The Lives of Images

In The Lives of Images, Peter Mason examines the production, transmission and occasional misunderstanding of visual images representing non-European peoples and their cultures from the last five centuries. Mason's analyses address such topics as what has been taken to be the earliest three-dimensional European representation of Native Americans; the migrations of images from sixteenth-century Mesoamerican codices via Europe and back to the murals painted in Mexico City by Diego Rivera four centuries later; and the relationship between eighteenth-century drawings and engravings of natives of Formosa produced by the man who called himself George Psalmanaazaar. The travels not only of images but also of their human subjects lie at the heart of Mason's discussion of representations of the native peoples of Tierra del Fuego, from their first encounters with Europeans in the sixteenth century to the present, paying particular attention to the visual traces of them left in the work of such famous artists as Odilon Redon. The Lives of Images engages in an ongoing dialogue with the seminal work of Rudolf Wittkower and Aby Warburg, sharing as it does their preoccupation with art and anthropology, as well as their opposition to the borders that tend to separate intellectual disciplines. In taking pains to illuminate single obscurities, Mason's study teases out some of the implications of particular cases to arrive at a concept of the image that can truly be said to have a life of its own.