As a social phenomenon and a commonplace of internet culture,
virality provides a critical vocabulary for addressing questions
raised by the global mobility and reproduction of early modern
artworks. ...This book uses the concept of virality to study artworks'
role in the uneven processes of early modern globalization.
Drawing from archival research in Asia, Europe, and the
Americas, Stephanie Porras traces the trajectories of two
interrelated objects made in Antwerp in the late sixteenth century:
Gerónimo Nadal's Evangelicae historiae imagines, an
illustrated devotional text published and promoted by the Society
of Jesus, and a singular composition by Maerten de Vos, St.
Michael the Archangel. Both were reproduced and adapted across
the early modern world in the seventeenth century. Porras examines
how and why these objects traveled and were adopted as models by
Spanish and Latin American painters, Chinese printmakers, Mughal
miniaturists, and Filipino ivory carvers. Reassessing the creative
labor underpinning the production of a diverse array of copies,
citations, and reproductions, Porras uses virality to elucidate the
interstices of the agency of individual artists or patrons,
powerful gatekeepers and social networks, and economic, political,
and religious infrastructures. In doing so, she tests and contests
several analytical models that have dominated art-historical
scholarship of the global early modern period, putting pressure on
notions of copying, agency, context, and viewership.
V ital and engaging, The First Viral Images
sheds new light on how artworks, as agents of globalization,
navigated and contributed to the emerging and intertwined global
infrastructures of Catholicism, commerce, and colonialism.
