Monuments and Architectural Painting
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Published:January 2025
The third chapter, “Monuments and Architectural Painting,” examines two dominant narratives of early modern maritime space. One history is dominated by the enslaved and Indigenous pearl divers, whose bodies became crucial to natural philosophers’ understanding of water, air, pressure, gas, and the corporeal system, thereby existing at a crux of discourses exploring the physicality of oceanic ecospheres and their depths. The other history describes the ocean as an immaterial site of erasure and oblivion, as demonstrated in the legal writings of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and the rise of international law. This chapter juxtaposes these two histories to demonstrate how an urban ideal of citizenship was built from constructing an immaterial oceanic space, a phenomenon that structured ideas of citizenship and noncitizenship that would come to be embodied in the Dutch naval monument.
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