Silver, Flesh, & Holy Water: Colonial Conversions in the French Enlightenmen

Eighteenth-century French art conjures images of fete galantes, chinoiserie decorative objects, turquerie portraiture, and the French Revolution; one does not immediately think of religious art and architecture. While scholars have recently examined this blindspot in the art historical literature, they have only examined religious art in terms of spiritual experience, science and artistic exchange, and, at a micro level, its political resonance visible in the interiors and still-lifes (Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin) of domestic space. I will examine eighteenth-century French religious art in terms of its relationship to colonization. My thesis will use Paul-Ponce-Antoine Robert de Seri's (1686--1733) painting Saint Francis Solano Baptizing Natives of Peru, made in Paris in 1730, to argue that the Catholic Church used the symbolic capital of empire to bolster its own struggle for power in an enlightened, yet religiously intolerant period. The church capitalized on the symbolic potency of the native American body as means to ally themselves with the more stable institution of French empire. In turn, I will show that this relationship was reciprocal; empire needed the symbolic capital of the Catholic Church to bolster its rationale for colonization. By examining eighteenth-century French religious art and its relationship to colonialism, I hope to bring attention to religion as an important force omnipresent in eighteenth-century French culture, empire, and global politics.