Description
Book SynopsisExamines internet virality as a critical framework for considering early modern artworks’ global mobility and replication. Explores the role of artistic labor, gatekeepers, infrastructures, and social networks to reassess art’s role in processes of globalization.
Trade Review“Briskly argued, this engaging volume tells a story of dispersive transmission and ‘distributed agency,’ focusing on the forms and functions of the multiple versions of St. Michael the Archangel produced in Antwerp, Spain, Peru, New Spain, and the Philippines between the 1580s and ca. 1700. Porras’s account is theoretically engaged—as witness her rejection of paradigms of ‘translation,’ ‘hybridization,’ or ‘circulation’—and her argument, precisely because she anchors it in a specific image and its afterlife, is entirely convincing.”
—Walter Melion,author of The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550–1625
“By parsing the layovers made by prints during their international transit in the sixteenth century, Stephanie Porras shows us the trace of their journeys. Prints transgressed both geographical limits and boundaries set up by the idea of genre and medium. Forging an exemplary path through both decolonial and reception studies, this book leaves in the rearview mirror the privileging of authorship, centers, and points of origins as it attempts to recuperate localities and agents occluded by colonial erasure.”
—Stephanie Leitch,author of Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture
“[M]onumentally important.”
—Arthur J. DiFuria The Historians of Netherlandish Art
