ABSTRACT
Two bearded men stare at us from a finely carved ivory casket. The casket was made in Sri Lanka around 1557 (Figure 3.2.1). Covered in richly textured clothes, each clutching a bagpipe and bending a knee to lift a foot over another, the two figures look both exotic and strangely familiar. Students of art history have seen the pose many times, though with a different finish, and on a different material. The two figures echo, of course, Albrecht Dürer's famous 1514 bagpiper engraving (Figure 3.2.2), a veritable icon of the German Renaissance. 1 The print is widely considered to signal the newly found interest of “Renaissance man” in the realistic rendition of secular, even everyday subjects. But what can the bagpiper be said to mean when it stares at us from a South Asian ivory casket as a “copy” or “adaptation” or “appropriation”? What can it tell us about the societies that produced and consumed such images? Is this still Dürer's bagpiper, or someone else's? What did the image represent in the sixteenth century, and what can it do for us now to further our understanding of the global connections under construction in the sixteenth century? Last, but not least, where does it sit in relation to the politics of global art historical scholarship today?
