4 - Woman with a Shell: Transcultural Exchange, Female Bodies and Maritime Matters

Summary

Abstract

This chapter discusses images of women with shells across Eurasia and the artistic negotiation of materiality and corporality, objectification and sexual agency, intimacy and distance in both physical and geographical senses. While some of the works discussed are well-known representations of Venus surrounded by sexualised objectscapes, the chapter also introduces religious imagery framed by shells and women with shells in early modern Chinese and Japanese paintings. Despite their differences, all of these works link female bodies to objects of maritime material culture. The chapter argues that in China and Europe, images of women with shells are visual and material reflections of foreign (underwater) spaces full of riches, paradise-like realms that not only promise material affluence but also erotic fulfilment.

Keywords: Eurasia, shells, objectification, Venus, Galatea, Guangzhou

Standing inside a shell, a woman with windblown hair lifts a sail above her head. (Fig. 4.1) While we see her back, she exposes her front to three figures in Chinese robes. The scene is framed by bamboo and a pine tree, a garden scene with scholar's rocks pierced by wind and water, and houses beneath palm trees. The delftware dish with its blue and white decoration dates to 1680/90; it merges technologies and iconographies of Chinese and European origins. The female figure incorporates attributes of the mythological goddesses Venus and Fortuna, she is “European,” while the shell underneath her feet that connects her to the “Chinese” pictorial space is EurAsian, as this chapter will show. Building on the previous parts of this book, chapter 4 argues that early modern European images of women with shells are connected to imaginary visions of foreign (underwater) spaces full of riches, paradise-like realms that promise material affluence and erotic fulfilment. It focuses on “women with shells” in depictions of Venus, allegories of lust, and representations of foreign women during the sixteenth and seventeenth century and goes on to consider how the erotic content of European images of women with Asian shells was appropriated and amplified by artisans in China after its arrival there from the eighteenth century on.