Author(s): James and Kelty Bennett

General Art

Treasure Ships: Art in the Age of Spices presents the complex artistic and cultural interactions between Europe and Asia from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries - a period known as the Age of Spices. The book includes nearly 300 outstanding and rarely seen works of ceramics, decorative arts, furniture,metalware, paintings, prints and textiles from public and private collections in Australia, India, Portugal, Singapore and the United States. The works of art illustrated reveal how the international trade in spices and other exotic commodities inspired dialogue between Asian and European artists, a centuries-old conversation whose heritage is the aesthetic globalism we know today. Highlights include a diverse range of Christian works of art created in ports such as Goa and Nagasaki from collections in Portugal and India, two works from the personal collection of Queen Adelaide (1792-1849) after whom the city of Adelaide is named, artefacts retrieved from the Batavia, which sank off the Western Australian coast in the seventeenth century, to name a few.