The Plastic Shell: Mother-of-Pearl and Material Literacy in an Early Modern Dutch World
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History of Art
First Advisor
Cooke, Edward
Abstract
Material engagement drove innovation in early modern Dutch art. With the expansion of Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) trade, craftspeople gained access to a world of unfamiliar resources: in addition to finished trade goods, the VOC also transported raw materials, like mother-of-pearl, in bulk. While there is extensive scholarship on how makers responded to export wares—such as Delft ceramics imitating the aesthetics of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain—the impact of unprocessed resources on Dutch craft remains understudied. To develop tools and techniques to apply to a material, craftspeople must first understand its plasticity—how it could be physically and conceptually manipulated. The characteristics that made mother-of-pearl desirable and useful are grounded in its unusual materiality. Iridescent, nonporous, lightweight, and chemically inert, mother-of-pearl possessed properties rarely found in a single material and impossible to replicate in any man-made substance in the early modern period. The shell is made up of layers of nacre, an organic-inorganic composite material produced by the living mollusc. Flexible and durable, the shell’s layered growth makes it possible for parts of it to be chemically stripped or carved away without weakening its overall construction. Makers developed material literacy through hands-on experience, which informed how they shaped the shell and tested its material possibilities. Each chapter explores an aspect of mother-of-pearl’s plasticity to address how engagement with the shell shaped the working methods, intellectual endeavors, and worldviews of Dutch makers. Chapter 1 introduces the experimental approach of mother-of-pearl workers and traces the ways Dutch makers incorporated nacre into their craft. I investigate the oeuvre of the Bellekins, a family of mother-of-pearl craftsmen (parelmoerwerkers or parelmoersnijders) to consider how the unusual and unfamiliar plasticity of mother-of-pearl prompt artists to work across disciplines. Chapter 2 analyzes how mother-of-pearl’s dynamic iridescence challenged understandings of color, optics, and light, as well as notions of liveliness in still life painting, and establishes art-making as a method of material investigation in parallel to the work of early modern natural philosophers studying the physics of light and materials. Chapter 3 centers on mother-of-pearl’s layered nature in the context of Dirck van Rijswijck’s inlaid still lives. Although mother-of-pearl often retained associations with East Indies crafts, I argue that Van Rijswijck focuses on the materiality of the shell to redefine the possibilities of the medium, allowing it to accrue new meaning and complicate painting as a category of art in the early modern. The final chapter situates mother-of-pearl’s resilience among resources with material affinities, like metals and glyphics, and with related plastic properties, such as tortoiseshell and whale baleen. Mother-of-pearl linked to both a long history and a future of craft in Europe—in its exciting potential, nacre anticipated the synthesis of nonporous, inert man-made materials, which often sought to imitate the look of shell. Nacre was a material that complicated boundaries between haptic and optic, visual and material, art and craft, and distant and local. Grounded in mother-of-pearl’s ability to be continually reinterpreted and reinscribed, this dissertation examines how Dutch makers explored and imagined the early modern world through generative material encounters.
Recommended Citation
Kok, Cynthia Koyueh, "The Plastic Shell: Mother-of-Pearl and Material Literacy in an Early Modern Dutch World" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 869.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/869
