Vertiginous Mirrors

"In early modern Europe, the visual image began to move, not only as it travelled across great distances but also due to the introduction of innovative visual formats that produced animation within the image itself. This book traces the arduous journeys of visual images through evidence of their use and reproduction along missionary routes from Europe to India, Japan, China, Brazil and Chile. It argues that missionary world travel was crucial to the early modern re-animation of the image through devices such as the reflection of the mirror, the multiple registers of vision of the anthropomorphic image, the imaginative and disorienting possibilities of the utopic image, and even the reconstitution of the sacred image with memories of the relation of travel to life and death. These journeys produced a new kind of visual image, one closely related to the changing experience of the human body, including its extension through new technologies. A crucial point of reference is the legendary 1540s travels across south Asia of Jesuit Saint Francis Xavier, whose burial in Goa and ultimate failure to return to Europe became a provocation not only for subsequent missionary travel but also for a new conceptualization of the visual image. Within the journeys traced in the book, the visual image forged new connections between different locations and across different cultures, accumulating increasingly entangled histories. Even more intriguingly, these images frequently returned to Europe, changed but still recognizable, there to be used again with an awareness of their earlier travels"--Publisher's description, p. [4] of dust jacket.