In Search of Protoglobalization in Seventeenth-century Dutch Paintings: a Didactic Experience

Abstract

To investigate the daily life of human communities, values, beliefs and material culture, the use of iconographic sources is very important for the study of history. The images, in fact, comparated to written and oral sources, have an autonomous historiographic identity since they condition the way we observe, perceive, represent, and communicate reality. This paper illustrates the path of a didactic experience in lower secondary school in which the visual approach was accompanied by a global perspective, that is, using a perspective that allows you to go beyond the Eurocentric disciplinary model, to detect relationships and connections between different cultures within a trans-regional analysis and no longer limited to the nation-state. Specifically, some Dutch paintings of the Seventeenth Century were analyzed starting from which it was possible to identify, through a series of elements and inferences, the process of protoglobalization that, with geographical discoveries, colonization and the global trade of goods and people, it has brought continents and oceans to be interconnected.