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varied histories. Key to such an approach is a privileging of the movement of raw
materials, artisans, ideas, patrons, and finished art objects. Movement fundamentally
changes the meaning of an object: rarely does the logic undergirding the original
commission of an art object correspond in any straightforward manner to its recep-
tion and translation across the Mediterranean. The production of Byzantine silk, for
example, is embedded within court-regulated systems of precedence and prestation
but extant fragments find themselves most often in tombs of western saints, having
taken on sacral funerary associations in the western Mediterranean (Brubaker, 2004).
Scholars increasingly appreciate this distinction between original intention and later
reception (and often misunderstanding) in another cultural milieu. For Eva Hoffman,
it is precisely the aspect of portability that is especially productive in helping shift
scholarship away from issues of periodization (an archaeology of origins that privi-
leges categorization by style, date, and iconography) to questions of agency and cul-
tural self-definition as art objects change hands across cultures and are reconceptualized
over time and in different places (Hoffman, 2001). Such an approach is especially
welcome with regard to extant fragments of silk, many of which are both unattributed
and unattributable. Without inscriptions, which would suggest at least a general cul-
tural context on the basis of their language, many of the highest grades of silk exhibit
visual traditions common to multiple eastern Mediterranean cultures with common
Sassanian roots. An archeology of origins for such a corpus of tantalizingly ambiguous
textiles misses the point of their circulation. To analyze them instead through a
Mediterranean optic, with its prioritization of portability and movement, allows us to
see such imitations of distant centers of production, for example, as connective—as
forging symbolic networks among diverse locales.
The painterly MediterraneanThis emphasis on the distances crossed by workers and materials afforded by a
Mediterranean methodology opens up new interpretive terrain beyond the medieval
world. It is in this regard that the Mediterranean optic raises questions of colonialism
and orientalism. Many viewers are attuned to recognize the foreign or the “exotic” as
a mapping of imperialism in art, as, for example, in the tradition of seventeenth-
century Dutch still life painting. With their luscious display of goods indexing expanded
Golden Age trade routes, such paintings testify to the robustness of the Dutch mercan-
tile networks throughout the Mediterranean and New World while simultaneously
suggesting a moral uneasiness with conspicuous consumption (Schama, 1987, 1993).
Here rather than invoking an iconological symbolism alone, the works emerge as a
simultaneous discourse on Mediterranean mercantilism and Dutch colonialism. A
post-colonial reading of Diego Velázquez’ celebrated royal portrait of the household
of Philip IV, Las Meninas (1656), is similarly predicated on distances travelled and labor
manifest in the objects presented to the Infanta at the very center of the painting: the
red ceramic cup, silver tray, and red curtains, all read as the “products of the labor of
Amerindian subjects of the crown” (Hamann, 2010). Such a reading marks a profound
shift in the literature on this renowned painting that mirrors a larger shift within the
field of art history more broadly from studies rooted almost exclusively in the visual—
and indeed the technologies of vision and the gaze are all well served by the reflective
potential of Velázquez’ painting-within-a-painting—to the materiality of the objects