The present volume offers a collection of essays that examines the mechanisms and strategies of collecting, displaying and appropriating Islamic art in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many studies in this book concentrate on lesser known collections of Islamic art, situated in Central and Eastern Europe that until now have received little attention from scholars. Special attention is given to the figure of the Swiss collector Henri Moser Charlottenfels, whose important, still largely unstudied collection of Islamic art is now preserved in the Bernisches Historisches Museum, Switzerland. Contributors to the volume include young researchers and established scholars from Western and Eastern Europe and beyond: Roger Nicholas Balsiger, Moya Carey, Valentina Colonna, Francine Giese, Hélène Guérin, Barbara Karl, Katrin Kaufmann, Sarah Keller, Agnieszka Kluczewska Wójcik, Inessa Kouteinikova, Axel Langer, Maria Medvedeva, Ágnes Sebestyén, Alban von Stockhausen, Ariane Varela Braga, Mercedes Volait. Les contributions de l’ouvrage examinent le mécanisme et les stratégies relatifs à la collection, la présentation et l’appropriation des arts de l’Islam au XIXe siècle et début du XXe siècle. Elles mettent l’accent sur des collections situées en Europe centrale et orientale, lesquelles ont été peu étudiées jusqu’à présent. Une attention particulière est dédiée à la figure du collectionneur Suisse Henri Moser Charlottenfels, dont les objets se trouvent aujourd’hui au Bernisches Historisches Museum (Suisse) et qui ont été de même peu étudiés. Les textes émanent de jeunes chercheurs comme de chercheurs confirmés, basés en Europe occidentale et orientale, et au-delà.

The material and visual culture of the Islamic World casts vast arcs through space and time, and encompasses a huge range of artefacts and monuments from the minute to the grandiose, from ceramic pots to the great mosques. Here, Venetia Porter and Mariam Rosser-Owen assemble leading experts in the field to examine both the objects themselves and the ways in which they reflect their historical, cultural and economic contexts. With a focus on metalwork, this volume includes an important new study of Mosul metalwork and presents recent discoveries in the fields of Fatimid, Mamluk and Qajar metalwork. By examining architecture, ceramics, ivories and textiles, seventeenth-century Iranian painting and contemporary art, the book explores a wide range of artistic production and historical periods from the Umayyad caliphate to the modern Middle East. This rich and detailed volume makes a significant contribution to the fields of Art History, Architecture and Islamic Studies, bringing new objects to light, and shedding new light on old objects.

For centuries artists, diplomats, and merchants served as cultural intermediaries in the Mediterranean. Stationed in port cities and other entrepôts of the Mediterranean, these go-betweens forged intercultural connections even as they negotiated and sometimes promoted cultural misunderstandings. They also moved objects of all kinds across time and space. This volume considers how the mobility of art and material culture is intertwined with greater Mediterranean networks from 1580 to 1880. Contributors see the movement of people and objects as transformational, emphasizing the trajectory of objects over single points of origin, multiplicity over unity, and mutability over stasis.

New perspectives on early globalisms from objects and images Tales Things Tell offers new perspectives on histories of connectivity between Africa, Asia, and Europe in the period before the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century. Reflected in objects and materials whose circulation and reception defined aesthetic, economic, and technological networks that existed outside established political and sectarian boundaries, many of these histories are not documented in the written sources on which historians usually rely. Tales Things Tell charts bold new directions in art history, making a compelling case for the archival value of mobile artifacts and images in reconstructing the past. In this beautifully illustrated book, Finbarr Barry Flood and Beate Fricke present six illuminating case studies from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries to show how portable objects mediated the mobility of concepts, iconographies, and techniques. The case studies range from metalwork to stone reliefs, manuscript paintings, and objects using natural materials such as coconut and rock crystal. Whether as booty, commodities, gifts, or souvenirs, many of the objects discussed in Tales Things Tell functioned as sources of aesthetic, iconographic, or technical knowledge in the lands in which they came to rest. Remapping the histories of exchange between medieval Islam and Christendom, from Europe to the Indian Ocean, Tales Things Tell ventures beyond standard narratives drawn from written archival records to demonstrate the value of objects and images as documents of early globalisms.

While the impact of the Persian style is undeniably reflected in most aspects of the art and architecture of Islamic Central Asia, this Perso-Central Asian connection was chiefly formed and articulated by the Euro-American movement of collecting and interpreting the art and material culture of the Persian Islamic world in modern times. This had an enormous impact on the formation of scholarship and connoisseurship in Persian art, for instance, with an attempt to define the characteristics of how the Islamic art of Iran and Central Asia should be viewed and displayed at museums, and how these subjects should be researched in academia. This important historical fact, which has attracted scholarly interest only in recent years, should be treated as a serious subject of research, accepting that the abstract image of Persian art was not a pure creation of Persian civilization, but that it can be the manifestation of particular historical times and charismatic individuals. Attention should therefore be given to various factors that resulted in the shaping of “Persian” imagery across the globe, not only in terms of national ideologies, but also within the context of several protagonists, such as scholars, collectors and dealers, as well as of the objects themselves. This volume brings together Islamic Iranian and Central Asian art experts from diverse disciplinary and professional backgrounds, and intends to offer a novel insight into what is collectively known as Persian art.

Rafał Quirini-Popławski offers here the first panorama of the artistic phenomena of the Genoese outposts scattered around the Black Sea, an area whose cultural history is little known. The artistic creativity of the region emerges as extraordinarily rich and colorful, with a variety of heterogeneous, hybrid and intermingled characteristics. The book questions the extent to which the descriptor "Genoese" can be applied to the settlements’ artistic production; Quirini-Popławski demonstrates that, despite entrenched views of these colonies as centres of Italian and Latin culture, it was in fact Greek and Armenian art that was of greater importance.