The Dutch India Company, or the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), was founded in 1602. As one of the first joint companies in the world, the COV allowed Dutch citizens to invest in trade with Asia, causing a wave of capital in the New Republic, an extent of Windy Seacoast and easily flooded the dishes that were remains of the Empire of the Holy Raine. The population of Amsterdam jumped and the middle class has swelled.
In addition to new channel houses, the new executioner class wanted paintings. The Republic was officially Calvinist, a reformed faith that rejected images in religious worship. This meant that devotional art, once the bread and butter of artists, was no longer a profitable subject, but the demand for art stimulated innovations in the form of new secular genres such as landscape, dead life and scenes of daily life. Dutch artists produced at least at least five million paintings in the 17th century only.
For a long time in the history of art, the VOC (and its equivalent for the trade of the Atlantic, the West India Company, or WIC) were the engines largely not examined behind the Dutch Golden Age, responsible for the subscription of its premiums and the delivery of porcelain vases and pepper which often presents dead paintings. More recently, however, the VOC and the WIC were examined, which made it possible to understand that the two operations depended completely on the purchase and the sale of human beings.
The fact is that you don't really see slavery represented in Dutch art. Although it was illegal in the Republic itself, some still had slaves. Blacks appear in paintings, especially in religious stories, but there is nothing manifest in their representation which alludes to the inseparability of the slavery of the wealth of the nation. In fact, Dutch art is remarkably shy on all the colonial effort. Imported objects and spices appear in the lives and scenes of daily life, but there are few paints of sailors, or the port of Amsterdam, or life in the newly constructed colonies. Art historians in search of objects to help dig this story must look at the works of the few artists who have traveled with WIC and VOCs again.
In his book, Dutch slavery and invention of art (2025), Caroline Fowler advances a new thesis – which, in fact, with good concentration, you can see traces of slavery in Dutch art, and more importantly, that the very development of racial capitalism underpins the characteristic aspects of art. The key among these traces is the replacement of religious content by the secular matter of daily life. Based on the interventions of the Canadian-Caribbean poet Mr. Nourbese Philip, Fowler marries the well-known “representation crisis” which came with the rejection of religious art to “the emerging image of transbsstantiated human life”.
Transubstancement is a central doctrine of Catholic faith, the belief that a slice of wheat and a cup of wine, during the consecration of a priest, becomes the body and blood of Christ. As much as Calvinist theology rejected the possibility of divinity in the images, it also rejected transubstancement, by choosing rather to see the declaration of Christ to its disciples at the last supper that bread should be consumed and the wine should be drunk “in memory of him“As a memorial solely from the sacrifice of Christ. Fowler maintains that once eliminated from the Church, the work of transubstantiation, to see a substance in another, was transferred” from the altar to the market “, while investors transformed enslaved organisms into brands on a large book for investors.
Fowler explores his thesis in five chapters, each addressing another group of works of art and artists. It sums up the previous interpretations – most of them focusing familiar objects, such as the Emmanuel de Witte “Tomb of Michiel de Ruyter in the new church»(1683) – and returns them again from the point of view of his thesis. This is a variable effect, and its points are generally stronger when linked to a specific visual concern rather than an economy of slavery. In addition to an inventory entrance which accompanied the painting when it was sent to Louis XIV in France. The Portuguese, to prevent them from escaping, cut their tendons. The impassive horror of this declaration contrasts with the superficially soft painting, which a previous writer has described as a “charming sugar factory”. In its interpretation, Fowler stacks the blue sky and the green landscape to focus on the yellow flames of the mouths of the oven, considering them as a “vehicle by which … defend the transformation of life into property” which “transfigures violence into a single flame … An abstraction that has determined the lives and the fats of many
In the next chapter, this heat is extinguished by a discussion on the ocean, but the results are just as disturbing. The Dutchman, argues Fowler, considered the ocean as an without path that did not belong to anyone – a belief put forward by the Dutch legal researcher of the 17th century, Hugo Grotius, who wrote the fundamental text on international maritime law – a fluid surface on which cross the world. Flooding on their wooden ships, the Dutch have remained on the surface of the water. Fowler contrasts the dynamic experience of white Europeans to that of people who are enslaved who were held for transport, sent under the surface of the water at a considerable cost for their health to harvest pearls and corals, and thrown into the depths of the ocean when an insurance payment has been deemed more profitable than sales. Presented by Derek Walcott's poetry, Fowler advances a similar contrast between the corpses of Africans slaves lost at sea, and the repatriated bodies and the massive tombs of dead naval heroes placed in Dutch reformed churches, like that of Michiel de Ruyter.
Especially unlike Italian art at the same time, with its relatively standard repertoire of subjects, religious homogeneity and little modified social hierarchies, there is an unfit quality to the Dutch art of the 17th century, with its many genres and subjects which sparkle between poetry and prose. This invited theorization and generalization, of the Eugène Fromentin Masters of the past: Belgium-Holland (1857), which maintains that Dutch art is a realism strictly descriptive to Roland Barthes “The world as an object“(1972) who affirms that Dutch art is the expression of Dutch mercantilism, and of Svetlana Alpers Art of describing (1983), who maintains that Dutch art is a reflection of mirror of the visual world, in the hope of capturing why behind art. Fowler's book features, to be the new story explaining the flowering of Dutch art, identifying this fertilizer as human blood.
Like all these generalization accounts, however, the thesis of Dutch slavery and invention of art gets complicated if you look too closely. Like that of Alpers, Fowler's book neglects the variety of XVIIth century Dutch art, which included much more than church lives and interiors, such as the theatrical paintings of Jan Steen or the stories of Pieter Lastman. Purists will probably oppose the use of modern poetry as a source to replace the lost votes of Africans victims of the slave trade. And the link between the transubstance and the abstraction of value, although interriving, does not recognize the much older history of the monetary imagination, already in place by the 14th century in the bills This made it possible to travel without the danger of transporting parts. However, there is a lot to learn from the provocative account of Fowler, and much to rely.
Dutch slavery and invention of art (2025), written by Caroline Fowler and published by Duke University Press, is available on online pre -order.
