Translating the Sacred

6 INTRODUCTION TO TRANSLATING THE SACRED Kelli Wood “If God had not put his hand to work with a miracle, what India lost, Rome would not have gained.” Daniello Bartoli, On the History of the Society of Jesus in Asia (1653)1 In 1615, a relic of famed missionary Saint Francis Xavier departed India on a ship destined for Lisbon. After Jesuits in Goa agreed to send part of Xavier’s much venerated incorruptible body—the saint’s forearm—to the seat of the Society of Jesus in Rome, Father Sebastian Gonzales oversaw the relocation of the sacred relic (a rite known as “translation”) as it traversed the hazards of thousands of miles across sea and land. Seventeenth-century Jesuit historian Daniello Bartoli would later recount how the saint’s arm miraculously protected the ship and crew during the perilous voyage from assault by “Dutch pirates” who were “double enemies” on account of their difference in both religion (Protestants) and sovereign loyalty.2 When their vessel came under attack, the crew entreated Gonzales to employ the power of Xavier’s relic to protect them, whereupon the priest lifted up the arm and chanted the saint’s name. Both crews were awestruck, and the Dutch ship halted “as if it were frozen in the sea.” “This was the voice of God, and of the Saint,” the grateful crew concluded. Xavier’s arm arrived at the port of Lisbon and from there onto Rome without further interruption.3 The sacred did not travel or translate easily in early modernity.4 Sacrality relied on a communal agreement that was deemed holy, and such agreements inevitably engendered friction. Words, images, objects, and bodies that conveyed the sacred took on varied and sometimes unpredictable resonances as they were shared between people and as they moved across space, place, and time. Who and what, as in the case of the corporal remains of a saint’s relic, could authoritatively proffer the “voice of God,” and how, and in what form, the sacred should be expressed preoccupied artistic patrons, as did incommensurable modes of belief.5 The translation of scripture into new languages had already long concerned Catholics, from Jerome’s vulgate Bible to vernacular prayer books printed by Protestant Reformers, well before the papal institution of the Propaganda Fide in 1622 and its mandate to promulgate the faith universally through polyglot publications. Over the course of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003294986-36 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. 451 Kelli Wood fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, Jesuit, Mendicant, and Puritan evangelists founded orders and missionary companies across Africa, the Americas, and Asia that employed variegated strategies of religious conversion, using pedagogy as well as punishment to convince and coerce nonbelievers.6 Such evangelism not only coincided with, but was often constitutive of, the colonial expansion of European empires.7 The crew of the ship transporting Xavier’s arm first “threw their valuable merchandise into the Ocean” to dissuade their Dutch pursuers before beseeching the saint to intervene. The largely Protestant Dutch Republic sponsored the lucrative mercenary ventures of East and West India Company ships operating in foreign waters and ports; while the Iberian crowns of Spain and Portugal claimed papally endorsed dominion over the southern hemisphere.8 Each of these powers sought access to, and then control over, profitable resources, commodities, and technologies that had been circulating in long-standing trade routes and entrepôts established outside Europe. Missionaries both relied upon and contributed to such European expansion. “What India lost,” in the words of Daniello Bartoli, and indeed the Indies broadly, both East and West, included material wealth and human lives as Rome and its Protestant rivals expanded their spheres of spiritual reach.9 Evangelism and empire were coterminous with movement, their ambitions necessarily dependent upon travel, transfer, and translation in every sense of the word.10 Translatio, the relocation of a saint’s body or relics, energized the circulation of objects in the Middle Ages for and by the peregrinus, the foreign pilgrim from another land.11 Yet the very placed-ness of the sacred, the locality of religious agency, inspired Catholics to undertake pilgrimages to sites rendered holy by virtue of their saintly remains and the cachet bestowed on them by the work of artists who crafted bejeweled reliquaries, embroidered priestly vestments, golden liturgical vessels, and souvenirs for the pious to take home. As Zuleika Murat’s essay demonstrates with the case study of English priest John Goodyear’s 1456 trip to Santiago de Compostela, pilgrims often venerated saints by offering precious works of artifice to their shrines. Goodyear’s extraordinary donation to the cathedral—an alabaster polyptych—communicated its patron’s piety through its narration of the translation of the body of St. James the Greater to Spain by sea voyage, and through both the form and material signification of alabaster as a quintessentially English medium for fifteenth-century viewers and collectors. Attention to religious objects in the context of their regional and global movements, along with foregrounding the resonances of their material substrates, can highlight the potentially rich iconographic variety and polyvalency that emerges when center-periphery binaries are interrogated rather than assumed to govern artistic production. Verena Krebs’ essay explores the unexpected encounter of the highly local Saint abba Gäbrä Märʿawi with the cosmopolitan and imperial figure of St. George in an icon dating to ca. 1500 from the Tǝgray Christian kingdom of Solomonic Ethiopia. Through a careful reading of the image, Krebs reconstructs how the icon’s patron rhetorically claimed the lofty status of a Solomonic courtier by donating it to a preferred monastery of the ruling elite and fashioning the saint who evangelized his remote province in the sartorial conventions of the kingdom’s nobility.12 Much in the same way that saints’ relics and icons conveyed the sacred through their location and physical form, Catholic doctrine was imparted in the form of texts that carried in their very language the weighty aura of the holy. The translation of religious works from one language into another thus prompted concerns over veracity—concerns based on 452 Introduction to Translating the Sacred the serious consequence that translational or interpretational mistakes might lead to heresy. Missionaries in particular faced the challenge of accurately teaching their core tenets to potential converts who held different beliefs in divergent languages.13 Practically, this required the clergy to understand foreign tongues, necessitating either immersion into the language and culture of their colonial outpost, as with Jesuit priest and missionary Michele Ruggieri’s assertion, “we … have become Chinese in order to win China for Christ,” or reliance on local translators.14 Both solutions brought with them their own problems: priests who “went native” might lose sight of faithful translation in their adoption of the customs of their foreign homes, and foreign converts who aided with translation were often accused of treachery and untrustworthiness, as in the case of the nahualli priest Martín Ocelotl who was put on trial in New Spain.15 Moreover, while the comparison or conflation of pagan deities and practices with Catholic ones well-served as a didactic strategy for conversion, the potential for heretical misunderstanding in some areas led to hundreds of thousands of tribunals of faith and more than a million and a half denunciations of converts by officers of the Inquisition.16 Conversion was not always incontrovertible, nor did it necessarily impart upon its subjects the status and station of those born into the Christian faith.17 Western Europe’s Jewish populations endured persecution and expulsions that reached an apogee with the Alhambra Decree of 1492 by which Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand ordered their Kingdom’s longstanding Jewish population to convert or be exiled. While many conversos in Spain found commercial and social success, even holding posts as government officials, others were subject to blood purity statutes and Inquisition accusations of crypto-Judaism.18 Those who fled Iberia brought with them the styles and motifs of Sephardic visual culture, leading to, as Simona Di Nepi’s essay evinces, a revitalization of artistic practices across the diaspora. Jewish ceremonial objects at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, including Torah finials and Ketubbah marriage contracts, combined Sephardic iconographic and stylistic traditions with design elements characteristic of their new homes, thus maintaining the materials of Jewish ritual across geographic and cultural perimeters.19 Upon expulsion from Lisbon, Samuel ben Isaac Nedivot and his son established a press in Fez, Morocco, and began printing books in 1516 to preserve and promulgate Hebrew spiritual and intellectual text.20 Their first work, an edition of the Sefer Abudarham, aimed to explain Jewish prayers and customs not to those highly educated in rabbinical literature, but rather to a broad populace. At least for Catholic missionaries, the benefits of translation were ultimately felt to outweigh the risks of conversion. The sixteenth century witnessed the establishment of printing presses throughout the reach of Christendom: the Casa de la Primer Imprenta de América in Mexico City in 1539, a press at the College of St. Paul in Goa in 1556, and Antonio Ricardo’s workshop in Lima in 1584. These presses produced multilingual works and translations of instructional church doctrine in indigenous languages, including a Nahuatl dictionary, a Tamil translation of Xavier’s Doctrina Christam, and the catechism in Quechua and Aymara.21 After a printing license was granted in the Philippines in 1593, Chinese artists (known as sangleys) working at a Dominican monastery outside Manila helped produce a catechism in the baybayin script of Tagalog. Regalado Trota José’s essay chronicles the history of the ivory statue Our Lady of the Rosary of La Naval, which was carved by a sangley artist in the same year that the Tagalog catechism was printed. By teasing apart the actors in the network surrounding the statue’s creation and reception—its patron, colonial governor Luis Pérez Dasmariñas, Dominican missionaries to the Philippines, the trade network oared 453 Kelli Wood by local gangs, the significance of ivory, the iconographic impact of the Virgin Mary on statuettes of the Chinese bodhisattva Guanyin, “Bestower of Sons,” the six African slaves who were gifted alongside the statue, and the subsequent literature about and celebrity of Our Lady of the Rosary—José opens room to value and evaluate, within a pre- and postcolonial Philippine history, the work of one of the many unknown sangley ivory carvers.22 The frequent anonymity of the non-European artists and craftsmen who produced works for Christian missionaries and merchants must not be conceived as accidental. Rather the “very idea of historicizing,” which “carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty,” in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, have obfuscated artisanal epistemology in perceived geographic peripheries.23 Encyclopedic descriptions, images, and histories produced by early modern travelers functioned to organize and categorize the colonized lands and peoples as commodities.24 Simultaneously, a haze of distance imbued artworks and objects produced by foreign hands and materials with the thrill of the exotic and a constructed fantasy of the unnamed.25 For example, an ethnographic-style costume book of the peoples of Asia illustrated by an Indian artist around 1540 depicts Goan smiths contentedly absorbed in their tasks of working iron and gold.26 When brother João da Costa of the College of St. Paul of Goa sent the manuscript to Lisbon in 1627, it arrived to a city that had already filled itself with crucifixes and croziers made from precious metals by the Indian artisans imagined within its pages. Such artists remained largely anonymous to Europeans despite more than a century of praise for their talents. Italian explorer Andrea Corsali remarked upon “the large number of goldsmiths, the best in all India” in a letter of 1516 to Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici. In 1639, the Dutch merchant Johan Albrecht de Mandelslo reported: “The local artisans, metalworkers, and jewelers are incomparably better than ours.”27 Skilled artistic labor hardly went unvalued even if it often went unnamed. Rauluchantim, the Goan goldsmith who traveled to Lisbon from 1518 to ca. 1520, to produce royal jewels and ornaments for King Manuel I is very much an exception to such anonymity.28 The Duke of the Bragança’s inventory of 1564–67 included two entries listed with the same value of 100,000 reis (approximately four years’ salary of a skilled worker in Lisbon): #5675, a slave who was a particularly skilled artisan, and #1037, a gilt cross encrusted with five diamonds and a pearl.29 Such cold calculations remind us of the increasing brutality of systems that saw local populations reduced wholly to their value as labor and also how biographical and patron-centered narratives that focus on the value of materials while rendering skills invisible become reifications of privilege within art historiography.30 Attention to such instrumental arithmetic also provides an entrée to understanding the intersecting and competing structures of power that governed the creation of even canonical sacred images and objects. Rachel Miller attends to Italian sculptor Giovanni Battista Foggini’s late seventeenth-century pedestal for Xavier’s sarcophagus in Goa, part of efforts to align the saint’s hagiography with aims of Foggini’s patron Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici.31 The tomb of Xavier had previously comprised the relic of the saint’s sixteenth-century body and an early seventeenth-century silver coffin. Newly elevated by Foggini’s marble support and decorated with bronze reliefs, the tomb emerges in Miller’s reading as a composite that transforms earlier Xavierian narratives focused on the imperial health of the Portuguese state into praise for the universal reach of the Church outward from its center on the Italian peninsula. While the Medici used sculpture to leave a material, tangible, and stylistically recognizable mark on India’s Christian landscape, the power brokers of Spain channeled their largesse into art and arms in the colonization of the New World and the concurrent expansion of the 454 Introduction to Translating the Sacred Church.32 The twined ideology of translatio studii et imperii—the westward transfer of knowledge and power modeled on the authority of classical antiquity—provided a providential pretext for both (on empire, see Aaron M. Hyman’s contribution to this volume.) Yet the inherent friction in the “everyday process of translation” and the unconscious “particular accretion of histories that are not always transparent” results in religious objects steeped in local and parochial ideals and aesthetics.33 Renaissance scholars are familiar with the ways in which early humanists sought to give new life to antiquity by editing, translating, and imitating authorities such as Ovid, Pliny, and Virgil. The results, of course, amounted to more than revival, but were the transformation of that past and its texts through adaptive processes including vernacularization.34 Building from a pair of woven tapestries created for a church in Peru or Bolivia between 1560 and 1580, Maya Stanfield-Mazzi charts a corollary form of adaptation and its unexpected results, an Andean classicism that stands in counterpoint to the inherited European template.35 Although the angels of these tapestries, intended for liturgical use, bear the Arma Christi, they reflect too the sacred geometry of an Andean divine realm and evoke mythic profile attendants when reframed within vernacular and pictorial conventions for representing deities in an ancient South American religion and the later Incan empire. Among its many proposed restrictions on religious images, the Council of Trent sought to ban, or at least curtail, many representations of angels. Such heavenly messengers nonetheless proliferated not only in the art of Catholic Europe but also throughout the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru.36 In the wake of the Protestant Reformation a militaristic rhetoric accompanied the Catholic church’s expanding evangelism, and angels must simply have proved too tempting in their resonance as soldiers in an army of the faithful. The workshop of Bolivian painter José López de los Ríos, known as the Master of Calamarca, produced images of armed angels wielding harquebuses that spoke to local concerns over the necessary protection of confessors and the newly converted alike. Garbed in local Inca finery as well as aristocratic European clothes, outfitted with a Spanish firearm, plumed with divine wings, and legible within not only Catholic but also Andean beliefs and Incan myth, the Master of Calamarca’s angels were calculated to instill the fear of God in the distinctive devotees of an evolving and hybrid environment of colonial faith.37 A wealth of Christian iconography came to the Americas from the commercial center of Antwerp and through the portable medium of print.38 Agustina Rodríguez Romero employs Johannes Wierix’s engraving of The Last Judgment after Michelangelo to probe print’s circulation as a channel for processes of transculturation. With a keen understanding of the market for specific types of images in New Spain, Wierix foregrounded Michelangelo’s authorship of the design, appealing to local painting practice and its strategic visual quotation of well-known figures and motifs. Vicente Carducho’s Postrimerías frescos in the Lima Cathedral in Peru and Diego Quispe Tito’s painting for the convent of Saint Francis in Cuzco, Romero explains, simultaneously relied upon intervisuality and bolstered Michelangelo’s celebrity in the Americas; the multiplicity of print and the copying inherent in quotation ironically reified the cult of artistic genius founded in Vasarian biography. Tracking the translation of global evangelism and empire need neither obscure nor eclipse understanding of local artisanal epistemologies in emerging markets and centers of production. Sixteenth-century decrees prohibiting Hindu artists from creating or selling Christian images, when considered in light of the complexities of conversion, resistance, noncompliance, and long-standing reliance on indigenous craft, speak directly to the tensions inherent in translating the sacred. Allison Caplan traces the long-standing precolonial methods of featherwork in Mexico and distinguishes an Indigenous Nahua appreciation 455 Kelli Wood for and aesthetic of feathers as distinct from the attitudes of colonial European collectors. Amantecah featherworkers, as Caplan shows, relied on a persistent, long-distance Mesoamerican trade network to obtain particular neotropical feathers for indigenous clients with a connoisseurial eye for their value. The same artists used less valuable, but more locally available, hummingbird feathers when they produced featherwork mosaics based on Christian prints for their non-native clients who lacked a nuanced appreciation of plumage. Perhaps the most pressing barriers to interpreting sacred objects made during the global Renaissance are those limitations suggested by our own connoisseurial biases and often reinforced by the disciplinary contours of European history as such. “Writing about the presence of gods and spirits in the secular language of history,” with the assumption of a “secular code of historical and humanist time—that is, a time bereft gods and spirits” can often be a process of “translating into a universal language that which belongs to a field of differences.”39 In her essay on the fifteenth-century Emerald Buddha now enshrined in Bangkok, Melody Rod-ari analyzes the legend and political utility of a holy icon whose meaning evolved outside the boundaries of European evangelism and empire. A fifteenthcentury Thai revival of ancient religious traditions and texts, born from a doctrinal fear of Buddhism’s decline, prompted chronicles of the statue’s travels and delineated a sacred geography across the kingdoms of Buddhism. While Chakrabarty cautions that “claims about agency on behalf of the religious, the supernatural, the divine, and the ghostly” are necessarily mediated by the conventions of European history, Rod-ari chronicles the inexorable religious, intellectual, and political responses to the divine creation and subsequent agency of the Emerald Buddha in ways that sometimes parallel, yet remain markedly different from, the Christian Renaissance dichotomies of rebirth and apocalypse. The essays in this section consider how the meaning made by religious objects in an increasingly interconnected early modern world was contingent upon expansionist Catholic and Protestant policies that governed the intersections and interactions of makers and viewers. The influence of these exchanges constituted a dominant power in the production of early modern artwork. A multitude of non-Christian faiths and spiritual beliefs, however, were also practiced across the globe in early modernity, including the formidable Islamic sphere of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal states. Indeed, the essays in this volume thoroughly demonstrate the import of visual and material cultures worldwide, including architecture and objects produced in and understood within other realms of religion: see the essays by Fitzgerald, Hamdani and Qureshi, Purdy, and Pushaw. Yet art historiography, and much Western thought since the Enlightenment, has construed (the decidedly modern concept of) religion within a secular logic of history built upon the difference and interactions of European Christianity and its attendant empires with other peoples.40 Attention to the historical and historiographic structures of power at play in the production, use, and narration of the lives of religious objects can afford, as these essays demonstrate, novel perspectives on how, why, and for whom iconography, form, function, and material translated the sacred into the visible. Notes 1 “Un braccio di San Francesco portato da Goa a Roma difende da’ corsali la nave con miracolo…. se Iddio non metteva mano a miracoli, l’India il perdeva, e Roma nol guadagnava,” Daniello Bartoli, Dell’Istoria Della Compagnia Di Giesu L’Asia… Libro IV (Rome: Varese, 1653), 245–6. On Lisbon as global entrepot reference Kate Lowe, The Global City: On the Streets of Renaissance Lisbon (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2015). 456 Introduction to Translating the Sacred 2 “Quando eccogliene sopra a vele piene una corsali Olandesi, doppiamente nemici, come eretici, e come ribelli della Corona di Spagna,” Bartoli, Dell’Istoria Della Compagnia Di Giesu L’Asia, 245–6. 3 “e quella fu voce di Dio, e del Santo, che per lui così ordino; peroche la nave Olandese, tenendo per tuttavia le vele gonfie, immanternente ristette, e come le si fosse gelato intorno il mare, così immobile si fermò,” Bartoli, Dell’Istoria Della Compagnia Di Giesu L’Asia, 245–6. 4 A significant corpus of recent scholarship treats sacred objects in motion. See Finbar Barry Flood, Objects of Translation. Material Culture and ‘Hindu-Muslim’ Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Christine Göttler and Mia Mochizuki (eds.), The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of World for Early Modern Religious Art (Brill, 2017); Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World, eds. Suzanna Ivanič, Mary Laven, and Andrew Morrall (Amsterdam University Press, 2019); The Seas and the Mobility of Islamic Art, eds. Radha Dalal, Sean Roberts, and Jochen Sokoly (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2021), Erin Benay, Italy by Way of India: Translating Art and Devotion in the Early Modern World (Turnhout: Brepols/Harvey Miller, 2022); Eloquent Images: Evangelisation, Conversion and Propaganda in the Global World of the Early Modern Period, eds. Giuseppe Capriotti, Pierre Antoine Fabre, and Sabina Pavone (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022); Cécile Fromont, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2022). 5 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference— 2nd Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 6 On the intersection of structures of knowledge and colonial violence reference Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 7 Evonne Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2014); Ines G. Županov and Ângela Barreto Xavier, Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), and Gauvin Bailey, Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire: State, Church, and Society, 1604–1830 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018). For a distinction between evangelization and colonialism see Cécile Fromont, “Penned by Encounter: Visibility and Invisibility of the Cross-Cultural in Images from Early Modern Franciscan Missions in Central Africa and Central Mexico.” Renaissance Quarterly 75 (2022), 1221–65. 8 The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) and Treaty of Zaragoza (1529). 9 “l’India il perdeva, e Roma nol guadagnava,” Bartoli, Dell’Istoria Della Compagnia Di Giesu L’Asia, 245–6. On colonialism and collecting, see Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (London: Reaktion, 2005), Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey, The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492–1750 (Cambridge and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Collecting across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, eds. Daniela Bleichmar and Peter Mancall (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World, eds. Daniela Bleichmar and Meredith Martin (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). 10 On the many senses of translation, see Michael Wintroub, “Translations: Words, Things, Going Native, and Staying True.” The American Historical Review 120 (2015), 1185–217. 11 Trans-latio, and, pere-(a)grinus. 12 “those objects valuable that resist our desire to possess them” Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money [1907] 2nd Eng. ed. (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1990), 67. 13 On translation see Elizabeth Hill Boone, Louise Burkhart, and Davíd Tavárez, Painted Words: Nahua Catholicism, Politics, and Memory in the Atzaqualco Pictorial Catechism (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2017); Fatma Sinem Eryılmaz, “Translating Inspired Language, Transforming Sacred Texts: An Introduction.” Medieval Encounters 26 (2020): 333–48; Tony Ballantyne, Lachy Paterson, and Angela Wanhalla, eds. Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire. Special issue of Native American and Indigenous Studies 9 (2022): 195–7; Iberian Babel: Translation and Multilingualism in the Medieval and the Early Modern Mediterranean, eds. Michelle Hamilton and N. Silleras-Fernandez (Leiden: Brill, 2022). 14 Wintroub, “Translations,” 1193. On missionaries to China, Liam Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 157–1724 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2007). 15 Patricia Lopes Don, Bonfires of Culture: Franciscans, Indigenous Leaders, and the Inquisition in Early Mexico, 1524–1540 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012). 457 Kelli Wood 16 Francisco Bethencourt, The Inquisition: A Global History, 1478–1834 (Cambridge and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2009 [revised]). 17 On narratives of conversion, exile, and identity formation, reference David Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and Nicholas Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation (Cambridge and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 18 For a detailed analysis of one particular convert reference Tamar Herzig, A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2019). 19 On early modern Jewish art, reference Dana Katz, The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) and From Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art, Patronage, and Power: 1600–1800, eds. Richard Cohen and Vivian Mann (New York, NY: The Jewish Museum, New York, 1996). 20 Essays on the Making of the Early Hebrew Book, ed. Martin Heller (Leiden: Brill, 2021) and Sephardic Book Art of the 15th Century, eds. Luís Urbano Afonso and Tiago Moita (Turnhout: Brepols/Harvey Miller, 2019). 21 Casa de la Primer Imprenta de América, in Mexico City, 1539—Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y Mexicana (Mexico City, 1555); College of St. Paul, Goa, 1556—Henrique Henriques, Doctrina Christam en Lingua Malauar Tamul தம்பிரான் வணக்கம் (1578, Quilon); Antonio Ricardo, Doctrina Christiana (Lima, 1585). 22 On ivory in the Philippines, see Stephanie Porras, “Locating Hispano-Philippine Ivories.” Colonial Latin American Review 29 (2020), 256–91. 23 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. 24 On ethnographic encyclopedic knowledge, see Elizabeth Hill Boone, Descendants of Mexican Pictography: The Cultural Encyclopedias of Sixteenth-Century Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2021); Sandra Young, The Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the Production of Human Difference as Knowledge (London: Taylor & Francis, 2016). On travel narratives, Peter Mancall, Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 25 On the affective rhetoric of one ethnographic encyclopedia, reference Jennifer Nelson, “A Ming Chinese and Spanish Imperial Collaboration in Southeast Asia: The Boxer Codex.” The Art Bulletin 104 (2022), 20–45. 26 Jeremiah Losty of the British Library, through careful comparison with painting traditions on the subcontinent, has convincingly argued that the artist must have been trained in Gujarat only later moving to Goa where he practiced. It is believed that the text in Portuguese was added after the creation of the images, which show various aspects of labor and life throughout the East Indies. Losty, “Identifying the Artist of Codex Casanatense 1889.” Anais de História de Além-Mar XIII (2012), 13–40. 27 Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Primo volume delle nauigationi et viaggi nel qual si contiene la descrittione dell’Africa, et del paese del Prete Ianni, con varii viaggi, dal mar Rosso a Calicut & infin all’isole Molucche, dove nascono le Spetiere et la navigatione attorno il mondo li nomi de gli auttori, et le nauigationi, et i viaggi piu particolarmente si mostrano nel foglio seguente (1550), f. 193v, Lettera d’Andrea Corsali Fiorentino All Illustrissimo Signor Duca Giuliano de Medici Scritta in Cochin, “Qui trovonsi grandissima quantita d’orefici, & li megliori che siano in tutta l’India” and Printed in John Davies, The Voyages & Travels of the Ambassadors from the Duke of Holstein… (London: Thomas Dring, and John Starkey, 1662). 28 Nuno Vassallo e Silva ed., A Heranca de Rauluchantim (Lisbon: Museu de São Roque, 1996). 29 Joana Torres and Hugo Crespo, O Inventário dos bens do 5º Duque de Bragança (CHAM— Centro de Humanidades, 2018). BDMII Res Ms 18 (1564–1567); Lisbon copy from 1665. 30 On a foundational object-based (rather than biographical) approach, reference George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962). 31 On Medici collecting reference, Jessica Keating and Lia Markey, “‘Indian’ Objects in Medici and Austrian-Habsburg Inventories.” Journal of the History of Collections 23 (2011), 283–300; and Lia Markey, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2016). 458 Introduction to Translating the Sacred 32 On the Medici’s imprint on India, see Benay, Italy by Way of India. On religious art in South America, Gauvin Bailey, The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru (South Bend IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010); Alejandra Betilde Osorio, Inventing Lima: Baroque Modernity in Peru’s South Sea Metropolis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Michael J. Schreffler, Cuzco: Incas, Spaniards, and the Making of a Colonial City (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020). 33 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 17: “Such defiance of translation was, of course, part of the everyday process of translation. Once put into prose, a universal concept carries within it traces of what Gadamer would call ‘prejudice’—not a conscious bias but a sign that we think out of particular accretion of histories that are not always transparent to us. To provincialize Europe was then to know how universalistic thought was always and already modified by particular histories, whether or not we could excavate such pasts fully.” 34 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, xiv. 35 On the citation and reception of European classics in the Americas, see Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas, eds. Maya Feile Tomes, Adam J. Goldwyn, and Matthew Duquès (Leiden: Brill, 2021). 36 On art and exchange in the “New World,” Barbara E. Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015) and Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America 1450–1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). 37 On armed angels, reference Julia P. Herzberg, “Angels with Guns: Image and Interpretation,” in Gloria in Excelsis: The Virgin and Angels in Viceregal Painting of Peru and Bolivia, ed. Barbara Duncan (New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, 1986); Eleanor Goodman, “Portraits of Empire: Notes on Angels and Archangels in the Spanish World,” in Art in Spain and the Hispanic World: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Brown, ed. Sarah Schroth (London: Paul Holberton, 2010), 395–411; Ramón Mujica Pinilla, “Angels and Demons in the conquest of Peru,” in Angels, Demons and the New World, eds. 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