In early modern Europe, the visual image began to move, not only as it
traveled across great distances but also due to the introduction of
innovative visual formats that produced animation within the image
itself.
This book traces the arduous journeys of visual images through evidence
of their use and reproduction along missionary routes from Europe to
India, Japan, China, Brazil and Chile. It argues that missionary world
travel was crucial to the early modern re-animation of the image through
devices such as the reflection of the mirror, the multiple registers of
vision of the anthropomorphic image, the imaginative and disorienting
possibilities of the utopic image, and even the reconstitution of the
sacred image with memories of the relation of travel to life and death.
Within the journeys traced in the book, the visual image forged new
connections between different locations and across different cultures,
accumulating increasingly entangled histories. Even more intriguingly,
these images frequently returned to Europe, changed but still
recognisable, there to be used again with an awareness of their earlier
travels.