Louis Renard, mermaid, from Poissons écrevisses et crabs… (Amsterdam, Reiner & Josué Ottens, 1754), State Library Victoria, RARESEF 597 R29
Mermaids have long been intertwined with the imagery of pearls, frequently portrayed like Boticelli’s Venus as dwelling within bivalve shells or scouring the ocean depths for treasures. This connection casts mermaids, whose dual corporeality symbolizes the interdependency between human bodies and the more-than-human abilities of a fish, as both guardians and seekers of the sea, bestowing them both a mythic allure throughout much of recorded history. Sometime before the turn of the 20th century however, both mermaids and pearls started to lose some of their enchantment. With the advent of cultured pearls and the decline of the once flourishing pearl trade in the Persian Gulf, only natural pearls with historical significance command the highest prices in the market. Except for a few sanitized exceptions, as we will discuss later, we don’t frequently invoke the mermaid’s image in political propaganda or feature her in places of worship. Most notably, the belief in the mermaid’s existence has largely disappeared. Perhaps in response to this disenchantment, there have been more studies that explore the human fascination with mermaids and pearls both within folkloric and scientific realms during the early modern period. Historians have studied how the figure of the mermaid became a motif employed by artisans from the Tokugawa-era Japanese archipelago to the North Sea of the Dutch Golden Age. However, there is not enough attention paid to how the allure of the mermaid, or the status of the pearl, has been informed and influenced by indigenous knowledge and visual representations from the 16th- and 17th-century. While I do not seek to fully address epistemological questions just yet, I would like to advance some ideas on early modern oceanic visual culture. I will focus on under-theorized and rarely acknowledged representations of mermaids from the largest chain of islands in the world, roughly covering the present modern-nation states of Japan, Philippines, and Indonesia; and the global trade in commodities that passed through this region.
The recent scholarly interest in mermaids is positioned within the framework of colonial worldings and transcorporeal narratives in blue humanities which is only fitting because the dualistic nature–part human, part fish–of the mermaid invites a more liquid approach to their study. In the following passages, I present a range of seemingly unconnected images and texts, to model a lenticular method, considering the mermaid both as an allegory for maritime cultural landscapes and as a lens through which to examine the challenges of cultural displacement faced by artisans in a globalized milieu. Each selection is underpinned by the fluidity of optical technologies that made industrial print (both image and text) possible, illuminating the structural connections and distinct perceptions fostered by what I call here the “mermaid view”. Considering the liquidity of these visual technologies, the essay advances the notion of how images and narratives function not just as art, but as tools for understanding how mythological thinking manifests during periods of significant cultural and economic transformation.
Geronimo Cristobal 