The “Textile with Elephants, Crowned Double-Headed Eagles, and Flowers ” is dated back to the “second half of the 16th century.” This exquisitely patterned “silk damask” was woven by the Chinese and sold in the Iberian market. The Portuguese who were the first voyagers to set up European ports in Asia through the Indian Ocean Basin, could operate only at the port of Macau. Though foreign trade opened China to new forms of wealth, successors of the Ming empire forbade foreign interaction in China and ended maritime trade so that China could revert back to traditional standards of living which involved strictly following Confucian values. However, thousands of Chinese merchants managed to trade with, for example, Spanish forces in Manila, as well as the Dutch VOC at their “colonial capital of Batavia.” Consequently, Chinese merchants were of the lowest class according to Confucian “social hierarchy” because moralists saw them as avaricious and “unscrupulous social parasites.” Still, China developed elegant silks also among other decorative, traditional fabrics to the point where Europeans copied Chinese techniques and thus made artificial products to sell within the European markets. This silk damask is darkly colored in blue and gold where the consistent pattern of floral, double-headed eagles, and short-eared elephants give it a sense of genius and power, but Europeans would find it harder to understand the deeper meaning behind this textiles and so could only admire the piece aesthetically.

Ramanpreet Chand

“Two Men Contemplating the Moon,” by Casper David Friedrich is a German, oil on canvas from 1825 to 1830. The most prominent component of this painting is its diagonal landscape, where it seems an uprooted tree is falling not forward out of the picture and into our space compared to paintings of Romanticism’s predecessors, but backwards, almost into its own. This parallels the disengagement of the two male figures, in the middle ground, as they both do not interact with the viewer. Its a painting focusing on its own world. Its a painting that works to emphasize contemplation. Usually the act of contemplating focuses on a single aspect of life rather than many, where engaging an audience would force one to think about or show many other things in comparison. In fact, the era of Romanticism is in part characterized by imagination and emotion, and an appreciation of external nature which Friedrich portrays both as the two frozen, but relaxed figures look interestedly and diagonally at parts of the landscape.

Ramanpreet Chand