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This essay reunites a diverse corpus of portable devotional objects likely created around the late sixteenth century which feature minute wooden carvings set against grounds of brightly coloured hummingbird feathers. While the Christological narratives that they commonly depict reveal clear links to the artistic traditions of Western Europe, the plumage that they sport is derived from a family of birds endemic to the Americas. This juxtaposition has inspired the scholars who address them to focus all but exclusively on determining their provenance. Yet their composite nature undermines simplistic notions of origin by suggesting the pathways that they travelled in the early modern world: while the carvings themselves were likely produced by Indigenous artists in central Mexico, the metal cases sported by several examples were made in Europe. After surveying the corpus and its place in previous scholarship, this essay turns to an examination of their reception by elite European audiences. It argues that such viewers drew formal and theological connections between the materials and iconography of these objects that greatly enhanced their potential to serve as effective tools for private devotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Herri met de Bles's Way to Calvary is a ‘visual exegesis’ closely related to Erasmus' exegetical theory. Erasmus conceived exegesis as a dialectical tension between the two extremes senses of the Biblical text (literal and spiritual), mediated by the figure of allegory. Not only does allegory designate Christ, but also the veiled language of the Scriptures and Christ's constant use of enigmatic, paradoxical and obscure figures. Interpreted in the light of the Erasmian exegetical model, and related to the figure of the Silenus popularized by the Christian humanist, Bles's landscape reveals the presence of a specific pictorial phenomenon of crypto-anthropomorphosis. This landscape of a procession following a tiny mocked Christ-Silenus, is also a portrait of a gigantic rocky mocking Silenus. This pictorial device is an integral part of the exegetical logic of the picture and is instrumental in inviting the beholder to conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an account of the copies made during the fifteenth and sixteenth century of Rogier van der Weyden's "Deposition from the Cross" (c. 1430–35), as that altarpiece migrated from the chapel of Our Lady Outside the Walls in Louvain to the monastery of El Escorial in Spain. My primary concern in describing the journey of the "Deposition" from the Netherlands to Spain and the copies that it left in its wake is to show how these events and images bear on the concept of originality, and on the art-historical practice of reconstructing what is commonly designated as original context – a practice that, I use this material to argue, is more problematic than it is sometimes taken to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of the representation of cannibalism have noted that the discourse on that practice that emerged in the sixteenth century operated as a differencing mechanism, a counterpoint to ideas about the ideal and individuated Christian subject of early modern Europe. But how were these associations and differences articulated within visual culture? This essay examines Jan Van der Straet's Amerigo Vespucci Rediscovers America and other visual images that present cannibalism as an attribute and/or practice of the inhabitants of the Americas. It identifies the strategies of visual rhetoric through which that association operated in the construction and maintenance of relationships of colonial power and subordination in the early modern Atlantic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction situates the essays of this special issue within current scholarship on art and religious reform in early modern Europe. The first section considers iconoclasm and the settlements reached in its aftermath, and emphasizes the richness and diversity of the Protestant and Catholic visual cultures that evolved alongside movements for religious reform. The second section considers the individual essays, and draws out common themes: the relationship between image and word; artists’ and patrons’ responses to new understandings of Christian history and soteriology; images’ role in the construction of confessional boundaries, but also their ability to transgress those boundaries. The introduction highlights the plurality of methodological approaches adopted by the contributors, which reminds us that although attention to the social and political contexts in which images were produced and received is an essential part of both historical and art-historical analysis, the power of art can never be fully captured through words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agnolo Bronzino's Pygmalion and the Statue (c. 1529–30), the cover for Jacopo Pontormo's portrait of Francesco Guardi, reveals an ambitious young painter engaging Latin and vernacular poetry. Ultimately, however, Bronzino evolved an incisive pictorial meditation on the implications of the Pygmalion myth for the assumptions of an art that aspired at once to idealization and to animation. Bronzino probed the unstable relation of the ideal nude to flesh and to nature by interpolating references to ancient sculpture, Michelangelo, and Pontormo with a citation from transalpine landscape imported unexpectedly from Martin Schongauer, and with evocations of the life drawings of lanky adolescent boys from which many of the nudes in ambitious Florentine art originated. This youthful experiment permanently conditioned Bronzino's approach; a period critic of his later Christ in Limbo, sensing that work's contamination of the ideal with the real, would remark incisively ‘He truly meant to show Christ [and] the saints … but he mistook a brothel for Paradise.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay engages with current debates on the character of objects as material artefacts, focusing on a genre that can be reappraised especially fruitfully from such a perspective: the small-format portrait medallion. The first part sets out how lockable portrait medallions were ‘wandering things’, artefacts of transcultural networks, and possessed ‘agency’ (to use Alfred Gell’s term). The second part is devoted to analyzing an example from England around the year 1600 by Nicholas Hilliard, the so-called Gresley Jewel, against the backdrop of European slavery at that time. It vividly exemplifies, it is argued, the active semanticization of skin colour, and in doing so repositions white, aristocratic identities. To what extent, the study centrally asks, have portrait medallions like this not only helped to establish the hegemonic pretensions of white aristocratic identity but also to undermine them as well? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]