Another Ivory Work

 

Crucified Christ

c. 1600-1650

Hispano-Philippine

Polychromed ivory with traces of gilding

24 5/8 × 26 3/4 × 5 1/8 in.

The material ivory circulated within and across continents, from Yupik cultures to European empires, providing through-lines to examine both the works themselves and the connections (and disconnections) between the cultures that produced them. The Crucified Christ work is notable for the ways its circulation highlights the spectacular web of connections throughout the seventeenth century. This work was likely made of African or Thai ivory that was shipped to the Philippines, where European merchants sold the material to Spanish Catholic patrons who commissioned Chinese immigrants called sangleys to sculpt the religious figurine using Netherlandish prints as a model. Once this work was completed, it was likely sold to a wealthy individual in colonial Mexico and eventually brought back to Spain before being donated to the Harvard Art Museums.

Although the hegemonic geographies typically ascribed to the term Orientalism figure prominently in the production and circulation of this work, the themes, materials, and derivative imagery suggest the ways in which Orientalism acts as what Ali Behdad says, “a powerful network of aesthetic, cultural, economic, and political relations with which art historians research institute curators have to reckon in studying” (Behdad 711). The European colonial gaze is simultaneously fundamental to the production of this work, but its attributions become muddled by the inherent materiality of the work itself. The agency of Chinese immigrants whose presence in colonial Philippines complicates conceptions and understandings of European imperialism in the seventeenth century. Whose gaze matters in the production of this work? Is it the craftsman? The Catholic missionary commissioning the work? The Netherlandish painter producing the works from which this was derived? The complex networks and connections attributed to the twentieth century still existed hundreds of years prior, even if those connections exist in unexpected locales and artworks.