Scholarship and Art: Visual and Intellectual Encounters across the Mediterranean

This lecture will discuss the intellectual and artistic engagement across the Mediterranean especially during the Medieval, Humanistic and Renaissance periods.  Middle Eastern artefacts were appreciated, collected and sometimes transformed in Medieval Europe, and especially in Italy, and contacts through trade, war and diplomacy were to evolve further during the Renaissance, with complex patterns of acquisition, emulation and innovation. Reflecting varied modalities of reception, they demonstrate openness to a transcultural dimension, and alongside them we find a continuing intellectual engagement with the Islamic world.

Anna Contadini

Full Professor of the History of Islamic Art at SOAS, University of London.

She has recently finished her term as Director of the School of Arts, which she established, and continues to be the Director of the “Treasures of SOAS Project”. Her areas of interest are Arabic and Persian illustrated manuscripts, material culture of the Islamic world, and the artistic and cultural connections between the Middle East and Europe, especially Italy. Professor Contadini graduated in Arabic and Islamic Art (cum laude) at the Oriental Institute of Ca’ Foscari, Venice University, and obtained her PhD in the History of Islamic Art at SOAS, University of London. She also has a Diploma in piano from the Conservatory “Benedetto Marcello” in Venice. She was a curator at the V&A, working on the Fatimid art collection, which led to her publication Fatimid Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London: V&A Publications, 1998. She was then Lecturer in Islamic Art at Trinity College, Dublin, and Curator of the Middle Eastern collection at the Chester Beatty Library. Professor Contadini has been visiting professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris and at the University of Heidelberg and was awarded the Research Academy of Iran Prize for “Book of the Year 2010”, she serves in 11 international Peer-Reviewing bodies and in 16 Editorial, Scientific and Advisory Boards. Her publications span studies of illustrated manuscripts, text and image in Islamic art, questions of materiality and transculturation, and the agency of objects within a broader artistic and social-historical context. She has just finished an international and interdisciplinary project on the Pisa Griffin and the Mari-Cha Lion, their technology, function, translocation and transformation. She is currently working on a project on the intellectual and artistic contacts between the Middle East and Italy in the 15th to 18th centuries. Professor Contadini travels extensively in the Middle East and other areas for research purposes. She teaches on numerous aspects of Islamic art, especially of the medieval to pre-modern periods, and on the connections between Middle Eastern art and Europe. She continues to supervise a great number of MA and PhD students.