Beelden van ‘Afgoderij’ - Tekeningen als kennisproductie in de correspondentie tussen Nicolaas Witsen en Gisbert Cuper (1713-1716)
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2025-08-11
Language
nl
Document type
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Title
ISSN
Volume
Issue
Startpage
Endpage
DOI
Abstract
This thesis investigates the role of drawings of so-called ‘idol images’ from South Asia in the early
eighteenth-century correspondence between Dutch scholars Nicolaas Witsen and Gisbert Cuper. These
images, depicting Hindu and Buddhist deities, circulated as part of a broader visual and intellectual
exchange, facilitated by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Republic of Letters. In this
study, these drawings are examined not as mere illustrations, but as visual agents in early modern
knowledge production.
The study begins by positioning Witsen and Cuper within the context of the Republic of Letters, a
virtual, European community of intellectuals that exchanged letters and scientific information. Placing
their correspondence at the intersection of scientific discourse and broad networks of (colonial)
connections, together they carried out a major study. This can largely be reduced to a study in the
fields of linguistics, criticism of religion and ethnography, in which a perceived common origin was
sought. Special attention is given to the influence of Protestantism in framing of South-Asian religious
images, as well as the European frameworks through which they were interpreted and classified.
Through an object-based analysis of the drawings themselves and their accompanying letters, this
thesis demonstrates how the images were transformed from devotional objects into scientific study
material. In a collective search for a common origin, these drawings were put into a classificatory
system that blended Protestant suspicion of visual devotion with colonial impulses and ideological
motivations to catalogue and master the unknown. This research shows that these drawings were not
passive representations but active instruments of knowledge construction. As such, they played an
important role in shaping both the image of the ‘Other’ as well as of the self. This thesis has examined
a largely overlooked corpus of drawings, shedding light on material that has received little scholarly
attention. By shifting the focus beyond Cuper and Witsen to consider the drawings themselves as
active agents, it contributes to the discourse on the role of visual culture in religious framing and the
construction of knowledge in the early modern Dutch Republic.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Letteren