Seventeenth-Century Europe in a Global Art History

Abstract

In the study of Seventeenth Century art, the rise of global art history coincided with the marginalization of ‘Baroque’ as an overarching historical and cultural formation. While ‘Baroque’ persists as stylistic label and transhistorical aesthetic category, most studies of artistic interactions between Europe and the wider world subscribe, implicitly if not explicitly, to a gradualist and modernising narrative of accelerating circulation of people, object, and texts, and a rising tempo of cultural transfer and hybridisation. This paper asks to what extent the Seventeenth Century might be considered a distinctive period in Europe’s cultural interactions with the wider world; whether new research would be best served by adopting methodologies and agendas from allied subfields; or whether it is possible to make a case for the Seventeenth Century’s particularity on epistemic grounds, based on the networks of trade, and exchange, and the forms of collecting and print culture, that typified the period.