In the 16th century, Antwerp was at the heart of the Spanish crown, one of the biggest cities in Europe, a hub for the trade of spices, silk and wool, timber, and precious metals that were vital for the economy of an expanding empire. Patronized by wealthy merchants and aristocrats, the arts flourished. What’s more, the city was the publishing capital for the colonial power, producing religious prints and books that were carried by Jesuit missionaries around the world. Images like St. Michael the Archangel were exported to cities from Lima to Manila, where they were then reproduced and adapted in new ways.
This question of how images travel is explored in Porras’s new book, The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp Print, and the Early Modern Globe. In the 16th century, Porras says, artworks moved faster and farther distances than they had before, and wherever they moved, they were copied. During her research, she realized the phenomenon was not unlike memes spreading rapidly across the Internet: multiple iterations of a single image existing simultaneously and in different places.
Discovering the ivory St. Michael the Archangel in Mexico led Porras on a worldwide quest to collect more variations of the figure. “It is such a weird iconography that you can identify and trace it across places,” she says. Each time she presented her research at a conference, it seemed like someone in the audience knew of another version—in Grenada, Oaxaca, Quito, or some other former Spanish outpost. Every time Porras traveled to a new location, she unearthed another archangel. Within a few years, she had a “sizable corpus” of these images.
Flemish manuscripts have long captivated Porras, who began studying Northern Renaissance art after working on Getty’s Illuminating the Renaissance exhibition as a Marrow intern in the early aughts. Over time, she became interested in how these European images circulated throughout the Spanish Americas. “What I found most interesting in doing my research was all the nitty-gritty of ‘How did the print get there? How did those ivory sculptures get to Central Mexico or to Salamanca or wherever?’” Studying the workings of ports and shipping routes, commercial fairs and markets, royal courts, and religious missions led her to understand how certain images were able to travel so quickly and so far.
For the archangel, she says, the print first was smuggled out of Antwerp before being sold in Seville, the gateway to the Spanish Americas. Catholic missionaries or merchants would then have transported the image to Veracruz, Mexico. Once in Mexico, the engraving traveled overland, via Mexico City, to coastal Acapulco, where it was loaded on a Spanish ship, in the cargo of a priest or trader, for the 100-day voyage to Manila. In the Philippines, the image became the inspiration for the ivory sculpture, using material harvested in Africa and carved by East Asian artists, which eventually found its way to Mexico sometime later.
If the archangel is one of the first viral images, it’s not the only one. For Porras, it’s important to emphasize how different communities have agency in how they navigate new cultural imports. Too often, she says, it’s taught that “European prints get sent abroad in service of colonization and conversion and are just copied as tools of oppression.” But copying, she says, is a creative practice.
These Renaissance images, like today’s media, were adapted and distributed in many different ways across a global network. But people choose whether or not they will pass an image or story along. “Internet virality is not passive. It requires us to like, to share, and it isn’t something that just happens to you,” Porras says. “It was not just a one-way street.”
Watch Stephanie Porras’s Going Viral in the Renaissance, delivered in December 2023 as the annual Thomas and Barbara Gaehtgens Lecture at the Getty Research Institute.
