Callot’s Caravan & Cresques’ Atlas, Romance Studies at the Nasher Museum

Elvira with students, inTransit

An experimental installation designed by faculty and students provides context and gives significance —again – to the political talk of caravans and a “medieval” border wall.  Read more about In Transit: Arts of Migration around Europe, and visit the small show on view at the Nasher Museum until January 6.

When students first encountered Jacques Callot’s engravings in Helen Solterer’s seminar “Imagining Europe”, they were intrigued by the early modern portraits of people on the move.  Why were they called ‘Bohemian’?  one asked.   Who are these families : mothers with their babies wrapped in striped blankets, men guiding the procession ? Callot’s s four miniatures were already described as depicting caravans in the 1680s; the artist’s admirers recognized how he drew the figures with sympathy.  No matter who they are, refugees fleeing Europe’s wars, travelling merchants, or the nomadic group we know today as Roma, the class identified them as early European migrants.  Graduating senior Sophie Caplin translated the accompanying vignettes, calling them “destitute vagabonds who carry with them only things of the future.”

Annette Messager, the contemporary multi-media French artist, agreed. “You have to exhibit them,” she said, in a show that helps visualize migrants in Europe’s past,  “and with this text that I like a lot.”  Her own work, a textile piece of two upended figurines in a precarious position, is juxtaposed with Callot’s.  Two visions of people having to migrate. One common quandary, at different times.

Elvira Vilches and students in her Cervantes seminar were exploring another scenario of the long history of migration.  How were untold many uprooted, like the Spanish Golden Age writer, displaced across the Mediterranean?  This was a human pattern already mapped by the Catalan cartographer, Abraham Cresques, and in both directions, southwards and northwards.  His colorful atlas from 1374 traces routes taken across North Africa, representing strongholds in the Islamic caliphate in Andalusia, fortified ports like Ceuta on the Moroccan coast.  Students pored over the painted reproduction that is also a part of the Nasher exhibit. What did those displaced by dynastic conflicts and holy wars know of their world?  Far more than most Dukies imagine; with a scientific accuracy that the navigational instrument, the astrolabe, made by Muhammed ibn al-Fattuh al-Kham’iri offered to many travelling across North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.  When early modern migrants were displaced, they encountered ramparts securing towns like Fez, Valencia, Jerusalem, and Calais, but fewer walls than those attempting access to modern colonial and imperial nation states. No visa inspections that Barthélémy Toguo, the Cameroonian artist satirized in his series of round wood-cut prints, also on exhibit. And no border controls that Raquel Salvatella de Prada recreated in her multi-media piece, Cornered, shown at the Rubenstein Arts Center in conjunction with In Transit.

For more details on the over-arching project that Romance Studies faculty and students developed with colleagues in Art, Art History and Visual Studies see the project’s website: https://www.intransitduke.org/

AstroWeb
J Caldwell, photo
inTransit Image 2
J Caldwell, photos
Elvira Vilches and students, inTransit
J Caldwell, photo