RACE, MATERIALS, THE BODY, AND GREGOR BRANDMÜLLER’S LES QUATRE PARTIES DU MONDE IN THE FRANCO-SWISS WORLD

Abstract

In 1688 Swiss artist Gregor Brandmüller fit the known-to-Europeans world in a five- by six-foot rectangle by dividing it into four continents and painting each as an amalgamation of the human and the material. The continents frolic; they casually pose in a seemingly prelapsarian environment. As the Americas grew more familiar to Europeans over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many artists combined New World objects with elaborately dressed figures in ethnographic fantasies to craft aesthetic responses to global colonial expansion. These scenes frequently draw on allegorical formulas recorded and popularized by Italian iconographer Cesare Ripa in his influential illustrated treatise of 1603. These established ideas shaped Brandmüller’s work. However, his inclusion of a tomb (or ruinous sculpture), shipping bales and bundles, a lacquer box of pearls, a North American-made basket, a triangular shack, and the reconfigured allegory of Africa disrupt our reading. These additions and changes were strategic negotiations on the artist’s part. Rather than paint a pure fantasy, he staged a different sort of visual colonization, one that was grounded in the political realities of Basel, where Brandmüller was active from 1686 to his death in 1691. Brandmüller’s is a measured, considered response to broader European colonization projects. In the 1680s, the outcome of settler colonialism was far from certain and race as a concept was more fluid than cultural memory holds. Brandmüller participated in these conversations by proposing a future for colonialism based on exploiting non-white bodies and grounded in European’s visible, material possession of New World objects and landscapes.