Transubstantiation across Atlantic Worlds
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Published:January 2025
The introduction, “Transubstantiation across Atlantic Worlds,” is an overview of the presence of race and slavery in the historiography of Dutch art and its obfuscation in creating certain mythologies around the rise of the bourgeoisie and the first art market. Drawing on the theological concept of transubstantiation, this chapter argues that the debates around presence, absence, and corporeality that were central to the Reformation continued into the seventeenth century, displaced onto the figure of the enslaved person. Whereas the sixteenth century introduced a crisis in the pictorialization of divinity, this chapter argues that the rise of the transatlantic slave trade created a crisis around the figuration of the transubstantiation of a life into chattel property.