Ink and Ivory: Print, Mimesis and the Market in Early Modern Manila

Stephanie Porras, Professor of Art History and Chair of the Newcomb Art Department, Tulane University

April 9, 2026  6pm

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

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In 1590, the Bishop of Manila, Domingo de Salazar, informed the Spanish king Philip II that: “The mechanical arts pursued by Spaniards have all died out, because people visit and buy from the Sangleys, who are very good craftsmen in Spanish fashion, and make everything cheaply.” Salazar goes on to detail how the so-called Sangleys, the immigrant Chinese population of the Philippines, created ‘perfect’ paintings and ivory sculptures after European exemplars, as well as excelling in bookbinding and other arts. A few years later, the first Tagalog and Chinese imprints were published in Manila, drawing on immigrant labor, technologies and prints imported from China, Spain and New Spain. 

This talk reconstructs the print cultures of early modern Manila, considering early Filipino printed illustrations alongside a broader corpus of imported European, American and East Asian prints and print technologies, as well as the shared material practices of carving and incision in ivory and wood and metal by Tagalog, Chinese and Japanese residents of the archipelago. More than a project of recovery, Porras suggests that the mimetic faculties praised by Salazar and the diverse print products of early modern Manila, reveal how artists working in the Spanish Philippines negotiated colonial control, tactically positioning themselves and their products within an emerging global artistic marketplace

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About Stephanie Porras

Stephanie Porras is Professor of Art History and Chair of the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University in New Orleans Louisiana, and is currently the Hans Brenninkmeyer Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Netherlandish Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is the author of Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination (2016), Art of the Northern Renaissance: Courts, Commerce, Devotion (2018) and most recently, The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp print and the early modern globe (2023). She is also the co-editor of numerous volumes, including the 2024 Routledge Companion to the Global Renaissance with Stephen Campbell and the 2025 Dutch Americas: art histories of the Atlantic world with Aaron Hyman.

Caption for images: (from left to right)

Frontispiece to Juan Cobo, Shih lu, woodcut block book (Manila, 1593), Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid

Manila carver, detail of Triptych with Assumption of the Virgin, ivory, ca. 1600, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Frontispiece to Juan de Plasencia, Doctrina Christiana, en Lengua Española y Tagala, woodcut block book (Manila, 1593), Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

This lecture series is made possible through the generous support of:

The Marshall Woods Lectureship Foundation of Fine Arts and The Anita Glass Fund