Arma Virosque... The Coat of Arms in Extra-European Contexts

From the very beginning of the Iberian expansion, artifacts, images and objects played key roles in the first contacts between people who were not yet well acquainted with one another. One of the most important images in these first encounters was the coat of arms: As a marker of occupation, it was engraved into the padrões, the stone pillars that the Portuguese took with them on their voyages of discovery and planted in the newly conquered coastal areas. Some decades later, the same coat of arms appeared on ivory oliphants made in Sierra Leone by indigenous artists for Portuguese clients. And after the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope, coats of arms including those of individual fidalgos multiplied even further, appearing on caskets manufactured by Ceylonese artists, on the silversmith’s locks of boxes made in the Gujarat, on colchas woven in Bengal, etc.

The roles and functions of armorial bearings in European medieval and early modern contexts have been well researched. In recent decades, the coat of arms has revealed itself as a fruitful topic for visual studies and the anthropology of art. The proposed conference aims to build upon this work and also put pressure on it by expanding investigations of the coat of arms into the field of global art history. It wants to focus on the specific visual format of the coat of arms, as well as its material qualities in tandem with the functions it performed overseas. Questions of media transfer will be addressed as well as the issue of transcultural permeability of coats of arms within the contexts of negotiation processes that took place in extra-European contact zones. The conference proposes to connect questions from the well-established field of early modern political iconography and heraldry with more recent approaches of transcultural art history and visual culture studies.

Programme

Friday, 31. January 2020

10:00
Coffee

10:30
Urte Krass
Welcome and Introduction to the Conference

11:00
Miguel Metelo de Seixas
Between Dynasty, Crown and State: The Visual Signs of Power in Portuguese Overseas Territories
Medieval Studies Institute (IEM), Universidade Nova de Lisboa

12:00
Lunch break

13:30
Raphaèle Preisinger
The Virgin of the Assumption, the Habsburg Eagle and the Nopal Cactus: The Emblem of Mexico's Archdiocese as an Expression of Cultural and Political Mestizaje
University of Zurich, Switzerland

14:30
Luis Fernando Herrera Valdez
Tepeaca or the Mestizo Coat of Arms
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City

15:30
Coffee break

16:00
Excursion to Bern Historical Museum

Saturday, 1 February 2020

10:00
Jeremy Roe
Recovering the Aura of the Heraldic: A Textual Archeology of the Triumfos festivães Held for the Acclamation of John IV.
Centro de Humanidades - CHAM, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

11:00
Urte Krass
Coats of Arms as Sites of Mediation in a Treatise from Goa (1659)
University of Bern, Switzerland

12:00
Lunch break

13:30
Robyn Dora Radway
The Habsburg Album Amicorum in the Ottoman World: Self-Representations in Ink and Paint
Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

14:30
Jessica Barker
Heraldic Echoes: The Afterlives of the Padrões as Monuments to European Colonialism
Courtauld Institute of Art, London, Great Britain

15:30
Coffee break

16:00
Final Discussion