There is far more to 1492 than ‘Columbus sailing the oceans blue’. One writer has dramatically claimed it is the year the world began. In the wake of Columbus’ 1492 voyage, sea trade routes opened up, linking Europe with Africa, India and the Americas. Brave ships at full sail carried treasures of unimaginable exoticism to Europeans and Far Easterners. Europe acquired, in one fell swoop, a monopoly on the Americas. Worldwide trade had begun. We live today surrounded by a vast inventory of riches no one – before 1492- could have begun to imagine.
At present, our world is dominated by three superpowers, the United States, Russia, and China. The white United States of America owes its imperialistic origin story to the ‘Columbus discovered America’ legend. Putin’s 21c landgrabs in the Crimea and Ukraine can be traced to the success of Ivan the Great’s tastes for conquest in 1492. In 1492, China alone was inward looking, as it reached its pinnacle as the largest, the oldest extant, and the richest civilisation in the world. Its sabre-rattling today in the direction of Hong Kong and Taiwan remind us that it knows its seniority, if not its superiority. Small wonder that things are as they are today in Trump’s America, Netanyahu’s Israel, and in Putin’s and Jinping’s intent to claim lost lands.
It is amusing to realise that Columbus’ ‘achievement’ was accidental: not only did he not ‘discover’ America, he had not intended to find it! He intended, instead, to discover a western route to Asia. However, after a relatively short voyage, his ship landed on one of 700 islands in the Bahamas convinced that it was Marco Polo’s China or Japan! His wildly recast ‘discovery’, together with the veritable stranglehold on western culture of ‘The Renaissance’, the ‘golden’ age of civilisation, has overshadowed our knowledge of other achievements around the globe in this same year.
In China, this is the period of glorious Ming porcelain, best known in the West for its swirling blue decorative brushstrokes on a whitest of white clay body. Little is known, however, of China’s more astounding achievement in creating complex monochromatic glazes for porcelain; monochrome porcelain is one of the ceramic world’s greatest achievements; Ming porcelain had major influence on the ceramics of other countries from Japan to Britain. Most of the monochrome pieces are simple forms without any prominent design or decoration, thus the eye is focused on three elements alone: vessel size and shape, and pulsating colour. Yellows, reds, and blues were the most popular colours used by the imperial court. At the same time, intricate exquisite carvings of flora and fauna in variations of sea-green colours of jade were produced in imperial workshops. Meanwhile, in the supremely unforgiving art of painting with ink, Shen Zhou’s misty masterpieces were matched only by similar masterpieces in Japan.
In West Africa, we see the complex process of brass casting reaching heights of supreme fine art in magnificent sculptural heads of the Kingdom of Benin over some of which the British Museum claims ownership, though the British looted them from Benin! Their prestige has been enhanced not diminished by the controversy. They are exquisite in their individuality and execution!
In the Americas, Mexico shows spectacular and mystifying iconographic complexity coupled with highest craftsmanship in the carving of what appear to be sun dials or stone calendars. They have yet to be fully decoded.
In Colombia and Costa Rica casters working in gold produced works of ceremonial and ornamental art more singularly striking than anything made with the same material by the European conquistador culture. These startling works, along with superlative pre-Columbian functional and ceremonial pottery, shell engraving, and rock art, were produced by the very indigenous peoples the European conquerors were keen to exterminate.
We begin by linking two great artefacts and one intriguing painting: the first known terrestrial globe, made by Martin Behaim in Nuremberg in 1492.
Leonardo’s drawing of ‘Vitruvian Man’ probably made once Leonardo had reached Milan in that same year,
and a portrait of the father of modern accountancy and inventor of double-entry bookkeeping, the mathematician Luca Pacioli.
Many of these western notions of measurement originated in Spain and China, and spread from there via Islam along the silk roads between China and the Ottoman Empire. We use these remarkable works of art and science to explore ways in which, by the 1490s, Europeans were using Oriental developments in navigation and mathematics to serve their new creed of ‘man as the measure of all things’. We ask what that phrase might have meant for increasingly powerful, often brutal, Christian cultures, whether Spain or Russia.
We look at how self-serving confidence in the backing of the Catholic Church led the Spanish monarchs in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella, to defeat Boabdil and the Muslim Kingdom of Granada in order to establish Catholicism throughout Spain. This savagery was soon reinforced through the vicious expulsion of the Jewish people from Spain almost exactly 200 years after they had been expelled en masse by Edward I from the shores of the British Isles. These two Semitic religious groups, the people of the Torah and of the Koran, had lived in peace in Spain during the centuries of convicencia, a long period of religious and social toleration during which Jewish and Islamic scholars together created modern navigation based on enlightened understanding of the classical disciplines of geometry and algebra. The effect of the concurrent 1492 genocides, displacement and forced conversions continues to bear fruit in the recent resurgence of virulent anti-Semitism once again spreading hateful lies against two such ancient and civilised people, resulting in conflict one against the other.
But art is nothing if not resilient, and 1492 sees major achievements in the ongoing Renaissance in the arts. In Florence, recently under the patronage and guidance of Lorenzo de Medici, the 16-year-old Michelangelo sculpts his thrilling ‘The Battle of the Centaurs’.
In Venice, Giovanni Bellini mystified his spectators by diverging from his habitual Christian subject matter into his ‘Four Allegories’.
In Mantua, Andrea Mantegna seemed almost to echo the struggles of Italian City-States with his frieze-like vast project of The Triumphs of Caesar now in Hampton Court.
Germany sees the glories of Tilman Riemenschneider’s limewood carving in Würzburg, while Nuremberg is engaged in one of the most remarkable printing projects of the 15c, the ‘Nuremberg Chronicle’, a universal history compiled from earlier sources by Hartmann Schedel, and directly echoing the global reach of the very year in which it was being produced.
In France, Charles VIII is already planning to take advantage of the weakness of Italy to invade it, which he does in 1494. Yet this is also the period of the exquisite and peaceful miniatures of Jean Bourdichon.
Meanwhile Britain, after over 100 years of war with France followed by the 30 years’ internecine strife of the ‘Wars of the Roses’, begins a period of relative political stability guided by Tudor King Henry VII, thus forming a foundation for the beginnings of its Empire two hundred years later. Britain’s greatest artistic strength at this period lies in the power of literature: this is the year of a major new hand-coloured edition of the Canterbury Tales.
Please join us, as together we follow a story of great works of art, whether a gold condor from Costa Rica or an Italian renaissance mythological painting, produced amidst sometimes horrific vicissitudes of politics both secular and religious. 1492 may not have been ‘the year the world began’, but its reverberations, whether religious, political or artistic, can certainly be felt in present day turmoil in art and politics.
SESSION ONE
Tuesday 14 May
5 pm
Cartography: Maps, Charts, Tools and Trade Winds
SESSION TWO
Tuesday 21 May
5 pm
Catholic Conquerors in Spain: The ‘Reconquista’
SESSION THREE
Tuesday 28 May
5 pm
Columbus and the Bahamas: Outwitting the Winds
SESSION FOUR
Tuesday 4 June
5 pm
The Arts of the Americas before Columbus: Abstractions in Gold and Clay
SESSION 5
Tuesday 11 June
5pm
Muslim and Christian West Africa: The Songhay Empire; The Christianisation of Kongo; the Kingdom of Benin
SESSION SIX
Tuesday 18 June
5 pm
Eastern Conquests: The Russia of Ivan the Great
SESSION SEVEN
Tuesday 25 June
5 pm
China and Japan: Porcelain, Jade, Lacquer and Landscape Painting
SESSION EIGHT
Tuesday 2 July
5 pm
Florence After Lorenzo the Magnificent: Ficino, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Michelangelo
SESSION NINE
Tuesday 9 July
5 pm
Northern Italy: Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, Bellini and Cima da Conegliano in Venice, Mantegna in Mantua
SESSION TEN
Tuesday 16 July
5 pm
Northern Renaissance: English and French manuscripts and printed books, German Chronicles, the limewood carvings of Tilman Riemenschneider
Booking Information:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
This online course via Zoom has been developed by Louise Friend and Nicholas Friend. It will be presented by Nicholas Friend, Co-Founder of Inscape. It is held on Tuesdays, beginning on Tuesday 14 May 2024 at 5 pm and ending on Tuesday 16 July 2024 at 5 pm. Please note the time of 5 pm: Nicholas will be lecturing from California (at 9 am his time) for the duration of this course.
You may choose to attend individual sessions or all ten. If you book for the course but cannot manage a particular date, then be assured we will be sending recordings of sessions to all registered participants. Each session meets from 15 minutes before the advertised time of the lecture, and each lasts roughly one hour with 15 minutes discussion.
Cost: £470 members or £570 non-members for the course of 10 sessions or £47 members or £57 non-members per individual session. All sessions are limited to 21 participants to permit an after-lecture discussion session.
Please make your payment to Friend&Friend Ltd by bank transfer to our account with Metrobank, bank sort code 23-05-80, account number 13291721 or via PayPal to nicholas@inscapetours.co.uk, or credit/debit card by phone to Henrietta on 07940 719 397. She is available Tuesdays 10-12 and 2-5 pm or Thursdays 10-12 and 2-5 pm.
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