TRADE ROUTES: Maluche - Exploring the Early Dynamic Routes of Trade:

In 1501, the Florentine explorer and navigator, Amerigo Vespucci (1454 –1512), mentions 'Maluche' in a letter he penned to the famed Lorenzo De Medici. "Maluche"or the Malaku Islands – also called the Moluccas, Melisa, Moluccas Islands or perhaps more commonly known as 'the Spice Islands' by the Europeans and Chinese – form an Indonesian archipelago and most importantly for our series, play a central role in the early exchange and dissemination of vast amounts of cultural information.

What we know today of this region's importance and of the overall significance of early maritime trade, arrive to us in the form of maritime chronicles and letters that date back to the 1300's-1500's and beyond, and give the reader a good account of the high degree of cultural exchange and discovery during the dawn of the Renaissance. But letters are just one type of relic or example of this type of exchange and discovery: wheras in art lies another.

The Maluche series will thus focus on the many variegated routes of discovery originating from the Far East, the Near East and Europe as well as each region's transmission of cultural motifs along the way. The impact of these motifs on a given regions art and society as they come into contact with one another, creating a unique and dynamic art based narrative, will be of primary importance.

Katherine Schimmel Baki is Director of Global Partnerships at Wild River Review and host of the popular series: The Mystic Pen, which features the life and scholarly works of the late Orientalist scholar, Annemarie Schimmel, through transcriptions of her classes at Harvard and through the author's own personal memoirs. She also hosts a series called: MOSAIC, which highlights examples of Near Eastern art as well as Near Eastern themes and motifs as found in early Italian art at: the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Timken Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA).

Katherine graduated with a Master's degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University and an undergraduate degree from Berklee College of Music.  Her academic interests involve the pan cultural transmission of Near Eastern motifs through an adjacent societies art and music. She is currently writing a monograph on Caravaggio and also on Dr. Winslow Lewis (1799-1887), as told through a painting by Andrea Appiani (1754 –1817).

She is excited to host this new series as there is both a scholarly connection to her work as well as a personal one: on the maternal Portuguese side of her family, she is of relation to the Pinzon family of Palos, which was one of the leading families of the Palos de la Frontera in the 15th century and whom Martin Pinzon and his four brothers, served in various positions – as navigator's and ship master – to the early voyages of Christopher Columbus, making her history intertwined with that of Vespucci's and other explorers of that day.

For more information please contact:

Katherine Schimmel Baki/Director of Global Partnerships

Wild River Review

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