Penned by Encounter 3.25.22

Cécile Fromont

"Penned by Encounter: Central Africans, Capuchin Friars and their Images in Early Modern Kongo and Angola"

Friday March 25, 2:30pm

Findley History of Art Lecture Series

Zoom Lecture

Please register in advance

In this talk, I consider a largely overlooked corpus of paintings about Kongo and Angola that Italian Capuchin Franciscans composed between 1650 and 1750. I demonstrate how these early modern images, though European in form and craftsmanship, did not emerge from a single perspective but rather were and should be read as the products of cross-cultural interaction. With this intervention, I aim to model a way to think anew about images created at the crux of cultures, bringing to the fore the formative role that encounter itself played in their conception, execution, and modes of operation. 

Cécile Fromont is an associate professor in the history of art department at Yale University. Her writing and teaching focus on the visual, material, and religious culture of Africa and Latin America with a special emphasis on the early modern period (ca 1500-1800) and on the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic World. She is the author of The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo(2014), the editor of Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition (2019). Her latest book Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola comes out in June 2022. 

Image: Bernardino da Vezza d’Asti, The Missionary, before entering a locality, is welcomed by the ruler accompanied by his entourage, ca. from 1750. Watercolor on paper, 19.5 x 28 cm. From “Missione in prattica: Padri cappucini ne Regni di Congo, Angola, et adiacenti.” Turin, Biblioteca civica Centrale, MS 457, 9v. Photograph courtesy of the Biblioteca civica Centrale, Torino.

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