The large collection compiled by Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa (1607–81) in his residence in Huesca, a city in the Spanish region of Aragon, included an impressive range of objects.¹ Lastanosa, a minor nobleman interested in antiquities, coins, and the arts, is best remembered today for his patronage of the celebrated writer Baltazar Gracián (1601–58). Lastanosa’s collection attests to his interest in fashioning a cultivated identity and in presenting his palace as a site of civility and sociability. A visitor to the palace would encounter the collection distributed among many rooms. It included naturalia and artificialia and all sorts...

Do palm trees grow in New England? Fanciful and incongruous as this horticultural proposition may seem, it was seriously contemplated by early modern Europeans, particularly those who amassed materials depicting the exotic world—those who “collected across cultures.” Such materials were produced abundantly in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and they circulated widely—New England palm trees, in various forms, seemed to spring up across much of early Enlightenment Europe. Among the many sources showcasing this remarkable phenomenon was Johannes van Keulen’s enormously popular Paskaart van Niew Engeland, which was printed as a single-sheet map, included in the...

Antiquity embodied a horizon of thought that obsessed European curiosity from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment. The Greeks, the Romans, and even the Egyptians were omnipresent in the discourses of philologists, in the scholarly research of antiquarians, and in the obsession of men of state and even sovereigns. We owe the discovery of Herculaneum and Pompei to Bernardo Tanucci and his king, Charles of Naples, Charles III of Spain. For the king and his first minister, the buried cities of the area around Vesuvius were not just a simple field of ruins, an open mine of the antique; they were...

After Hernán Cortés shipped the first cargos of gold, silver, gems, and feather treasure from Mexico to Europe, they were viewed with marvel and admiration. The treasure was a gift from the conquistador to Charles V, king of Castile and elected Holy Roman Emperor. Albrecht Dürer’s delighted view of these objects, at Charles’s court in Brussels in August 1520, is often quoted:

I have seen these things, which have been brought to the King [Charles] from the new golden land. . . . They are so splendid, that one would treasure them at a hundred thousand guldens’ worth. And I...

This work arises from an inquiry concerning two of the most influential intellectual enterprises of the seventeenth century: the new sciences and baroque culture. Equally imprecise in terms of definition and historiographical characterization, both projects shared a somewhat similar social, political, and cultural background. Historians of science, however, seem to have overlooked many of these connections. Since Heinrich Wölfflin and Werner Weisbach introduced “baroque” as a category in the history of art, the term has been widely used in numerous areas: architecture, painting, literature, drama, and so forth. This category, however, has not succeeded in entering the field of natural...

According to Bernard Bailyn, we owe our concept of the Atlantic world to an article by Walter Lippmann in the New Republic from February 1917, encouraging the United States to enter the Great War and defend the integrity of this early modern construction. Compared with that piece, “Some Jacobean Links Between America and the Orient” by Boise Penrose, appearing in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography in October 1940 and January 1941, seems quite obscure, albeit also in its own way prescient. Penrose contended that “of the leading figures in the early history of the East India Company and of...

This essay analyzes the role played by images in the collection and communication of knowledge across cultures in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Central Africa. It is based on the study of a set of illustrated manuscripts created between approximately 1650 and 1750 by Capuchin friar missionaries to the West Central African Kingdom of Kongo and Portuguese colony of Angola. These documents vary in size from a single page ink-on-paper panel to longer, richly illustrated manuscripts ranging between fifteen and over one hundred folios. Yet they form a cohesive group united by a common mode of operation that centers...

With this fragment of dialogue begins the likewise fragmentary journal of Ok-Phra Wisut Sunthon, known more familiarly as Kosa Pan, Siamese ambassador to France in 1686–87.¹ The next event in his narration, “Those ladies then departed,” allows us to reconstruct the scene. Kosa Pan is aboard the Oiseau, the ship that has brought him and two coadjutants from Siam on a diplomatic mission to the court of Louis XIV. There he has been the object of curiosity for the first French women to get a look at him after his arrival in their country, and he has assured them...

When Thomas Thistlewood died in late November 1786, he was eulogized in an obituary in the Cornwall Gazette on December 16, 1786 as follows:

In Westmoreland, on Thursday the 30th of November, in the 65th year of his age, Thomas Thistlewood, Esq., a gentleman whose social qualities, during a residence of upwards of thirty years in that parish, had greatly endeared him to a whole circle of his neighbours and acquaintances and whose attainments, in many branches of natural knowledge, in which he was peculiarly communicative, rendered him a most desirable companion to men of science.¹

Thistlewood was a gentleman...

In the early modern era, some European visitors to the Western Hemisphere thought they would take indigenous Americans home with them. Christopher Columbus was the first to do so, but soon after, Sebastian Cabot did the same thing, as did many Europeans who traveled to the Americas before the mid-eighteenth century. Historians have tended to understand the movement of Americans across the Atlantic Ocean as a portent of incipient slavery, the development of long-distance diplomacy, or the expression of a European craving to understand the “other.”¹ But this particular population movement can also be understood as a problem in the...

This essay surveys some of the many late eighteenth-century collections of Spanish Americana, attempting whenever possible to match extant objects that are held today in contemporary museums to the inventories and textual descriptions that survive from when they were originally gathered. Although archaeological curiosities were shipped from the Indies to Europe before the eighteenth century and it is known that the Spanish Crown maintained American collections, those early collections seem to have perished in the 1734 fire at the Reales Alcázares in Madrid, which destroyed most of the royal palace. Thus, a new era of royal collecting of Americana began...

As bishop of the intendancy of Trujillo, Peru, during the 1780s, the Basque priest Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón y Bujanda (1737–97) created what was surely the most systematic and best-documented collection of natural history and pre-Columbian art and artifacts assembled in late eighteenth-century Peru.¹ In 1788 and 1790, the bishop sent box upon box of flora, fauna, metals and minerals, northern Peruvian antiquities, ethnographic objects, and colonial artworks from Cartagena, across the Atlantic, to the Bourbon crown in Spain.² Although the current location of the natural history collections is unknown, fortunately many of the artifacts the bishop collected survive...

The disciplines of anthropology and archaeology underwent a spectacular development in the nineteenth century: the entire world could now be studied and classified. A major focus of this ambitious scientific project was the Americas. The artifacts and images that explorers and collectors brought back from the Americas documented peoples and cultures that were profoundly different from anything known in Europe.

Due to colonial Spain’s and Portugal’s efforts to control the circulation of ideas, merchandise, and information between Latin America and Europe, little information about the indigenous history of Latin America reached Europe before the early nineteenth century.¹ Countries such as...

These words mark the beginning of Mexique, 1865, an album of Louis Falconnet, a French officer in Emperor Maximilian’s military cabinet during the French “Intervention” or occupation of Mexico in the mid-1860s, when Maximilian of Habsburg was placed by Napoleon III as the “emperor” of Mexico.¹ Although in Mexico on official business, Falconnet makes the rhetoric of the album personalized, both in this poem and in the original watercolors, hand-written descriptions, collected cartes de visite, and even a scrap of cloth pasted on the album’s paper pages.² In this “Pensée, “Falconnet claims that never would he efface Mexico from his...