Collecting and Empires: The Impact of the Creation and Dissolution of Empires on Collections and Museums from Antiquity to the Present
5–7 November 2015
Lorenzo de’ Medici, Florence, ITALY
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.
ROYAL COLLECTIONS IN THE ANCIENT WORLD – Chair: Maia Wellington Gahtan
Zainab Bahrani (Columbia University, New York): The biopolitics of collecting: Empires of Mesopotamia
Alain Schnapp (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris): The idea of collecting from Mesopotamia to the classical world, convergences and divergences
Carrie Vout (University of Cambridge, Cambridge): Collecting like Caesar: the pornography and paideia of amassing artefacts in the Roman Empire
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
Enrique Florescano (Conaculta, México): The Mexica Empire: Memory, Identity, And Collectionism
Dominique Poulot (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris): Empire and Museums: the case of Napoleon I
Christoph Zuschlag (Universität Koblenz-Landau, Landau): Looted Art, Booty Art, Degenerate Art – Aspects of Art Collecting in the Third Reich
Katia Dianina (University of Virginia, Charlottesville): The Ruin and Restoration of the Russian Art Empire
EXPANDING EMPIRES – MORNING SESSION – Chair: Eva Maria Troelenberg
Gerhard Wolf (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence): Material versus Visual culture: Collecting, Dispersing and Display in Imperial Dynamics (400 – 1600)
Catarina Schmidt Arcangeli (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence): Collecting in Venice and Creating a Myth
Michael North (Ernst Moritz Arndt Universität Greifswald, Greifswald): Collecting European and Asian Art Objects in the Dutch Colonial Empire, 17th and 18th Centuries
EXPANDING EMPIRES – AFTERNOON SESSION – Chair: Francesca Baldry
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (Princeton University, Princeton): Habsburg Imperial Collecting
Ebba Koch (Universität Wien, Vienna): The Mughal emperors as collectors: Jahangir (rul. 1605-27) and Shah Jahan (rul. 1628-58)
Tapati Guha-Thakurta (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta): The Object Flows of Empire: Cross-Cultural Collecting in Early Colonial India
Ruth B. Phillips (Carleton University, Ottawa): Imperfect Translations: Indigenous Gifts and Royal Collecting in Victorian Canada
Late and Post-Empire, De-Colonization and Museums – Chair: Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
Edhem Eldem (Bogaziçi University, Istanbul):Ottoman Imperial Collections in the Nineteenth Century: A Critical Reassessment
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
Daniel J. Sherman (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill): The (De) Colonized Object: Museums and the Other in France since 1960
Wendy Shaw (Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin): Islam and the Legacies of Empire: Ownership of Islam in 21st-Century Museums
(…more at Lorenzo de’ Medici website…)