Pearls for the Crown: Art, Nature, and Race in the Age of Spanish Expansion

In the age of European expansion, pearls became potent symbols of imperial supremacy. Pearls for the Crown demonstrates how European art legitimated racialized hierarchies and inequitable notions about humanity and nature that still hold sway today. When Christopher Columbus encountered pristine pearl beds in southern Caribbean waters in 1498, he procured the first source of New World wealth for the Spanish Crown, but he also established an alternative path to an industry that had remained outside European control for centuries. Centering her study on a selection of key artworks tied to the pearl industry, Mónica Domínguez Torres examines the interplay of materiality, labor, race, and power that drove artistic production in the early modern period. Spanish colonizers exploited the expertise and forced labor of Native American and African workers to establish pearling centers along the coasts of South and Central America, disrupting the environmental and demographic dynamics of their overseas territories. Drawing from postcolonial theory, material culture studies, and ecocriticism, Domínguez Torres demonstrates how, through use of the pearl, European courtly art articulated ideas about imperial expansion, European superiority, and control over nature, all of which played key roles in the political circles surrounding the Spanish Crown. This highly anticipated interdisciplinary study will be welcomed by scholars of art history, the history of colonial Latin America, and ecocriticism in the context of the Spanish colonies. COVER Front 2 Copyright Page 5 Table of Contents 8 Acknowledgments 14 Introduction 16 Notes to Introduction 182 Chapter 1: Signs of Divine Power: Pearls and the Immaculate Conception in Habsburg Spain 32 Notes to Chapter 1 183 Chapter 2: Mastering Nature: Pearls Natural History, and Artistic Practice in the Early Modern Spanish World 62 Notes to Chapter 2 185 Chapter 3: Contested Stories of Wealth: The Island of Pearls in "New World” Chronicles 90 Notes to Chapter 3 187 Chapter 4: A Pearl for the Grand Duke: Images of Native American Pearl Divers in Medici Florence 116 Notes to Chapter 4 188 Chapter 5: Pearl and Ebony Treasures: Precious Collectibles at the Court of Augustus the Strong 144 Notes to Chapter 5 190 Notes 182 Bibliography 194 Index 214