu, Shipwreck Archaeology; Xu, “Songchuan chutu”; Brown and Sjostrand, Maritime Archaeology; Brown, The Ming Gap. 25 Benett, Vibrant Matter, 23–24. 26 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

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Fig. 2.4 Celadon bowl overgrown by oyster shells, Southern Song dynasty (1127–1278). Porcelain bowl. The Collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, K1B018151N000000000PAE.

food, resembles the shapes of the shells that once contained edible oysters. It is difficult to tell where shell matter ends and ceramic matter starts as the glazed surfaces of the ceramic bowl resemble the shiny surfaces of the shells. The object’s aesthetic appeal, its blurring of elements for the containment of food and its tight bond between manmade form and natural matter made it worthy of being an imperial collectable; Emperor Qianlong marked its status as such by having it reframed in a tailor-made wooden stand and a beautifully embroidered textile wrapping.27 The Qing emperors had other natural objects artificially modified and framed for use at the scholar’s desk. Among them are a moose horn and coral branches that were adapted for use as brush rests, a table screen made of mounted fish fossils and a piece of non-Chinese wood with an ingrown pebble adjusted to serve as a brush holder.28 In lengthy inscriptions for each collectable, Qianlong addressed the aesthetics of the “heavenly produced” (tiancheng) and the “manmade” (renqiao).29 His reflections were inspired by artificial materials that resembled natural ones, for example, glass 27 On the material framing of the bowl overgrown by oyster shells and other collectibles at Qianlong’s court as an act of “branding” see Yu, Story of a Brand Name. 28 Grasskamp, “Kuangjia ziran.” 29 Chen, “Gupu tiancheng.”

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that could be confused with crystal, and objects that forces in nature shaped in particularly appealing ways, making them resemble artefacts. While Tang dynasty thinking was underpinned by the idea that the “transformative processes” (zaohua) of qi were integral to both human and non-human creations, Qing dynasty scholars such as Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692) and Li Yu (1611–1680) discussed manufacturing within the arts as a distinct matter of human creativity.30 By Qianlong’s reign, the question of why objects of use were made was distinguished from the purposes behind the emergence of manifold forms in nature; a utilitarian view of crafts had been established.31 Accordingly, Qianlong’s inscriptions mark his collectables as contrasting manual skills with the forces of nature, highlighting their differences within the aesthetically-defined framework of Qing collecting in which only the most beautiful and rare (qi) items were included. In early modern Europe, artisans attempted to duplicate natural objects including shells and, as discussed in chapter 1, experimented with techniques to replicate Asian ceramics. In Renaissance France, the natural philosopher and artisan Bernard Palissy (c.1510–1589) found ceramics whose glaze he wished to imitate. We cannot be sure of the Chinese origin of the particular white-enamelled majolica vessel that allegedly inspired him to develop new enamelling technologies,32 yet we can safely assume that other ceramicists in Renaissance Europe, who were also engaged in the development of new materials and techniques, were aware of and to a certain extent inspired by Asian products that, under the label of “myrrhine vessels,” were seen in the same category as ancient vessels whose material properties were widely admired.33 In addition to drawing on the products of other craftsmen, Palissy’s work was informed by forms found in nature such as those of shells and small aquatic creatures living in and around his pond.34 Palissy employed life casts of these organisms to craft vessels and architectural spaces that had “neither the appearance of sculptural form, nor the work of human hands,”35 and were designed to be taken for nature’s creations. His pilgrim flask of 1556–1567, for example, is covered by snail conches and bivalve shells moulded out of stoneware that encrust the bottle and serve as its handles and lid knob, oscillating between natural forms and artificial object designs resembling fossilized shells. (Fig. 2.5) The shells carry religious connotations 30 Schäfer, “Things (Wu),” 65. 31 Schäfer, “Things (Wu),” 65; Ye, “Cong ‘qi yi zai dao’ dao ‘qi ti dao yong’.” 32 Morley, Palissy the Potter, 1:115. 33 See, for example, Scaliger, Exotericarum exercitationum, quoted in Lightbown, “Oriental Art and the Orient,” 230–31. 34 Andrews, “The Space,” 276. On Palissy and his casts see also Kemp, “Palissy’s Philosophical Pots,” and Smith, Body of the Artisan, 59–95, Shell, “Casting Life.”. 35 Andrews, “The Space,” 284.

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Fig. 2.5 Bernard Palissy, Pilgrim flask, probably 1556–67. Earthenware with colourless and transparent or opaque pigmented green, purple, blue, yellow, red-brown, and black lead glazes, 31 × 19cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975, 1975.1.1620.

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as they closely resemble the pilgrims’ mussels associated with the worship of Saint James the Great, while fossils refer to biblical times as they were believed to have originated in the processes of petrification as the waters of the Great Flood evaporated. In the middle of the bottle, we see a snake that seems life-like due to its shape and its brown shining glaze. As Noam Andrews has argued, Palissy’s combination of life casts of animals with clay duplications of fossils re-stage a transitional state in which the animate and the inanimate coexisted during the processual petrification of matter in biblical times.36 To Palissy, “a fundamental mimetic compulsion” underlies the behaviour of all things in nature, an insight that he materialized and communicated in his life-imitating art and object-like creations based on life casts.37 In a text of 1563, Palissy presented his idea of an ideal garden and an ideal city whose designs were informed by the shape of a murex, an Asian-African shell species from the Indo-Pacific Ocean.38 The description of the architectural layout, which invites the reader to recreate the artisan’s actions in his mind, enables a “walk through its spaces, a process that re-forms the reader as an active participant in a vivid experientiality” in which knowledge is materialized in practice and practice is embedded in the body of the artisan.39 Palissy’s design was also intended to solve the problem of defence by turning a city into an impenetrable fortress informed by the murex shell’s geometrical chamber system. It logically continued his hands-on experiments with shell sizes in ceramic matter as the murex-like city increases a conch’s scale to the maximum. To Palissy, the shell fossils, the murex and his own shell-like creations all formed part of a world created by the “sovereign Creator [, who] has commanded nature to work, produce and conceive, consume and dissipate.”40 According to the logic of his writings, Palissy’s pilgrim flask and his shell-shaped fantasy city both testified to the presence of God, the master craftsman responsible for the creation of all things and the supreme architect of the cosmos itself. What attracted Palissy to shells might have been a combination of the “beauty of substance” and the “beauty of geometrical form” in addition to the enamel-like qualities of their surfaces that seem to be achieved with the help of fire, as in the baking of clay. 41 This attraction is not limited to Palissy in sixteenth-century France or potters in Tang dynasty China. Observations such as those made by 36 Andrews, “The Space,” 284. 37 Andrews, “The Space,” 282. 38 Palissy, Recette véritable, discussed in Andrews, “The Space,” 278–87, and Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 127–32. 39 Andrews, “The Space,” 282. 40 Palissy, Recette véritable, 84, cited in Andrews, “The Space,” 283. 41 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 127.

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the French philosopher Paul Valéry (1871–1945) on shells blurring the boundaries between natural and artificial form are neither time-bound nor limited to particular civilizations. Valéry suggests that whoever encountered a shell for the first time would wonder how it was made and by whom (or by what forces). According to him, to explain shells we need to “remake their form in thought.”42 As our examples have shown, one mode of understanding shells was through craft. “Thinking through craft,”43 ceramicists created objects that form part of systems of material enquiry and “artisanal epistemology”44 and articulate their makers’ understandings of nature. Tang dynasty stoneware shells and Palissy’s bottle can be understood as relating to cosmological belief systems in which clay, the matter they are made of, plays a crucial role. The belief systems’ inherent relationships between matter and spirituality differed from each other despite the fact that the understanding of the “fashioner of creations” as artisan bears some rudimentary resemblance to ideas on the Christian god-as-creator.45 Furthermore, though highly influential, Palissy’s position cannot be seen as representative of early modern European practices at large. In the endangered position of a Huguenot persecuted for his beliefs, Palissy “pursued personal salvation” through his work, “harnessing himself physically as well as metaphorically to the alchemic process of purification” that, in line with the writings of Paracelsus (1493/1494–1541), he considered as a purification of both, mind and matter. 46 Palissy’s theology of alchemy and its conceptualization of craft as a material-holiness synthesis therefore stand in sharp contrast to the utilitarian turn in the understanding of Chinese craftsmanship from the Ming to the Qing dynasty. Generally speaking, however, mixing earth with water to produce stoneware, artisans across cultures manipulated matter, but also understood themselves as forming part of a matrix of earthly matters that, in turn, were part of a constant flow of material transformation that was, according to different belief systems, crafted by the Christian God, the mythological Nü Wa or the “fashioner of creations.” The twentieth-century philosopher Bachelard sees “matter as an inherently captivating entity with the power to hold and shape human affect and imagination,”47 anticipating the paradigms of the more recent approach of vital materialism proposed by the political theorist Jane Bennett (1957–). Without relying directly on Bachelard, Bennett, too, aims at overcoming a “false dichotomy” that “separates the world into “dull matter (the it and the category of things)” and “vibrant life (the 42 Valéry, “Man and the Sea Shell,” 117. 43 Adamson, Thinking through Craft. 44 Smith, “Giving Voice to Hands.” 45 Schafer, “The Idea of Created Nature.” 46 Kamil, Fortress of the Soul, 47–48. 47 Smith, “New Bachelards?,” 163.

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us, the category of beings)”48; she proposes a reconceptualization of matter as active and “vibrant” rather than merely recalcitrant. This set of modern propositions on the conceptualization of matter and the premodern ideas explained above allow us to see shells as clever objects that inform the making of manmade shells in clay as teachers of creative minds and artisanal bodies and as examples of vibrant matter that exert agency.

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Clam Creations While the artisanal engagement with the “vibrancy” of matter is not bound to a certain period or geographic space, a return to Valéry’s question of “who made shells?” reveals a multitude of historically conditioned narratives moulded and transformed along itineraries of transcultural exchange across Eurasia. The Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures was compiled in 1698 as a survey of maritime flora and fauna with lavish illustrations of fish, molluscs, amphibians and certain types of coral and aquatic plants. 49 Painted during the Kangxi reign, it entered the imperial collections under Emperor Yongzheng (1722–1735). In addition to zoologically and biologically accurate renderings of known organisms, the album contains pictures of fantastical underwater creatures with human features as well as an image of an opening bivalve out of which a landscape emerges that is described as a mirage emerging from a shell. (Fig. 2.6) The accompanying text refers to “green-coloured” visions of cities emerging from bivalves during certain spring months “as the old people say” and also during the summer with specific wind conditions in place.50 A similar vision is evoked on a leaf of the album Insects, Birds, and Beasts by Qing dynasty painter Luo Ping (1733–1799).51 While Luo does not depict the mirage and shows three tightly-closed bivalves, the accompanying inscription by the poet and playwright Jiang Shiquan (1725–1784) specifies that they are “spitting vitality accomplishing towers and terraces” (xu qi cheng loutai).52 The term “vitality” here translates as qi. Charts for observing qi (wangqi tu) interpret the abstract energy in figurative terms and depict qi shapes occurring in nature that closely resemble the form of a tower.53 The common expression “towers and terraces” that Jiang uses refers to artfully made building complexes in general. It, for example, also appears 48 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 159. 49 Wu, “Haicuo tu,” Nie, Haicuo tu. 50 色青綠…老人言. Nie, Haicuo tu, third ce. 51 Luo Ping and Jiang Shiquan, Insects, Birds, and Beasts, dated 1774, album of ten leaves, ink on paper, 20,6 × 27,4 cm, Palace Museum Beijing. 52 吐氣成楼臺. Also see Karlsson et al, eds. Eccentric Visions, 277. 53 Huang, Picturing the True Form, 146.

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Fig. 2.6 Nie Huang, Haicuo tu 海錯圖 [Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures], 1698. Palace Museum, Beijing, 00006318-3/3. Image copyright © The Palace Museum.

in a poem by Gu Zhenli (1623–after 1672) that reflects on the (traditionally female) art of weaving and the creation of “towers and terraces” from the “emptiness” of a loom’s frame.54 Song Yingxing’s The Exploitation of the Works of Nature of 1637 uses the same term to denote creative forces found in nature and in humans: zaowu. While the clams in Luo Ping’s album are not explicitly referred to as “creating” in the sense of zaowu, by “spitting vitality, they accomplish (cheng) towers and terraces” their agency in transforming qi energy into forms that look manmade is in line with Song’s conceptualization of “the manufacture of things (zaowu) being on a par with (or even the same as) transformational processes (zaohua)” found in nature.55 Clearly, the shells in the Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures and the painting album were perceived as transformative, generative and artfully creative; they are “vital,” in line with Luo Ping’s conception of qi and “vibrant” in Bennett’s sense. While mirages can still be observed in the South China Sea, where, on some days, they create the illusion of islands, ships and coastal regions detached from the surface of the water, the idea that architectural complexes of “terraces and towers” can emerge from certain shells was a standard subject in pre-Qing dynasty sources as well as encyclopedias of the Kangxi reign.56 The connection between large bivalve molluscs and mirages has been traced back to Tang dynasty texts that describe clam-monsters (shen), some closely resembling molluscs, others featuring the attributes of dragons, inhabiting shells and other kinds of underwater containers, 54 Li, Women’s Poetry, 105. 55 Schäfer, “Things (Wu),” 77. 56 They appear, for example, in the large imperial project between 1700 and 1725 that resulted in the encyclopedia Gujin tushu jicheng, but also in much older treatises, for example on architecture, such as Nie, Xinding sanlitu.

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cavities and grottoes.57 The widely read compendium of materia medica Bencao gangmu, completed in 1578 and printed in 1596, says:

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Clam-monsters (shen) belong to the scaly dragons with four legs ( jiao); their shape resembles that of snakes, but they are bigger; they have horns that look like dragon horns. [They feature] red whiskers and all scales below their waist are upside down. They eat swallow chicks. They can spit vitality accomplishing the shapes of towers and terraces, citadels and their surroundings; before it is going to rain, they can be seen; they are called clam-towers and also sea-cities. Their fats and oils light up exerting a fragrant smell within a circle of one hundred feet; in the smoke [that they spread] there are also the shapes of towers and pavilions.58

The phrase “spitting vitality accomplishing towers and terraces” also appears in the inscription on Luo Ping’s album leaf highlighted above. The treatise also mentions images of a “citadel with its surroundings” and “towers and pavilions” that stand for early modern settlements such as the one illustrated in the Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures as well as “clam-towers” and “sea-cities.” “Spitting vitality” or, in other words, spreading life energy (qi) through the exertion of pneuma, the creation of foam, light and smoke, these creatures were believed to create ingeniously designed architectural complexes. To them “the nation’s foremost craftsmen look[ed] up in awe,” according to the eighth-century poem Rhapsody on the High House of the Clam-monsters.59 While made as if by the use of human tools such as squares and compasses, the structures are further described in Tang dynasty poetry as surpassing human construction technologies of the time by the unprecedented height of their turrets. In addition, Tang writings praise other occurrences in nature that were perceived as comparable to human creations, among them a rock formation resembling a manmade citadel.60 This “natural stone masterpiece”61 is the subject of an essay by Liu Zongyuan (773–819) that investigates the previously mentioned relationship between qi and the “fashioner of creations” that Tang dynasty thinkers were trying to understand.62 Although the descriptions of clam-castles do not explicitly mention the “fashioner of creations,” it can safely be assumed that mirages were seen in line with the rock 57 Schafer, “The Haunted Seas,” 395–99. 58 蛟之屬有蜃，其狀亦似蛇而大，有角如龍狀。紅鬣，腰以下鱗盡逆。食燕子。能吁氣成樓臺城郭之 狀，將雨即見，名蜃樓，亦曰海市。其脂和蠟作燭，香凡百步，煙中亦有樓閣之形。Li, Bencao gangmu, juan 43. 59 Schafer, “The Haunted Seas,” 397. 60 Schafer, “The Idea,” 153, and Kubin, Der durchsichtige Berg, 264. 61 Schafer, “The Idea,” 153. 62 Liu, Xiao shicheng shan ji.

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Fig. 2.7 Nie Huang 聶璜, Haicuo tu 海錯圖 [Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures], 1698. Palace Museum, Beijing, 00006318-3/3. Image copyright © The Palace Museum.

citadel encountered by Li and perceived as part of a transformational process (zaohua) in which, as the sea-cities revealed, monstrous ingenuity could far exceed human skill. The Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures frames the “towers and terraces” in an organic shape emitting from the opened shell that somewhat resembles a smoke cloud. Through a similar pictorial strategy, the album visualizes the presence of pearls within a pair of mussels. (Fig. 2.7) While the landscape view of the mirage is framed by curved lines and ocean waves in Figure 6, the pearl seems to be positioned in a ray of light that connects the shell’s enclosed inner life

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to the outside world. The previously mentioned Ming treatise The Exploitation of the Works of Nature mentions neither mirages nor clam-monsters, but it elaborates on the connection between shells, pearls and light and emphatically contradicts previous explanations of pearls coming from snake intestines, dragon jaws and shark skins.63 Such beliefs on the origin of pearls were widespread and are exemplified by a tale staged during the Chenghua period (1465–1487) of the Ming dynasty, The Tangerines and the Tortoise Shell.64 It tells the story of an exceptionally large tortoise shell discovered by a Chinese traveller on an uninhabited oceanic island between China and India. Picked up as a curiosity, the gigantic shell is examined by an expert merchant from Persia based in Fujian province who declares that it originally belonged to a larval dragon that discards its shell after ten thousand years and, if broken open, the shell would reveal twenty-four magnificent pearls which glow in the dark and are worth a fortune. Song Yingxing’s treatise ran contrary to such folk beliefs. Widely known as The Exploitation of the Works of Nature, its title Tiangong kaiwu has recently been translated as The Work of Heaven and the Inception of Things, a more accurate version that better conveys the treatise author’s understanding of the complex relationships between the heavenly made and matters manipulated through human intervention.65 Filled with descriptions and illustrations of manmade things as well as objects “crafted” by nature in eighteen chapters related to agriculture, mining, and artefact and yeast production, the treatise closes by examining things “conceived” and “created” in the ocean and other bodies of water in its final chapter Pearls and Gems.66 It describes pearls as being “conceived inside the mollusks through the shining of moonlight”67 and asks, “Is it … true, that the splendor of the mountains is contained in jade and the glamor of water concentrated in pearls? Or are these but random notions of the imagination?” The work counts pearls among the “bright and clear things” in “the world of Nature’s creations,” which “are … the opposites of the dull and turbid,”68 whose creation it describes as follows: “Gold and silver are formed underneath a cover of accumulated earth, but gems are different. They are exposed from the bottoms of their pits directly to the air, and are formed by absorbing the essence 63 Song, Tiangong Kaiwu, 295. 64 Ling, The Tangerines and the Tortoise Shell, translated in Barmé, ed. Lazy Dragon, 239–68. The tale is discussed in relation to dynamics of cultural exchange in Lu, Accidental Incest, 34–38, esp. 37. 65 Schäfer, The Crafting of the 10,000 Things, 17–18, on different translations of the treatise’s title see Brooke, “Review”: 158–59. 66 Song, Tiangong. For a book-length study of the treatise with a focus on craftsmanship see Schäfer, The Crafting of the 10,000 Things. 67 Song, Tiangong Kaiwu, 295. 68 Song, Tiangong Kaiwu, 295–309, on 295.

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of the sun and moon, which gives gems their brilliance. This is the same principle that causes jade to form in rushing streams, and pearls in watery depths.”69 The Work of Heaven and the Inception of Things establishes the ocean treasury as a counterpart to subterranean treasure troves. The practices of diving and fishing for maritime goods thus have terminological and conceptual equivalences in mining and digging, as specified elsewhere in the same chapter. As with pearls, the moon and the forces of water are involved in the creation of jade and “Like jade that is still encased in its rock crust, the value of a pearl inside a mussel [or oyster] is unknown, and becomes manifest only after it has been taken out and examined.”70 Among all gems it is therefore jade, the superior matter in Ming dynasty material hierarchies, that figures as the earthly equivalent of the pearl. In line with sources dating to the Han Dynasty,71 the Ming-era treatise specifies pearls as originating in the Southernmost part of China, in the Guangdong prefectures.72 It describes jade as “the glory of China’s mountains” in the Northwestern province Xinjiang and contrasts it with the pearls of the Southwestern prefecture Lianzhou in Guangdong, where “pearls reign supreme.”73 The work not only ties local identities to the materiality of their natural resources but identifies pearls in the south as equivalent to jade in the north, the matter at the top of Chinese material hierarchies. The Work of Heaven and the Inception of Things frames pearls and gemstones as materializations of the northern earth’s and the southern ocean’s powers to produce and transform matter. Pearls are tied to the South not only in scholarly writings such as Song’s treatise,74 but also in vernacular stories of the Ming dynasty that reflect on the different roles of the famous pearls from the Southern Chinese district Hepu. The story Jiang Xingge Reencounters His Pearl Shirt features such pearls as commodities in the hands of an elderly woman who, going from door to door, presents them to female clients alongside kingfisher-inlayed hair ornaments hoping for a deal. The tale’s key object is a rare pearl-sewn shirt inherited by a member of a merchant family whose business is based on trading “pearls, tortoise shell, sappanwood, aloeswood, and the like in Guangdong.”75 In the course of the story, the shirt is given to a man by his lover as a keepsake charged with erotic implications as, according to its female donor, to “wear this shirt is to feel my 69 Song, Tiangong Kaiwu, 299. 70 Song, Tiangong Kaiwu, 298. 71 Han to Song dynasty sources on pearl acquisition in South China are discussed in Schafer, “The Pearl Fisheries of Ho-p’u.” 72 Song, Tiangong Kaiwu, 295. 73 Song, Tiangong Kaiwu, 295. 74 Schafer, “The Pearl Fisheries of Ho-p’u.” 75 Feng, “Jiang Xingge,” 33. On the “economy of pearls” and the distances they travel in this tale see Lu, Accidental Incest, 38–54, esp. 42–43.

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body.”76 Jiang Xingge Reencounters His Pearl Shirt illustrates not only the trade in Hepu pearls across China via Guangzhou and their local distribution by female peddlers with access to wives left behind by long distance travelling merchants, it also illustrates the personal value, emotional connotations and erotic implications that Southern Chinese pearls could attain when exchanged across generations and between lovers. Such aspects of materiality and object agency remain naturally unmentioned in Song’s treatise, whose focus is not on the social lives of things but on the origin of the matter of Southern Chinese pearls, specifying that when “a mussel [or an oyster] conceives a pearl, it does so by creating substance out of immaterial matter.”77 To be able to “exist in peace and increase their progeny” mussel or oyster populations should be “left undisturbed for a few decades” and not “gathered too frequently.”78 The material properties of certain pearls were considered more special than those of others and were classified in systems that “call to mind the human ranks, from prince to ordinary subjects and servants.”79 Some pearls were attributed with special powers, for example to prevent the decomposition of a corpse. Among others, the “flaming pearls” hold a special place in Chinese visual culture, although Song specified that they do not exert light in the dark.80 These are best known being pursued by a pair of dragons in a number of symbolically loaded contexts. (See for example Fig. 1.6 in chapter 1.) A set of ceramic objects made during the Kangxi period offers a glimpse of the perceived connection between flames, pearls, shells and clam-monsters with dragon features. (Fig. 2.8) The illustrated bowl shows a seascape with a flower blossom and the shells of a sea snail and a clam. The heads of two creatures peek out of them. They are mollusc-like in terms of their slimy shapelessness and monstrous due to their facial features. The vessel features as a cup in a set of porcelain items comprizing a tea pot, plates and saucers.81 All of the items feature red flames and 76 Feng, “Jiang Xingge,” 33. 77 Song, Tiangong Kaiwu, 296. 78 Song, Tiangong Kaiwu, 298. This statement relates to Han dynasty legends which establish a connection between uncorruptible prefectural rule in Hepu and success in pearl-fishing, a relationship emphatically rejected by Song. 79 Song, Tiangong Kaiwu, 298. 80 Song, Tiangong Kaiwu, 298. 81 In the Dresden collections, the cup was collected along with a plate belonging to the service (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, inventory number PO 594). Recently, several pieces have also been offered for sale. Examples include: A pair of Chinese famille verte dishes Kangxi period, Christie’s London, Lot 46, 15.5.2012; A lobed Chinese famille verte plate with shells among waves, Kangxi, Rob Michiels Auctions, Lot 1116, February 2017; Rare ewer “famille verte” – Kangxi period and rare dish porcelain famille verte – decorated with mythical creatures transformed in shell shape – Kangxi period 1662/1722 offered by Bertrand de Lavergne, Paris, see https://www.bertranddelavergne.com/artworkdetail/788815/18221/

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Fig. 2.8 Anonymous, Cup, China, Jingdezhen, Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Kangxi reign (1662–1722). Porcelain, underglaze blue, overglaze enamel glazes and gold, 6.3 × 13.4 cm, foot: 6.7 cm. Bpk / Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Porzellansammlung PO 6575. Photo: Adrian Sauer.

pearls held by red, blue, grey, yellow or white creatures whose heads peek out of shells that float on waves. These creatures oscillate between the natural and the fantastic: like the clam-monsters described in the Bencao gangmu cited above, they have whiskers that can also be identified as byssus threads that naturally grow out of shells. Like the clam-monster described in the treatise, they somewhat resemble snakes and might be “bigger than them,” but whether they “have horns that look like dragon horns” and scales below their waists remains unclear as the shells hide the creatures’ bodies from view. Unlike clam-monsters they do not produce mirages of “towers and terraces,” but float on water and open to present pearls as, according to rare-dish-porcelain-famille-verte-decorated (accessed December 21, 2020) and https://www.anticstore. art/78682P (accessed December 21, 2020).

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The Work of Heaven and the Inception of Things, some clams and oysters naturally do. Yet, the red flames that emerge from the shells relate them to clam-monsters and the potential of the oily substances they produce and carry in their bodies to light up and spread fragrant smoke. The decorations on the vessels in the set merge myth and observation-based findings. In addition, the shells form part of a scenario in which the transformation of matter is sacred. This is indicated by the blossoms that float alongside the open shells and form a reference to religious flower offerings made during water rituals. The religious link between shells and Buddhism is a strong one as conch shell horns were traditionally used to gather people for prayer and form one of the “sapta ratna, the seven precious objects that Buddhists are encouraged to offer to Buddhist images.”82 Ming dynasty wares decorated in blue and white, whose decorations have been interpreted as religiously inspired,83 feature images of a single snail shell against a backdrop of ocean waves. Among them, some show the shells’ inner and outer spiral shapes in semi-abstract ways, while others feature a mollusc- or snail-like creature lurking in them. While the blue and white Ming wares are reduced in terms of their decoration but heavily loaded with links to Buddhism and Daoism, the paintings on the Qing service are dense and strikingly colourful, featuring a variety of patterns that surround the central motif of the shells with decorative imagery devoid of religious connotations. Their key motif is to some extent informed by decorations on Ming dynasty wares, but their style owes much to Japanese imari wares that Europeans developed a taste for when Chinese kilns alone were unable to satisfy their demand for ceramics. While the clam-monsters form part of an eclectic array of visually striking motifs on Qing dynasty export ware, the motif of pearl-producing molluscs in shells that float on water also reflects early modern Chinese conceptualizations of the transformative forces of nature. The Work of Heaven and the Inception of Things records that when “a pearl has been conceived, the mussel [or oyster], even if it lives in water a thousand fathoms deep, will open its shell when the full moon shines, letting the moonbeam fall on the pearl, of which the form is made out of the essence of the moon.” The treatise further specif ies that, during a clear night, “aged mussels … will float with opened shells all night long, following the course of the moon and turning in every direction to absorb the moonlight.”84 Modern science has shown that pearls are the result of a process of biomineralization around a nucleus that is formed by a parasite, a grain of sand or any other particle that has entered the shell and threatens to harm the 82 Linrothe, Paradise and Plumage, 68. 83 Li, “Mingdai taoci.” 84 Song, Tiangong Kaiwu, 296.

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mollusc’s body. While the ability of nautilus shells to ascend to the surface after the death of their inhabitants has received scholarly attention, 85 the idea that mussels and oysters surf the ocean’s wave in an attempt to produce pearls remains unproven. Nevertheless, the image of floating open shells that “conceive” and create pearls is not limited to Chinese textual and pictorial records, but also appears in European writing.

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Female Features An early modern German translation of the medieval encyclopedia Reductorium morale by the Benedictine monk Petrus Berchorius (Pierre Bersuire, d.1362), records that “various ocean snails [that] live in hard shells” become “fat and pregnant” of the conception of “heavenly dew” (HimmelThaw).86 This happens as “that sea fish or mother of pearl moves to the shore at night, opens up and is fed and impregnated by heavenly dew [and] conceives and gives birth without intercourse and in its flesh a pearl or delectable stone is generated whose birth is created more by the heaven than by the [forces of the] sea.”87 The author uses this narrative as an allegory for the impregnation of Saint Mary with the “gem of the Body of Christ” by receiving “the dew of the [sacred] word in her intestines” without any “male seed” involved.88 The early modern German translation of the Latin encyclopedia refers to “sea fish or mother of pearl” to denote molluscs. The expression PaerlinMutter that literally translates as “pearl mother” is strikingly similar to the explicit equation made between a mollusc’s body and a female womb in Chinese terminology, for example the use of the term “pearl mother” (zhumu) in Tang dynasty sources. As The Work of Heaven and the Inception of Things illustrates, in ancient and early modern Chinese writings, the perception of a mollusc is deeply rooted in notions of its connections with the moon, the ocean and the pearl, which, according to ancient cosmology, are filled with an abundance of yin energy and hence female. 85 See Chamberlain et al, “Post-Mortem Ascent,” and Matteucci, “Drifted Nautilus Shells from the Bajuni Islands.” 86 Etliche Meerschnecken wohnen in harten Schalen … werden feist und schwanger dar=von. Albertinus, Der Welt Tummel- und Schaw-Platz, 661. 87 diser Meerfisch oder PaerlinMutter in der Nacht zum Ufer gehet / sich auffthut und vom Himmelthaw gespeist und geschwaengert wirdt / auch ohne einige Vermischung geberet und empfahet / und in ihrem Fleisch ein Baerlin oder koest=licher Stain erzeugt wirdt / also ihre Geburt mehrers verursacht wirdt durch den Himmel / denn durchs Meer. Albertinus, Der Welt Tummel- und Schaw-Platz, 662. 88 Thaw deß Worts in ihrem Ingewaid empfagen / mit dem edlen Stein des Leibs Christi schwanger worden / unnd also ohne einigen mannlichen Samen. Albertinus, Der Welt Tummel- und Schaw-Platz, 662.

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The majority of pearls handled in medieval and early modern Europe came from extra-European sources. 89 This was already the case when the generative powers of oysters in the “female underwater economy”90 of the ocean were f irst mentioned at length in European writings in Pliny’s Naturalis Historia of 77 BCE, “the best-known and most widely-quoted” source on pearls in early modern Europe.91 The Latin term for pearl (Meleagrina margaritfera) was preceded by the Persian name mervaid, which can be translated as “offspring of light.”92 While the “notion of the raindrop or dewdrop as a kind of celestial sperm that impregnated the oyster” features in Pliny’s writings, it is absent in The Work of Heaven and the Inception of Things and other Chinese sources and has been traced back to ancient Indo-Iranian sources.93 In addition to Pliny and sources that relied on him including the medieval encyclopedia cited above, writings by scholars such as Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576) referred to pearls as being created by the dew of heaven.94 During the second half of the sixteenth century, this idea was dismissed by scholars and explorers. Rondeletius Gulielmus (1507–1566) questioned it on scientif ic grounds,95 while the explorer Richard Hawkins (1562–1622) referred to it as “some old philosopher’s conceit” on the basis of his f irst-hand encounters with pearls and shells in South America. In a travelogue of 1593, he reports: And here let me crave pardon if I erre, seeing I disclaime from being a naturalist, by delivering my opinion touching the breeding of these pearles, which I thinke to be of a farre different nature and qualitie to those found in the East and West Indies, which are found in oysters; growing in the shell, under the ruff of the oyster, some say of the dewe, which I hold to be some old philosophers conceit, for it cannot be made probable how the dew should come into the oyster; and if it were to be the case, then questionlesse, wee should have them in our oysters as those of the East and West Indies; but those oysters were, by the Creator, made to bring foorth this rare fruit.”96

89 On pearls in and from the Americas see Warsh, American Baroque, and Domínguez-Torres, “Pearl Fishing in the Caribbean”; on pearling in the Indian Ocean region see Machado, Mullins, and Christensen, eds. Pearls, People and Power. 90 Pointon, Brilliant Effects, 117. 91 Pointon, Brilliant Effects, 117. 92 Malaguzzi, The Pearl, 10. 93 Donkin, Beyond Price, 13, Pointon, Brilliant Effects, 366n39. 94 Smeesters, “The Secretion of a Pearl,” 464–68. 95 Pointon, Brilliant Effects, 366n39; Gulielmus, Universae aquatilium, cited in Harley, “The Structural Arrangement of the Mineral Matters,” 612. 96 Hawkins, The Observations of Sir Richard, 134.

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Similarly, during his travels to India, the gem merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605–1689) came to the conclusion that the dew theory was unsubstantiated.97 First-hand experiences enabled by travelling as well as scientific examinations, like those by Gulielmus, began to dispel earlier cosmological and religious beliefs that had been shared across Eurasia about the creation of pearls being related to female energies and induced by heavenly sources. Although the exact term “pearl mother” and the perception of shells being related to female energies might not have travelled directly through the transmission and translation of any Chinese texts, it is clear that terms and ideas related to the act of biomineralization in the bodies of molluscs were conveyed as part of a flow of matter, practices, people and knowledge from East to West in which pearls and pearl-related narratives travelled, as well as minerals like cinnabar, as part of “material complexes.”98 The idea of a process of “coming to know” through the manipulation and trading of materials that move across geographic and epistemic space is “an always complex and often partially obscured process” in which much knowledge on the interaction of the human body with the material world “emerge[s] from very long durée systematic observation of patterns in nature, as well as long-term and sustained experimentation with natural substances” and is often recorded in codif ied forms, for example in myths, songs, rituals, etc.99 Understanding the transfer of pearl-related knowledge across time and space as part of a “reciprocal engagement of humans and materials”100 allows us to do away with clear-cut stories of single-point origin in geographic entities defined as China, Persia or Europe and allows for an understanding of “diverse and entangled itineraries from which materials and knowledges emerge”101 and their manifestation in epistemological systems, some of which are more site- and time-specific than others. The concept of “material complexes” has helped us to make sense of the transcultural dimensions of what Marcia Pointon has called “pearl bio-chemistry (that is, the discourse surrounding the constitution of the gem in relation to the organic world).”102 It also supports a better understanding of the connections established between shells and birds in EurAsian sources, among them the idea that molluscs created pearls in a similar way to that in which a hen would generate her eggs.

97 Tavenier, Travels in India, 116–17. 98 On cinnabar and “material complexes” in Eurasia see Smith, “Itineraries of Materials and Knowledge,” on “material complexes” in Eurasia in a more general sense see Smith, ed. Entangled Itineraries. 99 Smith, “Nodes of Convergence,” 8. 100 Smith, “Nodes of Convergence,” 8. 101 Smith, “Nodes of Convergence,” 8. 102 Pointon, Brilliant Effects, 118.

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Bird Bodies The idea that pearls were the “eggs” of molluscs had f irst appeared in the writings of Athenaeus (c. third century BCE) but was not widely adopted until the late-sixteenth century when it increasingly superseded the notion of a pearl’s creation by dew in European texts. 103 The notion that pearls resemble the eggs of hens and other birds changed over time; an early eighteenth-century treatise on collecting, for example, uses the term “eggs” (Eyer) to explain the nature of pearls, comparing them to the eggs of snails and “wild molluscs” in Europe.104 The connection made between birds’ eggs and shells was, however, not limited to the explanation of the origin of pearls. Etymologically, “there was no perceived essential or functional difference between f ish, fowl, or plant casings” in sixteenth-century English, but arguably also in other European languages, and shells “were not unique to marine life but understood as protective devices of relative sophistication and durability to both plants and animals.”105 In ancient Greece, kingfishers were thought to lay their eggs in shells,106 a motif further discussed in chapter 4, and the belief that certain ducks hatched in shells or grew out of shells attached to a tree is illustrated in medieval texts and early modern treatises.107 The illustrations in Ulysse Aldrovandi’s De Reliquis Animalibus of 1606, for example, show a tree with clam-shell-like shapes growing out of its branches from which ducks emerge as well as a bird developing in a “shell” (concha). (Fig. 2.9) The latter is paired with an image of so-called goose barnacles, crustaceans that live attached to hard surfaces, which were believed to be the remains of birds’ eggs until the sixteenth century when travellers started to unravel the connections between the egg-like shapes that are often attached to tree branches and aquatic birds.108 In the Netherlands, the art theorist Karel van Mander (1548–1606) suggested that parrots, birds and shells offered “examples of how to unite all colours with one another,” a demonstration of the fact that nature alone is the “provider and mother of the art of painting.”109 It is highly likely that van Mander had Asian shells in mind, whose polished mother-of-pearl surfaces absorb light in different 103 Smeesters, “The Secretion of a Pearl,” 459; Donkin, Beyond Price, 13–14. 104 Valentini, Museum Museorum, 497. 105 Kelley, “Shells,” 113. 106 Gutzwiller, “The Nautilus, the Halcyon, and Selenaia,” 208. 107 Seide, “The Barnacle Goose Myth”; Lappo et al, “About geese growing on trees.” 108 Aldrovandi, De reliquis animalibus, 543–44. 109 Exempel de bespraeckte Papegaeyen, / Voghels, schelpen, en meer dinghen gheschapen, / Hoe alle verwen malcander verknapen, / Dus Natuere, die ons alles maeckt vroeder, / is van het schilderen voester en moeder. Van Mander, Den Grondt, I, fol. 45v (2.11.8) cited after Hoecker, Das Lehrgedicht, 258–59.

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Fig. 2.9 Ulisse Aldrovandi, De reliquis animalibus exanguibus libri quatuor, post mortem eius editi: nempe de mollibus, crustaceis, testaceis, et zoophytis, Bologna: Joannes Baptista Bellagamba, 1606, 544. Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Biblioteca del BiGeA, Bologna.

ways to European ones, enabling the “uniting of colours” in their reflection. It is even possible that van Mander was familiar with the nautilus shells whose parrot-like shapes Guangzhou craftsmen had reinforced through their carvings, as discussed in chapter 1. If that had been the case, his statement is testimony to transculturally informed aesthetics in which Netherlandish painting theory consciously or unconsciously formed part of a “material complex” across Eurasia that related birds, in particular parrots, and birds’ eggs, to shells. If van Mander had, however, never seen one of the Asian “parrot shells” or heard about their existence, his statement illustrates the possibility of thinking of the comparison between parrots’ colourful feathers and the iridescent inner surfaces of mollusc shells, rather than the Chinese perception of the nautilus’s resemblance to the shape of a parrot with its beak pressed to its chest. The Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures, which was made around 90 years after van Mander’s remarks, refers to birds that transform into shells and shells that transform into birds. As a Song dynasty scholar reports, clam-monsters were

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Fig. 2.10 Nie Huang 聶璜, Haicuo tu 海錯圖 [Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures], 1698. Palace Museum, Beijing, 00006318-3/3. Image copyright © The Palace Museum.

created when a scaly dragon with four legs ( jiao) copulated with a pheasant.110 As the compendium of materia medica Bencao gangmu states, these creatures lived on swallow chicks (yanzi).111 The catalogue features the image of a pheasant surrounded by water among other marine creatures. It appears alongside the phrase “Pheasants enter large bodies of water and transform into clam-monsters (shen).”112 This statement can be traced back to the ancient Book of Rites (Liji) where it belongs to the Monthly Ordinances (yueling); it marks the tenth month, the first month of winter, in the calendrical texts that include accounts of (real and imagined) animal activities.113 The sentence announcing the ninth month, the last of autumn, is: “Sparrows enter the sea and become mollusks.”114 The same idea is represented in the Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures where, alongside an image of sparrows and clams, we read that “Fujian people have a saying: sparrows transform into saltwater clams.”115 (Fig. 2.10) The text goes on to describe how sparrows delve into the sand and their bones and wings are scattered before they turn into clams and that the clams’ surfaces look like sparrows, probably referring to the patterns on their wings. While some of the Monthly Ordinances can still be easily understood, for example, the statement that in the middle of the ninth month “hibernating creatures all push downward,”116 the two ordinances related

110 陸佃雲︰… 交雉則生蜃. Dian Lu (1042–1102) is cited in Li, Bencao gangmu, juan 43. 111 Li, Bencao gangmu, juan 43. 112 雉入大水為蜃. Liji yueling, translation cited from Legge. 113 Zheng, “Animals as Wonders,” 228, 231. 114 雀入大水為蛤. Liji yueling, translation cited from Legge. 115 閩人初為予述海滨花蛤. Nie, Haicuo tu, third ce. 116 蟄蟲咸俯. Liji yueling, translation cited from Legge.

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to birds and marine creatures seem to fall under the rubric of “seasonal legends” rather than seasonal truths. The Monthly Ordinances were provided with extensive written commentaries by scholars of different periods. By the early Qing dynasty, when the Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures was compiled, Chinese scholars had “already acknowledged the discrepancies between animal life cycles as recorded in the Monthly Ordinances and their own observations.”117 As Zheng Xinxian has shown, Emperor Qianlong, the grandson of the Manchu Emperor Kangxi for whom the catalogue was made, aligned himself with Han scholars by adding his own empirical observations to the ordinances. In an appraisal of Qianlong’s comments, the scholar Cao Renhu (1731–1787) remarks on the emperor’s thoughtfulness and gives examples of the ordinances that he corrected, among them the one on molluscs and clam shells. Cao asks: “molluscs transformed from other animals, who had [ever] seen these?”118 The Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures also records historic occurrences of special shells that had been discovered, exchanged and preserved. Among them is an ox-horn shell found in Fujian province that was gifted to Emperor Kangxi, who, as the catalogue informs us, treasured it very much. It is described as having “hair” that resembles “birds’ hair” but mentions that no one knows which bird transformed into this shell. 119 The expression “birds’ hair” probably refers to the byssus threads that molluscs use to f ilter nutritious substances out of the water. A certain similarity between an opened shell that reveals a mollusc’s “hairy” flesh and the view of a hatchling’s developing embryo in a cracked eggshell cannot be denied and might have informed the connection that the treatise makes between molluscs and birds’ bodies, shells and eggs. Although the animal activities of the Monthly Ordinances offered misleading information on bird–mollusc transformation, certain resemblances between the ecologies of flying animals and swimming creatures were drawn from observation (not from classical sources). The relations seen and the connections made between eggs and shells as well as birds and molluscs were inspired by natural objects but would be perpetuated and developed in images and writings. In the European context, the encounter with goose barnacles lead to the creation of medieval myths that were still discussed in Aldrovandi’s early-seventeenth-century treatise on natural history and not seriously questioned before crustaceans in foreign countries would be more closely examined by early modern explorers. Similarly, the pictorial and textual information presented in the Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures builds on ancient texts 117 Zheng, “Animals as Wonders,” 218. 118 Cao Renhu, “Qishi’er hou kao,” cited after Zheng, “Animals as Wonders,” 228. 119 毛… 鳥毛. Nie, Haicuo tu, third ce.

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as well as natural occurrences that in the critical eye of Emperor Qianlong were in some cases seen in contradiction to old beliefs that had remained unquestioned for centuries, among them the assumption that pheasants turn into molluscs. Although the tale of a tree that grows clam shells out of which birds develop is reported, for example, in the medieval travel records associated with Sir Mandeville, who allegedly also travelled to Asia, it seems unlikely that there is a direct connection between Chinese beliefs as manifested in the Monthly Ordinances of the Book of Rituals and the European network of associations made between eggs, shells, birds and molluscs. The seventeenth-century Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures, however, can only be fully understood by paying attention to the transcultural surroundings in which it was created, the Qing dynasty under Emperor Kangxi at whose court European missionaries were crucial agents in the transmission of knowledge on mathematics, astronomy and natural science.120

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Cultured Connections The three volumes of the Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures form part of a larger body of animal treatises collected at the imperial court and preserved in the Palace Museum Beijing. In addition, an album known under the title Manual of Sea Oddities dated to 1688 has survived in the collections of the National Palace Museum Taipei.121 Images of fish in this Chinese treatise can be traced back to motifs from early modern European sources such as Conrad Gessner’s Historiae Animalium of 1558.122 Alongside imagery executed in a naturalistic style that is associated with European painting techniques Sino-European aesthetics of animal representation informed Qing dynasty images of sea creatures whose visual appearance is also reminiscent of illustrated, traditional sources including the Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhai jing). While treatises such as the Bencao gangmu mainly focus on shells that could be consumed, for example for medical purposes, the agenda behind the making of the Qing texts and images was different as they were designed as part of a systematic effort to map the empire. The project to visually document all known creatures was a statement on the imperial ownership of knowledge on nature within and outside the Chinese empire. As such, the albums were also a display of power in a period when ancient writings related to ecology, such as the Monthly Ordinances, were discussed by scholars but questioned by the emperor himself. 120 Jami, The Emperor’s New Mathematics. 121 Anonymous, Manual of Sea Oddities. On the dating see Greenberg, “Weird Science,” 397. 122 Greenberg, “Weird Science.”

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By the eighteenth century, an unprecedented amount of transcultural knowledge on non-Chinese flora and fauna had become available and was being integrated within the political rhetoric of the Chinese empire. As Lai Yu-chih has argued in relation to an album of birds made on imperial command, “the globalized world ironically helped Qianlong to develop an unprecedented revision and innovative reconstruction of the most traditional ideals of the Chinese world order.”123 Qianlong’s bird image project and his Album of Beasts reframed motifs derived from European sources. The latter, for example, includes a rhinoceros that is reminiscent of the one drawn by Albrecht Dürer in 1515 that had been transformed into a widely-copied motif.124 Qianlong’s animal albums incorporated knowledge of foreign creatures to display imperial dominance over them and, by extension, over their lands of origin. In contrast, as illustrated by its bird–mollusc-related entries, the earlier works made during the Kangxi reign period were more deeply rooted in the traditional mapping of nature through means of proto-scientific treatises that treated natural occurrences in relation to classical texts and local proverbs. While the Qing albums were partly informed by non-Chinese imagery, Asian concepts of underwater creatures were, in turn, influential overseas. The most important early modern European sources on China, Johann Nieuhof’s Gezandtschap of 1665 and Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata of 1667, both feature a wide range of Asian creatures, among them marine animals.125 Nieuhof’s travel report includes the image of a flying fish (Exocoetidae), while Kircher’s treatise depicts the “flying turtles of Henan.”126 Nieuhof’s report formed part of European colonization efforts in which the Dutch East India Company, on whose behalf Nieuhof travelled, was pivotal.127 The purpose of the illustrated travelogue was to present “accurate maps and sketches, not only of the countries and towns, but also of beasts, birds, fishes, and plants, and other rarities never divulged (as I am informed) heretofore,” all made “after life” (na het leven).128 As Dirck China, an earlier adviser to the Dutch East India Company, wrote in 1592: “In China lives a very good people and the land is very rich in gold, gemstones, all kinds of silk, pearls, mother of pearl, camphor, quicksilver, rhubarb, gold thread [and] musk.”129 This brief report on the commodities 123 Lai, “Images, Knowledge and Empire.” 124 Lai, “Domesticating the Global and Materializing the Unknown,” 155–57. 125 Nieuhof, Gezandtschap; Kircher, China Illustrata. 126 Kircher, China Illustrata, 205. 127 For a recent overview of approaches to and studies of the history of the Dutch East India Company see van Meersbergen, “Writing East India Company History after the Cultural Turn.” 128 For an in-depth discussion of the concept of verisimilitude in relation to Nieuhof’s treatise see Sun, “The Illusion of Verisimilitude.” 129 In Sina woont seere goet volck / ende is een landt seer rijck van Gout / Edel ghesteente / alderhande syde / Perlen / Perlemoer / Camfer / Quicsiluer / Rhabarbar / Goutdraet / Muscus. Dirck Gerritsz. Pomp, “bericht,” cited after Ijzerman, Dirck Gerritsz Pomp, 20.

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China could offer the Dutch East India Company lists pearls and mother-of-pearl (Perlemoer) directly after the most highly-desirable items of gold, gems and silk, but neither Dirck China nor Nieuhof mentioned shells. While the purpose of the Dutch reports lay in the mapping of commodities, harbours and waterways to enable trade, Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata, which was published only two years after Nieuhof’s travelogue, had a different purpose. The German Jesuit polymath Kircher had never been to China but relied on a rich archive of records written by missionaries, some of whom were fluent in Manchu and Mandarin and had lived in China for decades with direct access to the inner circles of the court under Emperor Kangxi. Kircher’s mapping of foreign cultures and non-European flora and fauna ultimately served religious purposes and was meant to lead the reader “to marvel at and praise God’s admirable arrangements and His wisdom in all things.”130 Much of the information he presented is based on, or even directly translated from, Chinese sources. His detailed explanation of the making of swallows’ nests for consumption in China and Japan was, for example, based on local information gathered by other Jesuits. The comparison Kircher makes between edible swallows’ nests and shells reminds us of the connection made between clam-monsters and swallow chicks mentioned in the Bencao gangmu.131 Equally, the book’s paragraph on flying turtles that are “found in the Chinese Ocean” is based on Chinese accounts that describe some of them as having “wings on their feet,” physical characteristics that Kircher questions.132 Although Kircher was deeply invested in explaining even the rarest natural phenomena in line with the creations of God, his treatise does not address the occurrence of Asian pearls, mother-of-pearl or shells. Concerning European shells, he believed that at a coast in Sicily crushed seashells sprinkled with water would come to life, a view perhaps inspired by Aristotle’s theory of spontaneous generation of matter that he explains, among other examples, through shells.133 Despite the keen interest of European merchants and travellers in Asian pearls and shells as commodities, neither Nieuhof’s nor Kircher’s comprehensive records helped to further nuance the pictorial idea of snail-like monstrous creatures that inhabit Asian shells proposed in the medieval illustrations of the travelogues of Sir John Mandeville, adapted in Ulysse Aldrovandi’s De Reliquis Animalibus (1606) and copied thereafter.134 (Fig. 19A and 19 B in chapter 1) While detailed information on sparrows’ nests, flying fish and turtles in China was made accessible to a wider European readership, the hidden shapes and secret lives of Asian molluscs remained 130 Kircher, China Illustrata, 197. 131 Kircher, China Illustrata, 190. 132 Kircher, China Illustrata, 197. 133 On Aristotle’s theory of spontaneous generation and shells see Leroi, The Lagoon, 231–36. 134 Buonanni, Ricreatione dell’occhio.

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untouched and unknown. This did not change until the eighteenth century when studies of shells and shell ecologies in Asia, especially molluscs and their products, were published in the work of the botanist Georg Eberhard Rumphius (1627–1702),135 who was the first to also give a detailed account of the polishing of nautilus shells in Indonesia before their export to other parts of Asia and Europe. While the agency of molluscs as creators was acknowledged across cultures, images of sea animals with monstrous features travelled in both directions, from China to Europe as Kircher’s and Nieuhof’s accounts illustrate, and from Europe to China as shown in the Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures and the Manual of Sea Oddities. The visual transfer contributed to an exchange in knowledge, but also to the further exoticization of ocean spaces and their “foreign” inhabitants.

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Conclusion Despite the shared quest for knowledge about marine creatures and the transcultural exchange of objects, images and texts, the bodies of molluscs remained largely invisible and understudied in early modern Chinese and European sources. Shells functioned as “clever objects” in China and Europe, where they played an important role in cultures of play but also “taught” scholars and artisans insights into the creative agency of molluscs in particular and nature at large. Clams were recognized as building their own shelters out of “vibrant matter,” but also considered to exert a type of agency associated with human artisanship. The idea of shells capable of crafting magnificent “terraces and towers” was bound to the natural appearance of mirages in the heat of the South China Sea and not appropriated by European sources or images, but ideas on pearl creation in Asian oysters travelled across cultures as part of “material complexes.” Equivalences between the “wombs” of pearl-bearing oysters and the wombs of women surfaced in a number of written sources across Eurasia, some of which also refer to resemblances between shells and eggs or molluscs and birds. In addition, images of monstrous creatures associated with ocean ecologies were exchanged between Asia and Europe, contributing to an exoticization of foreign maritime life. The fact that organisms living in clam and snail shells could design and build their own shelters and form pearls marked them as rare and exceptional, while the ingenious shapes of their shells posed philosophical, mathematical, artisanal and motoric challenges. The organisms that inhabited shells were even more difficult to make sense of than the ingenious 135 Rumphius, The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet. Martin Lister (1639–1712) and his daughters also explored the ecology of shells with a focus on local specimens in their Historiae Conchyliorum of 1685. Roos, Martin Lister and his Remarkable Daughters.

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shapes of the shells themselves as they never fully entered the world of the collector but remained largely invisible inhabitants of the dark and mysterious spaces of foreign oceans believed to be populated by mythological creatures.

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Shell Worlds: Maritime Microcosms in EurAsian Art and Material Culture Abstract Asian shells were collected in early modern Europe, while Mediterranean coral was sought after in Asia. In both locations, artists and artisans created EurAsian objectscapes placing maritime material appropriated from abroad alongside local matter. Such painted and crafted shellscapes and coralscapes materialised ideas on the generation and transformation of matter. This chapter compares the cosmological ideas and material constituents that underlie artistic maritime microcosms and shows how their components echoed the material mapping of foreign spaces in the frameworks of European colonialism and Chinese tributary systems. Despite associations with culturally specific tropes in Greek mythology, Christianity, Daoism and Buddhism, the chapter argues that across Eurasia shells were believed to form gateways to underwater treasuries and give access to supernatural females.

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Keywords: colonialism, Chinese tributary systems, Eurasia, Buddhism

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Asian shells were highly desired by collectors in early modern Europe, while coral from the Mediterranean was eagerly sought after in Asia. In both locations, artisans and painters created EurAsian objectscapes that placed maritime material appropriated from abroad alongside local matter. Such shell and coralscapes were highly ambiguous, belonging to oceanic and terrestrial, global and local, commodified and sacred realms, but unambiguously materialized ideas on the generation and transformation of matter. Despite the attribution of different culturally defined meanings to shells and coral, this chapter argues that, in both Europe and China, maritime material culture formed a gateway to imaginary foreign worlds full of precious rarities, unusual creatures and beautiful women.

Grasskamp, A., Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia. Shells, Bodies, and Materiality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463721158_ch03

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Shells in Flux

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The material cultures of European harbour cities, such as Antwerp and Amsterdam, Lisbon and Livorno, incorporated imported Asian objects, among them shells.1 The same was true for elite collecting in inland cities such as Florence and Dresden where important court collections were being formed, as discussed in chapter 1. In addition, archaeological evidence of a non-European shell, which was presumably traded through Portuguese networks, from the remains of a fifteenth-century fishing village on the Belgian coast in West Flanders confirms the existence of extra-European maritime material culture beyond the main urban centres. 2 Inventories, correspondence and other texts from the time document the availability of large quantities of a wide range of shell species that were exchanged through networks that connected courts, merchants and collectors across Europe.3 In addition to archaeological and written evidence, paintings and prints illustrate aspects of the marketing and collecting of shells and the mythological and religious connotations associated with them. 4 (Fig. 3.1) For example, Cornelis de Man’s painting The Curiosity Seller depicts one of the travelling shell salesmen who knocked on the doors of elite households 1 Literature on the subject of Asian objects in the material cultures of Antwerp, Amsterdam, Lisbon and Livorno is vast and ever-expanding with some publications also addressing aspects of maritime material culture collecting such as the following ones. On Antwerp see Rijks, “A painter, a collector, and a horseshoe crab,” 344–45; the outcomes of the project Reading the Inventory: The Possessions of the Portuguese Merchant-Banker Emmanuel Ximenez (1564–1632) in Antwerp published online under http://ximenez.unibe. ch/project/ (accessed December 24, 2020). On Amsterdam see Coomans, “Schelpenverzamelingen”; Van der Veen “Dit klain Vertrek,” 233; Bergvelt and Kistemaker, De wereld binnen handbereik, 201–2, 232–58, 313–34; diverse entries in Corrigan et al, eds. Asia in Amsterdam; Kehoe, “The Nautilus Cup”; Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in addition to recently excavated archaeological evidence of extra-European shells in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Amsterdam households which includes specimens of Strombus pugilis, Terebra maculate and Oliva published online under https://belowthesurface.amsterdam/nl (accessed December 24, 2020). On Livorno see Iannello, “Red Coral from Livorno to Hirado”; Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers; Trivellato, “From Livorno to Goa and Back.” On Lisbon see Vassallo e Silva, “Goa or Lisbon: Problem of Attribution,” Senos, “The Empire in the Duke’s Palace” and several entries in Kraus and Ottomeyer, eds. Novos Mundos – Neue Welten. 2 Pieters with Bouchet, Ervynck and van Strydonck, “Een 15de-eeuwse sector,” 227, 229, fig. 17. 3 On the role of the Fugger and Welser merchant families and Portuguese trade in the European supply of nautilus shells see Mette, Der Nautiluspokal, 35. On shell exchange between scholarly collectors across Europe see Prosperetti, “‘Conchas legere’,” esp. 390, and Gigante, “Medici Patronage,” 58–61. On trade connections between Genoa and Munich, which included the exchange of Asian shells, see Stockbauer, Die Kunstbestrebungen, 111. On diplomatic gifts exchanged between Italy and Dresden, which included nautilus shells, see Marx, “Künstlermigration und Kulturkonsum,” and Marx, “Medici Gifts to the Court of Dresden.” On shell-made works from Gujarat exchanged in Habsburg networks across Europe see Sangl, “Indische Perlmutt-Raritäten,” and Rudolf, “Exotica bei Karl V.,” 197–98. 4 Roelofs, “Painting Asia,” 232–35; Weststeijn, “Cultural Reflections,” 216.

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Fig. 3.1 Cornelis de Man, The Curiosity Seller, 1672–1067. Oil on canvas, 60 × 51 cm. Sotheby’s.

in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. With a basketful of Asian conches at his feet, he encourages his potential clients to experience the full sensual appeal of his wares by handling them or listening to the “sound of the ocean” that they seem to emit from within. An earlier Dutch painting from the 1640s stages the objects that itinerant shell sellers would have carried with them alongside a living bird and bird cadavers like those that could be acquired in some of Amsterdam’s many shops selling goods

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Fig. 3.2 Attributed to Jan Davidsz de Heem, Still Life with Shells and Birds, 1640–1650. Oil on canvas, 88.5 × 156 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Gemäldegalerie 9675.

from the East Indies.5 (Fig. 3.2) The bird, the cadavers and the shells are displayed on ruins with an ocean scene in the background that includes a ship like the Dutch East India Company’s Witte Leeuw, mentioned in chapter 1, which transported goods from Asia via Africa to Europe. The painting illustrates the view held by painting theoretician Karel van Mander, discussed in chapter 2, that nature was a “provider and mother” of inspiration for painting and birds and shells were “examples of how to unite all colours with one another.”6 In addition to their depiction in genre scenes and still lives, shell-covered shores feature prominently in early modern paintings with mythological content. Several representations of Andromeda show her at the shore, standing on a beach or cliff with shells at her feet. Some of these paintings and engravings show shells from local waters,7 while others, for example Joachim Wtewael’s work of 1611, depict the princess surrounded by non-European conches.8 (Fig. 3.3) The erotic appeal of Andromeda’s 5 van der Veen, “East Indies shops.” 6 Exempel de bespraeckte Papegaeyen, / Voghels, schelpen, en meer dinghen gheschapen, / Hoe alle verwen malcander verknapen, / Dus Natuere, die ons alles maeckt vroeder, / is van het schilderen voester en moeder. Van Mander, Den Grondt, I, fol. 45v (2.11.8) cited after Hoecker, Das Lehrgedicht, 258–59. 7 For example Titian, Perseus and Andromeda, 1554–1556, oil on canvas, Wallace Collection, London; Giuseppe Cesari, Perseus and Andromeda, 1592, oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Jan Collaert II, Perseus and Andromeda, c. 1600, engraving. 8 In addition, also Jan Saenredam after Hendrick Goltzius, Andromeda, engraving, 1601; Jan Brueghel the Elder and Frans Francken I, Perseus liberates. Andromeda, 1599–1613, oil on canvas, Rubenshuis, Antwerp.

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Fig. 3.3 Joachim Wtewael, Perseus and Andromeda, 1611. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF1982-51. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Stéphane Maréchalle.

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exposed body and the sexual connotations of her gesture,9 are enhanced by the fleshcoloured shells at her feet, some of which were perceived as resembling parts of the female body.10 They mark a liminal space between the land on which Andromeda stands and the water in which a monster moves, between living flesh and flesh-like matter and skeletons, between life and death. According to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which inspired many early modern artworks, Andromeda is the daughter of the king of Ethiopia and hence a mythological figure of non-European origin. Although she is depicted surrounded by shells that indicate foreign shores and human skulls and other bones, we cannot safely assume that Wtewael meant his painting to be a reflection on the brutal realities of colonization, which brought African and Asian goods to Europe’s shores, but also caused thousands of deaths. As indicated by a group of people in the background who kneel down in prayer or point at the sea monster and the ocean,11 the image is rather a meditation on the subject of the unpredictable force of the sea itself. Its life-threatening power impacted people in the Netherlands, where Wtewael painted, on a daily basis through floods and dam breaks and by devouring fishermen and their boats and children playing in the tides, but also in relation to Dutch East India Company activities, from which many seafarers did not return. Primarily, however, the painting is an eroticized display of the “sensuous surfaces”12 of female skin and desirable collectables. Their attraction is further enhanced by the morbid elements in the painting that symbolize the thrilling dangers that Andromeda’s saviour Perseus must overcome, which are to some extent comparable to the dangers Dutch seafarers had to overcome to acquire foreign commodities like the shells at Andromeda’s feet. Erotic connotations were absent, however, in religious imagery where shells mark the liminal spaces between land and water in representations of saints, such as depictions of the encounter between Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and the boy by the seaside.13 (Fig. 3.4A, Fig. 3.4B) The illustrated example from 1490 shows the child, who Augustine met during a walk at the seashore, scooping ocean water into a small hole he has dug in the sand using a wooden ladle described as a shell in 9 While she is not literally putting her pointed index finger through the hole formed by her right hand (as her arms are chained to the rock behind her), the explicit gesture for sexual intercourse is prepared by her gesture. Joanna Woodall interprets Andromeda’s hands as gesturing to Perseus, Woodall, “Wtewael’s Perseus and Andromeda,” 41. The interpretations are not mutually exclusive. 10 See chapters 1 and 4. Woodall, “Wtewael’s Perseus and Andromeda,” 41, 45. 11 Joanna Woodall identifies one of the figures as Andromeda’s mother, Woodall, “Wtewael’s Perseus and Andromeda,” 56. This interpretation does not necessarily contradict the one presented here as “the mother” is dressed in clothes that resemble Netherlandish dress rather than “Ethiopian” garments worthy of a queen. 12 Hay, Sensuous Surfaces. 13 Examples include Master of the Legend of Saint Mary, St. Christopher Triptych, 1501–1525, oil on panel, Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp; Benozzo Gozzoli, The Life of Saint Augustine, Scene 12, 1464–1465, fresco, Apsidal chapel, Sant’ Agostino, San Gimignano; Adam Willaerts, Saint Augustine and the Child, 1652, oil on canvas.

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Fig. 3.4A Anonymous, SS. Peter and Augustine, 1490, Tyrolia. Oil on pinewood panel. Staatliche Museen Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Kat. 1692/1693. In the Public Domain. Photo: www.kunstbeziehungen.de.

the original version of the story; this is a parable on the impossibility of Augustine’s attempts to penetrate the mystery of the Holy Trinity with his mind. In the painting, the shells in the foreground remind us of the tale, while their spiral shapes echo the vortex of the water hole into which the boy tries to fit the entire ocean. Pictorially, the shells have the visual power to transform a tiled checkerboard floor into a beach. In religious imagery, shell-covered shores inevitably evoke associations with the Great Flood. As mentioned in chapter 2, the artisan-scholar Bernard Palissy saw the evaporation of the floodwaters as the moment when fish and other aquatic

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Fig. 3.4B Anonymous, SS. Peter and Augustine, detail, 1490, Tyrolia. Oil on pinewood panel. Staatliche Museen Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Kat. 1692/1693. In the Public Domain. Photo: Anna Grasskamp.

organisms turned into stone. Like Palissy, other Renaissance scholars were also interested in fossilized molluscs or mollusc products and they were discussed in treatises by the previously mentioned naturalists Ulysse Aldrovandi and Girolamo Cardano and appear in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and a book by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, whose China Illustrata was mentioned in chapter 2. Another work by Kircher, his Mundus Subterraneus of 1664, shows an illustration of a cluster of petrified shells. (Fig. 3.5) Such remnants from ancient times formed part of any respectable antiquarian collection in early modern Europe and were central to learned discussions on the nature of minerals and the processes of petrification and permineralization.14 While, at first sight, the shell-covered shore in the image 14 See Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time, 15–16; Findlen, “Projecting Nature.”

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Fig. 3.5 Athanasius Kircher with contributions by Crispijn van de Passe and Anthonie Heeres Sioertsma, Mundus subterraneus, Amsterdam: Johannes Janssonius van Waesberghe, 1665, 48. Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel.

of Saint Augustine and the flesh-coloured Asian specimen in the two previously discussed Dutch oil paintings look very different from the heap of fossils in Kircher’s treatise, painted masses of unusual shells were not only preceded by, but to some extent also pictorially informed by, the publication of images of clusters of fossilized shells whose occurrence in nature had been a subject of discussion among learned men for centuries. In a Christian religious context, clusters of shells would evoke biblical times. Mythological imagery staged shells as closely connected to ancient times, for example the era of Andromeda and the sea monster, in line with period conceptualizations of shells that frame them like antiquities, as “the Medals, Urnes or Monuments of Nature.”15 Even the shells in the bird-shell-painting indirectly connect 15 Hooke, Lectures and Discourses, 335.

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Fig. 3.6 Johann Walther, Interior of Count John of Nassau-Idstein’s Grotto at Idstein from idem, Florilège de Nassau-Idstein, manuscript, 1663. Watercolour on vellum, 46.2 × 33.8 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, FRBNF4 6529913.

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to fossilized ones from ancient times as representations of petrified shell clusters in natural history treatises preceded and prepared for the pictorial possibility of staging heaps of African and Asian specimens in a still life painting. A space, often in immediate proximity to cabinets of curiosity, where petrified and extra-European shells were paired with each other was the grotto. Grotto walls, such as those described by Bernard Palissy in his guide to the construction of an ideal grotto and a shell-like city of 1563, imitated fossilized shell clusters and used local and imported shells to evoke and imitate the natural processes of sintering and petrification.16 The illustrated watercolour shows a view of the grotto at the court of Johannes of Nassau-Idstein (1603–1677). (Fig. 3.6) It is one of fifty-four gouaches in the Nassau florilegium, a manuscript created between circa 1650 and 1670 by the painter Johann Walther (1604–1676/7) who documented the gardens and surroundings of the court at Idstein. Walther’s view of the grotto illustrates the seventeenth-century fashion of forming surfaces out of non-local materials, for example branches of red coral from the Mediterranean as well as African and Asian shells in addition to glass and mirror elements, fountains with sculptures of mythological figures, and handmade imitations of the walls and stalagmites of a dripstone cave. The ceiling features figurative decorations that include painted flowers and vine tendrils. Furthermore, sculptures made from shells figure prominently: three masks grow out of the ceiling and a water-spitting creature seems to jump out of a cavity in the wall. With its hooves, large ears, wings at its shoulders, and horn-like extensions on its head, it closely resembles a Zhenmushou, a type of stoneware tomb guardian first made during the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534 BCE). (Fig. 3.7) Alongside the famous Tang horses and other sculpted protectors in animal or human shapes, Zhenmushou came to form part of the material culture of Tang dynasty graves and have been interpreted as figurative representations of the “earth spirit.” The resemblance between Zhenmushou and the creature in the grotto at Idstein suggests that Zhenmushou iconography might have travelled to Europe alongside the Asian shells pinned to the grotto’s ceiling. Jurgis Baltrušaitis (1903-1988) suggested that images of demons in fifteenth-century Latin manuscripts might also have been informed by Zhenmushou iconography.17 Both assertions are difficult to prove. Tang dynasty tomb sculptures were not commonly collected in Europe, representations of the “earth spirit” are not a standard motif in Chinese paintings on porcelain, paper or silk and do not appear in early modern travelogues or other European records of Chinese culture. Although animals made of shells in Southern 16 On Palissy see chapter 2, on shells in Munich grottoes see Maxwell, “The Pursuit of Art and Pleasure,” on grottoes in Italy see Morel, “La théâtralisation de l’alchimie de la nature.” 17 Baltrušaitis, Le Moyen Age fantastique, 167.

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Fig. 3.7 Anonymous, Zhenmushou, late seventh century, China. Earthenware with pigment and three-colour (sancai) glaze. Height 78.1 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 11.83.4.

China during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have survived in European collections,18 evidence of earlier creations is lacking. (Fig. 3.8) While we cannot, therefore, safely assume that the creature in the grotto is a Zhenmushou or modelled after one, it is possible that it is more closely related to the horned, scaled and winged beasts called dragons that were equally associated with China in conjunction

18 Ducks covered with mother of pearl tiles cut in the shapes of feathers that often came in pairs and were crafted in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Southern China originally intended for use as containers or fragrance burners can be found throughout a number of Western collections. See for example One of a Pair of Boxes in the Shape of Ducks, Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Qianlong period (1736–1795), China, wood with mother of pearl, ivory, and glass, h 7 cm, w 5.1 cm, d 11.4 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 56.32.2a, b.

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Fig. 3.8 Anonymous, Beast, 19th century, China. Shells, 40.2 × 35.6 × 30 cm. Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, Leiden. Coll.no.: RV-417-71.

with other decorations on Asian porcelain vessels and other artefacts;19 and two painted dragons feature prominently on the ceiling opposite the sculpture of the water-spitting shell creature. While the Idstein grotto design echoes the nymphaea of antique Rome and materializes early modern European ideas on petrification, it is partially Asian in terms of its materiality and iconography. Spitting water while evoking the processes of sintering and mineral formation through dripstone cave elements, the grotto unites foreign and antique elements and is materially and culturally in flux. Outside the materially and culturally ambivalent spaces of the grotto, nautilus and nautilus-like shells were the epitome of shells in flux: according to ancient authors, whose writings were well known to Renaissance naturalists, man learned how to navigate the sea by following the example of the nautilus, which is described as a ship-like fish, an organism in which animal, sailor and floating vessel are one and the same. Aristotle’s writing describes the nautilus as a polyp, which “between its tentacles has a kind of web” that is “thin like a cobweb” and used “when a breeze is blowing, as a sail” while it lets down “some of its tentacles as rudders.”20 Pliny’s writing introduces an additional creature called nauplius that rides on board the 19 On sixteenth-century conceptualization of dragons in Europe and the difference between Chinese and European dragons see Senter, Mattox, and Haddad, “Snake to Monster,” esp. 71. 20 Gutzwiller, “The Nautilus,” 196.

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Fig. 3.9 Pierre Belon, L’histoire naturelle des estranges poissons marins, avec la vraie peincture & description du Daulphin, & de plusiers autres de son espece, Paris: Regnaud Chaudiere, 1551, 109. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, FRBNF30081627.

nautilus shell, spreading its body’s extensions into the wind to form sails and also using them to row.21 For centuries to come the nautilus shell would be imagined as a boat sailed and navigated by a tentacled creature as, for example, illustrated in Pierre Belon’s Natural History of Unusual Marine Fishes of 1551.22 (Fig. 3.9) In early modern Dutch and German, the antique web of connotations was preserved through the use of the expression “pearl boats”23 for nautilus shells. Furthermore, works by European goldsmiths literally employ conches as sailboats. Examples include shell ships made in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that survived as part of French and Spanish church treasuries, a luxurious salt cellar made in early sixteenth-century Paris in 1527–1528, and numerous German collectables from around 1600.24 (Fig. 3.10) While the striking combination of a shell ship with the gigantic female body materialized by the salt cellar will be further addressed 21 Tümpel, “Die Muschel der Aphrodite, ” 387–88, 391–92. 22 The motif also appears in Wenceslaus Hollar, Nodose paper nautilus (Argonauta nodosa), c. 1646, etching, 9.8 × 13.5 cm. The British Museum, London; Camerarius, Symbolorum et emblematum ex aquatilibus et reptilibus; Lamarck, The Book of Shells. 23 Perlboot, parelboot. 24 Mette, Der Nautiluspokal, 184–86.

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Fig. 3.10 Anonymous, The Burghley Nef, 1527–1528, Paris. Nautilus shell with parcel-gilt silver mounts, raised, chased, engraved and cast, and pearls, 34.8 × 20.8 × 12.2 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, M.60-1959.

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through a discussion of representations of women and shells in chapter 4, it is worth noting here that ancient writings by Aristotle and others describe the nautilus as not just like a boat but also like a woman, using a number of different terms for shells and molluscs that were the same as, or evoked, words used to denote brides or female genitalia.25 The “analogy between the nautilus’s shell and female reproductive capacity”26 evoked in an epigram by the Greek poet Callimachus (305–240 BCE) can also be found in Pliny’s description of pearl generation as similar to female parturition and plays an important role in medieval thought. The Reductorium morale of Petrus Berchorius (Pierre Bersuire, d. 1362), for example, an encyclopedic work widely read until the seventeenth century, presents a metaphorical equation of shells with female genitalia. 27 In addition, there is a pictorial and conceptual connection between antique representations of beasts emerging from shells and fifteenth-century representations of human- and animal-like creatures “born” out of sea snail conches.28 According to Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Aphrodite’s “birth” out of an egg-like shell is conceptualized in similar ways to that of her son Eros, who is sometimes also depicted being born in a shell; these are two among many examples of shell-born apparitions that informed antique art as well as medieval imagery.29 In the visual evidence gathered by Baltrušaitis, the boundary between terrestrial and sea snail shells is blurred in some examples, while others, including one of Giovanni Bellini’s (1430–1516) allegorical representations, show clear evidence of maritime material culture. (Fig. 3.11) Bellini’s image has been interpretated as an allegory of calumny, shame, envy or acedia.30 Regardless of the picture’s specific meaning, which still remains somewhat obscure, it is clear that the naked male figure, whose body is partially revealed by the gigantic sea shell in the image, oscillates between invisible and visible, hidden and exposed, mollusc and man, water and land, fantastic shell worlds and realistic landscape surroundings, natural and supernatural. If we follow the nautilus–vagina equation of the previously discussed ancient and medieval sources, the images of creatures emerging from shells show mythological or supernatural figures at the very moment of their birth. This moment catches them in a state of flux, emerging from the uniquely shaped ocean portals of shells, they are about to begin life on earth. In Baltrušaitis’s reading, the ancient myth of the generative shell that gives birth to Aphrodite and other 25 Gutzwiller, “The Nautilus,” 203. 26 Gutzwiller, “The Nautilus,” 203. 27 Grasskamp, “Spirals and Shells,” 152. 28 Baltrušaitis, Le Moyen Age fantastique, 55–62. 29 Baltrušaitis, Le Moyen Age fantastique, 56. 30 Campbell, “33a–d,” 109.

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Fig. 3.11 Giovanni Bellini, Allegory of Calumny, before 1500. Oil on panel, 32 × 22 cm, Galleria dell’ Accademia, Venice, cat 595d. G.A.VE Archivio fotografico – su concessione del Ministero della Cultura.

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creatures in Greco-Roman cosmogeny lives on in medieval imagery where it is sometimes related to ideas on resurrection and the origin of monstrous creatures. In Europe during the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, monsters were thought to originate in extra-European territories. As The Travels of Sir John Mandeville of 1356/71 report, griffins, dog-headed people and cyclopes could be found in Asia and elsewhere alongside rare beasts unfamiliar to most Europeans at that time, for example elephants. John Mandeville probably never existed, but the “travelogue” attributed to him was one of the most widely circulated travel writings in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe and translated into ten languages. It features an entry on an “island near India” called Traponce, which is commonly considered to refer to Sri Lanka. Here, the “largest shells in the world grow” and, according to the travelogue, “are used as dwellings by the people.”31 Another French version of Mandeville’s tales, a manuscript dated to 1480–1485, presents us with a vision of gigantic snail shells occupied by knights and fair ladies, the inhabitants of Sri Lanka. (Fig. 3.12) In contrast to the previously discussed spiral-shaped shell gates from which supernatural creatures emerge, these conches are dwellings with window-like openings and “entrances.” Although they are surreal in terms of their size, they are closer to what could be found in nature than the creature-bearing conches in other medieval bestiaries. After all, snail shells that were far larger than any European species had arrived in Europe from Asia by the fifteenth century.32 According to Mandeville’s tales, Sri Lanka was close to a place called Trapa, “an ever verdant part of India” with “fertile ground” where “precious stones are mined,”33 which, as another illustration in the same volume reveals, included gemstones but also pearl-filled oyster shells, both of which were imported into Europe from Asia.34 Despite the fact that Asian nautilus shells were created by large molluscs, in terms of their structure and materiality they were comparable to European snail shells. Mandeville’s snail tale exaggerates the size of the shells imported from India in the same way as it exaggerates the fertility of Indian soil, which is depicted as densely covered by gemstones and pearls ready to be collected by whoever passes by. The idea of houses built out of gigantic snail shells is therefore not contradictory to the presence of nautilus conches in Europe, but complementary. Mandeville’s shells are in a state of flux in terms of their cultural identity, represented as amplified escargots they live in Asia, resembling land snails they are of marine origin.

31 Anonymous, Livre des merveilles du monde, fol. 78r. Transcription and translation cited after Morgan Library, Curatorial description, 9. 32 Mette, “Der Nautiluspokal,” 34, 66. 33 Anonymous, Livre des merveilles du monde, 76. Transcription and translation cited after Morgan Library, Curatorial description, 9. 34 Testard, Secrets de l’histoire naturelle, fol. 57r.

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Fig. 3.12 Robinet Testard (illuminator), Secrets de l’histoire naturelle / Le livre des merveilles du monde, ca. 1480–1485, Cognac, fol. 78r. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Fr 22971.

The idea of shells as dwellings also appears in the writings of Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536).35 In a colloquy between a young mother and a teacher that addresses questions of motherhood, the equality of the sexes and the female body’s relationship to the mind, Erasmus’s text states that the mind is bound to the body as a snail or tortoise is bound to its shell.36 The avid shell collector Erasmus also saw conches as tokens of time well spent and trophies of repose in reference to the delectable activity of gathering shells at the seashore in the company of friends, an activity already lauded in ancient writings.37 Exchanged among members of the elite, for example through a gift of twelve Asian shells offered by the Antwerp painter Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625) to the Archbishop of Milan Cardinal Federico 35 On shells as metaphor for bodies left by the souls they housed see Baltrušaitis, Le Moyen Age fantastique. 36 Erasmus, “The New Mother,” 599. 37 Prosperetti, “‘Conchas legere’,” 395.

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Borromeo (1564-1631), in still life paintings “the toys of a gentleman’s leisure” could symbolize mental relaxation, such as that gained from walking on the beach in a friend’s company.38 Simultaneously, shells were charged with religious meanings; the act of looking at God’s creations in paintings implied an act of “revelling in the most beguiling artifice that can be found in the contending realms of Nature,” and an act of meditation and contemplation on the order of the universe that would lead to spiritual insights and renewal.39 In Dutch still lives, shells would additionally refer to colonial networks of commodification and trade.40 This illustrates that, even within the neatly defined pictorial realm of Dutch still life painting, the meaning of a shell in a single image could fluctuate between a trophy of repose, a symbol of God’s creation, and material evidence of colonial connections. In the visual and material culture of medieval and early modern Europe, Asian shells serve as powerful markers of liminal spaces when depicted at the water’s edge, they also symbolize the wide array of newly available foreign commodities against seascape backgrounds, allude to petrification if attached to the walls of a grotto, and evoke female bodies as well as processes of creation and birth. They were conceptualized as being in flux between Europe and Asia, land and water, mythological realms and natural surroundings, past and present times, bodies and things, organic and mineral matter. Forming part of transcultural shellscapes, natural objects originating in Asia were understood within European epistemic frameworks. Such frameworks were radically revized under the impact of early modern globalization processes that increasingly led to a blurring of the boundaries between the “Asian” and the “European” in “EurAsian matters”41 such as SinoGerman ceramics and Italian-Japanese lacquerware. While EurAsian shellscapes were taking shape, rare maritime goods from Europe, most significantly coral from the Mediterranean Sea, were sought after in places throughout Asia including India, Japan and Korea and played an important role in the increasingly globalized material cultures of Ming and Qing dynasty China.

Coralscapes In recent years, the “coral networks” of trade that linked the Mediterranean to the Chinese court have been examined in a global context.42 Maritime material culture 38 Prosperetti, “‘Conchas legere’,” 402. 39 Prosperetti, “‘Conchas legere’,” 402. 40 Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade. 41 Grasskamp and Juneja, ed. EurAsian Matters. 42 Grasskamp, “Branches and Bones;” Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers; Trivellato, “From Livorno to Goa and Back”; Lacey, “The Coral Network”; Raveux, “Du corail de Méditerranée pour l’Asie.”

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offered by foreign merchants, missionaries and embassies to the Chinese court has been discussed in the context of elite collections held by Ming and Qing dynasty emperors as well as literati scholars. 43 It has been argued that coral was perceived as “transformative matter” in Europe as well as in China and that it was artistically employed in religious contexts in both cultures to embody metamorphic elements related to the resurrection of Christ and motifs from Ovid’s Metamorphoses on the one hand and the transformations of bodies in the context of Buddhist worship on the other. 44 In paintings, a branch of red coral had the potential to convey as many different meanings as the shells discussed above: it could symbolize tree branches and human bones, embody Buddhist saints and materialize an auspicious response from heaven; it was simultaneously considered to be part of Chinese material culture and acknowledged to be of non-Chinese origin.45 Coral’s status as a “rare”46 object in between organic and mineral matter, “a crimson tree, lacking flowers and leaves / Neither stone nor yet a gem-mineral,”47 as Tang dynasty poetry puts it, is in line with the important role shells played in European discussions on petrification processes. Like shells, which Europeans associated with foreign as well as mythological spaces, coral was known to originate in non-Chinese ocean waters, but simultaneously believed to “grow on the summit of Penglai,”48 the paradise-like islands inhabited by the Daoist Immortals. Comparable to the shellcovered beaches of European imagery, the coral-spiked ocean shores that appear in some Chinese paintings mark liminal spaces in which maritime objects remain in flux, their location oscillating between land and water, their status fluctuating between commodities and objects found in nature, and their context being tied to global networks of exchange as well as local frameworks of religious reception. 49 In addition to the parallels between the reception of Asian shells in Europe and the framing of Mediterranean coral in China, maritime material culture also formed an important constituent in the crafting of EurAsian miniature landscapes in both cultures.50 Early modern Handstein, hand-sized rocks sourced from German mines that became part of courtly collections, were decorated to represent miniature landscapes including fragments of maritime material culture such as coral and 43 Grasskamp, “Branches and Bones”; Grasskamp Objects in Frames, 127–62; Grasskamp, “Kuangjia ziran.” 44 Grasskamp, “Branches and Bones,” 135. 45 Grasskamp, “Branches and Bones.” 46 Grasskamp, Objects in Frames, 152–53. 47 絳樹無花叶，非石亦非瓊Wei Yingwu 韋應物 (c. 737–792), translation quoted from Schafer, Peaches of Samarkand, 246, also discussed in Ptak, “Notes on the term Shanhu.” 48 蓬萊石上生. Wei Yingwu 韋應物 (c. 737–792), translation quoted from Schafer, Peaches of Samarkand, 246. 49 Grasskamp, “Branches and Bones.” 50 Grasskamp, Objects in Frames, 127–62.

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shells. Likewise, numerous Chinese miniature landscapes (penjing) employed natural rocks as miniature mountains and coral pieces as trees. Both Handstein and penjing are manmade microcosms that display natural specimens – coral branches, shells or rocks – in curated ensembles to equate the creative power of art with that of nature.51 In addition to the miniature mountains that Handstein materialized, European artisans also crafted collectable underwater seascapes.52 Shielded by glass plates that materialized a membrane of transparent yet reflective water, such seascapes were made from shiny shells, coral and mother-of-pearl; inhabited by sculpted representations of mythological creatures, they materialized visions of a foreign underwater microcosm abundant in precious, rare and shiny objects.53 Collectable miniature mountains integrated corals and local shells alongside rocks as constituents of a panorama of mineral matter and petrification relating to actual sites and mining territories.54 Miniature seascapes, in contrast, staged the ocean as an underwater treasury and a nautical counterpart to subterranean spaces full of riches. While the rich tradition of “potted landscapes” and coralspiked “miniature mountains” in Chinese material culture far exceeds the limited phenomenon of early modern Handstein in scope and cultural signif icance, very few penjing materialize oceanic scenes. Examples of those that do include a sculpture of the mythological f igure Kui Xing emerging out of a roaring sea crafted from kingfisher feathers placed on top of a turtle-like beast with a fish tail (ao) staged in a tray carved out of coral.55 Unlike other penjing that employ coral and pearls to materialize mountainous microcosms, this “potted scene” uses maritime matter in the materialization of the oceanic realm. While sculpted representations of “potted” seascapes are rare, underwater scenes sometimes appear in Chinese painting. Buddhist paintings include diverse representations of the so-called luohan, followers of the historic Buddha who have survived from ancient times, awaiting his return to the mundane world of the unenlightened. Their number, attributes and “life stories” have changed over time with the rise of Chan Buddhism in China in conjunction with Confucianist and Daoist beliefs. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, “a new theme emerged in the repertoire of lohan painting, that of the 16 or 18 lohan miraculously crossing the sea,” a motif likely inspired by popular fiction’s 51 Grasskamp, Objects in Frames, 157–62. 52 Grasskamp, Objects in Frames, 87–126; Grasskamp, “Metamorphose in Rot”; Scheicher, “Korallen in fürstlichen Kunstkammern.” 53 Grasskamp, Objects in Frames, 116. 54 For example: Martin Stieber, Erzstufe of Christoph III. Scheurl (1535–1592), ore, minerals, coral, mother of pearl, gastropod shell, enamelled silver, Erzgebirge and Nuremberg, 1563, h 29.5 cm, w 35 cm, d 24 cm. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, HG10294. 55 Shih, “Qing diao shanhu Kui Xing.”

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description of the eight Daoist Immortals crossing the sea.56 The handscroll Luohan Crossing Land and Sea, dated to the seventeenth century and formerly attributed to Qiu Ying (1494?–1552), shows the disciples as they travel from the deep sea across ocean waves to the coast where they walk on the shore, and traverse forests and mountains. They stand or sit on the backs of beasts and mythological creatures, are surrounded by their attendants and adepts as well as a variety of deities and animals. Out of the eighteen luohan, thirteen travel on the backs of beasts, while three are represented standing with folded hands. They look towards an elaborately crafted baldachin that floats in the air guarded by two warriors. Behind this baldachin, at the very end of the scroll, a man appears in the woods. Scattered on the ground at his feet are the precious objects that Buddhists are encouraged to offer to Buddhist images (sapta ratna), among them shells and coral.57 His foreign-style gown and headgear, muscular and hairy body, facial features and curly hair signal that he comes from the territory outside China where Chan Buddhism itself originated. The golden rings around his arms and legs and the jewellery on his chest are references to the royal adornments of the body of the historic Buddha himself, prince Gautama, whose return the luohan await. The sacred objects that are depicted scattered on the ground at the very end of the scroll feature elsewhere in the landscapes and waterscapes travelled by the luohan. Among them coral is especially noteworthy as it appears in four places: first, against the background of a roaring sea in the hands of a female figure who emerges out of an open clam shell; second, amidst waves on two golden plates filled with precious gems and ivory tusks held by yaksas (semi-divine semi-demonic creatures who were understood as foreign and believed to inhabit the waters);58 third, in a vase that is carried by one of the attendants who accompany the luohan on their journey; and fourth, lying on the ground alongside other sacred items in the previously described scene toward the very end of the scroll. (Fig. 3.13A, Fig. 3.13B) Throughout the scroll, coral, tusks, gems and other “gifts” offered by a sanctified nature shift from natural matters in the claws of a crab-man and the hands of a shell-woman to staged items arranged on plates and in a vase. Moving out of the possession of animal-like figures and yaksas, maritime matters are culturally appropriated by the hands of the luohans’ attendants and, through the material frame of a vessel, framed as collectables before they enter the panorama of Buddhist treasures scattered on the ground alongside sea shells and pearls as well as precious metal objects. In addition to the representation of the luohan, who travel from 56 Baker, “From the Profound to the Mundane,” 105. 57 Depending on context they include gold, silver, lapis lazuli, crystal, pearl, coral, agate, emerald, carnelian and seashell. Linrothe, Paradise and Plumage, 68. 58 Shahar, “Indian Mythology and the Chinese Imagination,” esp. 28 and 31.

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Fig. 3.13A Formerly attributed to Qiu Ying, Luohan Crossing Land and Sea (detail), 17th century. Handscroll, ink on paper, 33.9 × 1121.7 cm. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Charles Lang Freer.

Fig. 3.13B Formerly attributed to Qiu Ying, Luohan Crossing Land and Sea (detail), 17th century. Handscroll, ink on paper, 33.9 × 1121.7 cm. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Charles Lang Freer.

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the ocean’s depths to mountain peaks, the scroll’s second underlying theme is the transformation of matter across space. Not all the precious goods in the scroll are maritime matter, but all of them could be of foreign origin and have traversed the oceans before arriving on Chinese shores: huge conch shells and coral branches, enormous elephant tusks and precious pearls, jewels and Buddhist emblems made of gold are all closely associated with goods that reached China from (or via) India. Tansen Sen has shown how trade across the Indian Ocean region changed from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries. First, Buddhist monks supplied China through “reciprocity, redistribution, and exchanges”59 with “religious items, pearls and coral, for example.”60 Later, between the mid-tenth to the fifteenth centuries a “new pattern of Sino-Indian commercial and cultural interactions” emerged “that was dominated by mercantile concerns instead of Buddhist doctrines and pilgrims.”61 Sen’s analysis of the “transformation of Sino-Indian relations from Buddhist-dominated to trade-centered”62 concludes with written evidence from Ma Huan (1380?–1460?), who accompanied Hong Bao (1412–1433) and Admiral Zheng He (1371–1433/35) on their early-fifteenth-century voyages through the Indian Ocean on behalf of the Ming Emperors. He describes how, upon the arrival of a Chinese embassy in Calicut, the local agents first receive Chinese goods and “the Chetty merchant and the men of wealth then come bringing precious stones, pearls, corals, and other such things, so that they can be examined and the price discussed.”63 Sen’s analysis shows that, during the early Ming dynasty, maritime matter became commodified, losing its earlier, regionally framed and exclusive perception as sacred Buddhist items brought by monks from India to China. Although the tusks and some of the jewels on the plate are not maritime matter by definition, they are related to the world of the oceans having entered China on board the “treasure fleets” (baochuan) or other vessels alongside maritime matter such as coral and pearls. Golden plates filled with gemstones, coral and tusks, like those carried by the yaksa in the handscroll, also appear in Images of Tribute Giving (Zhigong tu), for example, in a painting by Qiu Ying (1494–1552) that shows golden plates filled with coral and jewels carried by two people of colour from a region now in Indonesia who offer them as tributes to the Chinese emperor.64 The two figures in the handscroll

59 Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy and Trade, 210, referencing Liu, Ancient India and Ancient China. 60 Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy and Trade, 209. 61 Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy and Trade, 198. 62 Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy and Trade, 215. 63 Ma, Ying-yai sheng-lan, 140–41, modified and cited from Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy and Trade, 234. 64 Qiu Ying 仇英 (1494?–1552), Zhigong tu 職貢圖 [Image of Tribute Giving], ink and colour on silk, handscroll, China, before 1552. Palace Museum, Beijing. Grasskamp, Objects in Frames, 141.

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are demonic guardians of the Buddha and warrior-like yaksa living in the water, but they are simultaneously tribute bearers who offer him foreign sacred goods. The smaller monstrous creature next to the yaksa, which carries a snail shell on its back and holds a tusk in its claws, and the woman in the clam shell also resemble tribute bearers in ways that can be better understood in relation to Daoist imagery. The painting Three Officials Out on an Inspection was originally attributed to Song dynasty artist Ma Lin (fl. 1195–1264), but is rendered in a style different from his, with “the brushwork in the landscape forms being closer to that of a Ming dynasty (1368–1644) artist.”65 It shows the Daoist Officials of the Heavens, of the Land and the Water on an inspection tour to “observe good and evil in the land and take care of all living beings.”66 Their followers include demons and mythological figures and a few animal-like creatures in the entourage of the dragon-riding Official of Water. (Fig. 3.14A, Fig. 3.14B) Walking upright, the animals are represented like humans. They offer precious goods to the Official of Water: a snail shell “mollusc” and crayfish each carry a pearl, a fish and turtle each handle a branch of coral, while a frog and a clam-shell “mollusc” offer gemstones on a golden plate and a jar that emits beams of light. Similar objects appear in Images of Tribute Giving, for example, Yan Liben’s seventh-century Zhigong tu features foreign vassals of the Tang court offering a jar that emits beams of light that presumably emanate from the luminous gemstones it contains, enormous ivory tusks, different kinds of rocks shaped by wind and water, and other items. (Fig. 3.15) Yan Liben also created a painting of the Official of Water in the company of armed figures who, like the yaksa in the Buddhist handscroll and the creatures in the Daoist painting, were “neither demons nor barbarians” but something in between, as an eleventh century description of the now lost painting reports.67 It also featured a female figure. The Ming dynasty painting shows a woman in close proximity to the shell creatures and the Official of Water. She offers a ball of jade on a golden plate and stands next to a man with a jade slab. The luohan handscroll shows a variation of this pair: the woman with the coral branch who steps out of a clam shell is close to a man with a crone and a jade slab who resembles the f igure in the Daoist painting. He can be identified as the dragon king. This is suggested by the iconography of a slightly earlier representation of the luohan theme attributed to You Qiu (1525–1580) that prominently features an image of the dragon king with a jade

65 National Palace Museum, Curatorial statement, https://theme.npm.edu.tw/exh102/gods&ghosts/en/ ch01.html (accessed on July 1, 2020). 66 National Palace Museum, Curatorial statement, https://theme.npm.edu.tw/exh102/gods&ghosts/en/ ch01.html (accessed on July 1, 2020). 67 Huang, Picturing the True Form, 295; phrase from the poem to commemorate the viewing of Yan’s painting by Su Xun (1009–1090) also cited after Huang.

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Fig. 3.14A Formerly attributed to Ma Lin, Three Officials Out on an Inspection, probably Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk, 348 × 125.8 cm. The Collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, K2A000847N000000000PAA.

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Fig. 3.14B Formerly attributed to Ma Lin, Three Officials Out on an Inspection (detail), probably Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk, 348 × 125.8 cm. The Collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, K2A000847N000000000PAA.

Fig. 3.15 Yan Liben, Zhigong tu [Image of tribute giving] (detail), before 673. Handscroll, ink and colour on silk. The Collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, C2A000001N000000000AB.

slab.68 According to the Buddhist Ocean Dragon King Sutra, the dragon king had

68 You Qiu (active 1540–1590), Luohans Crossing the Sea, dated 1587, lot 557, Sotheby’s New York, 14.9.2016. Link: https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/lot.557.html/2016/roy-and-marilyn-pappcollection-of-chinese-paintings-n09544 (accessed December 26, 2020).

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invited the luohan and the Buddha to his palace at the bottom of the sea.69 While this painting shows them travelling to the dragon king’s palace, in the previously analysed seventeenth-century handscroll the luohan are travelling away from the underwater mansion. The palace’s open doors are depicted at the very beginning of the scroll surrounded by ocean waves and peeking out of the palace are a little boy and a beautifully dressed woman, probably the dragon king’s daughter, who also plays a role in Buddhist tales. The woman in the shell echoes the image of the elegant princess in the dragon king’s palace, but her upper body is naked. Looking like a lady, her “palace” is one of those gigantic shells called chequ that belong to the family Tridacnidae that live in tropical waters and were associated with foreign oceans.70 Here one would also encounter the mythical Kingdoms of Women (nüren guo).71 It has been suggested that Kingdoms of Women situated in the dangerous zone of the South China Sea might be understood as underwater refugium for females thrown overboard as human sacrifices.72 While this morbid explanation remains debatable, Kingdoms of Women are framed as either sites of “gender inversion” or “male sexual adventure” from ancient times to the Qing dynasty.73 Commonly associated with non-Chinese women from areas close to China, in nineteenth-century literature the trope became connected to women from Europe and America.74 While we can only speculate on the cultural identity of the shell-woman in the Buddhist painting and her potential citizenship in a Kingdom of Women, she illustrates that “‘woman’ served as an important figure of the other in Chinese ethnographic discourse”75 not only in relation to mythical spaces exclusively inhabited by females but in relation to non-Chinese ocean spaces in general. The shell-woman in the painting is not only “other” to man, but also neither fully human nor animal. As a hybrid creature she closely relates to clam-monsters. In fact, the same painting that shows the luohan travelling to the dragon king’s palace presents us with the image of a woman conflated with a clam-monster: a female face can be seen in an open clam shell that sends out a cloud with two buildings, a mirage typically associated with clam-monsters, as discussed in chapter 2. The close relationship between clam-monsters (shen) and dragons or kraken ( jiao) is, 69 Baker, “From the Profound to the Mundane,” 111. 70 Ptak, “Notizen zur Bezeichnung chequ.” 71 Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography. Different geographic regions outside China were associated with such kingdoms, among them “the fable of the ‘Kingdom of Women’ in Indonesia is a wide-spread one” according to Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo, II, 724. 72 Ptak, “References to the Coral Islands,” 58. 73 Teng, “The West as a ‘Kingdom for Women’,” 102. 74 Teng, “The West as a ‘Kingdom for Women’.” 75 Teng, “The West as a ‘Kingdom for Women’,” 102.

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in the case of female clam-monsters, further strengthened by tales of seductive, but often cruel, females who present themselves to men as beautiful women but can transform into water creatures. During the Tang dynasty, when the lure of the mirage-making clam-monsters took shape, poetry and prose featured various kinds of dragon and kraken women residing in rivers and lakes.76 Some of them are described as inhabiting ingeniously designed underwater palaces that resemble those in the mirages produced by clam shells,77 while others are located in spaces outside China.78 While the shapeshifting seductresses are associated with bodies of water frequently travelled by the readers of Tang writings, for men regularly had to travel across China’s rivers and lakes, for example “toward new country posts, or into exile, or on recreational excursions,”79 these bodies of water were, of course, connected to the ocean that was believed to be inhabited by monstrous creatures. While the dragon and kraken women who appear in Tang writings commonly turn their objects of desire into victims, drinking the blood of men and engaging in other cruel deeds, Buddhist and Daoist tales paint a different picture. The dragon king’s daughter, for example, can shapeshift and lives at the bottom of the ocean, but eventually becomes a devoted Buddhist. Furthermore, the bodhisattva Guanyin might be shown as an oceanic figure emerging from or floating in a shell, a motif further discussed in chapter 4.80 Similar to the yaksa in the painting, who are on the one hand bloodthirsty warriors and on the other protectors of the Buddhist faith, the woman who emerges from the clam shell oscillates between different identities. She is a beautiful lady and a slimy mollusc, a seductress and a clam-monster capable of creating mirages. The figure in the shell forms part of local ecologies in line with dragon ladies and kraken women who were reportedly encountered by travellers throughout Chinese waters, but her oceanic identity and the coral she holds closely link her to foreign underwater spaces. The fact that she presents a branch of coral to Buddha, not a pearl, which would be naturally produced by a mollusc and hidden inside its shell, is remarkable. It suggests that she is a human-like tribute bearer like the fish and the turtle in the Daoist painting who both offer coral branches to the Official of Water that they did not produce but harvested from the ocean. Unlike the creatures in the Daoist painting, the mollusc-woman is represented with feet. Her left leg seems to be stepping out of the wide-open clam. This liminal position connects her to the 76 Schafer, The Divine Woman. 77 Schafer, The Divine Woman, 166. 78 Schafer, The Divine Woman, 153. 79 Schafer, The Divine Woman, 187. 80 Kanō Tan’yū 狩野 探幽, Kouri Kannon 蛤蜊観音 [Shell Guanyin], ink and colour on silk, before 1674. Hakuin Ekaku 白隠慧鶴, Kouri Kannon 蛤蜊観音 [Shell Guanyin], hanging scroll, ink on paper, 87.5 × 26.8 cm, before 1769.

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dragon princess at the gate of the underwater palace whose left arm is positioned outside the underwater mansion while her body lingers inside. Vernacular stories from the Ming dynasty refer to such underwater palaces as built from “pillars made of coral” and “beams of hawksbill turtle shells” filled with treasures “of a different order from those in the human world.”81 Considering the understanding of conches as housing (discussed in chapter 3), we can interpret the clam-woman as being captivated between two spheres that are connected through the portal of an open clam shell: on the one hand fluid underwater spaces inhabited by clam-monsters, dragons and their daughters and on the other terra firma inhabited by humans. The shell is a gateway to other realms, out of which few creatures transcend to our world and out of which only a few objects – among them coral branches – reach human territories to enter elite collections and Buddhist shrines. As part of the increasingly globalized objectscapes of Ming and Qing dynasty China,82 coral was a widely travelled object associated with the “Western ocean” (xiyang) that connected seventeenth-century China to India, Africa and Europe. Its belonging to local and non-local spheres, as well as its transformative power to change from soft to hard, plant-shaped to mineral-like, are comparable to the shapeshifting powers of its bearer. Stepping out of the shell, the clam-woman does not bring a pearl, which would be the usual product of a mollusc’s body, but instead offers a wondrous and strange branch that grows in Penglai, the immortals’ paradise. Like the ocean, the gigantic shell is a gateway through which foreign objects entered local material cultures. Marine objects did not have one life, but many. Coral was invested with “social lives”83 as a literati collectable and in imperial contexts; it functioned as a relic with a “sacred life” in Buddhist shrines and symbolized the spiritual spaces of Daoist paradises in miniature landscapes, but it also became increasingly commodified through well-known Ming and Qing dynasty trade routes. Coral had “global lives”84 in EurAsian trade networks, but also “lived through” local episodes, as illustrated by the Buddhist and Daoist paintings analysed above that reflect on its transformation from natural substance to sacred matter and from foreign to “Chinese.”

Conclusion In Chinese and European visual and sculptural representations, maritime objects evoked associations with maritime worlds filled with unknown rarities. In 81 Feng, “Magistrate Xue,” 595. 82 Clunas, et al, eds. Ming: Courts and Contacts; Hay, Sensuous Surfaces. 83 Appadurai, The Social Life of Things. 84 Gerritsen and Riello, eds. The Global Lives of Things.

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transcultural paintings and carefully crafted miniature landscapes, Asian shells and Mediterranean coral resonated with the material mapping of foreign spaces in the frameworks of European colonialism and Chinese tributary systems. In both cultures, the spaces where maritime matter such as pearls, coral, and shells were thought to originate blurred distinctions between real foreign territories and imagined realms inhabited by mythological figures, such as the palace of the dragon king and his daughter, Kingdoms of Women, the Daoist immortals’ island Penglai and the affluent spaces of Ovid’s Ethiopia where Andromeda originated. Despite the association of shells and coral with culturally specific tropes found in Greek mythology and Christian, Daoist and Buddhist belief systems, across Eurasia maritime material culture did not only form a gateway to imaginary foreign worlds full of collectable rarities, but also to unusual creatures, among them women of great beauty. These were represented surrounded by or, in the case of Chinese shell women, even stepping out of rare maritime goods from abroad, evoking an equivalence between their bodies and the sensuous surfaces of foreign collectables.

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4

Woman with a Shell: Transcultural Exchange, Female Bodies and Maritime Matters Abstract This chapter discusses images of women with shells across Eurasia and the artistic negotiation of materiality and corporality, objectification and sexual agency, intimacy and distance in both physical and geographical senses. While some of the works discussed are well-known representations of Venus surrounded by sexualised objectscapes, the chapter also introduces religious imagery framed by shells and women with shells in early modern Chinese and Japanese paintings. Despite their differences, all of these works link female bodies to objects of maritime material culture. The chapter argues that in China and Europe, images of women with shells are visual and material reflections of foreign (underwater) spaces full of riches, paradise-like realms that not only promise material affluence but also erotic fulfilment.

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Keywords: Eurasia, shells, objectification, Venus, Galatea, Guangzhou

Standing inside a shell, a woman with windblown hair lifts a sail above her head. (Fig. 4.1) While we see her back, she exposes her front to three f igures in Chinese robes. The scene is framed by bamboo and a pine tree, a garden scene with scholar’s rocks pierced by wind and water, and houses beneath palm trees. The delftware dish with its blue and white decoration dates to 1680/90; it merges technologies and iconographies of Chinese and European origins. The female figure incorporates attributes of the mythological goddesses Venus and Fortuna, she is “European,” while the shell underneath her feet that connects her to the “Chinese” pictorial space is EurAsian, as this chapter will show. Building on the previous parts of this book, chapter 4 argues that early modern European images of women with shells are connected to imaginary visions of foreign (underwater) spaces full of riches, paradise-like realms that

Grasskamp, A., Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia. Shells, Bodies, and Materiality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463721158_ch04

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Fig. 4.1 Anonymous, Plate, ca. 1680–90, Delft. Delftware, tin-glazed earthenware. Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln, E3783. Photo: Karl Tobias Friedrich.

promise material affluence and erotic fulf ilment. It focuses on “women with shells” in depictions of Venus, allegories of lust, and representations of foreign women during the sixteenth and seventeenth century and goes on to consider how the erotic content of European images of women with Asian shells was appropriated and amplif ied by artisans in China after its arrival there from the eighteenth century on.

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Women on Shells Among all the images of women on shells, the most well-known is probably Sandro Boticelli’s iconic figure in the centre of his painting The Birth of Venus of 1485–1486. The painting depicts the goddess of love who, according to myth, was born out of Uranus’s sperm appearing as sea foam. Although ancient artists frequently represented Venus in an open clam shell,1 ancient Greek writings associated Aphrodite with the nautilus.2 While Boticelli’s shell resembles a scallop, it is much bigger than any local species. Its size connects it to the realms of mythology where many things are larger than life, but also to non-European geographic spaces where giant clams (Tridacna gigas) originated, including those from Asia found among the remains of the Dutch vessel Witte Leeuw that was wrecked in 1613. While Boticelli may never have seen a shell of this type, it was known at that time that shells from Africa and Asia could grow far larger than European specimens. The fourteenth-century writings associated with Sir John Mandeville (discussed in chapter 3) even referred to snail shells in Sri Lanka that were big enough to house humans. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the connections between larger-than-life snail shells, mythological figures, and the inhabitants of non-European territories persisted. An example is provided by Marx Kornblum’s nautilus cup, discussed in chapter 1. It places a large Asian shell on top of a mermaid and underneath a sculpture of a mythological goddess sailing aboard a cockle or scallop shell. Two gilded silver snails were originally fixed on either side of the nautilus,3 materializing the period perception that Asian shells were produced by gigantic underwater molluscs that resembled local species, as discussed in chapters 2 and 3. As argued above, the cup contrasts a clam shell’s symmetrical proportions and the ideal beauty of a Venus-like goddess with the “dangerously” seductive foreign bodies of an Asian snail shell and a Galatea-like mermaid. The image of Venus in a shell boat holding a sail, like the one on top of Kornblum’s cup, is a familiar motif in sixteenth-century Italian and Netherlandish prints. (Fig. 4.2) Ancient writings that associate Aphrodite with the nautilus refer to the nautilus’s sail, which consists of “a kind of web … thin like a cobweb.”4 Furthermore, the myth of Aphrodite and some of the visual representations of her as Venus are entangled with the cult of Isis, the Egyptian goddess of the sea, the tides and the winds, who is sometimes represented aboard a sailing vessel. From the sixteenth century onwards, Fortuna, the allegorical personification of luck and Roman goddess 1 The motif is discussed in Simon, Die Geburt der Aphrodite, 44; Gutzwiller, “The Nautilus,” note 30. 2 Tümpel, “Die Muschel der Aphrodite”; Gutzwiller, “The Nautilus.” 3 List, “Wiener Goldschmiede,” 292. 4 Aristoteles, History of Animals, 350 BCE, 662b5–15, translation cited after Gutzwiller, “The Nautilus,” 196.

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Fig. 4.2 Dirck Vellert, Venus Marina, 1524. Engraving, 7.3 × 4.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-2158.

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Fig. 4.3 Fortuna, illustration from Theodor De Bry, Emblemata Nobilitatis, Frankfurt: Dietrich de Bry, 1593. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 28917B.

of fortune who was traditionally depicted standing on an orb, a globe, a wheel or on board a ship, appropriated some of Venus’s features and was typically represented standing on an orb in a shell.5 (Fig. 4.3) Such images of Fortuna represent not only the dangers of life at sea, but also the fortunes of those who sail the proverbially stormy seas of love, Venus’s territory. The figure on Kornblum’s cup is one such Venus-like Fortuna, positioned inside the shell-like Venus, but standing on a pearl as Fortuna would. The same figure is suggested by period writings such as the 1584 treatise The discouerie of witchcraft by Reginald Scot (c. 1537–1599) that mentions how witches were believed to “saile in an egge shell, a cockle or muscle shell, through and under the tempestuous seas.”6 A drawing of 1520 by Urs Graf (1485–1527) shows a Fortuna with the attributes 5 See Bordignon et al, eds. “Fortuna during the Renaissance” and De Girolami Cheney, “Lavinia Fontana’s Galatea.” Further examples include Philip Galle, Melchior Lorck, Victor Ghyselinck, Fortuna, Antwerp, 1574, engraving; Fortunes with Sail, illustrations from the Triompho di Fortuna (Triumph of Fortune) by Sigismondo Fanti, Venice 1527. 6 Scot, The discouerie of witchcraft, 8.

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of a witch standing on a sphere in a shell-shaped cloud, although in sixteenthcentury German engravings, witches were not commonly depicted sailing shells, but, for example, shown riding goats.7 Riding in this context suggested sexual stimulation, but was also a reference to an activity almost exclusively restricted to men. Likewise, sailing was an activity to which women had little to no access. As a goddess, Venus-Fortuna transcended social and visual conventions and, in its German visual and material context, the sculpture on Kornblum’s cup carried overtones of transgressive female behaviour related to witchcraft, including the appropriation of male practices, spaces, and desires.8 The 1596 inventory of the collection of Archduke Ferdinand II at Ambras Castle clearly identifies the nautilus as foreign, describing Kornblum’s cup as “a beautiful Indian snail shell with gilded mounts.”9 Another image of Venus related to an exceptionally large, equally rare and potentially foreign water snail appears in a Southern German ink drawing of 1552. (Fig. 4.4) Here she is represented alongside her son Cupid and her lower body is inscribed with a barely visible flaming heart. The snail at her feet is a clear reference not only to Aphrodite’s shell, but, as Venus personifies love and its romantic, erotic and explicitly sexual implications, also to the ideas associated with shells in this period outlined in chapter 2. The German translation of Petrus Berchorius’s encyclopedia associates “water snails” with “carnality and prurience,”10 pointing out that “prurient and unchaste people”11 could be represented as snails. In addition, similarities between the haptic encounter with a snail’s slime-producing underside and the touching of a woman’s vulva underlie the pictorial representation of Venus depicted with a snail between her legs. The anonymous drawing is one of a pair, its counterpart is a depiction of Caritas surrounded by her children and ancient ruins, symbolizing an ideal mother and altruistic female love.12 In contrast, Venus and Cupid appear against the background of a half-wild, half-domesticated Northern European landscape featuring tree stumps; such stumps typically served as phallic symbols throughout sixteenth-century 7 Urs Graf, Fortuna, c. 1520, pen and ink on paper, 17.7 × 15.7 cm. Nuremberg, Germanisches Natio­ nalmuseum, Graphische Sammlung, HZ. 160. Brought to my attention by Owen, “Pollution and Desire.” Examples of witches on goats’ back include: Albrecht Dürer, Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat, engraving, 1501–1502. Hans Baldung (called Hans Baldung Grien), The Witches, chiaroscuro woodcut in two blocks, printed in grey and black, 1510. 8 Grasskamp, “Shells, Bodies, and the Collector’s Cabinet.” 9 My emphasis. Ein scheener indianischer, mit vergultem beschlecht, schneggen. Inventory of the Kunst­ kammer by Archduke Ferdinand II (1596) cited from List, “Wiener Goldschmiede,” 293. 10 Wasserschnecken … fleischlichkeit un geilheit; Albertinus, Der Welt Tummel- und Schaw-Platz, 350. 11 geile und unkeusche Leut. Albertinus, Der Welt Tummel- und Schaw-Platz, 340. 12 Caritas, with three children, seated in a landscape. On the left: ruins of a place. On the right: religious monument, South Germany, 1552, drawing in brown ink on paper, 36.5 cm x 22 cm, Friedrich-AlexanderUniversität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Graphische Sammlung, H62/B 1070.

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Fig. 4.4 Anonymous, Venus and Cupid, 1552, South Germany. Drawing in brown ink on paper, 36.5 × 22 cm. Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Graphische Sammlung, B 1069.

imagery.13 The different backgrounds behind Caritas and Venus heighten the contrast between maternal affection and altruism (a cultivated and superior form of female love) and the potentially animalistic nature of sexual love symbolized through natural elements such as tree stumps, a shell and a sea snail. The period association of the bodies of lustful people with molluscs and the charging of the landscape with erotic symbolism suggest a reading of the snail as genitalia in this particular image. The interpretation of the gigantic creature as belonging to foreign and mythological ocean spaces is supported by a nautilus shell cup of 1630 attributed to Jeremias Ritter. (Fig. 4.5) It is one of many precious cups that early modern goldsmiths made for German courts and shows a figure equipped with Cupid’s attributes, a quiver and bow, riding a gigantic snail. His feather dress and skin colour indicate an origin outside Europe. The figure has been interpreted as one of the “Pygmies, an African people of tiny size mentioned by Egyptian, classical, medieval and Renaissance authors.”14 The sculpture has also been identified as Cupid,15 an interpretation 13 Silver, “Fools and Women,” 131–32. 14 Massing, The Image of the Black in Western Art, III, 2, 471n64 referring to Gusinde, Kenntnisse und Urteile über Pygmäen. 15 Mette, Der Nautiluspokal, 106.

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Fig. 4.5 Jeremias Ritter, Nautilus Cup, ca. 1630. Nautilus shell and silver-gilt, 19.7 x l.27 × 10.8 cm. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917.260. Photo: Allen Phillips/ Wadsworth Atheneum.

that is in line with the erotic meanings attributed to gigantic water snails and the frequent appearance of Cupid with a shell in sixteenth-century prints. Images that represent Venus and Cupid with snail shells are not limited to sixteenth-century Germany. An engraving made after a design by the Italian artist Rosso Fiorentino (1494–1540) depicts Venus and her son with a shell that closely resembles the Bolinus brandaris, a muricid shell found in Asian oceans as well as the Mediterranean. (Fig. 4.6) As in the works discussed previously, this specimen’s realistic rendering is belied by its gigantic size. Its dimensions are comparable to the nautilus and turbo snail shells of extra-European origin that resemble local shells in their shape but not their dimensions. The image belongs to a series that also features other mythological figures such as Thetis, Opis and Juno. Thetis is depicted with a fish without scales, while the surface of Venus’s shell is also unrealistic, not only in its size but because it does not exhibit growth rings. Both attributes, the fish and the shell, relate to the respective female bodies they are paired with through the integration of wattle, wrinkles and auricular shapes; Venus’s shell even features a pair of eyes and a snout with an open mouth.

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Fig. 4.6 Jacob Binck after Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio after Rosso Fiorentino, Venus, 1510–1569. Engraving, 21.4 × 10.7 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-H-H-90.

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The shell’s lower half resembles the hidden fleshy opening of female genitalia. It embodies, enlarges and unveils crucial parts of the “most beautiful” and “lascivious” body of Venus who emerges from it. In this context, what Bret Rothstein has analysed in relation to sixteenth-century Netherlandish painting can be applied: anthropomorphic substitution disturbs the distinction between the inanimate bodies of objects and the bodies of living entities, resulting in a playful “confusion of categories” that would normally separate one from the other.16 In contrast to the previously discussed snail shell, this faced conch is more than the surrogate of a body part and goes beyond referencing the haptic encounter with a female’s breast or vulva. By representing the genitals as larger than life, the image objectifies, dissects and fetishizes the female body and its parts.17 By anthropomorphizing the shell, the engraving depicts an object with agency as well as a body part with a life of its own. This reflects the fact that, while we move our head and limbs at will, our “sexual organs are experienced as both under our control and at times beyond our control, at once deployed by us and again as ‘doing’ us.”18 Gazing and gaping, the shell-genital visualizes the wantonness of the “lascivious” Venus, her enlarged private parts forming a lively pars pro toto that breaks down the boundaries between things and bodies. The shell in the engraving does not only solve the artistic problem of how to visualize a woman’s partly hidden private parts but, because it possesses features that make it seem alive and hence an agency on its own, it also represents lust. This depiction is similar to earlier representations of the allegory of lust in which nautilus shells and other large conches play a prominent role.

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Women in Shells A woman emerging from a nautilus shell appears in the Halle Relic Book of 15251526.19 (Fig. 4.7A) The manuscript documents the collections of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg (1490–1545) kept in the church of SS Maurice and Mary Magdalene in Halle, Saxony, where the artefact in question contained relics of female saints.20 It was probably made for a commissioner without religious intentions and presumably belonged to a private collection before it was reused as a relic container. The woman, who holds a mirror, is complemented by another nautilus shell that contains the 16 17 18 19 20

Rothstein, “Jan van Hemessen’s Anatomy of Parody,” 478. This has been argued in relation to shells and female breasts in Grasskamp, “Spirals and Shells.” Katz, “The Social Psychology of Adam and Eve,” 555. Halle Relic Book, fol.281v–281r. Eichberger, “A Renaissance Reliquary Collection in Halle.”

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Fig. 4.7A Anonymous, Halle Relic Book, 1525–1526, Germany. Colour on parchment. Hofbibliothek Aschaffenburg, Ms. 14, fol.381v.

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Fig. 4.7B Anonymous, Halle Relic Book, 1525–1526, Germany. Colour on parchment. Hofbibliothek Aschaffenburg, Ms. 14, fol.282v.

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sculpture of a man in armour with a sword and shield.21 (Fig. 4.7B) Their attributes make them resemble Venus and Mars who are commonly represented with a mirror and weapons respectively. Yet, while Mars would happily give in to Venus’s seductive powers, as is often symbolically represented through his discarded armour and sword,22 the knight in the shell hides his face behind a protective shield and waves his sword in defence. While the woman is barely covered by her transparent gown, pointing at (rather than covering) her pubic area, the knight is ready to fight her. His left hand holds an object that the manuscript refers to as a “mounted shield,”23 which resembles a mirror rather than a military device. This mirror is different to the one held by the female figure, but it would reflect her image back in a similar fashion. Her left hand is empty, but in line with allegorical representations of lust, which invariably make “use of the image of a woman looking at herself in a mirror and combing her hair,”24 it is likely that the sculpture originally held a comb. She is a destructive agent of sensual love and the pair are a symbolic representation of the allegory of lust and the sin of wantonness, represented by the male’s defensiveness in the face of female desire. The figures’ shells appear to be gendered; the seductress’s nautilus features a fishtail and a swirl of waves the same golden colour as her hair. The knight’s shell is as embellished as his armour and forms a protective counterpart to his shellshaped helmet. The female shell is a semi-transparent, hairy and watery, finned and fish-tailed object whose white-and-gold colour scheme is shared by the female body inside it. The male shell is a protective, colourful and artfully embellished cover for the body it contains; it resembles the male figure’s sturdy armour, not his soft body. While the male nautilus provides armour-like protection, the female nautilus functions as an extension, bearing similar characteristics to the female body itself. The addition of scale-covered fins and a tail to her shell evokes a certain resemblance to period representations of mermaids that show fish-tailed women with mirrors (and combs), occasionally paired with male counterparts.25 Mermaids also play an important role in representations of Saint Christopher who, carrying the Christ child from one shore to another, has to cross dark waters filled with temptations and unpredictable dangers.26 A woodcut print by Master E.S. made between 1465 and 1500 shows two figures emerging from such waters. 21 Halle Relic Book, fol.282v–282r. 22 See for example Piero di Cosimo, Venus, Cupid and Mars, oil on panel, 1505, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. 23 eyn gewappentter man mitt gefastem schilde vnnd schwerte. Halle Relic Book, fol.282v–282r. 24 Moxey, “Master E.S. and the Folly of Love,” 131. 25 For example: Adriaen Collaert with possibly Crispijn van de Passe, Turtle, Crab, Mermaid and Merman, print from the series Piscium Vivae Icones, Utrecht: N.I. Visscher, 1634. 26 For examples of representations of the Saint that show mermaids see Benker, Christophorus, 108–09, and Stahl, Die Legende vom Heiligen Riesen, XXX, XXXVII, XLIV, XLIX, L, LII.

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Fig. 4.8 Master E.S., Saint Christopher, 1450–1467. Woodcut, print on paper, 14.5 × 10.8 cm. The British Museum, London, 1845,0809.99.

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(Fig. 4.8) They float in shell-like containers whose surfaces are covered with scales in the wilderness, far away from the dwellings and the vessel in the background of the image. Other period images show Saint Christopher confronted by a single fishtailed mermaid who in one depiction holds a mirror and a comb, a clear indication of her allegorical meaning as the personification of lust and her potential to seduce Christopher and lead him astray.27 Master E.S.’s print is unusual as it shows what appear to be a man and a woman in scale-covered shells. As the analysis of the Halle relics reveals, in addition to the widely known iconography of women equipped with mirrors and combs and fish-tailed mermaids with or without these attributes, allegorical representations of lust also include a pair of figures emerging from shells. The halcyon next to the female figure in the print is another reference to shells, as the bird had been believed to lay its eggs in the chambers of nautilus shells since antiquity.28 In contrast to the pair of swans that wait for Christopher on the shore, the halcyon in the image looks at the water, awaiting the return of its partner, a reference to the myth of Alcyone, who was transformed into a halcyon, and the drowning at sea of her husband Ceyx. The tale is full of nautical metaphors, which include a calm sea as a symbol of marital calm, and conveys the idea that the marital devotion of women to men is fundamental for the production of offspring.29 The halcyon in the image resembles the depicted swans, but as a bird-shaped transformation of Alcyone it is also connected to the two hybrid creatures who are in between humans and animals, resembling a man and a woman but navigating the seas like molluscs. The women in shells in the Halle Relic Book and Master E.S.’s print both resemble mermaids, but they are also linked to allegorical depictions of lust and, in particular through their shells, to representations of Venus with a snail shell. This interpretation is further supported by an image of Saint Christopher by Master H.L. dated to 1510. (Fig. 4.9) A fish-tailed and finned creature inhabits the water that Christopher has to cross. Its human-like head is weirdly distorted and appears as if formed out of shell-like organic forms. Christopher is shown in a moment of instability, the wind moves the waves and blows his gown into his face. Christ holds on to Christopher’s beard while the child’s cape is carried away and blown into a shape that closely resembles the pointed shell of a sea snail. The image is in the tradition of natural appearances that “by chance” take the shape of other things.30 Early modern discussions on “images made by chance” were informed by ancient writings in which depictions of foam played an important role, in particular the foam

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.

27 Melchior Broederlam, Saint Christopher, oil on panel, c. 1400, Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp; print attributed to Jost Amman (1539–1591), published in Stahl, Die Legende vom Heiligen Riesen, L. 28 Gutzwiller, “The Nautilus,” 203–9. 29 Gutzwiller, “The Nautilus,” 203–9. 30 Janson, “The ‘Image Made by Chance’.”

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Fig. 4.9 Master H.L., Saint Christopher, ca. 1505–1510. Woodcut, print on paper, 19.4 × 14.1 cm. Albertina, Vienna, DG1930/2219.

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from which Venus emerges, an exceptionally creative matter that brings forth all kinds of shapes.31 Venus and Cupid of 1506 by Lucas Cranach (1472–1553) visualizes the connection between “images made by chance” and the goddess of love, who represents “fertility itself, not least the generation of new … image creations.”32 Among the clouds at Venus’s feet, “the form curled up by the side of her foot has fleetingly assumed the shape of a conch shell.”33 Both Venus’s shell-shaped foam and the Christ child’s shell-shaped coat are creative matter as they give birth to a second layer of pictorial ideas. As such they are more than a mere “visual pun,”34 which merely tricks our perception, but comment on the creative potential of matter and mind. Waves and drifting clouds can also be interpreted as metaphorical references to artistic creation itself in the works Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) created a few years before Cranach’s woodcut.35 Cranach’s image of Venus was made using the same technique as an image of Saint Christopher from the same year, combining two blocks to achieve a chiaroscuro effect.36 Cranach’s Christopher is very different from Master H.L.’s, but the motif that both have in common is a Christ child with an orb and a cape that is blowing in the wind. Might Master H.L.’s print, in which the cape takes a shell-like form floating like a cloud, be a visual comment on Cranach’s Christopher and his image of Venus with the shell-shaped cloud? If so, the shell that flies in the sky in Master H.L.’s print would be a direct reference to Venus. This interpretation is further supported by the evidence presented above that suggests a close connection between water snail shells and Venus in German imagery of the period. Together with the stormy wind and the roaring waves, the creature in the water and Venus’s shell threaten to throw Christopher off course, a reference to the dangers of straying from the metaphorical path of virtue. The shell on top and the sea creature below both refer to the blinding sin of wantonness. The depictions of the woman in a shell in the Halle Relic Book and Saint Christopher’s temptations are moralistic by def inition, but also playfully subversive by the use of the highly sensual images and objects discussed, which present both visual and physical “temptations” to the pious beholder. The interplay between these moralistic overtones on the one hand and aspects of seduction on the other is materialized in a series of three almost identical cups 31 Janson, “The ‘Image Made by Chance’,” 256. 32 Venus steht fuer die Fruchtbarkeit schlechthin und nicht zuletzt fuer die Genese neuer, von ihrer Schönheit infizierter Bildschöpfungen. Fricke, “Schaumgeburten,” 53. 33 Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 192. 34 Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 192 35 Fricke, “Schaumgeburten,” 56. 36 Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 191–97.

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Fig. 4.10 Hans Petzolt, Lidded turbo shell cup from a set, 1603-1609. Turbo shell, gilded silver, 57,3 × 20,5 × 16,3 cm x 16,5 cm. Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart. Photo: Hendrik Zwietasch.

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made by the German goldsmith Hans Pezolt between 1590 and 1600.37 (Fig. 4.10) The cups can be divided into upper and lower halves. At the top we see the chest of one of the four cardinal virtues, Prudentia, with her attributes, the mirror and the snake, and in the drinking vessel’s lower half there is a turbo shell supported by a male creature who rides a dolphin and blows a shell. The division into a “serious” part with moralistic overtones or mythological content and a second part that features shell shapes, monstrous creatures and other playful elements is common in goldsmiths’ drawings and designs from sixteenth-century Nuremberg where Pezolt worked.38 Pezolt was well aware of the erotic implications associated with nautilus and turbo shells by those in the circles around Wenzel Jamnitzer and his followers who considered them to resemble female body parts.39 Accordingly, the cup in the image embodies a mythological figure whose lower body, which is a shell, makes her resemble a mermaid with a rolled up fish tail, while her upper body personifies wisdom, insight and knowledge. The turbo shell is held by a male figure with a dolphin behind his legs who, if we follow Nuremberg interpretations of the object, does not only touch the foreign conch, but simultaneously also the woman’s breast that it symbolizes. Clearly, the lower half of the cup has strong sexual overtones that are barely masked by the Prudentia on top. She is, in fact, as ambiguous as the cup itself: her exposed and pronounced breasts relate to the turbo shell shape underneath her, while the mirror puts her in line with the allegorical representations of lust discussed above. In close proximity to the shells and the dolphin, the snake in her left hand could also be interpreted as a water animal, for example as one of those “water snakes” (Wasserschlang Natrix) that poison the waters in which they live and transform humans into “wrongdoers, witches, prurient and unchaste people,” according to Berchorius’s encyclopedia.40 If we look exclusively at the cup’s upper half we see Prudentia; only when we reveal the vessel’s lower part, does the female figure’s second identity as a mermaid and the allegorical representation of lust emerge. Balancing prudence and folly, Pezolt’s design is simultaneously seductive and moralistic, like the Halle woman in a shell who symbolizes lust while containing the particles of female saints and representations of Christopher, presenting fantasies of mighty seductresses under the cover of religion. As diverse as these works appear, they all feature the motif of the shell, which is both local and global, the subject of study and the object of erotic fantasy, part of nature and of mythological realms. Highly multivalent in its own right, the motif of the shell forms a key constituent in the artistic representation of ambivalence. 37 Two of the cups are kept in the Württembergisches Landesmuseum, Stuttgart; the third one is in the collections of the Iparművészeti Múzeum, Budapest. 38 Grasskamp, “Spirals and Shells,” 148. 39 Grasskamp, “Spirals and Shells.” 40 Unholden / hexin / gaile und unkeusche Personen. Albertinus, Der Welt Tummel- und Schaw-Platz, 340.

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Women with Shells In the objects and images discussed above, shells figure as metonyms for parts of the female body. In addition, sixteenth-century imagery also employs shells in such close proximity to body parts that they appear to be surrogates while they also materially frame the body parts that they seem to substitute. An important example in this regard is Jan Gossaert’s painting of Neptune and Venus-as-Zeelandia (known as Neptune and Amphitrite) of 1516.41 (Fig. 4.11) The painting features two shells, one between Neptune’s thighs, another on Venus’s head. A brief excursion to the painterly uses of fig leaves in sixteenth-century painting is helpful in understanding Neptune’s shell, whose placement has been described as “provocative”42 and as something that “covers, but also accentuates”43 what it hides. The prime example of the fig leaf theme is the depiction of Adam and Eve after the Fall in which it symbolizes a newly acquired sense of “body shame.”44 The covering is also an indicator of the “sudden disappearance of the prior paradisiacal communality with the other”45 in the Garden of Eden, while the use of a “girdle (in some translations, an ‘apron’) of fig leaves” simultaneously symbolizes the attempt to return to “being organically intertwined in the world.”46 While there are parallels between depictions of Adam and Eve and Gossaert’s representation of Venus and Neptune, one of the major differences is Venus’s lack of a cover for her private parts. Unlike Eve, Venus feels no shame. Rather than resembling any of Gossaert’s depictions of Adam, the shell and vine leaf cover on the colossal, sculptural Neptune has much in common with the fig leaves applied to Michelangelo’s David of 1504. Through the application of a sculpted fig leaf, the cover of the originally naked David reveals rather than conceals him as a sexual object.47 Accordingly, in this and other cases, “while appearing to deny sex, censorship deeply affirms it.”48 Similar things can be said about Neptune’s shell, which appears to cover and hide a body part, but thereby “frames” the male body “in and through the sexual motif as the single most important fact of human nature.”49 Venus’s private parts, on the other hand, are neither covered nor framed. Yet, she has a shell attached to her body as well. It is fixed to her head by the same kind of tendrils that hold Neptune’s 41 Bass, “Jan Gossaert’s ‘Neptune and Amphitrite’.” 42 Schrader, “Gossaert’s Neptune and Amphitrite,” 49. 43 Bass, Jan Gossart, 46. 44 Katz, “The Social Psychology of Adam and Eve,” 546. 45 Katz, “The Social Psychology of Adam and Eve,” 552. 46 Katz, “The Social Psychology of Adam and Eve,” 553. 47 Colburn, “Desire and Discourse,” 61. 48 Colburn, “Desire and Discourse,” 66. 49 Colburn, “Desire and Discourse,” 63.

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Fig. 4.11 Jan Gossaert, Neptune and Amphitrite/Venus, 1516. Oil on oak wood, 188 × 124 cm. Bpk / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie / Jörg P. Anders.

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conch. Its shape and position bear obvious resemblances to shell-headed niches, an equivalence between objects and architectural elements that other artists would explore more explicitly.50 Venus’s shell as a reference to the architectural frame of a niche is further enforced as it mirrors the shape of the only other circular form in the image, the massive architectural body of the dome in the foreground. The massive, gilded frame that appears behind Venus and Neptune is as ambivalent as the shell, functioning simultaneously as a pictorial frame (to two human bodies) and an object (a door frame with a curtain). Accordingly, Venus’s shell is her attribute and head cover as well as a sturdy semi-architectural frame for her soft and vulnerable body. The contrast between hard and soft is also played out in the employment of the conch, previously filled with the soft body of a mollusc, to partially enclose Neptune’s soft spot. This, however, remains a pictorial fantasy as, in nature, it would be impossible to fill the spiral shape of a conch with anything but a spiral-shaped form. While Neptune carries a shell between his thighs, Venus’s shell is on her mind. Neptune is not ashamed (as Adam would be) and his image celebrates the sexual body, as does Philip of Burgundy, for whom the painting was made.51 As Stephanie Schrader has pointed out, the theme of Philip of Burgundy being chased by “certain rather licentious ladies, with all sense of shame removed”52 appeared in Philip’s biography of 1529. Neptune is Philip and Philip is Neptune.53 While the female next to him is Venus (and as such also a representation of the Dutch province Zeeland),54 she is first and foremost a woman without a fig leaf, embodying one of those “licentious ladies, with all sense of shame removed” mentioned in Philip’s biography. As Kenneth Colburn argues in his reading of David’s fig leaf interpreted through the lens of Michel Foucault, “the prototype for the relationship of sex and knowledge (Foucault’s concept of biopower) can be shown to already be evidenced in the story of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis. The fig leaf is thus simultaneously a sign of the body as naked, modesty as the response to this nakedness, and the covering of the genitals as the sign of this knowledge. Genesis thus establishes sex as a form of knowledge, and knowledge as something to be acquired through sexual activity.”55 Taking into consideration that Neptune is Philip and Venus is Zeelandia, Neptune knows Venus in the same way in which Philip of Burgundy knows Zeeland, they know each other intimately. Together, Neptune’s intricately 50 See for example Perino del Vaga (designer), Master of the Die (engraver), Antonio Salamanca, Ornament, scrolling foliage, a seated Cupid with a weathercock, two eagles, a satyr with Venus depicted in a shell, Rome, 1532–1553, engraving on paper. 51 Schrader, “Gossaert’s Neptune and Amphitrite,” 52; Bass, Jan Gossart, 69–70. 52 Cited after the translation by Schrader, “Gossaert’s Neptune and Amphitrite,” 51. 53 Schrader, “Gossaert’s Neptune and Amphitrite.” 54 Bass, “Jan Gossaert’s ‘Neptune and Amphitrite’.” 55 Colburn, “Desire and Discourse,” 67.

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laced shell-thong and Venus’s “scallop-shell bonnet”56 form a symbol of knowledge that is sexually explicit in the painting, but implies knowledge in a general sense, symbolizing biopower, the power over other bodies as acquired through sexual and other kinds of knowledge. Seen from this perspective, Neptune and Venus are Adam and Eve’s counterparts as they engage in “the Fall” and the implied acquisition of knowledge, but without experiencing shame. While “the fig-leaf girdle separates Adam and Eve from the animals, showing us that they now feel driven to go beyond the animals by dressing their creativity with culture,”57 Neptune and Venus remain closer to animals, their body parts being connected to molluscs. At first sight, Neptune’s conch, whose colours signal a local origin, appears to be less foreign than Adam’s fig leaf. Yet, as in the examples discussed above, it is the shells’ sizes that identify them as foreign specimens. In contrast to fig leaves that signal the Garden of Eden, Neptune’s and Venus’s shells signal maritime paradises that abound in ocean objects and erotic encounters with the bodies of foreign people and mythological figures. Like the fig leaf, which is “after all, not about David,” but rather “about an interpretation of the human body in terms of sex,”58 Neptune’s and Venus’s shells are trophies won in the allegorical battle of love, commonly symbolized by those tempestuous and calm seas that connect Holland with Asia, but they also form part of a painterly meditation on the relationship between his shell-covered loins and her shell-covered head, body and mind, hard and soft, dry and wet, familiar and extraordinary. Images of mythological goddesses with shells, such as Neptune and Venus, connect to period depictions of foreigners. The “Indian couple from America” from the seventeenth-century engraving series The Twelve Months Represented by Couples in Costumes from Diverse Countries closely resemble Neptune and Venus in terms of their posture and attributes. (Fig. 4.12) While Neptune holds a trident, the “Indian” holds a spear; while the god’s head is crowned by leaves, the “American” wears a feather “crone.” Although the “Indians” are more covered than the goddesses, they remain half-dressed, their bodies being presented in an eroticized manner. The exchange of gazes between the figures and her hand on his hips signal intimacy. The background of the image evokes Zucchi’s Coral Fishers, also known as the Discovery of America, discussed in chapter 1, through the coral-covered ground and a waterscape with naked people swimming or positioned at the shore. The picture clearly reflects on the exploitation of foreign resources through the harvesting of coral and pearls, but, like much imagery of the period, it also visualizes the Renaissance idea that people in extra-European territories did not fully cover their 56 Bass, Jan Gossart, 69. 57 Katz, “The Social Psychology of Adam and Eve,” 566. 58 Colburn, “Desire and Discourse,” 65.

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Fig. 4.12 Crispijn van de Passe II, July: An Indian couple from America in the series The twelve months represented by couples in costumes from diverse countries, 1604–1670. Engraving, 13.9 × 8.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-2002-692.

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Fig. 4.13 Anonymous, Pilgrim’s scallop with Lamentation of Christ, early sixteenth century, France or Rhineland. Carved ivory. Bpk / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstgewerbemuseum, F2468 / Stefan Büchner.

bodies and were “sexually overactive.”59 On the one hand, the shell that the woman holds is a reference to “Indian” commodities, on the other it directly connects her to Venus, the equally shell-equipped goddess of erotic love. Like Gossaert’s Neptune, the most famous but not the only man depicted with a shell between his legs, Venus and “foreign” women were not the only ones depicted with shells in early modern visual culture. Additional examples include nymphs and mythological figures such as Galatea, Thetis and Amphitrite, but also allegorical depictions of water and personifications of rivers. In addition to imagery in which erotic aspects play out as prominently as they do in depictions of non-European women, Venus, and allegories of lust, oysters can function as symbols of desire when depicted in the hands of a woman,60 but shells also appear in a few representations of female figures that are less sexualized. A shell carved out of ivory, which contains a Lamentation of Christ, prominently features the body of Christ as held by Saint Mary. (Fig. 4.13) It is dated to the early sixteenth 59 Mason, Deconstructing America, 173. Also see Manning Stevens, “New World Contacts.” 60 De Girolami Cheney, “The Oyster.”

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Fig. 4.14 Anonymous, Plaque: Caritas, end of sixteenth, beginning of seventeenth century. Earthenware with plumbiferous glaze. Musée du Louvre, Paris, OA 1354. In the Public Domain. Photograph: Anna Grasskamp.

century and was made in France or the Rhineland. At f irst sight, this pilgrim shell, which in size and design closely resembles the symbol of Saint James, a Mediterranean scallop, does not seem to carry any erotic connotations. Yet, as discussed in chapter 3, Saint Mary was believed to have conceived the Christ child in the same way as a pearl was produced by watery substances falling into an open shell. As a mother, the Virgin was certainly not associated with sexuality like Venus was, yet the positioning of Christ’s body in a shell inevitably evokes period ideas about his conception, sperm-like heavenly dew and other sexualized metaphors. A sixteenth-century ceramic plaque made in France focuses in a similar way on the representation of a woman as a mother, not a lover. (Fig. 4.14) It shows Caritas with her children, nursing one of them, her left breast exposed, a typical feature in representations of the allegory of Charity. The scene is framed by a circle of thirty-one conch shells. Their colour evokes a comparison between the ceramic shells and the sculpted female breast that is reinforced by the fact that sixteenth-century

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artisans perceived shells and breasts as similar.61 As mentioned before, Caritas could be represented as Venus’s counterpart, each symbolizing a different kind of female love: the love of a mother versus the love of a lover, altruism versus romance. While Venus is commonly pictured with foreign shells that are larger than life, in this ceramic plaque Caritas is framed by realistically shaped versions of snail shells found in Europe. Mary’s and Caritas’s bodies are both sculpted alongside local shells and are less sexualized than Venus’s. This shows that, although local shells could feature in eroticized imagery, more explicit depictions relied on the inclusion of foreign specimens. The shells that feature in images of Venus and other mythological females are EurAsian as they integrate Asian shells into European iconography. Their transcultural nature correlates with that of the women depicted alongside them who are also transcultural: physically resembling European females but referencing women in extra-European territories through their nudity and their attributes, the shells, they embody mythological figures associated with foreign realms. While depictions of women with local shells could carry pious and moralistic meanings as discussed above, images of EurAsian shells in conjunction with female bodies symbolized desire and lust. When such images of EurAsian shells arrived in China in the eighteenth century, their erotic connotations were amplified before travelling back to Europe, where they augmented collecting and craftsmanship practices.

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Women with EurAsian Shells The nymph Galatea appears on a series of Chinese plates made in 1742. (Fig. 4.15) In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, she is a seductive but also a dangerous beauty with “milk-white” skin comparable to polished shells.62 A prominent motif in European imagery of the sixteenth century, her representation includes many connections to the images of Venus and Fortuna. Like them, she can be depicted riding the ocean’s waves on a shell-shaped vessel using her veil as a sail.63 The eighteenth-century porcelain painting shows the nymph on a boat whose base is formed of a large shell surrounded by putti, four of whom are in the air and two are walking on the land dragging Galatea’s boat behind them. Naked, she uses her clothes as a sail. To her left we see a river god, to her right a pair of lovers float on the waves on the back of a shell and a large fish. In the foreground a naked man is depicted; he covers his loins while gazing at Galatea. 61 Grasskamp, “Spirals and Shells.” 62 Ovid, Metamorphoses 13.791–92. 63 De Girolami Cheney, “Lavinia Fontana’s Galatea.”

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Fig. 4.15 Anonymous, Plate, ca. 1742, Guangzhou. Porcelain painted in overglaze enamels,23 cm. Galerie Nicolas Fournery, France.

Eighteenth-century Chinese porcelain made in Guangzhou for the imperial court and the domestic and export markets, used European imagery for a variety of purposes. Among the different wares, which show all kinds of motifs inspired by Western engravings and prints, some were decorated with erotic imagery. Among these are refined objects showing pastoral scenes and images of Western women.64 Others are more crudely executed and show images of sexual practices, exposed

64 Grasskamp, “EurAsian Layers.”

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body parts and other explicit content.65 The Galatea plate belongs to the latter group. While the less explicit, but equally erotically loaded, porcelain paintings of European women on the more refined wares were collected at the imperial court, the cruder wares might have played a role in local material culture, although they were primarily made for export and some have survived in European collections. The image of Galatea on the plate is based on an engraving made after a painting by Francesco Albani (1578–1669) dated to 1635.66 While it was executed in colours and a style that are typical of Guangzhou porcelain painting, the motif is appropriated from European engravings that show Albani’s design. It somewhat simplifies the scene by reducing the number of putti and river gods and features androgynous body shapes, but its main modification lies in the foreground. While the original painting presents naked females with putti who handle three large pearl-filled shells, the Guangzhou plate shows a man on a blue cloth with a red shape in his hand alongside another human figure with a red drape. It seems unlikely that these modifications were undertaken by a European engraver making the male figure in the foreground Acis, Galatea’s lover. This would not make sense as Albani’s painting is not primarily a representation of Galatea’s tale, but an allegorical representation of water in which she is one mythological figure among others, surrounded by other water-related creatures such as river gods and nymphs. Chinese porcelain painters regularly changed certain details that they appropriated from European prints. This was necessary, for example, when a rectangular engraving was used to decorate a round vase or plate and the painter needed to omit certain details to make it fit. In addition, modifications to motifs were also made when pictorial elements were creatively translated from one visual idiom to the other, among them motifs that had not been fully understood. This seems to have happened in the case of the Guangzhou plate. The painter of the Galatea plate changed the nymphs in the foreground of the original painting into two androgynous figures, one of whom appears to be male, transforming their pearl-filled shells into red shapes that still somewhat resemble shells but could also be interpreted as textiles. In addition, a large drape was added that resembles Galatea’s sail. While the transformation of the pearl-filled shells can be explained by the unfamiliarity of the Chinese painter with this motif, the other changes seem deliberate and enhance the eroticization of the image’s content by introducing a man who looks directly at Galatea, while the additional drape adds another layer to the pictorial meditation on the subject of veiling and unveiling. The Guangzhou 65 For examples see Hervouët and Bruneau, eds. La Porcelaine des Compagnies des Indes. 66 Francesco Albani, Allegory of Water, one in a set of four with the theme The Four Elements, before 1660, oil on canvas, Galleria Sabauda, Turin. Prints after the painting were made by engravers who include Antoine Hérisset (1685–1769) and Étienne Baudet (1636–1711).

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design, in which Galatea is no longer Galatea, but just another foreign-style figure on a strangely shaped shell, further exoticized and eroticized Albani’s design. As one of many EurAsian artefacts that merged European with Chinese materials and iconographies, the plate formed part of a large body of transcultural images and objects in eighteenth-century Guangzhou, but its hybrid style would have surprised and amused Chinese and non-Chinese beholders beyond the globalized harbour city. In a similar way to that in which the Guangzhou workshop appropriated European designs in China, porcelain painters all over Europe copied Chinese motifs. In this regard, the delftware plate mentioned in the introduction to this chapter is but one among countless examples in which Asian styles and motifs were imitated and appropriated. What makes its design unique is its clear division between European and Asian styles and the motif of Venus/Fortuna and her Chinese beholders. In a way, the plate imagines our Guangzhou painter’s visual encounter with Galatea. Confronted with her image he looked at a mythological goddess on a shell in the same way as the three Chinese figures on the delftware plate do. A more likely interpretation of the motif is, however, that artisans in Delft workshops who were familiar with all kinds of Asian ceramics knew there was a demand in Europe for Guangzhou wares with erotic content. Trying to imitate their characteristic mix of Western and Chinese motifs and styles, the producers of our delftware plate responded to an emerging taste in Europe that had been shaped by collectables such as the Galatea plate. As explained above, the motif of pearl-filled shells was not transferred from one culture to the other; the image of a woman in a shell had been a theme in the visual culture of East Asia before the eighteenth century. Showing female figures emerging from open clam shells, these representations do not closely resemble Venus, Fortuna or Galatea but, as discussed in chapter 3, refer to local myths about dragon ladies and clam-monsters disguised as fairy-like beauties. They are also deeply connected to the iconography of Ming dynasty Buddhism in which images of the dragon king’s underwater palace and associated creatures were popular. Natural images of Guanyin formed out of mother-of-pearl could be found in nature emerging from the inside of clam shells,67 and, as Japanese paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries show, the idea that the female bodhisattva emerged from a shell was a popular theme in Chan painting.68 (Fig. 4.16) Her supernatural beauty, transformative powers and appearance from a clam shell connect Guanyin to her shapeshifting “sisters,” the demonic dragon ladies and clam-monsters disguised as 67 Cao, Gegu yaolun, 35b. 68 Kanō Tan’yū 狩野 探幽, Kouri Kannon 蛤蜊観音 [Shell Guanyin], ink and colour on silk, before 1674. Hakuin Ekaku 白隠慧鶴, Kouri Kannon 蛤蜊観音 [Shell Guanyin], hanging scroll, ink on paper, 87.5 × 26.8 cm, before 1769.

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Fig. 4.16 Kanō Tan’yū, Kouri Kannon [Avalokitesvara Appearing from the Clam / Clam Shell Guanyin], before 1674. Hanging scroll, ink and light colour on silk. Hara Museum ARC, Shibukawa, Gunma.

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women. While the latter are commonly associated with cruel deeds, in Buddhist paintings they form part of a spectrum of supernatural, foreign figures whose originally monstrous features are “tamed” and appropriated for the protection of the Buddha, such as the yaksa, the dragon king and his daughter, as discussed in chapter 3. The Clamshell Guanyin by Kanō Tan’yū (1602–1674) draws on Chinese imagery of women in shells in Buddhist handscrolls, developing it into a large-scale hanging scroll portrait of Guanyin against the background of a full moon whose size, colour and sheen resemble that of a huge pearl. Radiant and pure, Guanyin appears in between shell and pearl-like moon, a benevolent bodhisattva whose iconographic connection to images of clam-monsters is well hidden behind her graceful appearance. The shells that house Guanyin and the other female figures in Buddhist imagery are giant clams (Tridacna gigas; chequ in Chinese). They entered the Chinese empire through South China, which was an exotic space to the inhabitants of the more politically powerful Northern areas and was associated with the “Western Ocean” (xiyang) that connected Asia to Europe.69 In this sense, the shells were as EurAsian as Venus’s. Comparable to the eroticization of shells in European images, associations between natural objects and female genitalia were also evoked in Chinese writing. The Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures of 1698, discussed at length in chapter 2, for example, refers to a “sea lady” mollusc and describes its conspicuous byssus threads as resembling pubic hair.70 The connection between shells and foreign spaces, female bodies in general and specif ic body parts in particular, underlies the Chinese motif. Under the cover of Buddhism, a religion that connected India to China and Japan, globally exchanged materials such as coral and shell became locally available in East Asia while the monstrous forces of yaksa, dragon ladies and clam-monsters were “tamed” in the service of Buddha.

Conclusion – Woman with a Shell Early modern representations of females with shells reflect on aspects of materiality in relation to the human body. In the European examples, which include Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Gossaert’s Neptune and Venus, this body is a sexualized one, the shell eroticized. In Chinese arts, women emerging from shells were, as discussed in chapter 3, hybrid creatures with supernatural powers who unite human-like and animal-like features. Their representations are less obviously sexualized than those of their European “evil sisters,” seductive mermaids who appear in images 69 Ptak, “Riesenmuscheln.” 70 Nie, Haicuo tu.

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of Saint Christopher, but evoke associations with the shapeshifting dragon ladies who use their female charms to seduce and eventually hurt men. In the context of Buddhist imagery, they figure alongside other guardians of the Buddha and, by the seventeenth century, Bodhisattva Guanyin, who is associated with the protection of mothers and female fertility, would also be painted emerging from a clam. Regardless of whether we look at images of Venus or a shell-woman in a Buddhist underwater world, representations of Galatea or Guanyin, the shells that are paired with the bodies of these female figures are all oversized. In addition to aspects of materiality and corporality, objectification and sexual agency, the subject of intimacy and distance in both senses – physical and geographic – is central to the painterly negotiation of images of women with shells across Eurasia, which present us with foreign (underwater) spaces full of riches and paradise-like realms that promise material affluence and erotic fulfilment.

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Cited Primary and Secondary Sources Albertinus, Aegidius. Der Welt Tummel- und Schaw- Platz. Augsburg: Johann Krüger, 1612. Aristoteles, History of Animals, 350 BCE. Bass, Marisa. “Jan Gossaert’s ‘Neptune and Amphitrite’ Reconsidered.” Simiolus 35, 1 (2011): 61–83. –––. Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Benker, Gertrud. Christophorus: Patron der Schiffer, Fuhrleute und Kraftfahrer. Legende, Verehrung, Symbol. Munich: Georg D. W. Callwey, 1975. Bordignon, Giulia, Monica Centanni, Silvia Urbini, with Alice Barale, Antonella Sbrilli and Laura Squillaro, eds., Elizabeth Thomson, trans. “Fortuna during the Renaissance. A reading of Panel 48 of Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.” http://www.engramma. it/eOS/index.php?id_articolo=2975 (accessed 8.1.2021). Colburn, Kenneth. “Desire and discourse in Foucault: The Sign of the Fig Leaf in Michelangelo’s David.” Human Studies 10 (1987): 61–79. De Girolami Cheney, Liana. “Lavinia Fontana’s Galatea: Personification of Fortune and Venus.” The Journal of Literature and Art Studies 10, 1 (2020): 42–59. –––. “The Oyster in Dutch Genre Paintings: Moral or Erotic Symbolism.” Artibus et Historiae 8, 15 (1987): 135–158. Eichberger, Dagmar. “A Renaissance Reliquary Collection in Halle, and its Illustrated Inventories.” Art Journal 37 (2014), unpaginated. https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/arenaissance-reliquary-collection-in-halle-and-its-illustrated-inventories/ (accessed 8.1.2021).

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Fricke, Beate. “Schaumgeburten. Zur Topolgie der creatio ex nihilo bei Albrecht Duerer und ihre Vorgeschichte.” In Das Meer, der Tausch und die Grenzen der Repräsentation, edited by Hannah Baader und Gerhard Wolff, 33–58. Zurich: diaphanes, 2010. Grasskamp, Anna. “EurAsian Layers: Netherlandish Surfaces and Early Modern Chinese Artefacts.” The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 63, 4 (2015): 363–398. –––. “Shells, Bodies, and the Collector’s Cabinet,” in Marisa Bass, Anne Goldgar, Hanneke Grootenboer und Claudia Swan, eds. Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2021. –––. “Spirals and Shells: Breasted Vessels in Sixteenth-Century Nuremberg.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 67– 68 (2016/17): 146–163. Gusinde, Martin. Kenntnisse und Urteile über Pygmäen in Antike und Mittelalter. Leipzig: Barth, 1962. Gutzwiller, Kathryn. “The Nautilus, the Halcyon, and Selenaia: Callimachus’s ‘Epigram’ 5 Pf. = 14 G.–P.” Classical Antiquity 11 (1992): 194–209. Halle Relic Book, 1525-1526, reproduced in Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte/ Hofbibliothek Aschaffenburg, eds. Das Halle’sche Heiltum: Reliquienkult und Goldschmiedekunst der Frührenaissance in Deutschland (Stuttgart 2002), CD-Rom. Hervouët, François and Nicolas, and Yves Bruneau, eds. La Porcelaine des Compagnies des Indes à Décor Occidental. Paris: Flammarion, 1986. Inventory of the Kunstkammer by Archduke Ferdinand II, 1596, cited from Camillo List, “Wiener Goldschmiede und ihre Beziehungen zum kaiserlichen Hofe.” In Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 17 (1896): 291–306. Janson, H.W. “The ‘Image Made by Chance’ in Renaissance Thought.” In de artibus opuscula XL: Essays in Honour of Erwin Panofsky, edited by Millard Meiss, 154–166. New York: New York University Press, 1961. Katz, Jack. “The Social Psychology of Adam and Eve.” Theory and Society 25, 4 (1996): 545–582. Landau, David, and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print: 1470–1550. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. List, Camillo. “Wiener Goldschmiede und ihre Beziehungen zum kaiserlichen Hofe.” In Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 17 (1896): 291–306. Manning Stevens, Scott. “New World Contacts and the Trope of the ‘Naked Savage.’” In Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, edited by Elizabeth D. Harvey, 125–140. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Mason, Peter. Deconstructing America: Representations of the Other. London: Routledge, 1990. Massing, Jean Michel. The Image of the Black in Western Art. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. Mette, Hanns-Ulrich. Der Nautiluspokal: Wie Kunst und Natur miteinander spielen. Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1995.

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Moxey, Keith P.F. “Master E.S. and the Folly of Love.” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 11, 3/4 (1980): 125–148. Nie Huang 聶璜, Haicuo tu 海錯圖 [Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures], 1698, 3 vol. Palace Museum, Beijing. Ovid. Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Translated by Anthony S. Kline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Owen, Yvonne. “Pollution and Desire in Hans Baldung Grien. The Abject, Erotic Spell of the Witch and Dragon.” In Images of Sex and Desire in Renaissance Art and Modern Historiography, edited by Angeliki Pollali and Berthold Hub, 180–206. London: Routledge, 2018. Ptak, Roderich. “Riesenmuscheln: Notizen zur Bezeichnung chequ.” In Marine Animals in Traditional China: Studies in Cultural History/Meerestiere im traditionellen China, edited by Roderich Ptak, 121–144. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010. Rothstein, Bret. “Jan van Hemessen’s Anatomy of Parody.” In The Anthropomorphic Lens. Anthropomorphism, Microcosmism and Analogy during the Early Modern Period, edited by Walter S. Melion, Bret Rothstein, and Michel Weemans, 457–479. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Schrader, Stephanie. “Gossaert’s Neptune and Amphitrite and the Body of the Patron.” Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 58, 1 (2007): 40–57. Scot, Reginald. The discouerie of witchcraft. 1584, 1651, 1665. London: Eliot Stock, 1886. Silver, Larry. “Fools and Women: Profane Subjects by Lucas van Leyden.” Print Collector’s Newsletter 14 (1983): 130–135. Simon, Erika. Die Geburt der Aphrodite. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1959. Stahl, Ernst Konrad. Die Legende vom Heil. Riesen Christophorus in der Graphik des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts. Munich: J. J. Lentner’sche Buchhandlung, 1920. Tümpel, Karl. “Die Muschel der Aphrodite.” Philologus 51 (1892): 388–392.

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Conclusion Abstract As shells are integral to early modern reflections on the relations between human and non-human realms, thinking with and through ocean objects, their sensual appeal as well as their intrinsic ‘otherness’, teaches us about the shaping of aesthetics and ecologies of matter in imperial centres and their peripheries. The study of shell artefacts brings to the fore patterns of transcultural objectification in the early modern desire to collect and possess foreign nature and, by extension, foreign peoples across Eurasia. Adding references to selected modern artworks, the conclusion highlights how shells offer analogies between the appropriation of objects and the conquest of foreign peoples during the early modern period, a process in which material, sexual and political aspects are closely entangled.

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Keywords: Shells, ecology, collecting, Eurasia, postcolonial studies, materiality, gender

Looking at a modern image of a woman with a shell, Francesca Woodman’s (1958–1981) Untitled of 1979–1980, we notice three shells: a real one, a woman’s hairstyle arranged in the shape of a conch and a shell-shaped cloud. (Fig. 5.1) The image is one of Woodman’s many enigmatic self-portraits. It shows the artist with her eyes closed and her head resting on her hands as if sleeping or daydreaming. Similar to the visual correlations between the three shells – the real one, the one made of hair and the cloud shapes – are the links between the decoration on the artist’s sleeve and the maritime objects in the display case underneath her arm: they, too, seem to mirror each other’s shapes. Woodman rests her head on a glass panel whose transparent surface and the marine objects it shields and supports evoke associations with water. Her hands are reflected in it, evoking the impression of a shore that connects her head to the “underwater world” contained by the display case. Supported by a “coast” formed of her hands, the shell shape of the artist’s head indicates that we are looking at the self-portrait of a woman as a mollusc. Or, more specifically, a self-portrait of a woman’s dream of being a mollusc.

Grasskamp, A., Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia. Shells, Bodies, and Materiality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463721158_conc

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Fig. 5.1 Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979–1980. Silver gelatin print, 9½ x 12¼ in. © 2021, Woodman Family Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The arguably most famous shell images in the history of American photography were made a generation before Woodman’s time. Edward Weston (1886–1958) experimented with a nautilus and other kinds of shells, taking pictures of single specimens or combining them. (Fig. 5.2) Upon learning that this set of photographs was described as “perverse,” “erotic,” and “sexual” by those who first saw them, he was baffled. “Why were all these persons so profoundly affected on the physical side?” he wondered in his diary. “For I can say with absolute honesty that not once while working with shells did I have any physical reaction to them: nor did I try to record erotic symbolism.”1 More than 50 years later, Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) made his photograph Shell and Crystal (1986), an obvious reference to Weston’s works and one of many sexually explicit or erotically charged images of bodies and flowers in Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre.2 Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) may or may not have intended to represent sexual organs in her paintings of flowers 1 2

Weston, “Diary Entry, July 7, 1927,” in Weston, The Daybooks of Edward Weston, 2:32. Robert Mapplethorpe, Shell and Crystal, 1986–printed 1990, gelatine silver print, 48.9 × 48.9 cm.

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Conclusion 

Fig. 5.2 Edward Weston, Shells, 1927. Photograph, 22.86 × 17.78 cm. Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust, H-513.1958. © 2020 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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and shells. Judy Chicago (1939–), however, was quite intentional in using O’Keeffe’s work to represent a vulva at the Georgia O’Keeffe Place Setting of her installation The Dinner Party (1974–1979).3 Regardless of what Weston and O’Keeffe intended to evoke through their art, what Mapplethorpe, Chicago and others saw and continue to see in their representations of shells is related to human anatomy. 4 In twentieth-century America, the engagement with the polyvalence of shells was not limited to artists. Take, for example, a child’s encounter with shells documented in “Note on Conchology” of 1942 by the American psychiatrist and poet Merrill Moore (1903–1957), in which shells are associated with, among other things, porcelain and human genitalia.5 As a child, Moore writes, he had “felt that they were like people, distinct personalities in their own right, molluscan personalities”6 and one particular conch from India prompted him to think that the “shell could have been a lovely lady in a sweeping, swirling green dress, her train drawn around her and folded around her body.”7 As this book has shown, the tropes of lady-like shells and mollusc-like women, of conches resembling genitals on the one hand and porcelain on the other that surface in Woodman’s, Weston’s, Mapplethorpe’s and Chicago’s works and Moore’s writing had already played a role in early modern Eurasia. Some of them, for example associations between the surfaces of shells and human skin, nautilus conches and bodies, have in fact appeared in a variety of cultures throughout history.8 What makes the early modern European experience of such shells fundamentally different from the twentieth-century American one is the fact that they arrived in Europe as rare, treasured goods from regions that very few Europeans had access to or comprehensive knowledge of during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By then, Asia, where many of the most desired specimens were acquired, could be reached by crossing oceans that early modern maps depict as full of extraordinary creatures, sea monsters, and mermaids, which appear prominently on the elaborate mounts added to some shells by Northern European goldsmiths. A neatly woven web of symbolic meanings and metaphorical implications tied nudity and foreignness to Asian shells and informed the decorative framing that European craftsmen added to them in early modern collecting through the practice 3 Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974–1979. Ceramic, porcelain, textile, 1,463 × 1,463 cm. Brooklyn Museum; Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, 2002.10. 4 Further modern and contemporary artworks by non-American artists that make the same connections could be added, for example Rebecca Horn’s, Liebesflucht, Muschelschlaf, 2009. Examples in the field of modern design are discussed in Mette, Der Nautiluspokal, 16–27. 5 Moore, “A Note on Conchology.” For a historical overview of sexual aspects of the symbolism of shells also see Eliade, Images and Symbols, 125–50. 6 Moore, “A Note on Conchology,” 117. 7 Moore, “A Note on Conchology,”120. 8 For a historical overview of sexual aspects of the symbolism of shells, see Eliade, Images and Symbols, 125–50.

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of mounting. Numerous such mounts embody “wild,” fish-tailed or other “foreign” women, the shells being perceived as shaped in the forms of primary and secondary female sexual characteristics, their shiny surfaces inviting the collector’s imagination, gaze and touch.9 Classical and early modern texts abound in equivalences between the skin of otherworldly females and (oceanic) materials from which luxury collectables were made. In relation to aspects of “the foreign,” this book has examined an erotically defined “other” as embodied by and projected on Asian objects in European metal mounts. It has scrutinized the shells’ multi-layered “Indiannesses” as reinforced by European frameworks and addressed gendered notions of “self” and “other” that come into play through the perceived equivalences between maritime goods and female body parts, polished surfaces and smooth skin, the collecting “male” mind and subject and the collected “female” and woman-like object in early modern Europe. To understand the polyvalence of shell cups within this context also offers a new approach to early modern collecting and modes of display. Past scholarship has highlighted the Kunstkammer’s uses as a symbolic space, a microcosm, and a tool for the representation of power.10 Sixteenth-century collections have also been described as repositories of “practical knowledge” and as spaces for “practical and technical research … situated at the center of a complex of workshops and laboratories in which the practical work of court and state was undertaken.”11 The notion that the Kunstkammer “stimulated work as well as wonder” is crucial to understanding the encyclopedic dimensions and taxonomies of early modern collecting.12 Yet, neglected in all these accounts are the erotic dimensions of the encounters between object and collector that unfolded in spaces such as those of the German Kunstkammer, the Netherlandish konstkamer and the Italian studio and these deserve scholarly attention in their own right. As this book shows, to fully understand the early modern engagement with ocean objects and shell artefacts, it is necessary to look beyond the effects that spaces of collecting and display had in terms of “work” and “wonder” and to acknowledge their potential to function as sites of sexual knowledge and erotic fantasy. If we take this insight seriously, it has implications for a wider body of images such as the often-discussed illustration to Ferrante Imperato’s Dell’ Historia Naturale of 1599, which has been widely understood as referencing taxonomies of collecting and providing an insight into early modern viewing practices.13 (Fig. 5.3) In the centre of the image, a man appears to point at a vulva-shaped object. In the wider context of the full image, however, we see that the man is in fact pointing at the open jaws of 9 See also Grasskamp, “Shells, Bodies, and the Collector’s Cabinet.” 10 See, for example, Kaufmann, “Remarks on the Collections of Rudolf II;” Grote, ed. Macrocosmos in Microcosmo. 11 Meadow, “Merchants and Marvels,” 195; Meadow, “Quiccheberg and the Copious Object,” 53. 12 Roberts, “A World of Wonder,” 403. 13 See for example: Findlen, Possessing Nature, 38 f, Bleichmar, “Seeing the World in a Room,” 30.

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Fig. 5.3 Anonymous, frontispiece to Imperato Ferrante, Dell’ Historia naturale libri di Ferrante Imperato napolitano XXVIII, Naples: C. Vitale, 1599. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, *69.A.92.

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a crocodile on the ceiling. In the rectangular space where the vulva-shaped object is mounted to the wall, framed by shelves, a table and a window shutter, the man’s index finger forms one of many phallic shapes that point in the direction of the vulva, among them the curved animal horn to its right and the pommel that the man touches with his left hand. The vulva-like object resembles a seed-bearing fruit and might have been inspired by a split-open baobab fruit shell with its hairy and chunky pulp, or a sliced papaya with its seed-filled central cavity. Rare examples of both fruits had recently entered Europe for the first time from Africa and the Americas respectively, and a collection of natural rarities like the one in the illustration would have been an appropriate place for their storage and display. The fruit-like shapes are among the most obvious references to human anatomy in the image. Another slightly less obvious one is the cowry shell at the centre of the image’s upper edge; the cowry shell was called porcellana in Italian because of its resemblance to a vulva (colloquially porcello).14 The cowry shell and the conch shell to its left both evoke genital imagery. As part of this display of sexualized objects, the designer of the book plate included a jellyfish in this panorama of maritime material culture. It is positioned at the left upper corner underneath a walrus in a space that it would never have held in an early modern collection. Rather than a collectable, it is a visual fantasy of a jellyfish in the form of a corpse affixed to the ceiling in the most phallic shape a jellyfish could possibly attain. While some of the animal bodies in the image, such as the crocodile, would customarily have hung by ropes or wires from the ceilings of early modern collections and apothecaries,15 a jellyfish pinned to the ceiling was a product of the artist’s imagination, rather than a result of documentation. The jellyfish’s shape, too, is a product of the imagination: the illustrator has visually enforced and exaggerated a likeness between animal and human body parts. Though most digital reproductions of this illustration obscure it, the image is framed on both sides with flaps of paper. The flaps must be unfolded to view the image in its entirety. In this way, the flaps function like the cabinet doors in the picture, forming a commentary on the process of visual discovery and the nature of viewing itself, in which one thing stands for another, a jellyfish appears as a phallus, shells represent vulvas, and flaps of paper are cabinet doors. The wit required for the production of such a multi-layered pictorial comment on the nature of viewing was in league with the erudition of the scholars who read the book that contained it. Designing paper flaps that function like cabinet doors and images of natural objects that evoke body parts was an artful aspect of artistic skill and visual invention, appreciated by readers who would unravel these layers of information and visual surprise with wonder (rather than voyeuristic desire or pornographic interest). 14 Mish, ed. The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, 371. 15 Dilg, “Apotheker als Sammler.”

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Likewise, the much-discussed representations of open-shelled oysters that appear throughout Netherlandish paintings — allusions to female genitals and symbols of “food and sex; gluttony and lust; momentary passion and transitory life”16 — employ similar pictorial strategies. As illustrated by the seventeenth-century writings of Karel van Mander (1548–1606) and the emblem book Mirror of Old and New Times (1632), a collection of symbolic pictures with a commentary by Jacob Cats (1577–1660), some of these images functioned like proverbs. Cats writes that proverbs “appear to be one thing, in reality they contain another, of which the reader having in due time seized the act of meaning and intention, experiences wondrous pleasure in his soul; not unlike one, who, after some search finds a beautiful bunch of grapes under thick leaves. Experience teaches us that many things gain by not being completely seen, but somewhat veiled and concealed.”17 Cats’s words could be applied equally to the visual discoveries within the image of the collection above; like “a beautiful bunch of grapes under thick leaves,” shells’ juicy suggestions await discovery beneath a layer of literal meanings between the leaves of Ferrante Imperato’s book, putting them in line with the ocean objects discussed in this book that formed part of the complex “surfacescapes”18 of early modern collecting. As this book has shown, associations between maritime material culture and foreign spaces, and shells and female bodies were not limited to early modern Europe at all, but also played an important role in Chinese art and material culture. Here, craftsmen inscribed nautilus shells with pictorial fantasies of South Asian jungles while paintings confront us with female figures emerging from giant clams that were associated with the liminal spaces of the Chinese empire’s tributary system. While the objectification of foreign bodies in early modern Europe is relatively well researched,19 work on the relationships between artefacts and people, and object surfaces and human skin in the context of Chinese collecting has not yet considered the importance of cultural origin in the “surfacescapes” of Ming and Qing dynasty collecting. Building on the conceptualization of artefacts that “think materially” with the body of the early modern beholder and embody a powerful affective potential in addition to conveying a plethora of metaphorical meanings,20 this book shows that the entanglement of surfaces and bodies with information on geography and socio-political systems of power is too significant to be side-lined. 16 De Girolami Cheney, “The Oyster in Dutch Genre Paintings,” 155. 17 Cats, Spiegel, 87, cited from De Girolami Cheney, “The Oyster,” 146. 18 This term is borrowed from Jonathan Hay who developed and uses it in relation to late Ming and Qing collecting in Hay, Sensuous Surface, 67, where it is used interchangeably with “topography of sensuous surface.” 19 Burke, “Nakedness and Other Peoples”; Mason, Deconstructing America; Stevens, “New World Contacts;” Traub, “Mapping the Global Body;” Wilson, “Costume and the Boundaries of Bodies.” 20 Hay, Sensuous Surfaces, 13.

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This insight has wider implications not only for our understanding of collecting practices, but also contributes to the historiography of China as a seafaring empire that “explored” and “colonized” foreign goods and people along the “maritime silk road” using strategies some of which bear resemblances to those used by early modern European empires. The interest in ocean objects and organisms was not new to early modern Eurasia. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and Pliny the Elder (23/24BCE–79), for example, reflected on molluscs, as did Tang dynasty poetry and the collection of ancient texts known as the Book of Rites (Liji) discussed in chapters 2 and 3. But it was during the early modern period that this interest was commercialized using trade networks rooted in imperial and colonial patterns of exploitation in which the bodies of foreign slaves and vassals were often purchased in exchange for objects such as shell-money. Against this background, the associations evoked by shells’ smooth surfaces and suggestive shapes that included (and still include) analogies to female anatomy specifically called to mind the physical appearances of foreign women. Ocean objects appealed to the sense of touch, but they also offered analogies between the appropriation of objects and that of foreign people and their conquest, a process in which sexual and political aspects were closely entangled. As shells are integral to early modern reflections on the relations between human and non-human realms, thinking with and through ocean objects, their sensual appeal as well as their intrinsic “otherness,” teaches us about the shaping of aesthetics and ecologies of matter within the specific early modern frameworks of imperial centres and their peripheries. The use of vision and touch, allusion and fantasy in the early modern encounter with shell artefacts – paintings, prints and three-dimensional objects – brings to the fore patterns of transcultural exchange and objectification, submission and exploitation in the early modern desire to collect and possess foreign nature and, by extension, foreign people across Eurasia.

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Yu Pei-chin 余珮瑾, Pinpai de gushi: Qianlong huagndi de wenwucang yu baozhuang yishu 品牌的故事: 乾隆皇帝的文物收藏與包裝藝術 [Story of a Brand Name: The Collection and Packaging Aesthetics of the Qing Emperor Qianlong], exhibition catalogue. Taipei: National Palace Museum, 2017. Zhao Jiabin and Wu Chunming. Shipwreck Archaeology in Dinghai Bay, Lianjing, Fujian. Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 2011. Zheng Xinxian, “Animals as Wonders. Writing Commentaries on Monthly Ordinances in Qing China.” In Animals through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911, edited by Roel Sterckx, Martina Siebert and Dagmar Schäfer, 217–232. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Zuroski, Eugenia. “Nautilus Cups and Unstill Life.” Journal18 3 (2017): http://www.journal18. org/1493.

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Acknowledgments

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This book was made possible by the General Research Fund Project 12603017 of the Research Grants Council Hong Kong and supported by funding from the Hong Kong Baptist University Research Committee. Research in Europe was made possible by fellowships held at the International Institute for Asian Studies at Leiden University and at the Munich Centre for Global History at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. I am grateful to Caroline Nicholas for her work on the manuscript and to two anonymous peer reviewers for their suggestions.

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Index

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Note: page numbers in italics refer to figures. Adam 166, 168–69 agency 10–12, 14, 23, 59, 67–68, 74–76, 82–83, 88, 101, 147, 156, 179 Albani, Francesco 175–76 Album of Beasts 99 Africa 9, 23, 26, 36–37, 51, 80, 112, 114, 119, 139, 149, 154, 189; see also Ethiopia alcohol 27, 44, 49, 72–74, 165 Alcyone 161 Aldrovandi, Ulisse, De reliquis animalibus 9n17, 24, 37–39, 38, 39, 53, 55n76, 56, 69, 94, 95, 97, 100, 116 Allegory 51, 91, 124, 125, 148, 150, 156, 159, 161, 165, 169, 171–72, 175 Ambras Castle 152 America 32n31, 92, 137, 169, 170, 186 Amsterdam 9, 23, 110–11 Amphitrite 14, 57, 72, 166, 167, 168, 171 Andromeda 112, 113, 114, 117, 140 animals 7, 10, 14, 24, 37, 51, 55, 56, see also birds, mollusks, snakes, snails anthropocentric 10 anthropological 10–11, 14 anthropomorphic 156 antiquarian 116 antique, antiquity 121–22, 124, 161 antiquities 117 Antwerp 110, 127 Aphrodite 124, 149, 152; see also Venus apothecaries 189 Arabia 36 Archaeology, underwater archaeology, archaeological excavations 25, 27, 73, 76, 110 Aristotle 53, 100, 121, 124, 149n4, 191 Athenaeus 94 Augsburg 24n3, 32n31, 69n4 Saint Augustine of Hippo 114–16 auspicious meanings 35–36, 129 automatons 72–73 Bachelard, Gaston 11n28, 11n31, 75, 80n38, 80n41, 81 baobab fruit shell 189 bamboo 148 banquet (Schauessen) 72 Bantam 23 barnacle 94, 97 beach 112, 115, 128, 129; see also shore, coast, cliff Beijing 10, 98 Belgian 110 Bellekin, Cornelis 46, 48 Bellini, Giovanni 124, 125

Belon, Pierre 9n17, 26, 122 Bencao gangmu 10n21, 48, 89, 96, 98, 100 Benedictine 91 Bennett, Jane 81–83 Berchorius, Petrus / Bersuire, Pierre 91, 124 biography of objects see social life, of things biomineralization 10, 67, 90, 93 biopower 168–69 birds 10n20,12–13, 26, 27, 27n17, 25–44, 49, 51, 53, 58–59, 67–68, 82, 87, 93–101, 111–12, 117, 130, 161; see also cassowary, chicks, duck, goose, halcyon, hatchling, kingf isher, ostrich, parrot, pheasant birds’ hair, feathers 29, 32, 36–37, 53, 95, 97, 120n18, 130, 153, 169; see also kingfisher feathers birth, birthplaces, being born 13, 14, 68, 91, 124, 128, 149, 163 bivalve 10, 14, 78, 82–83 boat 114, 122, 124, 149, 173 Bodhisattva Guanyin see Guanyin Bolinus brandaris 154 bones 67, 96, 114, 129 Boticelli, Sandro 149 Borneo 37 Borromeo, Federico, Archbishop 128 breast, breast-shaped 55, 69, 72, 156, 165, 172–73 Britain 10 Brueghel the Elder, Jan 112n8, 127 Buddha 130–31, 134, 137–38, 178–79 Buddhist belief, Buddhist practices, Buddhist texts 13, 90, 129, 133, 136–40 Buddhist painting 14, 130, 134–37, 178–79 Buddhist material culture 131, 133, 139 burial objects (mingqi) 74, 76 byssus threads 89, 97, 178; see also birds’ hair Cao Renhu 97 Cao Zhao 10n20, 44, 50, 176n67 Calicut 133 Callimachus 124 camerae / rooms (shi) / ceng 67 camphor 99 Cardano, Girolamo 92, 116 Caritas 14, 152–53, 172–73 carving, carvings 12, 23, 25–26, 34–35, 39, 44, 46, 59, 60, 95 cassowary 26 Cats, Jacob 190 celadon 76, 77 Chan Buddhism 130, 131; see also Buddhist belief, Buddhist practices Charity see Caritas

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Chenghua period, Ming dynasty 86 Chicago, Judy 186 chicks 84, 96, 100 Christ 91, 129, 161, 171, 171 Christ child 159, 163, 172 Christian 13, 81, 109, 117, 140; see also God Christopher, St. 114n13, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163–66, 179 clam-monster (shen) 83–86, 88–90, 95–96, 100, 137–39, 176, 178 clam-towers 84; see also sea-cities Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhai jing) 98 clay 12, 26–27, 68, 74–76, 80–82 clever objects 68–72, 82, 101 cliff 112, also see beach, coast, shore coast 83, 100, 110, 131, 183; see also beach, cliff, shore cockle 55, 149, 151 conceive / conception 68, 80, 86, 88, 90–91, 172 Confucianism 130 coral (shanhu) 10, 13, 51, 52, 77, 82, 109, 119, 128–40, 132, 135, 169, 178 correspondence 9, 11, 24, 53, 110 cosmological, cosmology 13, 81, 91, 93, 109 cowry shell 26–27, 189 Cranach, Lucas 163 crab-man 131, 132 crayfish 134 Creator of Things/Fashioner of Creations (zaowuzhe) 74–76, 80–81, 84, 92 Crocodile 189 Cupid also see Eros 57, 57, 152–54, 153, 159n22, 163, 168n50 cutting of gems 29 Daoist 13, 44, 49, 73, 129–31, 134, 138–40; see also Immortals, Officials of the Heavens, of the Land and the Water David 166–69 Delft 176 Delftware 147, 148, 176 Deleuze and Guattari 76 demons, demonic creatures 119, 131, 134, 176 dew 91–94, 172 Dirck China 99–100 dolphins 51, 165 dragons 27, 32, 35, 37, 39n55, 46, 83–84, 86, 88–89, 96, 120–21, 134-40, 176, 178–79 dragons or kraken ( jiao) 84, 96, 137 dragon king 134, 136–37, 140, 176, 178 dragon ladies 138, 176, 178–79 dragon king’s daughter / dragon princess 137–38 Dresden 39, 42, 43, 44, 46, 88n81, 89, 110 drinking of alcohol 27, 44, 49, 72–74, 165 drinking games 73 dripstone cave 119, 121 duck 94, 120n18 Dürer, Albrecht 32n31, 99, 152n7, 163 Dutch East India Company (VOC) 7, 9, 23, 46, 99, 100, 112, 114 Dutch West India Company (WIC) 9

East India Company 7, 9, 23, 46, 99, 100, 112, 114; see also Dutch East India Company ecologies, ecological 7, 11–14, 67–68, 97–98, 101, 138, 183, 191 Eden, Garden of 166, 169 eggs, eggshells 12–13, 26, 35n47, 50, 67–68, 93–95, 97–98, 100, 124, 152, 161 Egyptian 149, 153 elephant 126, 133 embassy 129, 133 enamel 78, 80 Erasmus, Desiderius 127 Eros 124; see also Cupid escargot 126; see also snails, slugs Ethiopia 114, 140 Eve 166, 168–69 ewer 58n86, 71, 88n81 exoskeleton 67–68 exploitation, oceanic, subterranean 10, 12, 51, 83, 86, 169, 191 export porcelain / export ware 90, 174–75 Ferdinand II, Archduke 152 fig leaf 166, 168–69 Filipino 23, 26 fish 39, 46, 82, 91, 94, 98–99, 115, 121, 122, 134, 138, 154, 173 flying fish (Exocoetidae) 99–100 fish fossil 77 fish scale 35 fish-tailed /fishtails 24, 51, 53, 58, 130, 159, 161, 165, 187 flames 88, 990 flaming pearl 88 Flanders 110 flask, pilgrim flask 78–80, 79 flood/flooding 114–15; see also Great Flood Florence 25, 31, 32, 45, 46, 47, 51, 59, 110 flowers 27, 29, 35, 37, 39, 44, 88, 90, 119, 129, 184 foam 84, 161–63; see also sea foam folk belief 86 Fortuna 53, 55, 58, 147, 149, 151–52, 173, 176 Fossils, fossilization 77–80, 116–17, 119 Foucault, Michel 168 fountain 72, 119 France 9, 78, 80, 172 Fruit 92, 189 Fugger 32n31, 110n3 Fujian 86, 96–97 Galatea 14, 55, 57–58, 60, 149, 171, 173, 175–76, 179 gardens 80, 119, 147, 166, 169 gastropod 10, 130n54 gateway, gate, portal 13, 109, 126, 138–40, 124, 139 Gautama 131 games see drinking games gems 23, 26, 28–29, 86–87, 91, 93, 99–100, 126, 129, 131, 133–34 gems, cutting of 29

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Genesis 168 genitals 55, 57, 124, 153, 156, 168, 178, 186, 189–90; see also vagina, vulva, phallic Genoa 110n3 genre painting 112 Germany 9, 11, 29, 33, 48, 154 Gessner, Conrad, Historiae Animalium 98 de Gheyn, Jacob II 57, 72 giant clams see Tridacna gigas gifts 9–10, 24n3, 46, 97, 110n3, 127, 131 giraffe see qilin globalized, globalization 8, 12, 68, 99, 128, 139, 176 globe 151 goat 152 God 80, 81, 100, 128; see also river god goddess 14, 55, 72, 75, 149, 148, 152, 163, 171, 176 gold 9, 50, 53, 55, 86, 99, 100, 131, 133, 134, 159 goldsmith 9, 24, 33, 37, 60, 69, 122, 153, 165, 186 goose 94, 97 Gossaert, Jan 14, 166, 167, 171, 178 grafting 10 Great Flood 80, 115 Greek, ancient 13, 35, 50, 109, 124, 140, 149 griffin 126 grotto 84, 118, 119–21, 128 Guanyin/Kannon 14, 138, 176–79, 177 clamshell Guanyin 176–79, 177 Guangzhou 9–11, 14, 23, 15, 29, 35, 46, 49–50, 58–60, 87–88, 95, 174–76 Guattari, Félix see Deleuze and Guattari Gujarat 110n3 Hainhofer, Philip 24n3 halcyon 35, 37, 161; see also kingfisher hair 97, 131, 147, 159, 178, 184, 189 hair ornament 87 Halle relic book 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 163, 165 Han dynasty 87, 88n78, 27n17 Handstein 13, 129–30 hatchling 97 Hawkins, Richard 92 heavenly produced (tiancheng) 77 hen 93–94 Henan 99 hierarchies, social and material 74, 87 Holy Trinity 115 homo ludens 73 Hong Bao 133 horn 50, 77, 84, 89–90, 97, 119–20, 189 Hornick, Erasmus 69, 71 Huguenot 81 humanist, humanism 23–24, 69 Idstein, grotto at 118, 119, 121 Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures by Nie Huang 82–85, 96–98, 101, 178 Images of Tribute Giving (Zhigong tu) 133–34, 136 images made by chance 161, 163 imari 90

Immortals, the 44, 49, 73, 129, 131, 139–40 Imperato, Ferrante 187, 188, 190 “Indian” (indianisch) 24, 34, 53, 57, 126, 133, 152, 169, 171, 187 India 9, 24, 29, 32n28, 36, 86, 93, 126 Indian Ocean 92n89, 133 Indians 53, 57, 169, 170 Indonesia 7, 9, 23, 26, 37, 101, 133, 137n71 Indo-Pacific ocean 80 Insobriety see alcohol inventory 28–29, 46n58, 152 Iranian 92; see also Persian Isis 149 Italian studiolo collections 51, 53, 187 Italy 9, 11, 32–33, 44, 110n3, 119n16 ivory 14, 29n24, 46, 55, 120n18, 131, 171 jade 27–28, 76, 86–87, 134, 136 jar 134 James, Saint 80, 172 Jamnitzer, Wenzel 69, 165 Jamnitzer, Bartel 39, 40, 44n55, 58, Japanese 90, 128, 147, 176, 177 jellyfish 189 jewellery 23, 26, 55, 131 Jiang Shiquan 82 joke cups (Scherzbecher) 72 Juno 154 Kangxi emperor, Kangxi reign 82–83, 88, 97–100 Kannon see Guanyin Kanō Tan’yū 177, 178, 138n80, 176n68 Kingdom of Women (nüren guo) 137, 140 kingfisher bird 35, 37, 87, 94, 130; see also halcyon kingfisher feather 37, 130 Kircher, Athanasius 26, 46, 99–101, 116–17 Kornblum, Marx 39, 42, 53, 57–58, 149, 151–52 Kui Xing 130 Kunstkammer, konstkamer 9, 46n58, 48–53, 55, 51, 57–60, 152n9, 187 kraken or dragons ( jiao) 35, 137–38 kraken women 137–38 lacquerwork 32–33, 138 Leonardo da Vinci 116 Li Bai 27, 73 Liji (Book of Rites) 96, 191; see also yueling liminal spaces 114, 128–29, 138, 190 Lisbon 9, 110 literati 129, 139 Liu Zongyuan 84 Livorno 110 logarithmic spiral 69 Luo Ping 82–84 luohan 130–34, 132, 136n68, 137 Ma Huan 133 de Man, Cornelis 110, 111 Manchu 97, 100

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Mander, Karel van 94–95, 112, 190 Mandeville, John Sir 55n77, 56, 98, 100, 126, 149 manmade (renqiao) 77 Manual of Sea Oddities 98, 101 maps 53, 60, 99 Mapplethorpe, Robert 184, 186 mascaron 32, 46, 58 Mars 159 Mary, Saint 14, 91, 114n13, 156, 171–73 masks 32, 119 Master E.S. 159, 160, 161 Master H.L. 162, 163 materia medica 10, 84, 96 material complex 8, 93, 95, 101 transformation of matter, transformative processes 11, 13, 33, 68, 74–75, 78, 81, 83, 85, 90, 97, 109, 129, 133, 139, 161, 176 Materialism, New 11 mathematical 69, 72, 102 Medici, Ferdinando de’, Grande Duke of Tuscany 46, 51 Medici collections 32, 44 Medici workshop 32, 44, 46 Medici porcelain 33 medieval 55, 59, 91–92, 94, 97–98, 100, 124–28, 153; see also Tang Dynasty Mediterranean 10, 13, 55, 109, 119, 128–29, 140, 154, 172 merchants 7, 24, 86, 88, 93, 100, 110, 129, 133 mermaids 50, 53, 55, 57–58, 60, 149, 159, 161, 165, 178, 186 mermen 53, 60 Metamorphoses, Ovid’s 55, 114, 129, 140, 173 Metaphorical, metaphors 55n80, 60, 81, 124, 127n35, 161, 163, 172, 186, 190 Michelangelo 166 Milan 29, 128 minerals, mineral-like 13, 93, 116, 121, 128–30, 139 miniature landscapes 13, 129–30, 139 mining 13, 86, 87, 130 mirage 68, 82–86, 89, 101, 137–38 mirror 119, 190 woman with a mirror 156, 159, 161, 165 Miseroni 29–730, 31, 32–33, 44 missionaries 98, 100, 129 mollusks 7, 10, 12–13, 55, 67–102, 116, 124, 126, 134, 138–39, 149, 153, 161, 168–69, 178, 184, 186, 191 Moluccas, the 9 monsters, sea monsters, clam-monsters 32, 60, 83–84, 86, 88–90, 95–96, 100, 114, 117, 126, 137–39, 176, 178, 186 moon, moonlight 86–87, 90–91, 178 Moore, Merrill 186 metal mounts 9, 24, 29, 33–35, 37, 50–51, 53, 58, 60, 152, 186–87 mother-of-pearl 24n3, 39, 53, 59, 94, 100, 130, 176; see also “Pearl Mother” Munich 110n3, 119n16 murex/muricid 80, 154; see also Bolinus brandaris

musk 99 mussel 80,85, 87–88, 90–91 mythology 13, 46, 48–53, 55, 60, 73, 76, 81, 102, 110, 112, 114, 117, 119, 124, 128–31, 134, 140, 147, 149, 154, 165, 169, 171, 173, 175 natural history 9, 69, 97, 119, 122 naturalists 7, 24, 26, 69, 92, 116, 121 nauplius 122–23 Neptune 14, 57, 166–71, 167, 178 Nereids 55; see also Galatea nest 13, 35,67–68, 100 Netherlands, Netherlandish 9, 33, 46, 94–95, 114, 149, 156, 187, 190 Nie Huang see Illustrated Catalogue of Marine Creatures Nieuhof, Johann van 99–101 Nuremberg 40, 69, 70, 72, 130n54, 152n7,165 Nü Wa 75, 81 nymphaea 121 nymphs 171, 173, 175; see also Galatea octopus 55n76 Officials, Daoist, of the Heavens, of the Land and the Water 134, 135 oil 84, 90 O’Keeffe, Georgia 184, 186 Opis 154 orb 151, 163 ostrich 26, 50 Ovid, 55, 114, 129, 140, 173; see also Metamorphoses oyster 76–77 Pacific Ocean 80 Palissy, Bernard 78–81, 79, 115–16, 119 Paracelsus 81 paradise, paradise-like 14, 51, 129, 139, 147, 166, 169, 179; see also Penglai, Eden Paris 122 parrots 10n20, 25–44, 49, 51, 58, 94–95 parrot cups, parrot shells 25–44, 58–59, 73, 94–95 pearl boat 122 pearls 10, 35, 51, 85–94, 101, 126, 131n57, 134, 138–39, 151, 172, 175–76, 178; see also flaming pearl pearl-sewn shirt / pearl shirt, story of 87–88 Penglai 49, 129, 139–40 penjing (potted landscape) 13, 130 “Pearl Mother” 91, 93 Perseus 112n7, 112n8, 113, 114 Persian, also see Iranian 24, 92 petrification, petrified 80, 116, 119, 121, 128–30 Pezolt, Hans 165 phallic 152, 189 pheasant 96, 98 Philip of Burgundy 168 Photography 184–86 pine tree 147 plate 88, 130–34, 148, 173, 174, 175–76

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Pliny the Elder 92, 121, 124, 191 Polishing of shells, polished shells 23, 24n3, 39, 44, 94, 101, 173, 187 Polo, Marco 26 porcelain 12, 26, 33–34, 46, 50–53, 58, 60, 77, 88, 89, 119, 121, 173–76, 174, 186; see also Medici porcelain porcellane (as term) 26 portrait 10, 32n31, 178, 183–84 Portugal, Portuguese 9, 25, 54, 110 Postcolonial 10, 183 potted landscape see penjing pottery, potter 33, 74, 80, 130 pregnant 55, 91 Prudentia 165 Pygmies 153 qi (energy) 83–85 qi (rare) 78 Qianlong 76–78, 97–99 qilin 29, 33, 35–37 Qiu Ying 131, 132, 133 quicksilver 99

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rare see qi Rhapsody on the High House of the Clam-monsters 84 Rhineland 171, 172 rhinoceros 99 rhubarb 99 Ritter, Jeremias 153, 154 river god 173, 175 rock 13, 84, 87, 129–30, 134, 147 Roman 126, 149 Rondeletius Gulielmus 92 Rosso Fiorentino 154, 155 Rumphius, Georg Eberhard 7, 101 salt cellar 122, 123 sand 67, 90, 94, 114 sapta ratna 90, 131 Saxony 156; see also Dresden sea foam 149, 161–63 sea-cities see clam-towers sea monsters 60, 114, 117, 186 Scaliger, Julius 26, 78n33 scallop 14, 55, 149, 169, 171, 172 Schmidt, Nikolaus 69 Scot, Reginald 151 shell seller 111 shores 37, 51, 91, 112, 114–16, 127, 129, 131, 133, 159, 161, 169, 183; see also beach, cliff, coast shrines, Buddhist 139 Sicily 100 silk 99–100, 119 silk road 191 silver 29, 44, 50–51, 53, 86, 149 sintering 119, 121 skeleton 67, 114 skin 29, 50–58, 86, 114, 153, 173, 186–87, 190

skulls 114 slaves 191 snails / snail shells 9, 12, 14, 27–28, 50, 55, 67, 69, 70, 72–7478, 88, 90–91, 94, 100–01, 124–27, 134, 149, 151–56, 161, 163, 173 snake 55, 80, 84, 86, 89, 165 social life, of things 8, 25 South Asia 48, 190 Southeast Asia 12; see also Borneo, Indonesia, Vietnam Stalagmites 119 Sri Lanka 55, 126, 149 social life, of things 8, 25 Song Yingxing, Tiangong kaiwu (The Exploitation of the Works of Nature/The Work of Heaven and the Inception of Things) 83, 86–90 South China Sea 76, 83, 101, 137 South America 92 Spanish 25, 122 sparrows 96, 100 sperm 92, 149, 172 spirals 72, 90, 115, 126, 168 squid 55 still life 26, 112, 119, 128 stoneware 28, 74–76, 78, 81, 119 studio/studiolo 51, 53, 187 Tang dynasty 27, 35, 59, 68, 74–76, 78, 80–81, 83–84, 91, 119, 129, 138, 191 Tang dynasty poetry 27, 84, 35, 59, 73, 84, 129, 138, 191 tangerines 86 tendrils 119, 166 textiles 32, 77, 175; see also silk Thetis 154, 171 Tiangong kaiwu see Song Yingxing ‘towers and terraces’/’towers and pavilions’ (loutai) 82–85, 89, 101 Trapa 126 Traponce 126 tree 13, 46, 93–94, 98, 129–30, 147, 152–53 tributary exchange 12–13, 60, 109, 133–36, 138, 140, 190 Tridacna gigas (chequ), Tridacnidae 10, 14, 149, 178, 190 trident 169 turbo shells 9, 49, 55, 69, 72, 154, 164, 165 Turbo cornutus 69 Turbo marmoratus 49 turtle/tortoise, flying turtle, turtle shells 31, 50, 99–130, 134, 138–39, 159n25 treasure fleets (baochuan) 133 tusk 50, 131, 133–34 univalve 10 Uranus 149 Valéry, Paul 81–82 vagina 124; see also genitals

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vase 26, 131, 175 Venus 14, 53, 55, 58, 147–59, 161–63, 166–79 Vespucci, Amerigo 53–54 vibrant matter 11, 68, 76, 81–83, 101 Vietnam 37 vine 119, 166 vulva 152, 156, 186–87, 189

Xinjiang 87 Yan Liben 134, 136 yaksa 131, 133–34, 138, 178 yin energy 91 Yongzheng 82 You Qiu 134, 136n68 Yuan Zhen 73 Yueling (Monthly Ordinances); see also Liji 96 zaowu 74–75, 83 Zeeland 166, 168 Zheng He, Admiral 133 Zhenmushou/ “earth spirit” 119–20, 120 Zhigong tu see Images of Tribute Giving Zucchi, Jacopo 51, 52, 169

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Walther, Johann 118, 119 wanwu (‘myriad creatures’) 74 water spitting/spitting water 119, 121 Welser 110n3 “Western ocean” (xiyang) 139, 178 Weston, Edward 184, 185–86 witch, witchcraft 151, 162 De Witte Leeuw 23, 25–26, 25, 112, 149 womb 13, 68, 91, 101 wood, fragrant wood, sappanwood, aloeswood 46, 50, 77, 87, 114

Woodman, Francesca 183–84, 184, 186 Wtewael, Joachim 112–14, 113

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C O N N E C T E D H I S T O R I E S I N T H E E A R LY M O D E R N W O R L D

During the early modern period, objects of maritime material culture were removed from their places of origin and traded, collected and displayed worldwide. Focusing on shells and pearls exchanged within local and global networks, this monograph compares and connects Asian, in particular Chinese, and European practices of oceanic exploitation in the framework of a transcultural history of art with an understanding of maritime material culture as gendered. Perceiving the ocean as mother of all things, as womb and birthplace, Chinese and European artists and collectors exoticized and eroticized shells’ shapes and surfaces. Defining China and Europe as spaces entangled with South and Southeast Asian sites of knowledge production, source and supply between 1500 and 1700, the book understands oceanic goods and maritime networks as transcending and subverting territorial and topographical boundaries. It also links the study of globally connected port cities to local ecologies of oceanic exploitation and creative practices. Anna Grasskamp is Assistant Professor at the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University. She co-edited EurAsian Matters: China, Europe, and the Transcultural Object, 1600-1800 (2018) and is the author of Objects in Frames: Displaying Foreign Collectibles in Early Modern China and Europe (2019).

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“This fascinating study is meticulously researched and presented with verve. Anna Grasskamp is a rare scholar who is equally conversant with the European archives and the Chinese ones. Her examination of shells and other maritime organisms as collectible transcultural objects casts new light on these objects, and reveals attitudes towards alien creatures, faraway places, and the natural world that are quite different from modern attitudes.” ‒ Dorothy Ko, Barnard College

ISBN: 978-94-6372-115-8

AUP. nl

Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia, Amsterdam University Press, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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