In The Washington Post, 24-6-2007
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Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th
Centuries


"At the Sackler, Art That Meant the World to Portugal"


By Stephen Brookes
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, June 24, 2007; Page N01

To look at Henricus Martellus's 1490 map of the world is to behold a
strange, unsettling planet. Europe seems vaguely familiar, but beyond the
Mediterranean everything dissolves wildly into myth. Africa is a squarish
blob, connected to Asia by a long strip of land. A huge island called
Taprobana dominates the Indian Ocean, and there's no hint of the Americas
or the Pacific Ocean; the map simply stops at China. Half the world is a
confused jumble, and the other half is not yet even imagined.

But jump ahead a half-century to Pero Fernandes's map of 1545 -- and the
planet is utterly transformed. A huge wave of exploration has brought the
world into focus for the first time: Africa has taken on its distinctive
shape, India is no longer an insignificant bump, the Pacific is there in
all its vastness, and the Americas have appeared. Guesswork has given way
to knowledge: A new world, with all its complexities and possibilities, has
suddenly come into being.

The two maps -- works of art in themselves -- are part of a massive new
exhibit opening today at the Sackler Gallery. Called "Encompassing the
Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries," it's a
broad, impressionistic look at the trading empire built by the Portuguese
that stretched from Brazil to Africa to Japan -- an empire that brought an
explosion of knowledge to the Renaissance, fueled European expansionism and
launched (for good or ill) the integration of the modern world.

"It's hard for us to imagine how transformatory this period was," says
Julian Raby, the director of the Smithsonian's Sackler and Freer galleries.
"It's the first moment of globalization -- information about the variety of
the world, in terms of its peoples and cultures, was just pouring in. And
part of what we want to get across is that sense of wonder at the
complexities and textures of the world."

With roughly 275 objects on display, that shouldn't be a problem.
"Encompassing" is the largest single exhibit in the Sackler's 20-year
history -- taking up all its exhibition space and spilling over into the
adjacent Museum of African Art -- and undoubtedly the most diverse. There
are African ostrich eggs in ornate gold mounts, intricately carved
crucifixes from Sri Lanka, a life-size oil painting of a Brazilian
cannibal, Chinese astrolabes, Indonesian puppets, a Japanese shield covered
in the skin of a ray, and a bewildering array of other wonders.

Yet, despite its global scope and almost runaway eclecticism, the exhibit
is more than just souvenirs from a sprawling empire. "We looked for works
of real aesthetic significance," says Jay Levenson, the show's guest
curator, who scoured more than a hundred collections around the world to
assemble the exhibit. "Works that told the story of the voyages, but that
also documented the interchange among cultures."

For all that it changed the world, Portugal's empire remains largely
unknown in America, overshadowed by the Spanish voyages to the New World.
But the explorations that started in 1419 under Prince Henry the Navigator
(particularly Vasco da Gama's opening up of a sea route around Africa in
1498) were at least as important, laying the foundations of global maritime
trade and establishing an empire that endured until modern times; the last
outpost, Macau, was only handed over to China in 1999.

But it was an unusual empire, designed not for conquest but for trade and,
to a lesser degree, for spreading Christianity. The early voyages down the
coast of Africa were aimed at breaking the Islamic world's monopoly on

trade with the East, and forging an alliance with the mythical Prester
John, a Christian king thought to rule somewhere in Africa. Using small,
lightly armed flotillas of ships, the Portuguese established trading
relationships rather than colonies. And as they ventured ever more deeply
into Asia, they found themselves interacting not with the primitive world
they'd expected but with complex, deeply embedded cultures and flourishing
economies.

"It's much more about relationships between equals," says Levenson. "It's
about trade and the exchange of knowledge."

Empire-building of any kind is rarely a pretty business, though. And in
fact, the Portuguese weren't out to foster greater understanding among the
peoples of the world -- they were after control of the trading routes, and
they were ruthless. Slave trading was rampant, uncooperative ports were
bombarded, and piracy abounded. In one memorable episode, da Gama himself
locked nearly 400 Muslims onto a ship and burned them alive -- including
women and children.

"Many of the artworks were gained at a very high price," says Raby,
"whether it was the death of indigenous peoples, through the diseases that
were brought by Europeans, or by often quite violent encounters."

And in a sense, that's part of what makes "Encompassing" such a fascinating
exhibit: It puts objects on display that reflect disturbing ambiguity more
often than cheerful multiculturalism. Each of the encounters was different,
but the artworks that resulted rarely show a free hybridization of
cultures; many, in fact, almost seethe with tension.

Take, for example, a remarkable ivory saltcellar from 16th-century Nigeria.
Probably made as a trade item for European collectors, it's a beautiful,
intricately carved piece that shows a group of Portuguese sailors (who
would have been involved in the slave trade) supporting a ship. The
sailors' faces are carved almost like African masks, and the ship's captain
holds an African spear in one hand. The effect is charming -- until you
notice the small, wide-eyed face peering out from inside the ship, and the
objet d'art suddenly takes on a disturbing edge.

The complex relationships between the Portuguese and the cultures they
encountered becomes even more apparent in the art from Asia, or "Estado da
India," as the network of Portuguese enclaves throughout the region came to
be known. Most of the outposts were small trading centers, designed to
manage the lucrative spice trade. But Lisbon also held substantial
territories, including Bombay and Goa, and where the Portuguese held
physical control, they held cultural and religious dominance as well --
driven in part by Jesuit missionaries seeking converts.

"Goa in the 16th century was a territory of some hundreds of square miles,
with maybe a million people," says Sanjay Subrahmanyam, a professor at UCLA
and author of "The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700." "And there you're
talking about forcible conversion, the destruction of Hindu temples, the
elimination of the Muslim population."

It wasn't all conversion by force, but even so, the degree of Christian
influence is striking in the exhibit's Indian artworks. Many are stunning;
a 17th-century communion table from Gujarat mixes European and Indian
styles with effortless grace, and an elaborate ivory carving with Christ as
a lute-strumming shepherd draws deeply on Indian sculptural traditions; at
first glance it could be taken for a work of Buddhist art.

But a far more revealing work may be the ivory plaque that depicts the
infant Jesus sailing one of the Portuguese trading ships. It's called
"Young Christ as the Mariner on the Ship of Salvation," but the obvious
ingratiation goes deeper than the title. The masterful Sri Lankan artist
who carved it purged all traces of his culture from the work; it looks like
something out of an Italian Renaissance workshop. As art, it's lovely. As
an exercise in cultural self-abnegation, it's somewhat chilling.

* * *

Other imperial tensions simmer throughout the exhibit, in remarkably
different ways. In China, the Portuguese impact was so weak as to be almost

undetectable; Beijing adopted Lisbon's superior astronomical knowledge but
kept the rest at a studied distance.

In Japan, however, things turned disastrous. There the Portuguese initially
met with success, winning some 150,000 converts to Christianity. But it
quickly became their undoing; the ruling shoguns outlawed the religion,
expelling missionaries and forcing suspected Japanese Christians to stamp
their feet on bronze plaques bearing the face of Jesus -- known as fumi-e
-- to prove their indifference.

It was only in Brazil, in fact (discovered virtually by accident by Pedro
Alvares Cabral in 1500), that the Portuguese were able to build a
large-scale colony as opposed to smaller outposts. Easily overcoming the
indigenous Tupi people, Lisbon eventually set up huge sugar plantations,
bringing hundreds of thousands of slaves over from Africa and, over the
next few centuries, becoming the leader of the transatlantic slave trade.

Although that disturbing side of the empire is touched on only lightly,
several paintings of Africans and Tupi by the 17th-century Dutch painter
Albert Eckhout offer a gripping insight. Scaled to heroic size, the
paintings were commissioned as "promotional literature" to encourage
investment in the plantations, says the Sackler's Raby -- designed to show
Europeans how native peoples benefited from the civilizing aspects of
colonization.

And for all its multicultural aspirations, it's hard not to hear faint
echoes of a similar spin in "Encompassing the Globe." Ever since its
discoveries were celebrated by Luis Vaz de Camoes in his epic 16th-century
poem "The Lusiads," Portugal's empire has been at the heart of its national
identity, the rough edges softened and the myths massaged. Financed largely
by Portugal's Ministry of Culture and dozens of Portuguese banks and
corporations, "Encompassing" could be read as a paean to Portuguese
imperialism, sheltering from hard questions in its own sheer vastness. But
in the end, the artworks reveal a deeper and infinitely more satisfying
story -- the tense, difficult and sometimes brutal birth of the modern
world.