This chapter explicates the diverse models scholars have developed to analyze cultural exchange in early modern material culture. With a focus on objects originating in Asia and Europe in the early modern period, the author considers environmental, cultural, technological, social, political, economic, and ideological approaches and factors

Looking at a modern image of a woman with a shell, Francesca Woodman's (1958–1981) Untitled of 1979–1980, we notice three shells: a real one, a woman's hairstyle arranged in the shape of a conch and a shell-shaped cloud. (Fig. 5.1) The image is one of Woodman's many enigmatic self-portraits. It shows the artist with her eyes closed and her head resting on her hands as if sleeping or daydreaming. Similar to the visual correlations between the three shells – the real one, the one made of hair and the cloud shapes – are the links between the decoration on the artist's sleeve and the maritime objects in the display case underneath her arm: they, too, seem to mirror each other's shapes. Woodman rests her head on a glass panel whose transparent surface and the marine objects it shields and supports evoke associations with water. Her hands are reflected in it, evoking the impression of a shore that connects her head to the “underwater world” contained by the display case. Supported by a “coast” formed of her hands, the shell shape of the artist's head indicates that we are looking at the self-portrait of a woman as a mollusc. Or, more specifically, a self-portrait of a woman's dream of being a mollusc.

In 1705, the first treatise on Asian shells and molluscs was published posthumously. Its author was a man known as Rumphius (1627–1702), who was of German origin and had worked for the Dutch East India Company and spent many years in Indonesia studying maritime material culture and marine organisms. Rumphius's work marked the beginning of the transcultural and systematic study of Asian molluscs before which the collecting and study of conches had been the preserve of emperors and merchants, artists and artisans, and naturalists and amateurs in China as well as Europe. This book focuses mainly on Asian shells in early modern artefacts and paintings before 1705, considering them “things that talk,” and takes shells as a point of departure for transcultural “object lessons” in the study of art and material culture that teach us about aesthetics, craftsmanship and ecology in early modern Eurasia.

Research on the material culture of the early modern world has taken approaches that do justice to the period's globalized networks of mercantile and artistic exchange. Historians have written about the “global lives of things,” adding culture as one of the defining agents in the conceptualization of an object's “social life.” Early modern Europe has been conceptualized as a space whose object worlds were as “European” as they were “creole,” while the transcultural dimensions of Ming and Qing dynasty material culture have been widely acknowledged.

Standing inside a shell, a woman with windblown hair lifts a sail above her head. (Fig. 4.1) While we see her back, she exposes her front to three figures in Chinese robes. The scene is framed by bamboo and a pine tree, a garden scene with scholar's rocks pierced by wind and water, and houses beneath palm trees. The delftware dish with its blue and white decoration dates to 1680/90; it merges technologies and iconographies of Chinese and European origins. The female figure incorporates attributes of the mythological goddesses Venus and Fortuna, she is “European,” while the shell underneath her feet that connects her to the “Chinese” pictorial space is EurAsian, as this chapter will show. Building on the previous parts of this book, chapter 4 argues that early modern European images of women with shells are connected to imaginary visions of foreign (underwater) spaces full of riches, paradise-like realms that promise material affluence and erotic fulfilment. It focuses on “women with shells” in depictions of Venus, allegories of lust, and representations of foreign women during the sixteenth and seventeenth century and goes on to consider how the erotic content of European images of women with Asian shells was appropriated and amplified by artisans in China after its arrival there from the eighteenth century on.

Shells shelter the organisms that build them. As external skeletons (exoskeletons), they serve as homes, supporting and protecting the bodies inside them and, in fact, forming part of them. In English, the inner parts of snail shells are called chambers, from the Latin camerae; contemporary Chinese refers to them as “rooms” (shi) and labels the horizontal compartments ceng, a term that is used to denote layers of various kinds, most commonly the floors of a building. Furthermore, contemporary Chinese uses le, which translates as “ribs,” to denote the vertical parts of the shell structure, marking them as bone-like. The creative agency of molluscs as architects of their own homes is not unparalleled in nature. Birds, for example, design and construct temporary shelters in the form of nests. What makes some molluscs unique, however, is their ability to produce pearls through a process of biomineralization around a nucleus formed of a parasite, a grain of sand or any other particle that enters the shell.

Early modern scholars and artisans in Europe and China recognized the exceptional agency of organisms housed in shells to create matter and fashion it in aesthetically appealing ways. As this chapter shows, in both cultures shell-building organisms were even considered human-like in their abilities to design and construct proto-architectural geometric shapes. Striking images of birds hatching from shells feature in Chinese and European sources from the early modern period, evoking associations between the materiality of shells and eggshells and between molluscs and birds that both craft their own shelters.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Asian shells were highly desired by collectors in early modern Europe, while coral from the Mediterranean was eagerly sought after in Asia. In both locations, artisans and painters created EurAsian objectscapes that placed maritime material appropriated from abroad alongside local matter. Such shell and coralscapes were highly ambiguous, belonging to oceanic and terrestrial, global and local, commodified and sacred realms, but unambiguously materialized ideas on the generation and transformation of matter. Despite the attribution of different culturally defined meanings to shells and coral, this chapter argues that, in both Europe and China, maritime material culture formed a gateway to imaginary foreign worlds full of precious rarities, unusual creatures and beautiful women.

Shells in Flux

The material cultures of European harbour cities, such as Antwerp and Amsterdam, Lisbon and Livorno, incorporated imported Asian objects, among them shells. The same was true for elite collecting in inland cities such as Florence and Dresden where important court collections were being formed, as discussed in chapter 1. In addition, archaeological evidence of a non-European shell, which was presumably traded through Portuguese networks, from the remains of a fifteenth-century fishing village on the Belgian coast in West Flanders confirms the existence of extra-European maritime material culture beyond the main urban centres. Inventories, correspondence and other texts from the time document the availability of large quantities of a wide range of shell species that were exchanged through networks that connected courts, merchants and collectors across Europe.

When the Dutch East India Company ship Witte Leeuw sank in 1613 to the west of Africa, it was carrying a variety of Indonesian, Filipino and African shells. (Fig. 1.1) Its cargo also included Asian spices, Chinese ceramics, gemstones and jewellery. The vessel, which was on its way from Bantam, Indonesia, to Amsterdam, was one of many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ships that took Asian shells to Europe where they entered elite collections and played an important role in European networks of humanist friendships. In addition to natural and polished nautilus shells, highly-prized nautilus shells whose surfaces had been carved with figurative scenes and botanical patterns by Chinese craftsmen were also imported. These were often characterized as “Indian” (indianisch) in European correspondence, travel records and collection inventories between c. 1500 and c. 1700. Mentioning a nautilus in his treatise on “the relics of bloodless animals,” the Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), for example, identifies the shell as coming from “the Indies” (ab Indis). At times, the treatise specifically refers to the “West Indies” (Occidentalia India/India Occidentalis), but overall uses the generic term “India” to denote Asia as well as the Americas. In his World Book of 1534, the German humanist Sebastian Franck (1499–1543) explains that there were three different regions called “India.”