Relics, dreams, voyages: world baroque

Relics, Dreams,Voyages is a closely linked sequence of studies of global connections in all the art in the baroque period. The main theme is centre and periphery, and this book offers a sequence of studies of a diversity of peripheries, all of which offer modifications of accepted views of an anglophone centre. Minority cultures: exiles and Celts. Global networks: Habsburg and Jesuit. Diversity of exiles: Jacobites and recusant Catholics; wandering Gaelic scholars; mercenary soldiers and their visual culture; art dealers in eighteenth-century Rome. Centres of baroque culture outside the mainstream: exiled English Catholic colleges in Flanders and Spain; a remote symbolic garden in baroque Scotland; architectural fantasies from an isolated circle at Birr in the midlands of Ireland. Transmission from Asia and the Americas to Europe: the test case of Rubens; the Antwerp Jesuits; and the New World. Many of the chapters consider the secretive cultures of exiled or persecuted British Roman Catholics, including the pseudo-relics constructed in Antwerp for the posthumous cult of Mary Queen of Scots, and the triumphal procession of a vandalised statue to the exiled English College in Valladolid. The visual arts worldwide are considered, from a possible Andean influence on Rubens, to a rare Japanese Christian statue, to the pioneering work on Etruscans of a gay Scottish art dealer in Grand Tour Rome. Subversive iconographies are considered – iconographies feminist and recusant; there is a re-examination of the alleged toxin in a rumoured 1630s murder at the court of Charles I. There are also several chapters which touch on early modern Scotland as a paradoxically cosmopolitan contrast to a more inward-looking England.