As a social phenomenon and a commonplace of internet culture, virality provides a critical vocabulary for addressing questions raised by the global mobility and reproduction of early modern artworks. This book uses the concept of virality to study artworks’ role in the uneven processes of early modern globalization.
Drawing from archival research in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, Stephanie Porras traces the trajectories of two interrelated objects made in Antwerp in the late sixteenth century: Gerónimo Nadal’s Evangelicae historiae imagines, an illustrated devotional text published and promoted by the Society of Jesus, and a singular composition by Maerten de Vos, St. Michael the Archangel. Both were reproduced and adapted across the early modern world in the seventeenth century. Porras examines how and why these objects traveled and were adopted as models by Spanish and Latin American painters, Chinese printmakers, Mughal miniaturists, and Filipino ivory carvers. Reassessing the creative labor underpinning the production of a diverse array of copies, citations, and reproductions, Porras uses virality to elucidate the interstices of the agency of individual artists or patrons, powerful gatekeepers and social networks, and economic, political, and religious infrastructures. In doing so, she tests and contests several analytical models that have dominated art-historical scholarship of the global early modern period, putting pressure on notions of copying, agency, context, and viewership.

Vital and engaging, The First Viral Images sheds new light on how artworks, as agents of globalization, navigated and contributed to the emerging and intertwined global infrastructures of Catholicism, commerce, and colonialism.

Cockaigne, the legendary land of plenty, formed a sub-theme of popular depictions
of gluttony in sixteenth-century prints. These images combined carnivalesque
exuberance and moralising caution, illustrating both excessive consumption
and its ill efffects, from inappropriately lascivious or slothful behaviour to the
physical need to expel from top and bottom. Scatological motifs emphasised the
grotesque nature of Cockaigne, providing laughter while also warning viewers
of the consequences of gluttonous behaviour in the here and now: that spending
on fleeting pleasure will reduce fortunes to shit. These themes are explored here
chiefly through an exceptionally large mid-sixteenth-century German woodcut
now in the New York Public Library, as well as two related woodcuts by Peter
Flötner.

In the latter part of 2021, the Beyeler Foundation in Basel mounted the most important retrospective exhibition on Goya in recent decades. Curated by Martin Schwander—who is also the editor of the catalog—and developed by Isabela Mora and Sam Keller in collaboration with the Prado Museum, it gathered 181 Goya works, including seventy-seven paintings, fifty-three prints, and fifty-one drawings. It was a unique opportunity for those able to attend the fully booked exhibition, since many of the works have rarely been shown outside of Spain, and many come from private collections.

Prints, artists’ books, posters, multiples, printed ephemera have been displayed, sold and collected in international, large-scale exhibitions. Alongside paintings and sculptures, they were—and still are—regularly exhibited at the Venice Biennale, São Paulo Biennale, documenta and in several other perennial exhibitions. Regardless of their continuous presence and vitality, there have been few studies about the role of prints and artists’ editions in the context of these exhibitions. OBOE’s third issue, Exhibiting Prints: The Role of Printmaking in Large Scale Exhibitions guest edited by Jennifer Noonan, intends to redress this lacuna while shedding new light on the manner in which printed matter has been vital for the life and fortune of large-scale international exhibitions.

Works on paper have often played a pivotal role in disseminating artists’ works to an international audience. As multiples, they are more accessible, and have a lower production and distribution cost. They are easier to transport than painting or sculpture, but also to collect, which led several art museums of distinguishable importance to acquire prints from international large-scale exhibitions. Notably, when Alfred H. Barr launched MoMA Activities, he almost immediately established a Print Cabinet and enriched it over the years with purchases from large-scale exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale. It is no coincidence that even today major art fairs like TEFAF in Maastricht devote an entire section of the commercial show to works on paper and prints. Furthermore, at the beginning of the 20th century, printed editions were one of the preferred strategies to advertise these exhibitions. They served to bolster cultural tourism and to emphasise the value of exhibitions.

From the first perennial of the Venice Biennale in 1895 with the Sale del Bianco e del Nero, into the 20th century when prints, ephemera, manifestos, and leaflets of performances is quite renown (Contrabienal and the 1970 Venice Biennale), and most recently to documenta 15 (2022), in which even the making of prints through the Lumburg Press was part of the exhibition, printed material has always held a specific, if not shifting, place. The exhibition of prints and artists’ editions within these venues has provided opportunities for national representation and the dissemination of ideas, even in times of changing regimes and difficult economic circumstances. For this reason, to understand the constitutive role of prints it is necessary to incorporate various perspectives on cultural tourism, dissemination of the avant-garde, bourgeois collections, taste-making, democratisation of art, institutional critique, as well as politics. This issue, therefore, is necessarily cross-disciplinary, gathering together a group of scholars and researchers with varied methodologies and approaches. Examining the production, presence and circulation of printed matter in biennial-type exhibitions from its origins to the present moment will expand histories of printmaking and will enrich the body of literature on large-scale, international exhibitions. For this special issue, we have been assisted by a specialist on this topic, Jennifer Noonan, who has edited this issue selecting the papers of Alessia Del Bianco, Maeve Coudrelle and Camilla Pietrabissa.

In addition, in the section Miscellanea, the issue hosts Jacob Lund’s essay “Exhibition as Reflective Transformation”. Taking Forensic Architecture's project Triple-Chaser as its point of departure, Lund theoretically explores the role of exhibitions in contemporary aesthetic and artistic practices. Finally, Adelaide Duarte and Lígia Afonso provide us with a meticulous review of three books, published between 2020 and 2021, reflecting on the mutual histories and shared aspects of contemporary art fairs and biennials.

Colorful Neotropical parrots were amongst the first and most frequent exotic animals to be imported by Europeans from the “New World” of the Americas, becoming key figures in what would become known as the Columbian exchange. There has been an ongoing effort to locate and identify images of Neotropical parrots in the visual record of early modern Europe, with the classification of many remaining unsettled in the scholarship. Proper identification of these images can be valuable data for reconstructing historical biogeography and transatlantic trade; especially compelling is the potential of certain “mystery parrots” in the visual record to support the existence of taxa which may have gone extinct due to colonization and trade. However, it is important to recognize the potential pitfalls of trying to assert positive identifications through these centuries-old images. As parrots are amongst the most colorfully diverse taxa of birds on the planet, often, plumage color is a key diagnostic factor in making an identification; and yet, there are a variety of reasons why the colors of any one individual’s image may not be enough to confirm its scientific classification. Reading colors as recorded in the visual record must therefore be approached with caution and with an interdisciplinary knowledge of both the science and art of color. This paper offers a list of scientific and artistic variables which should be considered when reading color clues to identify Neotropical parrots in early modern European art, including explanations and illustrated examples of these factors, which scholars from across fields interested in engaging in such "historical birding" can consult.

Opossums (Order Didelphimorphia) are marsupial mammals endemic to the Americas. They are also the first marsupials Europeans ever encountered, over a century before any Australasian species. Because of their unique marsupial characteristics, opossums have historically been viewed as an “anomalous” animal form across both Indigenous American and European cultures, and thus developed a rich and complex transatlantic cultural history. By tracing the development of opossum imagery through the millennia, one can uncover clear patterns of how their distinct features became embedded in iconographies relative to biogeocultural sphere, and how certain iconographic conventions were transmitted through various media both within and between cultures. The single most important flashpoint in this historical visual timeline was the transatlantic convergence of cultures post-1492, as this was the catalyst which not only jumpstarted this visual record on the European side, but also curtailed it for centuries on the Indigenous American side. While European opossum images proliferated, a once diverse and widespread Indigenous American iconography was all but erased within a generation of conquest. However, it appears at least a few opossums managed to survive this apparent iconographic extinction, embedded within the imagery of early Spanish colonial projects illustrated by Indigenous artists, while Indigenous ethnozoological knowledge also influenced the production of European images. This thesis will examine how, through cross-cultural currents and syncretic processes, opossum iconography developed on both sides of the Atlantic during the Early Modern Period (fifteenth through eighteenth centuries), with an emphasis on where and how Indigenous knowledge survived in this visual record.

By their very nature writing manuals encourage viewer participation, as they illustrate how to form lines into letters. In Johann Neudörffer's “Gute Ordnung” (Good order, 1538–50s) this genesis of lines extends beyond pure pedagogy. By displaying etchings in mirror writing alongside true-sided counterproofs, Neudörffer invites viewers to consider methods of mechanical production of seemingly handwritten lines. His text-images share their self-aware attention to linear aesthetics and process with drawings and etchings by Albrecht Altdorfer and Albrecht Dürer. As Neudörffer's manual taught the formation of beautiful written lines, it also trained contemporaries to become sophisticated consumers of linear beauty in figurative art.

The frontispiece of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), added to increase the book’s humanitarian and commercial appeal, is an important “first” of Black portraiture. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the engraved representation of the poet’s dark skin and its contribution to her complicated reception. While engraving’s abstractions had long been used to commemorate idealized (white) individuals, an Enlightenment understanding of corporeal skin as a changeable surface meant that engraving’s linear syntax also lent itself to derogatory characterizations of Black skin as an “immoveable veil” that masks the expressions of Black subjects.