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Catalysts of knowledge:
Early modern cultures of collecting
Ghent University
15 December 2015
Registration deadline: 7 December 2015
This one-day workshop on early modern cultures of collecting aims to
bring together approaches from the domains of art history, the history
of science, and material culture studies. Of particular interest are
the processes through which collected objects became sources of
artisanal, artistic, or scientific knowledge and innovation. Users and
beholders of collections were invited to observe, investigate, depict,
and question individual objects and their interrelationships, and as
such, collections could become ‘catalysts of knowledge’.
Workshop is free of charge, but places are limited, so please register
online at: http://www.kunstwetenschappen.ugent.be/catalystsofknowledge
PROGRAMME
10.00-12.15
Session 1: Collecting in the Southern Netherlands
Session chair: Koenraad Jonckheere
Marlise Rijks
The epistemology of collecting. Artists’ and artisans’ collections in
seventeenth-century Antwerp
Nadia Baadj
Early Modern Cabinets as Catalysts of Knowledge
Jan Muylle
The Furniture of Count Anthony of Arenberg (Brussels, 1617)
12.15-13.45
Lunch
13.45-15.05
Session 2: Noble and bourgeois collectors
Session chair: Christine Göttler
Nuno Senos
Science and Empire in the collection of the Duke of Bragança
Renata Ago
Bourgeois collectors and their supporters (Rome, XVII century)
15.05-15.45
Coffee / Tea
15.45-17.05
Session 3: The global world
Session chair: Sven Dupré
Claudia Swan
Rariteyten and other specimens: VOC goods, liefhebbers, and Dutch
collections 1600-1650
Christine Göttler
A Javanese Dagger in a constcamer painting by Frans Francken the
Younger: Collecting Idols and Weapons in the Seventeenth-Century
Netherlands
17.05-17.45
Concluding remarks
Wijnand Mijnhardt
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Collecting and Empires:
The Impact of the Creation and Dissolution of Empires on Collections
and Museums from Antiquity to the Present
Istituto Lorenzo de' Medici - Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz
, MPI
5-7 November 2015
Venue
5 – 6 November LdM Church Auditorium (San Jacopo in Campo Corbolini),
via Faenza 43, 50123 Florence
7 November Kunsthistorisches Institut – Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai,
via dei Servi 51, 50122 Florence
PROGRAMME
Thursday 5 November
Istituto Lorenzo de’ Medici – San Jacopo in Campo Corbolini, via Faenza
43, 50123 Florence
8:30
Welcome and Opening Remarks – Rappresentanti degli enti coinvolti
Royal Collections in the Ancient World
Chair: Maia Wellington Gahtan
9.00
Zainab Bahrani (Columbia University, New York)
The biopolitics of collecting: Empires of Mesopotamia
10:00
Alain Schnapp (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris)
The idea of collecting from Mesopotamia to the classical world,
convergences and divergences
Coffee/ Tea
11:30
Carrie Vout (University of Cambridge, Cambridge)
Collecting like Caesar: the pornography and paideia of amassing
artefacts in the Roman Empire
12:30
Michèle Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens (École pratique des Hautes Études, Paris)
Princely treasures and imperial expansion in Western Han China (2nd-1st
c. BCE)
Collections and questions of national identity
Chair: Daniel J. Sherman
15:00
Enrique Florescano (Conaculta, México)
The Mexica Empire: Memory, Identity, And Collectionism
16:00
Dominique Poulot (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris)
Empire and Museums: the case of Napoleon I
Coffee/ Tea
17:30
Christoph Zuschlag (Universität Koblenz-Landau, Landau)
Looted Art, Booty Art, Degenerate Art – Aspects of Art Collecting in
the Third Reich
18:30
Katia Dianina (University of Virginia, Charlottesville)
The Dispersal of the Russian Art Empire
Friday, 6 November
Istituto Lorenzo de’ Medici – San Jacopo in Campo Corbolini, via Faenza
43, 50123 Florence
Expanding empires - morning session
Chair: Eva Maria Troelenberg
9:00
Gerhard Wolf (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence)
Material versus Visual culture: Collecting, Dispersing and Display in
Imperial Dynamics (400 – 1600)
10:00
Catarina Schmidt Arcangeli (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence)
Collecting in Venice and Creating a Myth
Coffee/ Tea
11:30
Hannah Baader (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence)
- title to be confirmed-
12:30
Michael North (Ernst Moritz Arndt Universität Greifswald, Greifswald)
Collecting European and Asian Art Objects in the Dutch Colonial Empire,
17th and 18th Centuries
Lunch
Expanding empires - afternoon session
Chair: Francesca Baldry
15:00
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (Princeton University, Princeton)
Habsburg Imperial Collecting
16:00
Ebba Koch (Universität Wien, Vienna)
The Mughal emperors as collectors: Jahangir (rul. 1605-27) and Shah
Jahan (rul. 1628-58)
Coffee/ Tea
17:30
Tapati Guha-Thakurta (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta)
The Object Flows of Empire: Cross-Cultural Collecting in Early Colonial
India
18:30
Ruth B. Phillips (Carleton University, Ottawa)
Imperfect Translations: Indigenous Gifts and Royal Collecting in
Victorian Canada
Aperitivo
21:00
Concert
Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini – Sala del Buonumore, Piazza delle Belle
Arti 2, 50122 Florence
L’Ensemble Marâghî – Ottoman Classical Music
Music of the Habsburg Empire, directed by Maestra Daniela De Santis
Saturday, 7 November
Kunsthistorisches Institut – Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai, via dei
Servi 51, 50122 Florence
Late and Post-Empire, De-Colonization and Museums
Chair: Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
9:00
Edhem Eldem (Bogaziçi University, Istanbul)
Ottoman Imperial Collections in the Nineteenth Century: A Critical
Reassessment
10:00
Eva Maria Troelenberg (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence)
Collecting Big: Monumentality and the Berlin Museum Island as a “World
Museum” between the Imperial and Post-Imperial Age
Coffee/ Tea
11:30
Daniel J. Sherman (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel
Hill)
The (De) Colonized Object: Museums and the Other in France since 1960
12:30
Wendy Shaw (Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin)
Islam and the Legacies of Empire: Ownership of Islam in 21st-Century
Museums
15:00
Roundtable
Moderated by Krzysztof Pomian (Uniwersytet Mikolaja Kopernika, Torun;
Ecole des hautes Études)
For more information, contact Myra Stals, [log in to unmask]
The creation and dissolution of empires has been a constant feature of
human history from ancient times through the present day, especially if
one passes from a historical to a theoretical definition of empire as
an open expanding global frontier. Establishing new identities and new
power relationships to coincide with changing political boundaries and
cultural reaches, empires also destroyed and/or irrevocably altered
social structures and the material culture on which those social
structures were partly based. The political activities of empires—both
formal and informal to use Doyle’s definition—find their material
reflection in the creation of new art forms and the reevaluation of old
art forms which often involved the movement of objects from periphery
to center (and vice versa) and promoted the formation of new
collections. New mentalities and new social relationships were
represented by those collections but they were (and are) also fostered
through them.
In recent decades such issues surrounding objects and empire have
become important components of our understanding of British
colonialism, and to a lesser extent of anthropological approaches to
colonial studies more broadly conceived. Concurrent with these
developments, comparative studies of the political forms of empires
have also appeared, though the baseline for such comparisons is
invariably the Roman Empire, from whose imperium we derive our word,
but which is ill-suited to describe post-WW-II hegemonies or even Asian
historical examples. This conference seeks to cast a wider net
temporally, spatially and conceptually by exploring the impact of the
expansion and contraction of empires on collecting, collections, and
collateral phenomena such as cultural exchange in a selection of the
greatest empires the world has known from Han China to Hellenistic
Greece to Aztec Mexico to the Third Reich without privileging
particular political models and always with an eye to how these
historical situations invite comparisons not only with each other but
also with contemporary imperial tendencies.
While some scholars would argue that the term empire no longer applies
to today’s global and transnational environment, others have redefined
‘empire’ in terms of contemporary capitalism and a developing
post-modern global order. Exclusively based on political and economic
concerns (including identity politics) and for the most part
distressingly Eurocentric, these analyses of empire or its evolution
into something else yet to be defined, also neglect the impact of
material culture, even though material culture studies have made great
strides in recent decades by addressing issues of the migration of
objects and people for both political and non-political reasons.
Therefore by investigating empires and imperialism in a comparative
manner through the lens of collecting practices, museum archetypes and
museums proper, it is hoped that this conference workshop will help
shape our understanding of what is indeed imperial about our own
approach to material culture.
Contribution to Scholarship: While individual empires have been studied
extensively, it is only in recent decades that they have been examined
from comparative political, social and cultural perspectives. It is
also only recently that scholarship in history of collecting and
anthropology has begun to address the role imperial expansion on
collecting and museums in reference to European and particularly
British colonialism. Still there is very little written on the history
of collecting from any perspective outside of the European tradition or
from before the Renaissance. This conference would—for the first
time—approach the subject of collecting and empires from a global and
inclusive comparative perspective, from which it is hoped that
significant conclusions may be drawn about the social, cultural and
political impact of collecting and display across the centuries and
down to present times.
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