Art Gallery of South Australia’s Treasure Ships: Art in the Age of Spices

Treasure Ships: Art in the Age of Spices evokes the cultural world of its period.

It comes as a surprise to most of us to learn the Portuguese brought chilli from the New World to India and indeed to the whole of Asia. It is hard to imagine the food of the subcontinent, or indeed of Southeast Asia, without what seems so much a part of its character. But the only hot ingredient in Indian food used to be pepper; and an Indian friend pointed out recently that it is mostly southern Indian cuisine that adopted the chilli, while the north continues to use more traditional spice combinations.

In Europe, something perhaps even more remarkable happened with the discovery of the New World, which brought us a collection of new ingredients, of which the most important were the potato and the tomato. We may find it hard to imagine much of the food of Italy without the tomato, but there are in fact countless examples of dishes that may, in one form or another, go back to the Middle Ages or even antiquity.

The archeology of cuisine begins by establishing when ingredients were first introduced. Thus in Sicily the crucial olive and grape as well as other fruit were brought by the Greeks, further edible plants from around the empire by the Romans, citrus and sugar cane by the Arabs — and of course the tomatoes, potatoes and chillis from the Renaissance onwards. It is striking, in this context, that the discovery of Australia added virtually nothing to our diet; almost every cereal, fruit and vegetable that we eat had to be imported to this continent. In contrast, the lands to our north were not only abundant in nutritious plants of every kind but were the home of spices whose trade around the world, as the new exhibition in Adelaide reminds us, was for many centuries enormously lucrative.

All traditions of cooking enhance the flavour of meat, fish and vegetables with herbs and ­spices. Herbs grew in abundance around the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and the Greeks already distinguished between the ones that had to be eaten fresh, such as parsley or mint, and those that could be used fresh or dried and preserved as aromatics, such as thyme and rosemary, oregano and even dill and fennel.

Spices, though, are essentially dried aromatic substances, usually seeds or sometimes bark. Some plants, such as coriander or fennel, are herbs in their fresh state but produce seeds that are spices. And most of these came from south and east of the Mediterranean and were consequently more or less expensive imports. Cumin, for example, was grown in Egypt and imported from there to Malta, giving its name to the tiny third island of the Maltese archipelago, Comino.

The Romans loved pepper, which came from farther away in India and Sri Lanka, with which there had been open channels of exchange since Alexander the Great established the Greco-Indian culture of Gandhara. But pepper remained an expensive luxury; a taste for it spread to the Gauls and the Germans ruled by the Romans.

Other spices came from still more distant lands. Cinnamon, used from India to Morocco, came from what is now Indonesia, as did cloves and nutmeg. These had to be imported along extended trade routes that included marine voyages and overland caravan transportation — routes whose economic and social importance is comparable to that of the transcontinental Silk Road far to the north. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire 15 centuries ago, such imports continued to be prized but, because of the disruption of trade to and within western Europe, became even more expensive. We can still see how these spices — especially the sweet cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg — became associated with special occasions such as Christmas, when they would be used in puddings, mince tarts, biscuits such as lebkuchen and spiced hot gluehwein.

They also were used in medicines, the most famous instance being the beak-like masks filled with spices worn by plague doctors, and intended to purify the air they breathed of pestilential infections. The exhibition includes many fascinating books that touch on medical questions, although the most curious of all is one that explains how to make a healing balm from human blood, or another precious medication from the dessicated corpse of a mummy.

The exhibition is mainly devoted to what the curators call the Age of Spices. We generally know this as the Age of Exploration, but their choice, in emphasising one of the principal motivations for exploration, brings the whole period to life from a particular angle. This age, whatever we call it, begins with the discovery by European mariners of direct trade routes to the East by circumnavigating Africa, which became inevitably routes of cultural exchange and eventually of domination.

The Portuguese had the initial advantage in this race to the East, and it is the impressive portrait of the first Portuguese governor of their Indian colony Goa, Dom Francisco de Almeida, that confronts us as we enter the exhibition. By the end of the 16th century Goa was the most important European city outside Europe itself. And although the Portuguese Empire was later dwarfed by those of other European powers, it proved one of the most enduring. Goa returned to Indian rule in 1961; Timor and Macau remained in increasingly nominal Portuguese control until even later in the 20th century.

In the 16th century the Dutch were still fighting the Spanish for their independence, but once that was achieved they turned their attention to the East and soon came to dominate the spice routes and indeed the whole business of shipping within East Asia and between Asia and Europe. It was not until the 18th century that the English finally overtook the Dutch as navigators and as mapmakers.

The Dutch were more focused on profit than anything else, but the Portuguese were also concerned with spreading the teachings of the church. Especially in India, there were Christian and even Jewish communities that went back to late antiquity, when there was much religious exchange before the imposition of what were largely doctrinal monocultures under Christianity and Islam. At one point, for example, there appear to have been Buddhist missionaries in Alexandria; the early Christians would have put a stop to that even before the Arab conquest.

What made the Indian Christians so interesting was also the legend that St Thomas had become the Apostle of India. In the post-antique period, there had been missions to India as early as the 14th century, when some Franciscans lost their lives there, and from the later 16th century it was the Jesuits who led the missionary efforts in India, China and Japan, as mentioned some weeks ago in the context of the Qianlong exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria.

One of the most interesting parts of the exhibition is the group of religious objects from Goa, including monstrances and reliquaries as well as sacred statues. One of these is a very fine infant Christ carved in ivory, naked now but undoubtedly originally intended to be dressed in ceremonial clothes. The other is an impressive but confronting Dead Christ, an Indian artist’s vernacular interpretation of the hyper-real Iberian style of the 17th century, with open mouth and tongue visible above the lower teeth.

There are fine textiles throughout, among the other goods that were traded along the spice routes, and these are witness to complex patterns of stylistic exchange, as motifs travel from India to Southeast Asia and even to Europe — or the other way around. Ceramics tell similar stories, for Chinese porcelain was a very significant import into Europe for centuries.

This naturally led to European efforts to achieve the same high-fired ceramics: Dutch Delftware and English stoneware were attempts to emulate the Chinese before real porcelain was finally achieved in the 18th century. European wares imitated Chinese motifs, but Chinese wares also were often designed with European ones; and there is a dish made in Iran but imitating Dutch Delftware, which shows how complex the play of influences can be.

Although they do not really belong to the seaborne spice trade, oriental carpets are another fascinating subject that occupies a notable place in the exhibition. They were clearly imported into Europe in some quantities from at least the 15th century, when they begin to be reproduced in paintings, for example in van Eyck’s Madonna with Canon van der Paele (1434). In the 16th and 17th centuries, when they often appear in Dutch paintings — they are common in Vermeer — oriental carpets are mostly used on tables rather than on the floor, presumably because of their value and rarity. We see a rug displayed in this way in Abraham van der Hecken’s painting of a Scholar in His Studio (c. 1655).

There is, however, a very fine example of a carpet that lies on the floor under the feet of a young English aristocrat in Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger’s portrait of Magdalen Poultney (c. 1620). The artist, who has painted virtually every stitch in the young girl’s richly embroidered dress, also has taken pains to represent the pile of the carpet and thus to reveal the grid of warp and weft that underlies the elaborate pattern. This painting is happily matched with the magnificent Trinitarias carpet from north India in the early to mid-17th century, when the courts and aristocracy of the area were still under the hegemony of the prestigious Persian culture and language

Another beautiful carpet is the so-called Yakob Polonaise carpet, made about 1625-30 in Persia by a Christian Armenian weaver called Jacob. It is a piece of very refined workmanship.

Also from Persia are several beautiful illuminated pages, one of which, an illustration to a work by Nizami, shows Plato charming animals with his lyre, an unusual adaptation of the motif usually associated with Orpheus, although sometimes appropriated for King David, also ­famous for musical performance.

There are numerous other themes to this exhibition — notably a rich selection of maps reflecting the changing understanding of newly explored lands, not least Australia — but in the end it is more of an impressionistic wunderkammer evoking the cultural world of its period than a linear exposition of a thesis. For this reason the beautifully illustrated catalogue, for all its weight, is recommended: it contains much useful historical information and fascinating commentary on an exhibition that is like nothing so much as the rich and diverse cargo of a treasure ship returning from the Orient.

Treasure Ships: Art in the Age of Spices

Art Gallery of South Australia to August 30; then Art Gallery of Western Australia from October until January next year.