bataille-feathers.jpg

https://archive.org/details/heresies_magazine

The application of Guerrilla Warfare in Jamaican maroon communities

This post comes from a History and Anthropology student at the University of Birmingham.

Maroon communities, prevalent in the United States, South America and Jamaica, were formed of black slaves who had managed to escape their white owners and build different lives for themselves, whilst continuing to combat the plantocracy system; also known as a ‘slavocracy’, whereby society is ruled by a dominant class of plantation owners. The focus of this essay will lie with the maroons of Jamaica, as they are considered to be the slave society with the greatest number of revolts and successes. The study of maroon guerrilla warfare is vital when attempting to identify their most salient characteristics. To gain a thorough insight into the emergence of and nature of these communities, their offensive and defensive tactics will need closer investigation, as will their Spanish historical links, African collaboration and Patterson’s formula for slave revolts.
With the English colonial takeover of Jamaica in 1655, the Spanish left behind some of their black slaves, who are believed to be the earliest Jamaican maroons and existed in the interior mountains of the island. As a result of maroon settlements tending to cluster in inaccessible, mountainous areas, the English found tracking them extremely difficult . Jamaica had the biggest economy in the West Indies with a regular influx of new slaves and a low degree of ‘creolisation’  leading to a high frequency of slave rebellions and escapees who were able to join the already existing maroons. The historical background of the maroons in Jamaica offered slaves hope of freedom and the possibility of accommodation among those communities if they were going to risk escape. Whilst rebellions and escapes were largely the cause for great increases in maroon numbers, slaves were also captured by maroons during plantation raids . Also, slaves or free blacks sent to fight the maroons sometimes defected; this was of great military value to the maroons as these defected slaves often had arms, as well as knowledge of the plantocracy’s plans . These factors, coupled with the atrocious conditions experienced by the slaves, provide an explanation as to why maroon communities emerged and grew in numbers in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.
The maroons of Jamaica can be divided into two factions; those situated in the west came to be known as the Windwards and those in the east the Leewards.

Scratch the Surface

Britain's involvement in the slave trade started when Elizabethan adventurer John Hawkins made a voyage to the coast of Sierra Leone, West Africa in 1562 with 100 men and three ships. While there, he kidnapped 300 people, sailed to the Caribbean and sold them to Spanish settlers.
Over the subsequent centuries, many people made their fortunes in the slave trade and related businesses such as banking, manufacturing and shipbuilding. These merchants commissioned paintings and collected art to show off their wealth and impress the traditional elite in the 18th century.
This exhibition examined the role that the slave trade played in the lives of two people featured in portraits in our collection: Zoffany's portrait of 'Mrs Oswald' and Sir Joshua Reynolds's 'Colonel Tarleton'.
Colonel Tarleton, as MP for Liverpool in the 1790s, argued very strongly in Parliament against the abolition of the trade. Mrs Oswald, along with her husband Richard Oswald, owed part of their wealth to a number of plantations in the Americas. The painting of Mrs Oswald was bought by the Gallery in 1938, while the Tarleton portrait was bequeathed to the Gallery by one of his descendants in the early 1950s.
As part of the exhibition, 2004 Turner Prize nominee, Yinka Shonibare MBE, was invited to create a new installation in response to these two portraits. This stunning new work went on display in the Barry Rooms.
'Scratch the Surface' is part of a range of activities and events that the National Gallery took part in commemorate the 200th anniversary of the 1807 Act to abolish the British trade in African people. Although the Act did not end slavery itself, it was the first attempt by the British to legally bring the trade to a close.

The High Place: Potosi

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana | Lima
Los Angeles | Mexico City | New Amsterdam | New Orleans
Paramaribo | Philadelphia | Potosi | Quebec City | Salt Lake City
Saint Louis | Santa Fe | San Francisco | Washington, D.C.

John Demos
On its coat of arms, in the late sixteenth century, appeared the following:

I am rich Potosi,
Treasure of the world.
The king of all mountains,
And the envy of all kings.

Its boast was justified; "rich as Potosi" would quickly become a byword for wealth and splendor throughout the premodern world. As late as 1806, and as far away as rural Massachusetts, local artisans might begin a complaint against the town fathers: "[They would] have you believe that when you entered the sandy plain of Dedham, you are upon a Potosi."
What, then, was this Potosi?
The key to its remote beginnings lies buried in the tectonic plates that shaped the South American continent and the Andes Mountain range. One mountain, in what is now southern Bolivia, was graced by these subterranean forces in a singular way. Though not especially high or otherwise conspicuous, it held within its conical flanks a silver lode of extraordinary size and purity.
And there it sat when the first human settlers–ancestors of the present-day Andean natives–arrived in the region roughly twenty thousand years ago. Millennia passed, societies rose and fell, till around 1200 A.D.–when first the Aymara, later the Inca, created large empires nearby. At some point the site was acknowledged, and perhaps named. In fact, the linguistic origins of Potosi are not known; but, according to one persistent tradition, it was an Aymara (or Quechua) word meaning "high place."
The native peoples apparently mined its silver from time to time, but not in any extensive way. Then, in the 1540s, as Spanish colonizers pushed south following their conquest of the Inca, everything about Potosi changed. A three-hundred-foot outcropping of silver ore, high on the mountain's western slope, suggested what lay underneath; by 1545 Spanish miners, and some Indians too, had begun tearing it away.

Inset of Potosi on Hermann Moll, Map of South America. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

From then on, for half a century, the boom around the cerro rico (rich hill) developed fantastically. In 1547 Potosi's population was about 14,000, in 1571 perhaps 40,000, by 1600 at least 150,000. This raised it to the demographic level of the chief capitals of Europe and Asia (London, Amsterdam, Canton, Tokyo), and made it by far the largest human community in the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, its population formed an astonishing, unprecedented mix. A 1611 estimate included 3,000 Spaniards, 40,000 non-Spanish Europeans (French, German, Italian, Portuguese, English, among others), 35,000 Creoles (American-born, many of mixed-race parentage), 76,000 Indians (themselves representing numerous different ethnic and cultural backgrounds), and 6,000 Africans (nearly all held as slaves by white Potosinos).

Violence and Hope in a Space of Death: Paramaribo

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana | Lima
Los Angeles | Mexico City | New Amsterdam | New Orleans
Paramaribo | Philadelphia | Potosi | Quebec City | Salt Lake City
Saint Louis | Santa Fe | San Francisco | Washington, D.C.

Richard Price
About 1710, J. D. Herlein, a Dutch visitor to Paramaribo, reported that a runaway slave from the town had been recaptured by the authorities. His sentence, which the court intended "to serve as an example to others," was "to be quartered alive, and the pieces thrown in the River." Herlein witnessed the execution: "He was lain on the ground, his head on a long beam. The first blow he was given, on the abdomen, burst his bladder open, yet he uttered not the least sound; the second blow with the axe he tried to deflect with his hand, but it gashed the hand and upper belly, again without his uttering a sound. The slave men and women laughed at this, saying to one another, 'That is a man!' Finally, the third blow, on the chest, killed him. His head was cut off and the body cut in four pieces and dumped in the river."
Herlein made clear that the harshness of this sentence was no anomaly, explaining to his European audience that "if a slave runs away into the forest to evade work for a few weeks, upon his being captured his Achilles tendon is removed for the first offence, while for the second offence, if they wish to increase the punishment, his right leg is amputated in order to stop him from running away; I myself was a witness to slaves being punished thus."
As in other capitals of New World plantation colonies, maintaining order among the mass of enslaved laborers was a central concern. In the idealized slaveocracy, planter hegemony would leave little room for slave response or maneuver and dramatic public executions, a veritable theatre of terror, played a central role toward this end. But the victims in the colonies, unlike those who suffered judicial penalties in the metropoles, generally refused to play their designated roles and mocked the system until their dying breaths, flaunting their individuality and resistance.
In the exercise of totalizing power, capital punishment constitutes a limiting case–yet for this very reason, it may be a good place to plumb the ultimate capacities of the oppressed to respond, resist, and create. An examination of the ways that condemned slaves went to their deaths reveals much about the limits of planter power and about the spirit that allowed slaves to create, within the limited spaces available to them, a world of their own, one that influenced not only every aspect of their own descendants' lives but also that of the descendants of their oppressors.
By the time of Herlein's visit, Paramaribo was a small, bustling town that served as the administrative and commercial hub of a fast-growing sugar plantation colony in northeastern South America. Named after the Amerindian village that had occupied the site, ten kilometers up the Suriname River from the Atlantic, it was dominated by the wooden fort (Zeelandia) that gave the town its name in the creole language created by the slaves: Foto. The first fort, and the town itself, were founded soon after 1650, when Frances Lord Willoughby of Parham sent out an expedition from Barbados to establish the English colony that lasted until the Treaty of Breda (1667), in which the English traded Suriname for New York with the Dutch.

Fig. 1. Paramaribo ca. 1710. From J. D. Herlein, Beschryvinge van de Volk-plantinge Zuriname (1718).

The town had grown from fewer than thirty houses in 1678–the homes of officials, inns, and public houses–to a couple of hundred structures with some five hundred people, only 3 percent of the colony's population but one-third of its Europeans (who included Dutch, French, Portuguese, Jews, Germans, Scandinavians, and others). The remaining whites lived either in and around the town of Jews Savanna fifty kilometers upstream, which had its own synagogue and where half the colony's slaves were owned, or on the plantations themselves. Paramaribo was the port where planters and their delegates did their shopping for slaves as well as other goods, all of which moved between town and plantations in boats rowed by slaves, and where they carried out their administrative affairs. In the early eighteenth century, over 95 percent of the colony's eighteen thousand slaves–almost all of whom had been born in Africa and two-thirds of whom had arrived during the previous decade–worked and lived on plantations.

gewandstudie

Eleonora of Toledo

1544-45 portrait of Eleonora of Toledo with her son Giovanni de' Medici (by Agnolo Bronzino; Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence):

Ornamentbegriffe

Der Ornamentbegriff in der Renaissance

In Anlehnung an Vitruv schreibt der Architekt und Theoretiker Leone Battista Alberti in seiner „De re aedificatoria“ („Über die Baukunst“, 1452): „In tota re aedificatoria primarium certe ornamentum in columnis est.“ Säulen sind also für Alberti in einem Ornamentbegriff als Schmuck des Baus eingeschlossen. (Buch 6, Seite 2). Weiter definiert er auch figürliche Wandmalerei als Teil dieses „Bauschmucks“.

Der Ornamentbegriff im Barock

Der Kunsttheoretiker und Künstlerbiograf Filippo Baldinucci schrieb in seinem 1681 in Florenz erschienenen „Vocabolario Toscano dell’arte del Disegno“ („Toskanisches Inventar von der Kunst des Entwurfs“): „Abellimento, e dicesi propriamente dicose materiali, che si aggiungiono intorno che che sia, per farlo vage e belle.“ („Verzierung nenne ich es, wenn Materialien zum Gegebenen hinzukommen, um es schön und eigenartig zu machen.“)
In Frankreich ist der Begriff ornemens gleich dem lateinischen ornamentum zu setzen und taucht in der Kunstliteratur seit dem 16. Jahrhundert auf.
Im deutschen Sprachraum sind die Begriffe Zierrat, Zierung, Beizier bis ins 19. Jahrhundert vorherrschend, so z.B. schon in der ersten deutschen Ausgabe Vitruvs, übersetzt von Walter Rivius (auch Walter Ryff, „Vitruvius Teutsch“, Nürnberg, 1548), in der es in Buch 4, Kapitel 2, heißt: „Columnen, sampt deren etlichen angehorigen theil glidern und ornamenten oder zierungen.“
Im wichtigsten deutschen enzyklopädischen Lexikon des Barock, im „Grossen vollständigen Universal-Lexicon Aller Wissenschafften und Künste“ von Johann Heinrich Zedler (1732 ), findet sich der Verweis „Ornamentum siehe Zierrath“ und die Definition: „Schmuck, Putz, Ornat, Zierrath, Ornatus oder Ornamentum, heißt überhaupt alles dasjenige, was zwar auf dem Leibe, nicht aber so wohl zu nötiger Bedeckung desselben als vielmehr nur zum Staate und Pracht getragen wird.“ (Band 35, Spalte 471)In der kritischen europäischen Ornamentdebatte des 18. Jahrhunderts, wesentlich von den Akademien ausgetragen, wurde den Ornamenten schließlich ein Eigenwert zugestanden, der sie aus der Rolle einer eher untergeordneten Kunstgattung befreite.

Abgrenzung Muster / Dekoration

Das Muster ist eine einfache Linienkomposition, die von Ornamenten abgeleitet sein kann, wie zum Beispiel der griechische Mäander.
Als Dekoration hingegen bezeichnet man eine objektgebundene Flächenkomposition aus einzelnen Ornamenten. Ornament und Dekoration stehen einander spannungsreich gegenüber. Das Ornament ist ungebunden und frei versetzbar, die Dekoration an die durch das Objekt vorgegebene Fläche streng gebunden. Während das Ornament als stilisiertes Einzelmotiv in beliebiger Wiederholung auftreten kann, bildet die Dekoration eine ausgewogene Gesamtkomposition. Die Dekoration unterliegt zeitgebundenen Variationen und Veränderungen, das Ornament einer strengen Tradition. Daraus ergibt sich, dass mit nahezu gleich bleibenden Ornamenten höchst verschiedenartige, stilistisch wandelbare Dekorationen gestaltet werden können.

Ornament und Rhetorik

Bei Vitruv und Alberti leuchtet die schon in der griechischen Antike gegebene Herkunft des Ornamentbegriffs aus der Rhetorik durch. Es besteht eine Verbindung zum rhetorischen ornatus unter dem Eindruck des Horaz’schen „Ut pictura poesis erit“ („Dichtung ist wie Malerei“), das heißt der Begriff wird über Redekunst und Dichtung hinaus auf die Architektur und die bildenden Künste im allgemeinen angewendet, in der frühen Neuzeit vor allem aus dem Geist des Humanismus heraus. So lässt sich die Integration der Baudetails in die Ornamentik in der Neuzeit erklären, besonders bei Alberti, der ja selbst aus der Dichtung seinen Weg zur Kunsttheorie fand.
Der römische Rhetor Quintilian legte in der 1415 von Poggio Bracciolini in der Bibliothek des Klosters Sankt Gallen für die Neuzeit wieder entdeckten „Institutio oratoria“ (92–96 n. Chr.) fest: „Das Geschmückte ist alles, was mehr ist als nur klar und genau.“ Schmuck wird so als das Wesentliche eines Kunstwerks herausgehoben, acutum (Witz), nitidum (Glanz), copiosum (Fülle), hilare (Lebhaftigkeit), iucundum (Charme), accuratum (Sorgfalt) werden als die Komponenten der gratia bei Quintilian genannt, die in seiner Sicht eine Rede zum Kunstwerk macht.
Derartige Begrifflichkeiten werden bis ins 18. Jahrhundert außerrhetorische Kunsturteile mitbestimmen. Die Ornamentik wird auf diese Weise auch zu einer Art Sprache, dem gebildeten Betrachter in ihrer Rhetorik verständlich.

African scarification

congo-mondele:

"African scarification to decorate and beautify the body". | Belgian Congo | Photographer unknown

Alois Riedl: Stilfragen digital

http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/riegl1893

Ornament. Motiv-Modus-Bild

Tales of the Arabesque

Not quite a year ago, further to a post here about the grotesque in art, Marly asked if I might also write something similar about the arabesque. This idea rested on a cold back-burner until a couple of weeks ago, when I acquired a booklet entitled Some Main Streams and Tributaries in European Ornament from 1500 to 1750 by Peter Ward-Jackson, in which are reprinted some articles that had first been published in a 1967 issue of The Victoria and Albert Museum Bulletin. One of these articles was specifically concerned with the arabesque, and is my source for the images (and for most of the information) below.
*
The very term arabesque is a rather diffuse one, sometimes used broadly to denote almost any style of geometric ornamentation prevalent in Islamic nations, but here I will take it as referring more specifically to stylised vegetal decoration ‘in which plants and leaves grow according to the laws of geometry rather than nature,’ forming ‘interlaced straps, zizags, spirals, scrolls and knots’ which tend to fall into complicated polygonal shapes, in turn forming separate frames for other patterns inside them. Use of this type of decoration, which apparently originated in 10th-Century Baghdad, became widespread throughout the Islamic world in the following centuries.
*
While stylised, interlaced ornament was not unknown in classical and mediæval Europe, the arabesque proper seems to have made a relatively sudden appearance in Renaissance Italy ca. 1530, with Venice as its likely point of entry. ‘Venice was a great market for Islamic wares, some of which were made in Venice itself by the Moslem community that lived there.’ The first image above shows part of a damascened brass vessel thought to have been made by a Venetian Moslem craftsman in the early 16th Century. Similar patterns, known even then as Arabesque, (or Moresque, or Saracenic) were used in the decoration of book-bindings, manuscripts, textiles and pottery.
*
‘This then,’ writes Ward-Jackson, ‘was the Saracenic ornament which certain Italian artists began to study and to copy during the 1530s, precisely in the decade when a new kind of scrollwork […] was beginning to emerge in the palace of Fontainebleau under the direction of Rosso Fiorentino.’ ‘It so happens,’ he continues ‘that the author of one of the first books of Moresque ornaments to be published in Europe, the Italian artist Francesco Pellegrini, was one of Rosso's assistants in the work of decorating the Palace.’ Ward-Jackson then speculates that Pellegrini ‘may have introduced Rosso to the Moresque, and Rosso’s knowledge of this free linear ornament may have encouraged him in his own experiments with bands and scrolls, [although] the Saracenic influence is not very perceptible in Rosso’s own work.’
*
This novel style was quickly circulated throughout Europe by means of pattern-books illustrating arabesques on needlework, jewellery, furniture, weaponry, etc., etc. The designs reproduced in Pellegrini’s volume (fig. 2), were intended for embroiderers. Some similar patterns were printed without a specific decorative context, such as the mid-16th-Century designs by the engraver Jean Gourmont (figs. 3 & 4). Others were shown in situ as embellishments on finished objects, such as the decoration on the cup designed by Hans Holbein the Younger shown above (fig. 5) in a later print by Wenceslas Hollar, or the pattern on the ‘pilgrim bottle’ (fig. 6), designed by the Nuremberg goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer.
*
By the mid-17th Century, the vogue for ‘pure’ arabesque had faded—Pierre Firens’s design for a dish (fig. 7) being a relatively late example. Arabesques, though seldom used any more in isolation, came to be an essential part of the design vocabulary of the 18th-Century rococo style, having been proved ‘capable of combining harmoniously with traditional classical motifs, above all with the grotesque.’ Even in the 16th Century, some designers had begun to combine grotesque and arabesque elements together: the patterns by Balthasar Sylvius in fig. 8, above, are an example. The ewer by Georg Wechter shown in fig. 9 is another hybrid design, where Fontainebleau-style strapwork is interlaced in an arabesque-like manner.
*
The design by Lucas Kilian (fig. 10) foreshadows the rococo deployment of grotesque elements following vaguely arabesque patterns around a central frame. The next image (by Jean Berain, fig. 11) is another example of what is, ostensibly, a grotesque, but again, one in which the ‘movement of the lines, the ogival patterns which they form when intersecting, and above all, the tendency of the bands to fall into polygonal patterns within the design’ we see ‘features typical of the arabesque.’ The final image above, a mid-18th Century ceiling design by François de Cuviliés the Elder seems no less distant from the the origins of the arabesque, but even so (according to Ward-Jackson) ‘the same basic features are still there: the lines of bandwork, alternately straight and scrolled, the acanthus foliage sprouting from them at intervals, the complex interlacements, and the tendency of the lines to form separate polygonal compartments.’

portrait

Portrait of an African Slave Woman is attributed to Annibale Carracci, circa 1580s

Ornament Plates: Jean Berain (French, Saint-Mihiel 1640–1711 Paris)

islamische architektur

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Arabian Antiquities of Spain

http://surfacefragments.blogspot.ch/

But it's true that it's hard to know what to write about. Take a post about the book Arabian Antiquities of Spain (1815); it could be about murals, designing tessellations, Islamic Architecture and the Alhambra, or the history of Orientalism in Western Art. There's just too much good stuff out there. Sorry, but ponies are way down on the list.

In the meantime, these incredible etchings could serve as a complete source for any mural or stencil.

I posted a whole set of large images from this book here, illustrated beautifully by James Cavanah Murphy. Poor bugger died a year after this book came out, apparently he "fell a victim to his labours."

Just in case you're feeling a little too lazy to draw these patterns yourself; here is one as an Illustrator file. Nice! Dover has of course published a book on Islamic designs with a CD containing a ton of vector art, so you could go that route.

Or you could buy and download SymmetryWorks by Artlandia; an amazing little plug-in for Illustrator that enables you to create any kind of pattern. Great for wallpaper designers or for those tricky Islamic patterns. Beats learning Geometry.

For those interested in the patterns of the Alhambra, there is a fantastic textbook on designing tessellations called, not very surprisingly, Designing Tessellations, by Jinny Beyer. And it's not just for quilters and Escher freaks. The Mathematics is understandable, and the lessons valuable. Here's a sample page from the book.

I found a great Illustrator file online of a Hilbert Curve. Open it and have fun, but whatever you do, don't try following that line with your eye! This would make a great standing screen if you laser-cut the design out of wood.

Lewis F. Day writes in Pattern Design about the development of the 'Arab lattice':

Well, the way this post unfolded, I guess it's about Islamic pattern. I'll just have to do a different one on the subject of the dubiously named 'Orientalist' painters of the 19th Century.

By the way, there's a great book called The Alhambra, downloadable in it's entirety for free here. When I say 'great' I mean it's got a great set of plates. It's unreadable garbage, written by one of those toffee-nosed prats who fancied themselves as 'Oriental', as in this image of it's Victorian author, Albert T. Calvert, in full regalia.

convenance

Un mariage de convenance

'convenance', der Angemessenheit des Standes, standesgemäss

Rokoko

Die Schaukel gemalt 1767 von Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Ein Sinnbild des Rokoko

Das Rokoko ist eine Stilrichtung der europäischen Kunst (von etwa 1730 bis 1770/1780) und entwickelte sich aus dem Spätbarock (ca. 1700–1720). Ausgangspunkt ist Frankreich. Der Name stammt von dem französischen Wort Rocaille ('Grotten- und Muschelwerk') nach einem immer wieder auftretenden Ornamentmotiv, das sich durch Asymmetrie und die Auflösung fester Vorbilder aus dem Barock unterscheidet.^[1] Das Zeitalter des Klassizismus, um 1760 bis 1800, löste das Rokoko ab.