From Rome to Beijing: Sacred Spaces in Dialogue, edited by Daniel M. Greenberg and Mari Yoko Hara, explores the relationship between Jesuit enterprise and Ming-Qing China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Jesuit order’s global corporation grew increasingly influential within the Chinese court after 1582, in no small part due to the two institutions shared interests in artistic and scientific matters. The paintings, astronomical instruments, spiritual texts and sacred buildings engendered through this encounter tell fascinating stories of cross-cultural communication and miscommunication. This volume approaches early modern East-West exchange as a site of cultural (rather than commercial) negotiations, where two sets of traditions and values intersected and diverged.
Daniel M. Greenberg is Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2015, and his work considers the relationship between maps, painting, and state ritual in early modern China.
Mari Yoko Hara is Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame, School of Architecture. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2015 and teaches and writes about early modern Italian art and architecture, particularly in relation to histories of media practice, knowledge production, and cross-cultural exchange.
List of Figures and Tables
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Cultural Exchange through a Spatial Lens
Daniel M. Greenberg and Mari Yoko Hara
Part 1: Space and Order: Visible and Invisible Constructions of Beijing
1 An Invisible City: Urban Life and Networks of European Missionaries and Christian Converts in Qing Beijing Eugenio Menegon 2 Beijing as Political Theater: the 1761 Syzygy in Painting and Legitimizing the Qianlong Regime Cheng-hua Wang 3 Crossing Bridges and Borders: the Political and Artistic Stakes of New Year’s Celebrations at the Qianlong Court Daniel M. Greenberg
Part 2: Spaces of Artistic Practice: Invention and Exchange in the Palace Workshops
4 “My Eyes and Taste Are Grown a Little Chinese”: Jean-Denis Attiret, SJ, Acknowledges the Equal Value of European and Chinese Art Jeffrey Muller 5 The Drawings of Ferdinando Bonaventura Moggi (1684−1761) and the Applied Arts Workshops (Zaobanchu) at the Qing Court Elisabetta Corsi
Part 3: Space, Knowledge Production, and Cross-Cultural Exchange
6 Before Sinology: Early European Attempts to Translate the Chinese Language in the Sixteenth Century Florin-Stefan Morar 7 Out of Habit: Jesuits in Flux Florence C. Hsia 8 What’s in an Image? the Annotated Manuscripts of Jerónimo Nadal’s Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia Eugenio Menegon 9 The Double Hemisphere Star Atlas (1634): Rhetoric of Empiricism in Sino-Jesuit Technical Images Mari Yoko Hara
Index
For libraries, specialists, and students interested in an interdisciplinary study of Ming-Qing China and European missionaries based in art, art history, urbanism, Jesuit studies, and history of science.