Tuesday, 6 October 2026, 6:00 PM | Elsje van Kessel (St Andrews University), Towards an Oceanic Art History of the Early Modern Portuguese World

Abstract: In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, vast quantities of objects crossed the oceans via Portuguese ships. Bales of silk, clothes and textile furnishings, wooden cabinets, chests, gold and silver coins, porcelain, paintings, precious stones, jewellery, ivory carvings, and many other more mundane objects spent months and sometimes years on ships navigating the Atlantic and Indian Ocean, where changeable fates awaited them: damaged ships, overloading, navigational error, pirates, as well as the winds and the waters made the safe arrival of ships and their cargoes deeply uncertain. This talk offers a fresh perspective on the global circulation of early modern objects by focussing on these oceanic journeys. Telling selected stories of objects travelling on the so-called Portuguese India Run, I examine their roles in empire-building, colonisation, and the extraction of natural resources.

About the speaker: Elsje van Kessel is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews. She specialises in western European art in a global context during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her wide-ranging interests include collecting and display, materiality, portraiture, and object mobility. She has published widely about these themes in through her first monograph, The Lives of Paintings: Presence, Agency and Likeness in Venetian Art of the Sixteenth Century (De Gruyter, 2017), and in journals such as Art History, Viator, Renaissance Studies, Early Modern Low Countries, and the Journal of the History of Collections. Elsje’s scholarship has been supported by the Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art, the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, the Museu Gulbenkian, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and the Leverhulme Trust, among others. She is currently writing a monograph about the oceanic journeys of early modern art objects, especially those travelling within the Portuguese maritime empire.

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