In 1543, Copernicus proposed the idea that the earth was not still at the center of a moving universe. In fact, as he proposed in his book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres it was the earth that moved around the sun. You could say that, thanks to what historians call the Copernican Revolution, human beings, particularly in Christian Europe, were removed from their imagined place at the center of the universe—even as they dominated, exploited, and converted cultures around the world.
Crucifixion, Convent of San Nicolás Tolentino, Actopan, Hidalgo, Mexico, 1546 and after (photo: linkogecko, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Soon after Columbus and other Europeans arrived in the Americas, friars also arrived. They built Mission churches to convert large numbers of Indigenous people. These conventos (conversion centers or missions) were built with forced labor and sometimes with stone from older Indigenous structures that predated the conquest. The paintings and sculptures that decorate them also the reveal complex layering of both European and Indigenous cultures. The murals at San Agustín de Acolman make it clear that artists (and prints after European paintings) came to the Americas from Spain bringing the forms and ideas of the Renaissance with them. In South America too, the ideas of the European Renaissance combined with Indigenous art forms, for example in the architecture of Colombia. Despite efforts to eradicate vestiges of Indigenous cultures in the Americas, there was active resistance to colonial rule. Although some cultural forms disappeared, many others were transformed, and still others continued unchanged.
Map of New Spain showing Mexico City (which was the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan before the arrival of the Spanish), 1610 (underlying map © Google)
In 1521 the large and powerful Mexica (Aztec) Empire fell to the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes and in 1533 Francisco Pizarro defeated the powerful Inka in Peru (also on behalf of the Spanish monarchs). To govern these and other new territories, the Spanish established viceroyalties in the Americas (lands ruled by viceroys who were second to, and a stand-in for, the Spanish king). The Viceroyalty of New Spain was established in 1535, and the Viceroyalty of Peru was established in 1542.
Map of the Viceroyalty of Peru (underlying map © Google)
Tragically, little remains of the art, architecture, and literature of American Indigenous cultures before the invasion of the Spanish. Shortly after their arrival in what today is Mexico, they began destroying Indigenous manuscripts; they also began recording what was being destroyed with an encyclopedic work, known as the Florentine Codex, or the General History of the Things of New Spain that documents the culture, religious and ritual practices, economics, and natural history of the Indigenous central Mexican peoples as well as the events of the conquest itself.
Remains of the Qorikancha (“Golden House”), the most sacred shrine of the Inka below Spanish church and monastery of Santo Domingo, Cusco, Peru, c. 1440 (photo: Angela Rutherford, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
In South America, The Inka had grown their empire across the Andes. Like the Mexica to the north, their cities were largely obliterated by the Spanish in the 16th century, though traces of their architecture remain in their capital city, Cuzco where the Spanish built a church atop a mostly destroyed Inka temple—a symbolic act of power and subjugation .
Map of the Portuguese colony of Brazil (underlying map © Google)
Also during this time, the Portuguese colonized Brazil and transported the first kidnapped Africans to Brazil to be enslaved laborers. In 1526 the Spanish brought the first enslaved Africans to North America. In the following centuries, more Africans were enslaved and transported to Brazil than to any other region of the Americas. During the following centuries, the transatlantic slave trade constituted a forced mass movement of African peoples to European colonies in North and South America. Over 11 million people were enslaved and endured horrifying brutality on cotton, rum, and sugar plantations throughout the Americas.
Mimar Sinan, Süleymaniye Mosque, Istanbul, Turkey, completed 1558 (photo: Steven Zucker,CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The 16th century is also an era of powerful leaders like the Medici family and Pope Julius II in Italy, King Francis I in France, Henry VIII in England, Charles V and Phillip II in Spain, Suleiman the Magnificent in the Ottoman Empire, Shah Tahmasp I in Safavid Iran, and Akbar I in Mughal India. It’s also the period of artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Mimar Sinan, Diego Velazquez, and Hans Holbein in Europe, Sultan Muhammad, and Nanha in West and South Asia, all of whom were employed by these powerful rulers.
In 1517, a German monk and theologian, Martin Luther, launched an all-out assault on the most powerful institution in Europe: the Catholic Church. The events sparked by Luther are referred to as The Protestant Reformation. Originally, the Reformation was an attempt to reform the Catholic Church, but reform became rebellion as people began to question the power and practices of the Pope and the Catholic Church (which had been the only church in western Europe up until Luther). The Reformation led to the establishment of new Christian religious traditions (such as Lutheran and Calvinist denominations) which offered a different path to salvation—one in which the role of the church was diminished.
Made in consultation with Martin Luther, The Law and the Gospel explains Luther’s ideas in visual form, most basically the notion that heaven is reached through faith and God’s grace. Lucas Cranach, The Law and the Gospel, c. 1529, oil on wood, 82.2 x 118 cm (Schlossmuseum, Gotha)
Thanks to the printing press and an increase in literacy, people could read and interpret the bible on their own. Pamphlets and images disseminated Luther’s theology and put into visual form these new paths to salvation. The Church initially ignored Martin Luther, but his ideas quickly spread throughout Europe. The Church’s delayed response to the threat from Luther and others during this period is called the Counter-Reformation (“counter”—against).
The iconoclasm began in Flanders and Brabant in the year 1568 and spread throughout the Netherlands in a short time. Here, iconoclasm is in full swing: pulling down and smashing statues of saints, and in the middle, attempts to pull down a crucifix standing on the altar. Jan Luyken, Beeldenstorm, 1677–79, etching, 27 x 34.8 cm (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
For the history of art, this has particular significance since the use (and abuse) of images was an important topic of debate. Protestants were concerned that the proliferation of images of Christ, Mary, and saints in churches essentially encouraged the worship of the images themselves (instead of the holy figures pictured in the images). In response, the Catholic Church reaffirmed the importance of images in helping to inspire faith and learn the stories of the Bible (remember many people couldn’t read). Many images were attacked and destroyed in northern Europe by Protestant reformers during this period, a phenomenon called iconoclasm.
Bernardo Bitti, Coronation of the Virgin, 1575–80, tempera (Church of San Pedro, Lima)
As part of an effort to renew and strengthen the Catholic faith in the face of the spread of Protestantism, in 1540 the Pope established the Jesuit order (also known as the Society of Jesus). Jesuit priests were among the first to arrive in the Americas in an effort to convert the Indigenous people. Bernardo Bitti was a Jesuit, but also a painter who traveled to Lima (Peru) as part of the order’s evangelization efforts (the Jesuits were at the forefront of global missionary efforts during the 16th and 17th centuries—including a failed effort in Japan). Bitti’s first project in Lima was a large altarpiece depicting the Coronation of the Virgin. The painting’s clarity and legibility are exactly what the Catholic Church prescribed for images to serve their didactic and devotional functions.
Medici Porcelain, c. 1575–87, soft-paste porcelain from the Medici Porcelain Manufactory, decorated in underglaze blue, 20.3 x 10.8 x 12.4 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; photo: Steven Zucker,CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Art history often focuses on painting, sculpture, and architecture, but other materials were often held in higher esteem. In this period, the Medici in Florence began to try to replicate Chinese porcelain because it was so precious and beautiful. Talavera poblana was developed by potters in New Spain inspired by imported ceramics, like highly coveted Chinese porcelains. In South America, both before and after conquest, textiles (a hallmark of Inka culture), could be worth more than gold or other luxury items. Carpets are among the most fundamental of Islamic arts—they were traded and sold across the Islamic lands and beyond its boundaries to Europe and China. The exceptional Ardabil Carpet from the following century is a good example. It is also through carpets and other portable media that we can see the kinds of cross-cultural exchanges that were taking place during this period (for example among Jews who were forced to leave Spain, and relocated to the Ottoman Empire).
View of the northeast of the exterior slopes of the quarry, with several moai (human figure carving) on the slopes; a young man with a horse is standing in the foreground for scale, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), photographed by Katherine Maria Routledge, c. 1914–15, lantern slide (photograph), 8.2 x 8.2 cm (© The Trustees of the British Museum, London)
In the vast region of the Pacific, numerous island cultures thrived. The Spanish were among the first Europeans to explore and establish contact with the Pacific Islands. The people of Rapa Nui produced enormous stone figures called Moai that stand on ahu (stone platforms) with their backs to the sea, in essence keeping watch over one of the most remote islands in the world. Roughly 6,500 miles to the west, on the Pacific island of Pohnpei (in what is today the Federated States of Micronesia), the Sau Deleur Dynasty used basalt and coral to construct a complex, known as Nan Madol, of close to 100 artificial rectilinear islets spread over 200 acres that are thought to have housed up to 1,000 people with walls as high 25 feet. Like in the Americas and Africa, the peoples of the Pacific would soon be impacted by soldiers, traders, and missionaries from competing European powers.
The first half of the 16th century saw radical changes akin in some ways to the digital revolution of the late 20th century. But it wasn’t only information that was moving in unprecedented ways, as we have seen, it was people and objects that were on the move. Not only were prints and the printing press bringing people together in exceptional numbers, but the voyages of Christopher Columbus and sailors from Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England, brought much of the globe together for the very first time, though often with disastrous consequences for the “discovered” including from the introduction of diseases that had been previously unknown and for which there was no immunity.