Violence at the Stems: Sixteenth-Century Vessels

Gilded vessels that portray Africans and Amerindians at the stems have often been described by likening the exoticism of the dark-skinned figures to the preciousness of the materials with which the cups were made. Yet such equivalences fail to articulate the violence behind the industries that produced this tableware. While New World inhabitants and Africans were becoming more visible in Europe as they were shipped, sold, and paraded at court, they were also being erased from view, forced into the labor of mining. Collapsed caves and noxious gases wiped out populations. “In some towns there are no people,” remarked Jesuits visiting Potosí. Conflicting with the early-modern rhetoric of nature’s inexhaustible abundance was the awareness--articulated in publications aimed at prospectors--that mines could be tapped and human resources could run out. Vessel-bearers portrayed as Africans in Tupi garb make visible anxieties surrounding scarcity. To rewrite a history of these drinking cups that includes consideration of how their materials were extracted requires not only a discussion of refillability and drainage but also one of concealment and revelation. Mining metaphors of bringing souls from the dark underground to the light of day were used to describe the process of spiritual conversion. Such language haunts objects whose argentiferous parts were covered with lacquer to portray black skin. Christoph Jamnitzer’s “Moor’s Head Cup,” made of once subterranean metal and gems, stands as an example of a goblet whose current museum display covers up the brutal encounters buried in the history of its making.