Viator

Perched above the world at an altitude of eight hundred meters, the Church of the Panagia in the village of Kapetaniana lies ten kilometers inland from the southern coast of Crete. In the building’s narthex, two large graffiti of ships, their sails full and oars extended, seem to glide across the images of St. Peter and St. John the Studite. These nautical images, found in a church overlooking the sea, are far from isolated examples of ship graffiti. Demetrios Tsougarakis, in his Corpus of Graffiti from the Churches and Monasteries of Crete, identifies thirty-five complete and three partial images of ships across the island, including several in monasteries around Kapetaniana. Placing the images in the Church of the Panagia within the broader context of Cretan ship graffiti, this paper explores how these ships mark locations of prayer by those whose lives and livelihoods depended on the sea for sustenance and trade. Together with the dedication and location of the church in the landscape and the location of the imagery on its walls, these unsanctioned images reveal the intertwining narratives of land and sea and track the individuals and communities who moved through these environments.

In his first dated canvas, Vittore Carpaccio includes the bravura piece of a ship seen from the front. This article argues that seafaring plays an important role in Carpaccio’s painting, not only as a motif. It demonstrates further that certain artistic techniques in Carpaccio’s work exist in an illuminating relationship to methods of shipbuilding. This correlation is rooted in a common problem: the difficulty posed by the design and depiction of complex curves. It is shown that Carpaccio’s approach to the problem not only anticipates drawing methods of naval architecture, but in some way participates in the idea, practically advanced in Venice by the humanist Vettor Fausto, of reforming the construction of ships in the spirit of antiquity.

The fifteenth-century humanist and architect Leon Battista Alberti had frequent recourse to nautical metaphors and similes throughout his many writings. In particular, he was drawn to the theme of shipwreck. This article explores some instances of Alberti’s engagement with shipwreck, examining how it sometimes appears, in his works, as a figure for the perils and difficulties that a family or individual will inevitably face during the course of their lives. As part of these discussions, Alberti points his readers toward some remedies, or at least toward the kinds of attitudes that ought to be adopted if one hopes to avoid the worst of such catastrophes. Beyond these practical considerations, however, Alberti often seems to regard shipwreck both as an existential condition that arises from the mere fact of being, and as the sign of a broader cultural situation in which one is of necessity forced to contend with the aftermath of collapse fragmentation. In this light, Alberti does not cast human beings primarily as sailors on the sea of life, always concerned with steering the safest course. Rather they appear first and foremost as shipwrecked swimmers, preoccupied above all with salvage and survival.

This essay examines gemstones and pearls (pedraria) in accounts of shipwreck on the Carreira da Índia. Through an analysis of selected early seventeenth-century texts, it explores the complex and ever-changing trajectories of these small and precious objects at sea. On the perilous journeys of the Portuguese India run, gemstones often went undocumented and easily escaped human control. Stored onboard inside boxes and cabinets, they were removed when the ship was threatened and continued their journeys on or inside human bodies. The essay demonstrates that, in stories of the experience of shipwreck, gems call the notion of value into question, exemplifying how, at sea, one type of liquidity turns into another. Reading shipwreck narratives attentive to the experience of maritime disaster as lived by diverse kinds of bodies opens a space to think afresh about the values of transported things.

This essay considers the structural ambivalence in an allegorical print by Johannes Stradanus showing Amerigo Vespucci on his ship. Overtly, the work presents the Florentine navigator as having mastered the winds and fortune through science and virtue, but, if interpreted under an Aristotelian conception of the tragic, the print casts its protagonist as vulnerable to failure. The engraving’s designer-patron, Luigi Alamanni, and his fellow members of the Accademia degli Alterati had the erudite knowledge required to activate the second, concealed meaning of the work, and political reasons for doing so. The back part of the essay positions these two visual arguments in relation to Aby Warburg’s ideas about humanist self-confidence and its expression in art of the fifteenth century, as well as to postcolonial critiques of that Renaissance discourse. The dynamic of interpretation established by the print as an allegory ensured that it could espouse the congratulatory view of European man and its postcolonial opposite, both at once.

In 1608, Medici court artist Giulio Parigi designed a ceremonial fleet to celebrate the marriage of Cosimo II de’ Medici, future Grand Duke of Tuscany (1590–1621), and Archduchess Maria Maddalena of Austria (1589–1631). A crucial component of the festivities was the Argonautica, a Jason and the Argonauts-themed naumachia (mock naval battle) staged on the Arno River, to which the ceremonial vessels were central. The ship designs were documented in a series of nineteen etchings produced by Parigi’s assistant, Remigio Cantagallina. Notably, the etchings do not survive in any festival books for the wedding and circulated instead as loose prints. With one exception, all the etchings include a lateral view of a single vessel at sea. Another distinctive feature of the Argonautica designs is their dynamic representations of the elements. The series focuses on individual vessels and reinvents festival illustration models, such as the bird’s-eye and lateral views, and operates independently from the festival—an aspect of the etchings that has not yet been considered. I show how Parigi and Cantagallina’s pictorial innovations support an expansive campaign to build the image of a Medici maritime state.

Outside of the Arsenal in Venice rests an astonishingly emotive sculpture: an over-lifesize marble lion, seated on a pedestal, the face of which models an intensely aggrieved expression. Belonging to antiquity, the creature—which once resided in the Athenian harbor of Piraeus—dates to approximately 360 BCE. Over time, its flesh has been pocked with bullet holes and eroded by weathering. Among these forms of wear, however, are the unexpected remains of Scandinavian runes and ornament. Finding that they are eleventh-century additions, scholars have committed formidable labor to verifying their ages and translations, though complete textual readings cannot be derived from their remnants. What, then, is left to interpret? Moving beyond the inscriptions to consider the object in its entirety, this article argues that medieval Scandinavian beholders changed the Piraeus Lion’s implicit function by binding it to their own associative network. Situating the sculpture’s impressive features in conversation with other material trends from the Viking Age, this article links the object with commemorative runestones, the Great Beast motif, and a cultural emphasis on cathartic acts of making to characterize its manipulation as an example of transmutation.

On March 26, 1199, Richard the Lionheart was lethally wounded by a crossbow bolt. The event is one of the best-known uses of a crossbow and has sparked articles and books on the death of the king. Although much was written about that fateful day, one source has largely been absent from discussion: Alberic of Trois-Fontaines’s chronicle. In this Cistercian universal chronicle, there is a unique account of the king’s death provided to Alberic by Hugo of Nesle. Instead of a crossbow, the chronicle states that Richard was killed by a javelin selected from among many by the blacksmith who made it, based on the omens that he had experienced while making the weapon. The story uses motifs common throughout the Middle Ages and beyond: The maker of the weapon, the blacksmith, is typically a character who has unique qualities that make him prone to see the true nature of things. The special enemy must be killed by a special weapon, which, if the narrative demands it, can be changed from one weapon to another. This paper considers these topics both within the broader cultural context and through the rules that dictated descriptions of the recent past. In doing so, we can see how the details of Richard’s newsworthy death were both romanticized and explained in Alberic’s chronicle.

This essay focuses on the Florentine baptistery of San Giovanni as a piece of urban architecture, religious and civic, as it was perceived in the fourteenth century: it was a presence in the texts, visual arts, and public festivities of the time. The essay demonstrates that the baptistery was a central element in shaping the image of Florence as the New Jerusalem and reveals the degree to which the chronicler Giovanni Villani (ca. 1275–1348) promoted this image. The essay also offers an original analysis of the architectural associations recorded by pilgrims to the Holy Land.

From 1370 to 1374, the Hungarian court was the host to four foreign princesses. Dorothy (d. 1390), the daughter of Ivan Stratsimir of Vidin, and her sister attended the Hungarian queen Elizabeth of Bosnia (d. 1387), while Anna (d. 1425) and her sister Hedwig (d. 1407?), daughters of Casimir III of Poland (r. 1330–70), were raised at the queen’s court. In essence, these princesses were akin to privileged hostages during their time at the court in Visegrad. Dorothy and Anna learned strategies of royal symbolism and performances of power from Elizabeth of Bosnia and the Hungarian court. The agency of Dorothy and Anna can be seen in their actions after leaving the Hungarian court as well as through regalia such as seals, heraldry, and tombs. This material-culture evidence shows not only that these princesses learned from their time at the Hungarian court but also that their position as hostages influenced the outcome of their adult lives.

In their writings, visionary authors Katharina Tucher (ca. 1380?–1448) and Magdalena Beutler (1407–58) invoke apparitions of Christ and Mary to repeat the basic catechetical teachings and instructions of contemporary didactic literature. “Endless and monotonous,” “derivative,” “disturbed”—texts by fifteenth-century Germany’s women visionaries have often faced a chilly reception in scholarship. This article brings together disparate bodies of research on medieval women’s mysticism and pre-Reformation Germany to argue that what initially seems to be these authors’ lack of literary and theological creativity is in fact deliberate. Tucher and Beutler use their visions of God to affirm and authorize the lessons they trust. Religious teaching of the fifteenth century stressed that the clergy were supposed to mediate between Christians and God. In Tucher’s and Beutler’s relentlessly orthodox writings, that relationship is turned upside down. Their trust in the authority of the Church is as fragile as it is absolute.

This article analyzes the travelogue of Ilyas ibn Hanna al-Mawsuli, an Arab Christian who composed the first account of Spanish America to be written in Arabic. Kitab siyahat alkhoury Ilyas ibn al-qissees Hanna al-Mawsuli (The book of the travels of the priest Ilyas, son of the cleric Hanna al-Mawsuli) documents the interaction between western Europeans and the Levant in the early modern period through the activities of Catholic missionaries. While such an account provides an important perspective on the “Levantine” view of Spanish and Indigenous populations in the Americas in the early modern period, I argue that it instantiates a discursive dialectic between Spanish colonial knowledge and the Levantine lexicon of Eastern Christianity that resulted in a perceptual synthesis through which al-Mawsuli understood colonial Spanish America and Indigenous peoples. The Indigenous populations emerge in his account as “savages,” but also as the direct spiritual beneficiaries of Spain’s new colonial world. The complexity of al- Mawsuli’s travel account stems from its bicultural referentiality: he was a Catholic priest and an Iraqi Christian living under Ottoman rule who also spoke Arabic, Latin, Eastern Syriac, Spanish, French, and Turkish well enough to give sermons, perform Mass, and translate from all of them. This article also illuminates an implicit telos of epistemic imperialism—namely, how colonial epistemologies became itinerant discourses traveling from imperial geographies and engulfing the representational prisms of countries and communities that never had a direct interaction with the Americas.