Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History
by Zoltán Biedermann | 2017 | 155,596 words | ISBN-10: 1911307835 | ISBN-13: 9781911307839
This book is called "Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History" and represents a compilation of scholarly insights, derived from various workshops and conferences. The subject of the articles are centered on the pre-1850 history of Shri Lanka as a hub of cultural interchange within the Indian Ocean. These pages explores how globalization and...
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Introduction
In contrast to South Asian ivory carvers, European ivory carvers in the late medieval and early modern period are generally not anonymous–their identities are known by their precise locations and names: for example, we know that in the fourteenth century, the Embriachi workshop in Venice made polygonal ivory caskets as marriage gifts; while in the 1600s, Nikolaus Pfaff created beautiful ivory statuettes for Emperor Rudolf II.[1] But while contemporary Sri Lankan ivory carvers produced objects of comparable quality, most notably for the Portuguese court, we struggle to identify where exactly these were created, by whom and for whom; and we know almost nothing about how they functioned in their first con-text in Sri Lanka.[2]
Sixteenth-century Sri Lankan ivory carvers created the now-famous ivory caskets scattered in public and private collections throughout the world, as well as a number of fans and combs, and also religious representations, including images of the Virgin Mary and Jesus.[3] These artists’ visual world was destroyed by Portuguese plundering missions[4] and the subsequent occupation of the kingdom of Kōṭṭe and its environs.[5] In fact, not much sixteenth-century art survives today in Sri Lanka itself. Writing the history of the country’s art between the 1400s and the 1700s is challenging because much of what is left consists of ruins, scattered pillars, doorways and basement mouldings, or monuments that underwent later reconstruction. Yet the visual world of sixteenth-century Sri Lanka partially survives precisely because artefacts from this complex encounter were scattered across the globe as a consequence of the Portuguese presence in the region. Thus, even if we cannot retrieve the names of the carvers or their workshops,[6] some aspects of their identities and their visual worlds have withstood the passage of time. The traces these carvers left behind on the thirteen surviving ivory caskets[7] currently datable to the sixteenth century may help us not only retrieve some aspects of the art of ivory carving and architecture in Sri Lanka, but also reveal a deeply connected global visual world in the early modern period.[8]
Several of the caskets can be categorized as diplomatic gifts or exotic lux ury goods, created with the Lisbon court or European patrons in mind.[9] The Sri Lankan ivory caskets are modelled on the form of sixteenth-century European leather caskets adorned with metal handles.[10] But, in contrast to those, they are covered with floral designs, animal motifs and human figures. Some caskets illustrate historical scenes, while others show local ideals of kingship. Depictions of Sri Lankan rulers, seated on thrones at court like bodhisattvas, are placed opposite portrayals of kings riding elephants to battle. The niches of some caskets feature scenes from the Rāmāyaṇa, a narrative that has received little attention in Sri Lanka, but that became popular in the sixteenth century.[11] Others depict Christian imagery, with stories from the Life of the Virgin and the Life of Christ. A few caskets depict elaborate fauna and flora, with hardly any negative space left on the surfaces.
Previous scholarship has emphasized the subject matter–historical, mythological, Christian–of these ivory caskets, and linked it to the caskets’ specific functions as diplomatic gifts,[12] luxury curiosities[13] or export art.[14] Yet while we have learned much about the place of such objects in Renaissance curiosity collec-tions[15] as well as about their famous collectors,[16] these kinds of frameworks, despite their merits, have limited our understanding of the makers of these objects and their multiple visual worlds.
That European prints were used by the carvers is no secret: the presence of European motifs on the caskets has received attention for more than eighty years now.[17] Most scholars, however, have focused on the ‘European-ness’ of these complex objects of encounter–or to put it more mildly, the European aspects that were introduced and hence brought about change in what has been perceived as the comparatively static art worlds of South Asia. Thus the Portuguese art historian Nuno Vassallo e Silva has noted that ‘it is relatively easy to identify European prints as the sources used for the decorative motifs on Sinhalese ivory during this period’.[18] More recently, Annemarie Jordan Gschwend’s extensive exhibition catalogue on ivories from Ceylon has also highlighted, very convincingly, the use of European prints in Sri Lankan ivories.[19] However, such an emphasis implies that Sri Lankan artists copied European models with assiduity but little originality, as passive subjects of a new, global market growing beyond their reach. In other words, these objects are ascribed a derivative nature even when their genesis is seen as part of an encounter.
When non-European aspects of the caskets are commented on, the picture tends to be schematic. Amin Jaffer and Melanie Anne Schwabe, the authors of the most frequently cited article on the subject, acknowledge the importance of local motifs and emphasize the intertwinement of the two striking visual traditions in these caskets. But they also argue that the caskets can be ‘diff erentiated according to the degree of European influence found in their decoration’.[20] Implicit in the latter statement is a problematic preconception: that all South Asian art looks similar, so that only by studying the degree of European influence can one differentiate between artworks, not by examining the South Asian characteristics at play.[21]
In reality, however, the ivory caskets have much more to tell us if we are willing to study the hybrid logic of their ornamentation–the use and the placement of South Asian motifs, and the way European motifs have been appropriated rather than simply ‘copied’ to become a part of the island’s visual world. Although the makers of these caskets put much effort into carving traditional South Asian motifs, their visual responses to European prints indicate that they were also quite clearly part of a larger connected world. I therefore propose that we situate these ivory caskets primarily within the context of the Sri Lankan and South Asian art worlds where they materialized in the first place. I suggest that the local motifs themselves, and their location on the caskets, illustrate the similarities between various local artistic mediums, including ivory carving and temple architecture. This chapter will show, through a close visual analysis of a group of motifs on the caskets, that these can be observed in connection with significant features on temples. I shall then place the ivory caskets back in the wider visual traditions of the early modern world, but maintain an emphasis on the agency of Sri Lankan artists, arguing that it is at least as important as the agency usually ascribed to the European models that circulated throughout the continents.
Read in such a light, the materials show that the Sri Lankan ivory carvers were as inventive and innovative as painters in the Mughal Empire and Japan, ivory carvers in Africa and the Philippines, and other artists from China to Latin America, in appropriating and transforming European motifs and forms. The visual complexity of these ivory caskets needs to be located in the visual traditions of a connected early modern world, in which sometimes the same European print was appropriated in different ways by artists in the Americas, Africa and Asia. The emphasis on the act of appropriation and transformation–something that might be termed ‘vis-ual response’[22] –not only helps in retrieving traces of the historical identities of the carvers and their visual surroundings, but also brings attention to the importance of local agency in the transfer of artistic knowledge across early modern art worlds.
Footnotes and references:
[1]:
‘Baldassare degli Embriachi: Altarpiece’ (17.190.489), in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–17), www.metmuseum.org/ toah/ works-of-art/ 17.190.489 (May 2010), accessed 14 October 2014. A number of ivories made by Pfaff, the imperial court ivory carver for Emperor Rudolf II, are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (see ‘The 270 Emperor’s Ivories Masterpieces from the Habsburg Kunstkammer Collections,’ www.khm.at/ fileadmin/ _ migrated/ downloads/ wichtigste_ Objekte_ engl.pdf, accessed 16 November 2014).
[2]:
In the 1970s, there were still living ivory carvers in the Kandyan region such as the carver named Rajaguru Otunu Pandita Swarnatilaka Sakya Seneviratna Moolacharige Appu Swarnatilaka. The long string of names and titles points to a lengthy tradition of royal patronage. See Jayadeva Tilakasiri, ‘Ivory Carving of Sri Lanka,’ Arts of Asia (1974), 45. I thank Sudharshana Bandara of the University of Peradeniya for bringing my attention to this article, and for all his help during my first visit to Peradeniya to study ivories at the university’s museum.
[3]:
Tilakasiri lists a variety of ivories: ‘small panels for decorating doorways, palanquin railings, boxes large and small (for various purposes), relic caskets, statuettes, fan handles, manuscript covers, combs, bracelets, necklaces, hairpins, knife handles, styluses, toy-drums and flutes’ (‘Ivory Carving of Sri Lanka’, 43).
[4]:
Alan Strathern, Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka. Portuguese Imperialism in a Buddhist Land (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 197.
[5]:
Senake Bandaranayake, ‘The Periodisation of Sri Lankan History and Some Related Historical and Archaeological Problems,’ reprinted in Continuities and Transformations Studies in Sri Lankan Archaeology and History (Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 2012), 146–7. Bandaranayke also points to another challenge in understanding the built landscape of this time period: the reuse of building materials by subsequent colonial authorities.
[6]:
These ivory caskets are also often seen as objects made only in Kōṭṭe, Sri Lanka, the main kingdom with which the Portuguese had diplomatic relations. However, as Alan Strathern’s book has emphasized, the Portuguese were in communication with numerous political factions in sixteenth- century Sri Lanka (Strathern, Kingship and Conversion, 24). Scholars have suggested that Dom João de Castro, governor of Portuguese India, did receive ivory caskets from non-K ōṭṭe rulers, includ- ing the king of the Sītāvaka Kingdom. See Amin Jaff er and Melanie Anne Schwabe, ‘A Group of Sixteenth-Century Ivory Caskets from Ceylon,’ Apollo 149 (1999), 8; Nuno Vasallo e Silva, ‘An Art for Export: Sinhalese Ivory and Crystal in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,’ in Re-exploring Links History and Constructed Histories between Portugal and Sri Lanka, ed. Jorge Flores (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007), 282; Annemarie Jordan Gschwend and Johannes Beltz, Elfenbeine aus Ceylon. Luxusgüter für Katharina von Habsburg (1507–1 578) (Zurich: Museum Rietberg, 2010), 70. Martha Chaiklin, ‘Ivory in Early Modern Ceylon: A Case Study in What Documents Don’t Reveal,’ International Journal of Asian Studies 6, 1 (2009), 42, also notes that Kandyan kings gifted ivory to other kingdoms, referring to C. R. de Silva, who cites a tombo from 1599. Colonial sources from the Dutch and British period also indicate that ivory was carved in various regions in Sri Lanka apart from Kōṭṭe: Jaff na, Kandy, Matara and Galle were centres of ivory carving (‘Ivory in Early Modern Ceylon’, 42–3). Recently, Ebeltje Hartkamp-Jonxis has argued for Matara as a centre of ivory carving (‘Coveted by Princes and Citizens: Sri Lankan Ivory Carvings for the European Market 1550–1700,’ Public lecture, Asian Civilizations Museum, Singapore, 11 June 2014).
[7]:
Jaff er and Schwabe first reported on eight ivory caskets (‘A Group of Sixteenth-Century Ivory Caskets’, 3–14). In a later exhibition catalogue, Jaff er referred to nine ivory caskets. Amin Jaff er, Luxury Goods from India: The Art of the Indian Cabinet-Maker (London: V&A Publications, 2002), 14. Pedro Moura Carvalho expanded the corpus to ten caskets in Luxury for Export: Artistic Exchange between India and Portugal Around 1600 (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2008), 25. Nuno Vasallo e Silva writes about twelve caskets (‘An Art for Export’, 281). I would further add the ivory casket at the University of Peradeniya’s Senerat Paranavitana Teaching and Research Museum, bringing the total number of Sri Lankan ivory caskets produced in the sixteenth century for local and global consumption to thirteen.
[8]:
Senake Bandaranayake has previously pointed to the idea of recovering the visual world of this time period by examining the ‘manuscript-cover illustrations, the relief sculptures of the fourteenth century, and the ivory carvings of Kōṭṭe and its successors in the fifteenth–eighteenth century period’ (The Rock and Wall Paintings of Sri Lanka, revised edition (Pannipitiya: Stamford Lake, 2006), 16).
[9]:
Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, ‘The Marvels of the East: Renaissance Curiosity Collections in Portugal,’ in The Heritage of Rauluchantim, ed. Nuno Vassallo e Silva (Lisbon: Museu de São Roque, 1996), 100–07; Jaff er and Schwabe, ‘A Group of Sixteenth-C entury Ivory Caskets’, 3; Silva, ‘An Art for Export’, 281–3.
[10]:
Silva, ‘An Art for Export’, 279. Two leather caskets from the sixteenth century, currently in the collection of the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, in Lisbon (inv. 45 Cx) and Museu Nacional Machado de Castro, in Coimbra (inv. 1737; M247), clearly share a similar shape with this group of Sri Lankan 271 ivory caskets. Apart from the elaborate lock, there is hardly any ornamentation on the seven surfaces; however, each face is further divided into separate spaces by metal strips, similar to the way in which the Sri Lankan ivory caskets are divided by pillars or ornamented borders. The form and the division of space may have been borrowed from Portuguese travelling leather caskets. I thank Alexandre Morais of Jorge Welsh Oriental Porcelain and Works of Art for bringing my attention to these caskets in Portugal (personal communication, 2 January 2014).
[11]:
John Holt, The Buddhist Visnu: Religious Transformation, Politics, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 132–45. Also see Alan Strathern, ‘Towards the Source-Criticism of Sitavaka Period Heroic Literature, Part Two: The Sitavaka Hatana: Notes on a Grounded Text,’ The Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities 34, 1–2 (2008), 64–5.
[12]:
Jaff er and Schwabe, ‘A Group of Sixteenth-Century Ivory Caskets’, 3.
[13]:
Apart from Lisbon, Renaissance curiosity collections existed at various European royal courts such as Madrid, Brussels, Vienna, Innsbruck and Prague (Gschwend, ‘The Marvels of the East’, 83).
[14]:
Although Silva frames these ivories as export art, he himself points out that they could only be aff orded by European royalty and aristocracy, in contrast to the more widely available export items such as porcelain (Silva, ‘Art for Export’, 288). Gaston Perera questions the assumption that these caskets were export products, due to the paucity in numbers and the lack of local literature suggesting any type of ivory industry (Gaston Perera, ‘Ivory Caskets,’ unpublished working paper, 2010).
[15]:
Two ivory caskets are mentioned in the inventories of Catherine of Austria’s (1507–7 8) Kunstkammer (Gschwend, ‘The Marvels of the East’, 104–8). Such collections were filled with naturalia and artificialia such as coconut shells, bezoar stones, jewels, textiles and porcelain. Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, ‘Rarities and Novelties,’ in Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500–1800, ed. Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2004), 32.
[16]:
On Catherine of Austria, regent from 1557 to 1562, see Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, ‘Catherine of Austria: A Portuguese Queen in the Shadow of the Habsburg court?,’ Portuguese Studies Review 13, 1–2 (2005), 173–9 4. As the Queen of Portugal and wife of King John III (r. 1521–57), Catherine was a recipient of diplomatic gifts, but she also had privileged access to curiosities from Asia through various agents working for her in Goa, Cochin, and Malacca (Gschwend, ‘The Marvels of the East’, 183–5).
[17]:
The earliest article in English about the topic of European influence on Sri Lankan ivories is by K. de B. Codrington, ‘Western Influences in India and Ceylon: A Group of Sinhalese Ivories,’ Burlington Magazine LIX (1934), 239–46.
[18]:
Silva, ‘An Art for Export’, 287, emphasis added.
[19]:
Gschwend and Beltz, Elfenbeine aus Ceylon.
[20]:
Jaff er and Schwabe, ‘A Group of Sixteenth-Century Ivory Caskets’, 3.
[21]:
Umberto Eco rightly points out this misconception regarding premodern visual traditions beyond Europe: ‘We know very well that in certain examples of non-Western art, where we always see the same thing, the natives recognize the infinitesimal variations and feel the shiver of innovation.’ Umberto Eco, ‘Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Postmodern Aesthetics,’ Daedalus 134, 4 (2005), 201. Although I appreciate Eco’s observation, I believe we need to go beyond only the ‘natives,’ ability to identify degrees of diff erence and ask for a wider appreciation of non-Western visual traditions.
[22]:
Although this still leaves an impression of reaction rather than action, a response implies an active decision rather than the passive action associated with terms such as ‘copy’.