Mission Art In Its Relation To Religion, Ethnicity And Culture
Mission art crated a number of important torrents in the world history of religion, ethnicity, and culture. European art initiated access to distant places on the earth. At the same time, people living in those remote places were not always ready to conform to the new standards imposed on them by strangers. Gauvin Bailey’s (1999) book, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America: 1542-1773, considers how art functioned as a global language in service of overseas missions in Asia and Latin America. Missionary orders, such as the Jesuits, were important patrons of art in late Renaissance period; in like manner, the Capuchins purchased works of Guercino for their missions in Canada and Brazil. In his innovative treatment of the question, Bailey makes clear that the devotional images commissioned for the missions were not simply derivative, second-rate copies, considered good enough for non-European audiences. Indeed, artists producing works for overseas felt themselves freer to experiment than they otherwise might. Bailey suggests that some of the works commissioned in Europe for shipment overseas to Jesuit and other missions anticipated the naturalistic and classicizing currents of Caravaggio and the Carracci (Sperling, 1999).
Bailey’s essay highlights European art and artists in Peru, and, to a lesser extent. Japan: it shows how missionaries sought to use images as a kind of universal language in their attempts to communicate with, and promote Christianity among, peoples of many languages. From Rome to Lima to Nagasaki, missionaries sought to make a path to eternal salvation visible and accessible, through paintings of Christ and the saints.
Beginning in the 1540s, European artists supplied paintings for the overseas missions of the Jesuits and other orders in Asia and the Americas, known collectively as the Indies. Furthermore, beginning in at least the 1570s, European artists made the journey themselves, founding art academies and decorating churches as far away as Peru and Japan (Sperling, 1999). Art works for the missions were primarily images of meditation and didactic piety and were therefore strongly iconic and minimally expressive with little in the way of setting. The simple, bright, and optimistic images produced for the missions generally featured large figures, centralized compositions, and a minimum of narrative detail or action. There was also a strong emphasis on copies or variations of miraculous “Paleochristian images such as the various Madonnas supposedly painted by Saint Luke” (Wright, 2002, p. 67). And, as reports sent home by missionaries confirm, these images’ superior qualities were taken quite literally. Missionary orders perpetuated the early medieval devotion to miraculous images, thus enlisting supernatural help in their creation.
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