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Vertiginous mirrors: the animation of the visual image and early modern travel

Research imperatives and process: San Juan’s book is about the early modern impulse to make the visual image move. The central claim of the book is that a new kind of animated image emerged out of the intensification of world travel, not only because it prompted the unprecedented movement of images across great distances, but also because travel became the linchpin for a new kind of interrogatory mode of looking. Reconstructing hitherto unknown early modern journeys of visual images from Europe to India, Japan, Brazil and Chile, the book argues that new forms of knowledge associated with travel – natural history, geography, topography, and ethnography – were forged not apart from embodied experience but within innovative imagery that conjoined embodied proximity with points of separation conceived in terms of traversable distances never to be fully breached.