Scenes from the Maritime Silk Road Peter Gordon and Juan Jose Morales, authors of a book on the Codex, say it was the first example of intellectual fusion between Asia and Europe
Just around the corner from Rome’s Pantheon, on the Via di Sant’Ignazio, is the famed Biblioteca Casanatense. Among its precious books and manuscripts is an album of 76 striking water colours made in Goa around 1540, the work of an anonymous Indian painter for an unknown Portuguese patron. The Codex, or Códice Casanatense, contains illustrations of daily scenes, occupations and religious ceremonies, as well as illustrations of the peoples of what is now known as the Maritime Silk Road, from East Africa to China.
Lively and evocative, the Códice Casanatense is a unique historical record that provides a human window into an Asia that Europeans were only just entering and a first testimony of an encounter that would transform the world. Yet this extraordinary document has never been discussed in detail other than in a few scholarly papers.
When we began this project after a discussion with the Italian Cultural Institute in Hong Kong as part of a programme of cultural outreach, we believed the Códice Casanatense to be a collection of charming paintings which deserved to be better known in the English-speaking world and in Asia. We did not expect to uncover that the anonymous Indian painter had in fact taken inspiration not only from his own pictorial traditions but also from some of the first European travel books and illustrations. Also unexpected was the striking discovery that the Codex had inspired illustrations in one of the most influential books of any age, Jan Huyghen van Linschoten’s Itinerario — that the painter had in fact produced a central document in the cultural history of the early-modern world, an early, perhaps the first, example of intellectual fusion between Asia and Europe.
By the time the Codex was composed, the Portuguese had been ensconced in India for four decades. In 1530, Goa became the capital of the Estado da Índia, Portugal’s possessions in the East, which ran all the way from East Africa to East Asia. This, then, was the bustling, cosmopolitan metropolis in which the Codex was produced.
Although they resemble cartoons, there is nonetheless something appealing about these illustrations. The figures often have a hint of a smile or a twinkle in the eye; when arranged as a couple, the Codex’s most common format, one can, on occasion, discern what appear to be looks of real affection. Before a group of women take a dip, they carefully hang their clothes and shawls on nearby branches and bushes. In the portrayal of a wedding, the attendees, dancing, give every indication of enjoying themselves. The few illustrations of Portuguese people aside, there is nothing in the Codex to suggest its origins in a European-ruled metropolis. The Codex shows a world seen through Indian eyes.
The Portuguese patron obviously made suggestions as well. The painter could not have visited all the places the Codex covers. But the Codex is filled with details of the painter’s own vision. The women who come to collect water are decked out in bangles and earrings. His eye was just as keen when it came to the Portuguese: the diners at a dinner party (incongruously taking place in a pool due to the heat), the European clothing and utensils are so detailed that they would seem to be the result of direct observation. And when the painter had no information, as it would seem he hadn’t for the costumes of some women from far-flung places, he would dress them in saris.
Most remarkably, we can point to actual European artwork that the painter must have seen. Among the passengers on a 1505 Portuguese fleet to India was Balthasar Sprenger, an Austrian trader. Sprenger’s account, illustrated with woodcuts attributed to Wolf Traut, was published in 1509, very soon after his return, with a long title usually abbreviated to Die Merfart. One illustration in the Codex leaves little doubt. The rendering of a Portuguese woman in a palanquin, is almost, and strikingly, compositionally identical to a Jain temple mural in Tamil Nadu (in Tiruparuthikundram). The painter has been remarkably inventive: he has repurposed the composition for an entirely different, secular use. This particular illustration is central to understanding the Codex’s influence for there is little doubt that it was used as the basis for a similar illustration of a lady in a palanquin in the famous Jan Huygens van Linschoten’s 1595 Itinerario. Linschoten, a Dutchman, had been aide to the Portuguese Archbishop in Goa in the mid-1580s. Once back in the Netherlands, he published the information he had gleaned about Portuguese Asia. The Dutch would make their inroads to Asia based on the book’s information. Thus we can track a single composition from the walls of a Jain temple through the Codex to one of Europe’s most influential books of the early 17th century. Nothing else quite like the Codex has yet been located. But echoes appear in the striking compositional and subject-matter similarities between the Codex and later “Company paintings”.
The Codex was sent to Lisbon in the early 17th century for reasons unknown. It would be acquired at some point by the Italian Cardinal Girolamo Casanata, a voracious 17thcentury collector of books and manuscripts. When Casanata died in 1700, he bequeathed his collection to form the basis of the library that now bears his name. And there the Codex lay largely undisturbed for the next two-and-a-half centuries.
The painter’s work was clearly appreciated in his own century, as evidenced by the the interest it evidently espoused in intellectuals like Linschoten. After almost five centuries, it’s time to appreciate it anew.