“Through the Slant of Night:” The Other Side of the Earth in the Early Sixteenth Century

A lecture by Alexander Nagel, New York University, Institute of Fine Arts.

The discoveries of Columbus focused attention on the newly discovered but barely known regions on the far side of the earth, a new zone of convergence where East and West met and crossed over into one another. It was now possible to think beyond the “inhabited world” known since Antiquity and to consider the earth in global terms, which is to say as a geometric object viewable from more than one side. The other side of the earth, where the New World formed the nearest part of an extended Asia, was now relayed to Europeans through a series of mediated images, almost immediately becoming a mirror for the European imagination, a place where Europe found itself reflected in distant others. By considering several works of European sixteenth century art and literature, Alexander Nagel explores the dynamic reconfiguration of the world at a time when the imagination of globality was being framed explicitly as a problem of point of view, a problem that directly concerned practices of image-making and image-viewing.