Location: Walters’ Graham Auditorium and Virtual (livestream on YouTube)
Registration is required.

At the center of this talk is the Walters Art Museum’s extraordinary ivory sculpture The Archangel Michael, made in seventeenth-century Manila by Chinese immigrant sculptors who used Flemish prints and African ivory to craft the elaborate object. This talk examines the various trade routes, the migrant materials, the artworks that served as models, the artists who produced this, and other ivory objects made in colonial Manila for export across the Pacific to the Spanish-American viceroyalties. The Archangel Michael reveals the complex circuits of the early modern global art market, traversing the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and positioning Manila as a unique creative locus at the intersection of multiple commercial and immigrant networks.

This talk will take place at the museum and will stream live on our YouTube channel. If you are unable to join us in person, the recording will be available on our YouTube channel following the program.

This talk is generously supported by the Walters Art Museum’s Friends of Asian Art group.

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About the Guest Speaker

Stephanie Porras is Professor of Art History at Tulane University who specializes in the visual and material culture of Northern Europe and the Spanish world, from the 15th to the 17th centuries. Her latest book, The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp Print and the Early Modern Globe (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023) traces the complex production and reception histories of an illustrated book, a painting and an engraving, all made in Antwerp in the late sixteenth century, but copied by Venetian print publishers, Spanish and Latin American painters, Mughal miniaturists and by Filipino ivory carvers. This year she also co-edited, along with Stephen Campbell, The Routledge Companion to the Global Renaissance, a volume of forty essays, introducing objects made across the early modern world.

Image Credit:
The Archangel Michael, Philippines, ca. 1670–90. Acquired by Henry Walters, before 1931.