As a social phenomenon and a commonplace of internet culture, virality provides a critical vocabulary for addressing questions raised by the global mobility and reproduction of early modern artworks. This book uses the concept of virality to study artworks’ role in the uneven processes of early modern globalization. Drawing from archival research in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, Stephanie Porras traces the trajectories of two interrelated objects made in Antwerp in the late sixteenth century: Gerónimo Nadal’s Evangelicae historiae imagines, an illustrated devotional text published and promoted by the Society of Jesus, and a singular composition by Maerten de Vos, St. Michael the Archangel. Both were reproduced and adapted across the early modern world in the seventeenth century. Porras examines how and why these objects traveled and were adopted as models by Spanish and Latin American painters, Chinese printmakers, Mughal miniaturists, and Filipino ivory carvers. Reassessing the creative labor underpinning the production of a diverse array of copies, citations, and reproductions, Porras uses virality to elucidate the interstices of the agency of individual artists or patrons, powerful gatekeepers and social networks, and economic, political, and religious infrastructures. In doing so, she tests and contests several analytical models that have dominated art-historical scholarship of the global early modern period, putting pressure on notions of copying, agency, context, and viewership. Vital and engaging, The First Viral Images sheds new light on how artworks, as agents of globalization, navigated and contributed to the emerging and intertwined global infrastructures of Catholicism, commerce, and colonialism.

An innovative examination of sixteenth-century Netherlandish drawing against the backdrop of the urban economic boom, the Protestant Reformation, and the Eighty Years' War Featuring works by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516), Jan Gossaert (c. 1478-1532), Maarten van Heemskerck (1498-1574), Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569), Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617), and others, this book positions drawing in the Low Countries in the sixteenth century as a dynamic, multifaceted practice. Drawings played roles as varied as the artists who made them: they were designs for prints, paintings, stained glass windows, decorative objects, and tapestries, as well as tools for presentation, translation, and the display of knowledge and virtuosity. The artists' diversified urban communities shaped their drawing practices, as did shifting cultural and political circumstances surrounding Protestant Reform and the Eighty Years' War. In addition to the book's four illuminating essays, many of the more than eighty catalogue entries-selected from the holdings of The Albertina Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art-present new research. Distributed for the Cleveland Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: The Cleveland Museum of Art (October 9, 2022-January 8, 2023) The Albertina Museum, Vienna (2023)

The question of how to understand Bruegel’s art has cast the artist in various guises: as a moralizing satirist, comedic humanist, celebrator of vernacular traditions, and proto-ethnographer. Stephanie Porras reorients these apparently contradictory accounts, arguing that the debate about how to read Bruegel has obscured his pictures’ complex relation to time and history. Rather than viewing Bruegel’s art as simply illustrating the social realities of his day, Porras asserts that Bruegel was an artist deeply concerned with the past. In playing with the boundaries of the familiar and the foreign, history and the present, Bruegel’s images engaged with the fraught question of Netherlandish history in the years just prior to the Dutch Revolt, when imperial, religious, and national identities were increasingly drawn into tension. His pictorial style and his manipulation of traditional iconographies reveal the complex relations, unique to this moment, among classical antiquity, local history, and art history. An important reassessment of Renaissance attitudes toward history and of Renaissance humanism in the Low Countries, this volume traces the emergence of archaeological and anthropological practices in historical thinking, their intersections with artistic production, and the developing concept of local art history.