 Good evening. Welcome to Russia, the research seminar in Islamic arts. Thank you for coming. You're very numerous and I'm very happy that you're all here. We have two fantastic guests tonight, one in France, from France, well, being in two different countries of Europe, one France and one Italy, and Dr. Isabel Dolezalek and Dr. Matteo Guidetti. So before I go over to them, I welcome them and give them the floor, I will introduce them briefly. So Dr. Isabel Dolezalek's research interests are in the production and reception of medieval art in the Mediterranean cultural interchange and museums. She studied at the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes in London and in Lyon and completed her PhD on Arabic script in Norma, Sicily at the Frey Universität in Berlin in 2013, The revised and extended version of which was published in 2017 as Arabic script on Christian Kings, textile inscriptions of royal garments from Norma, Sicily. Following a four-year project on transcultural connections of objects at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin, she joined the Technical University of Berlin to work with the Benedict Savoy from 2016 to 2019, researching the translocations of art and cultural property. In 2019, she was appointed the junior professor of art history at the University of Greifswald, and current research topics include object biographies and provenance, art and relic theft in the Middle Ages, and the reception of medieval artifacts in the 20th century, 18th to 20th centuries, especially in museums. And Dr. Matteo Guidetti is a senior assistant professor in the history of Islamic art at the University of Bologna. He held research and teaching positions at Harvard University, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the University of Edinburgh and Vienna University. And in 2017, he published the volume in the shadow of the church, the building of mosques in early medieval Syria. And current research projects include the reception of Ottoman artifacts in early modern Italy, and Islamic objects in Bologna collections. So it's very, I'm very happy to have you here, Isabelle Matteo. They will talk on interpretations of objects from the Islamic lands during the Age of Enlightenment. Please write your points and questions in the chat for me to pose to the speakers at the end. So, Isabelle Matteo, welcome again and over to you. Anna for this very generous and kind introduction and for inviting us to ratio to present some of the themes that have been addressed by the volume that you are going to see on the screen now, which will be the main topic of our talk. So I will start then Isabelle will take over and we'll move back and forward in order to introduce you to the main themes of this book and to try also to underline what is the possible contribution of the main, let's say theme for the field of Islamic art history, and more broadly for the field of art history. Well, first, let me also thank, because we are going to introduce you to the contents also of the volume to the other contributors that helped us to make it, I hope, a very valid contribution to the field. So, Isabelle and I, edit at the volume but among the contributors, there are also Anna Contadini, Tobias Merike, Miriam Thera, and Karina Juven, so I, Isabelle and I would like to thank them for what they wrote and for the energy they put into this project. And of course the book is also published thanks to Routledge, and we would like especially to thank the serious editor, Richard Woodfield, and also Isabella Vitti and Katie Armstrong from Routledge and also the production team that helped, especially in the last phase of the publication. So, thank you. So now I would like to introduce you with a few words on the general idea that basically gives way to the volume a few years ago. So, as many of us know, European elites started collecting objects from Islamic lands in the medieval period. The artifacts were collected in courts and churches treasuries as the result of diplomatic gift exchange, trade, or as a spoils of war, and scholars have investigated the changes in the reception of the artifacts throughout different periods. In a sense, fascination for some artistic techniques developed in the Islamic world resulted in the acquisition of certain classes of objects such as metal works and the luster works. However, apart from the acquisitions, also the understanding of the objects changed it over time. And the research projects that developed eventually into the volume rediscovering objects from Islamic lands in Enlightenment Europe focuses on the understanding of inscriptions displayed on objects from Islamic lands. For a long time, the presence of Arabic inscriptions was not an obstacle to the appreciation of objects from Islamic lands. Arabic inscriptions were left visible. And despite naming Muslim rulers or Islamic religious formula, they were considered inoffensive by Europeans handling the objects. On the one hand, inscriptions were not read and therefore were mute. Very few people knew oriental languages and those who knew them did not direct their gaze towards the object. On the other hand, it appears Arabic inscriptions for a long time possess a positive value as they reminded the beholders of the idea of a generic orient. The orient included the holy land and Arabic inscriptions in some instances were perceived as proof of the presumed provenance of the object from the lens of early Christianity. As some Islamic objects were converted into reliquaries, the alleged provenance of the object from the holy land, testified by the inscriptions, was extended to what was contained within the objects, namely the Christian relics. Furthermore, Arabic inscriptions were copied in European artworks. The transfer of inscriptions from Islamic objects to European artworks resulted sometimes in pseudo inscriptions. Though in a few cases as for instance in Florence in the glass window of the Santissimo in theater, Arabic inscriptions were replicated with accuracy and precision. So we started the project by with the idea of investigating the moment when Arabic inscriptions started to be read in Europe. Of course there is not a precise date to start with, but it was rather a process that culminated in the 18th century. The project also aims at determining the cultural circumstances that facilitated the reading of the inscriptions and the implications that the reading of inscriptions had for the objects themselves. The reading of inscriptions at the time the objects were reused in a Christian context was of paramount importance. Inscriptions could provide information on the place of provenance and the date of production of the objects and in turn confirm or deny the stories that circulated about some of the articles. I said before that some objects were converted into reliquaries. It should be added that in some cases objects from Islamic lands were considered Christian relics, inventing for them and an acronistic date of production. And to read inscriptions meant to reveal that such attributions were fictive and therefore to totally change their perception. Here's an example I take the object displayed on the cover of the volume, the one you see here, it is the so-called veil of Saint Anne here represented in an 18th century drawing. It is a fatimid textile dated to the final years of the 11th century that arrived in the city of Apt in southern France, probably shortly after the first crusade. By then, it was presented as a relic of Anne, the mother of Mary, a figure of the early age of Christianity. And in this specific case, the correct reading of the inscription, including the exact date of production, came as the final result of a long process, but eventually disclosed the fatimid Islamic origins of the textile. And the attribution of the textile to the early Christian age. But what were the conditions, the circumstances that promoted the rediscovery of the Islamic origins of some objects in the age of enlightenment. And here I will mention three of them. One aspect to consider was the rise of a new perspective on Islam as a religion and as a civilization. A new understanding of Islam was made possible by the direct reading of the Quran, including its printed edition and its translation into European languages. The recent works of the ERC network, the European Quran, offer plenty of evidence on the increasing engagement of Europeans with the Quranic text in the early modern period. Scholars who studied Islam in Europe in the late 17th and 18th century relied more and more on Arabic Islamic sources from the commentaries of the Quran to works of history. In the 18th century Islam started to be considered a religious system of its own and no longer Christian heresy. The chronology of Muslim dynasties were established and fixed in time and differences among Muslim thinkers were acknowledged in Europe. The work by Bevilakwa offers a sound survey of the change of perspective on Islam in Europe between the 17th and the 10th centuries. The second element has to do with the increasing proficiency in Oriental languages. Between the 17th and the 10th century, the knowledge of Oriental languages across Europe increased. As for instance, the teaching and learning of Arabic in early modern Europe. Explain how European institutions and native speaker teachers provided the teaching of languages such as Arabic or Turkish. People from the Levant, mostly Christian Arabs traveled Europe and were employed as librarians translate and professors of Near Eastern languages. They also engage with objects, though it seems Christian scholars from the Levant sometimes fail to acknowledge some subtleties of historical Arabic texts, including those featured in epigraphical works. The third and final elements that we found was the base for the change in the perspective in the reception of Islamic objects in between the late 17th, early 18th century, was the rise of antiquarianism, a cultural approach to history that moved to the foreground the objects. As stated by among the others, Arnando Moviliano, objects became direct sources of information about the past, to the extent that they were preferred to return sources. The first collections were very much appreciated among and among the first objects to be studied. Works on Greek and Roman coins were shaped, sorry, the study of coins from the Islamic world. They were outlined by the works of Stefan Heidman and Arianna Dottone, the very first publications dealing with Islamic material culture, where numismatic work, such as for instance, the catalog of the Museo Pufi Konaniano by Simone S. Antiquarianism methodology included the reproduction of the objects or some of their details. Once a precise drawing or etching of an object was made, it either circulated via mail between two private correspondents or was made public through publications. Taken together all these elements allow to look with new eyes at objects that live for centuries in European collections, either among other objects within treasuries, or re-signified in the Christian literature. In both cases, they were by then part integral part of European identity. And now I ask Isabel to come in and she will present you some more details about the volume, and then she will focus on her case study. Hello everybody, I'll try to share my screen just a second. There we go. In fact, I pick up where Mathieu left this, but I added our table of contents. And Mathieu already said a lot about the background to the object rediscovery we were interested in, in this volume, and about the general themes that we tried to address in our book by looking at art or material culture. And I will now speak about the contributions in a little bit more detail. In fact, as you can see, we sought to gather case studies covering very diverse European contexts and studies that shed light on the role of objects in Orientalist scholarship in the 18th century, because this is what we sort of identified as a disideratum, as something that still needs to be looked at more in depth. As you can see here, we grouped our contributions in three rather loosely defined overarching chapters. We have changing perceptions, protagonists and networks, and the large question at the end, whose heritage is it that we are looking at here with these objects. And these are chapters that firstly, of course, address the evolution taking place in dealing with objects from Islamic lands between the early modern period and the 18th century. The second chapter focuses on individuals and on networks of Orientalist exchange, and the contributions in the last part address broader questions about the implications of the new way of understanding Oriental objects and dealing with them, not least as we argue. In fact, their exclusion from the concept of European heritage at that very moment in time. So you can see the table of contents with contributions written by Mattia and myself, and with a large introductory overview by Anna Contadini, who adopts a very broad chronological and contextual frame to raise the question of the specificity of the 18th century approach in comparison to what had happened previously or how people engaged with the Oriental previously in previous centuries. Tobias Müricker, Mattia, said that already mentioned that already focused on Maronite Christians as object interpreters in early modern Europe. Maronite Arab Christians, so native speakers in Europe were actually very numerous, but have been quite overlooked so far with some exceptions in scholarship to date. We found the other hand focused on one of the iconic objects that had to come into our volume, I guess the Baptiste, the Saint-Louis, which many of you will know it's kept in the Louvre today, and she discussed the discursive reappropriation of this object once its origins were revealed. Once the object was read in the 18th century, this metal basin from the Near East was kind of turned into a national monument, it was used for nationalist French discourse. And our last contribution by Miriam Serabrea then turns to Spain, which is also obviously a really important place for our topic with a case study on the Mesquita Catedral of Córdoba. And she discusses its split reception between Arab heritage in the construction of a national Spanish history and initiatives which resulted in very thorough studies of the Arab legacy of Al-Andalus. So how is the Mesquita Catedral received, and how is the Arabic heritage actually used in constructions of Spanish identity. What all contributions have in common is that they shed light on processes of decipherment and recognition of monuments and objects with transcultural biographies. They speak about the rediscovery of provenances and they address the ensuing classification of objects. And in doing so, they also raise the question to what extent the long 18th century can also be considered a period in which Islamic objects began to be excluded from European culture. The 18th century is a very fundamental moment in the creation of national identities or senses of national, cultural, local identities. So what what is the role played by these rediscoveries of oriental objects at that specific time. Of course, I am not in a good position to speak in much depth about anyone else's research. So I hope you will be able to read the book. But what I am going to do and what Mattia is going to do afterwards is to present some aspects of my own case study on an orientalist from northern Germany. We will try to open up our own case studies to broader questions addressed in the volume so we can discuss that afterwards. But I'll start with my protagonist and I can't. Oluf Gerhard Tüchsen was born in 1734 in what is now Denmark, but he spent much of most of his life in northern Germany he studied in Halle theology and oriental literature, and he was appointed professor for oriental languages in Mecklenburg, which is in northeastern Germany in the 1760s first at the University of Butzel which no longer exists and then he moved to Rostock where he actually spent the rest of his life until he died in 1815. And there are several good reasons I guess why I focused on this particular orientalist protagonist. Firstly, he had a reputation of being an excellent paleographer and Mattia already pointed at the importance of reading inscriptions in the rediscovery of objects. Tüchsen as a great paleographer was consulted by collectors and scholars all over Europe for reading object inscriptions, particularly on coins as well. And so he had a huge network and actually gained a lot of fame for what he was doing. And his work, which is a second important point why I chose to focus on Tüchsen, his work is extremely well and accessibly documented. In fact, the Library of Rostock University keeps his nachlas his estate, which includes a huge number of unpublished documents and 12 massive folders of correspondence with orientalists from all over the world, European world. And, and all of that is currently being digitized, which was quite significant in times of pandemic research to be able to actually access something while doing research on it so this is, this is all of that Tüchsen. And thanks to this documentation, I was able to trace the process of rediscovery of several important objects in Tüchsen's correspondence, which actually reveals through networks for discussing objects. I was also able to catch a glimpse of Tüchsen's working methods which appear as the precursors of art historical methods established further on in the 19th century. So in the next 10 minutes or so I would like to show what I mean by these discoveries, using the example of the throne of St. Peter, which you can see here on the right on my slide. This is the throne of St. Pietro di Castello in Venice. And according to local tradition, this chair had belonged to the Apostle Peter in Antioch, and it had allegedly been given to Venice in the ninth century by the Byzantine emperor. And then published an interpretation of the seat in 1787 and then again in the following year and in 1794 in slightly revised form so this is an object that occupied him for a long time. And we know that this was a publication which circulated widely in both Protestant and Catholic Europe, and that it actually caused a real stir. And why? Because Tüchsen had looked closely at the inscriptions on the backrest, which you can see, I'm not sure you can see my cursor, but it's, yeah, all right, right there in the freeze. So he looked at the inscriptions and discovered that they were excerpts from the Quran, which is quite unusual or strange for something that is said to have belonged to the Apostle Peter. This is what we mean when Mattia and I in the volume speak about the demystification of objects in the 18th century. Suddenly a Christian object that was venerated as the throne of St. Peter for centuries is stripped of its attribution and turned into an Islamic object with a totally different biography and provenance, of course. I said in the introduction that one could catch a glimpse of Tüchsen's working methods and in fact in my work with the archival documents I found some notes, very interesting notes that allows to trace how Tüchsen actually brought to light or uncovered what he says were horrible lies about this object. And it all revolves. Where's the next slide. It is all based on what you can see here in the second image from the left. There's folio 37 recto of a folder called alfabetta orientalia from Tüchsen's estate. And what you can see here is actually Tüchsen deciphering the alfabetum kuficum the kufic alphabet on this cathedral of marble found in the church of St. Peter and Castello. And what he does is to very well, first of all, I guess he wrote the Arabic alphabet in the left hand margin, you can see alfabetta and so forth. And then he systematically searched the inscription on the chair for letter shapes at the beginning, and at the end of the word and in the middle of the word so he made his own list to decipher this kufic inscription and you can actually follow his process of working on the inscription very well in this notes, I think, and we know exactly what he was working from he never actually left Rostock, he was working from an image and he says which one. This is actually taken from Flaminio Coronado's publication about Venetian monuments. And this is what he was working with so a reproduction of the inscription. The result of all of this was the publication I already mentioned and engraving first of all that Tüchsen made himself with a long accurate reproduction of the inscription with which he also transcribes. It's interesting, especially in this document from Tüchsen's archives and from his publication, how much emphasis he puts on the in on the inscription rather than on the object. You see the object is totally marginalized what really interests him is the inscription. Right, you can see the publication in its first form. So the object interpretation in this case relies on Tüchsen's paleographic expertise, and on the circulation of accurate images. He never saw the object in person. But the demystification of this former throne of St. Peter significantly gains in complexity. One's first hand study comes into play. And this first hand study is traceable in Tüchsen's correspondence with Simone Asimani, a scholar from Padua, as he already mentioned, who actually went to the church in Venice and looked at the the object and discussed his findings with Tüchsen. And he tried to convince Tüchsen that this was not actually a chair but an Islamic tombstone and several other marble and sandstone and limestone slabs that have been assembled later. So in this discussion, which Tüchsen later published as an appendix to his reprint of the interpretazio, we see a progressive engagement with the material components of the objects of the object. It's exact measurements and the context in which it was made and used. And that is a process rooted in antiquarian practices of the past, but it is also one which heralds the emergence of Islamic art history as a discipline in the following century. In the interest for Tüchsen's working methods, I was also very fascinated by Tüchsen's errors, his misreadings and misinterpretations that, as I've found, often appear to conform very much to stereotypical expectations and bias. And in the case of this chair, for instance, Tüchsen really stubbornly holds on to his belief that this is a throne, this is a chair given to the Church of Venice rather than accepting the point of view that derives from the first-hand study of the object. So he really wants to believe what he thinks he already knows about the object. And perhaps an even more spectacular example of misinterpretation from today's point of view is that of Tüchsen's decipherment of the mantle of Roger II, or the coronation mantle of the Holy Roman Empire. And this, as you might know, has been attributed to Shalimani, so to the 9th century emperor. But Tüchsen read its inscription and correctly identified its manufacture in 12th century Sicily, so in Norman Christian Sicily. Although the wording of Tüchsen's translation of the inscription, which you can see here on the slide, was relatively neutral. So it's basically what we read now, it's the dating and location of the production of the mantle. The interpretation of how the mantle arrived in the realm of Latin Christian Europe is heavily biased and quite revealing in terms of the influence of bias on object interpretation, I think. So what he says, I translated this down here, is this mantle was produced by subjugated Arabs in Sicily for their conqueror King Roger in the year 1133 as a sign of their subservience. And I think that's highly revealing because how come there's nothing in the inscription that says this is a tribute by subservient Muslims. How come he considers this a tribute to Christian conqueror. And several reasons for that, that he argues for, which I won't mention because of time restrictions but you can ask me later. I suggest that the reasons behind this interpretation lie in the field of bias, he clearly, Tüchsen clearly perceives the object as transgressive. Its Arabic inscriptions are an intrusion into Latin Christian contexts, which he thinks he ought to explain by this. Well, by arguing this must have been a tribute. And to some extent this is still the case today. Islamicate objects had permeated European cultures for centuries, it is quite ironic then that the very quest to learn about them, the effort to decipher entailed their extraction from the construction of a European heritage. And we can discuss this further at the end, but Mattia is going to show you another case study before that. Thank you, Isabelle, I'm going to share my screen again. Yeah. Well, my case study in the volume. And so what I'm going to present you briefly today is slightly different because it deals with some objects that were new in Europe and were interpreted as Islamic objects as soon as they reached Europe in the late 17th and then in the 18th century. In fact, I deal with the reception of Ottoman banners, some of which you can see here in this slide, in the state of the church during the years following the siege of Vienna of 1683. My contribution focuses therefore not on objects that by the 17th 18th centuries were already in Europe, but rather with objects that were newcomers just arrived in Europe. The interest of these objects for the project of the rediscovering, so for the volume, lies in the fact that the spoils of war, such as banners, were carefully scrutinized as soon as they reached Catholic territories. Several Ottoman banners were installed within churches and sanctuaries. They were considered ex-voto and celebrated as signs of the triumph over the enemy and signs of the efficiency of the religious figures that were asked to help the Christian army during the battles against the Ottomans. Some of these banners presented highly visible inscriptional programs like those you see here in the screen that attracted a lot of attention as soon as they reached Europe and in this case, Italy, or central Italy. In some cases, the study of the inscriptions joined to the scrutiny of other details of the flag were included in publications. But these publications present the trophy from various angles, so they discuss their material, the dimensions, their iconography, and their inscriptions. And I would like to briefly present you the case of two large Ottoman banners donated by the Polish king, John III Sobieski, to Pope Innocent XI in Rome. One conquered in Vienna was expected to remain in Rome, displayed in St. Peter Basilica, and now is lost, while the other one, conquered at Paracani, today in Hungary, was to be sent to the Marian Sanctuary of Loreto, and today is in Krakow in Poland. As soon as they arrived in Rome, they both became the subject of a series of publications. As investigated by Barbara Karl, the publications devoted to Ottoman banners range from single leaflets, single folio, to booklets of around 10 pages. Together with other express publications, they circulated across Europe, spreading the news about recent events, especially regarding war theatres. To reach a different strata of the society, these publications also serve as propaganda aims. Regarding the one that ended up in the Sanctuary of Loreto, there were three different publications produced on this banner. And all three publications share a core of information that includes technical data about the banner, so the size, the material, the circumstances of the capture, and the donation of to the Sanctuary, and an explanation of some aspects of its iconography and the translation of its inscriptions. All of these, one pamphlet, so the longest among the three publications, adds an introduction devoted to the tradition of donating trophies of war to religious sanctuaries. According to the pamphlet, Loreto was but the most recent example of a tradition dating back to the time of antiquity, as testified by passage of DNA, which is added to the text. This pamphlet also deepens the religious interpretation of some iconographic elements visible on the banner. It is the case, for instance, of the double-bladed sword called Zulfikar in the Islamic tradition, which is explained in the pamphlet as a symbol of the Ottoman dominion on the east and on the west. And Loreto reports that in the Catholic word someone interpreted the double-bladed sword at the light of a passage of the book of the revelation, according to which the last ruler announcing the end of time would have a sword emanating from his mouth. So, though inaccurate, there was therefore an effort to offer an explanation of the iconography visible on the banners. At the time all publications stress the meaning of the inscriptions, for which a translation is offered. The available documentation in the Vatican Library in Rome allows uncovering the process that led to the interpretation of the inscriptions on both the banner sent to St. Peter and the one sent to the Holy House of Loreto. Both of them were sent to Rome to Cardinal Barberini in his role of protector of the kingdom of Poland. I mentioned before that the donor of both banners was the king of Poland. In the year 1683, when the first banner arrived to Rome, Cardinal Barberini, someone at Banesio de Maronite, a reader of Arabic and Syriac language at the Collegio Urbano de Propaganda Fide in Rome, and a priest native of Damascus in Syria that was resident in Rome. Christian Arabs interpreted the inscriptions visible in the banner. A few days later, however, Ludovico Maracci, the famous orientalist, who by then was working on the edition translation and commentary of the Quran, eventually published in Padua in the year 1698, submitted a better reading and translation of the inscriptions that were included in the publication. In the case of the second banner, the one sent to Rome one year later, and eventually displayed in Loreto, Cardinal Barberini only informs that he ordered the letters inscribing the banner to be interpreted and translated, though we are unsure about who was involved into the process. The necessity, however, to make public the content of the inscription of the trophy of war was not a new one. In 1571, a final, which is the silver element topping the pole of a flag, conquered in the Battle of Lipanto ended up in Venice. It was then reproduced in an engraving and included in several publications, among which the one you see here on the screen dated to 1575. Its letters Turkish letters were translated, though with some mistakes, making it one of the earliest Islamic objects to be interpreted in Europe. The Johnson-Bramet stressed the importance to publish the details of a trophy of war. According to her, the final became an object of study, through which it was possible to reveal precise details of the religious practice of the Turks by using their own words. Ben Nelson, more recently working on similar trophies of war that reached the city of Florence, underlines how the deciphering of the inscriptions meant to the cryptic message potentially dangerous. But before such direct military confrontation, the perception of the Arabic language was disconnected from its contents, as I mentioned in the introduction. The appearance of Arabic letters on military paraphernalia taken from the enemies, transformed the language and the inscriptions into a direct emanation from the enemy. They interpreted their inscriptions meant to make sense of them and eventually take full control of their content. However, in Venice in 1571, the information on the objects were very limited and the translation inaccurate. In 1883 and 1684 publications produced to celebrate the arrival of the two large Ottoman banners from Vienna and Parcony, explored the objects from all possible angles. The reproduction of the flag and a series of technical data, such as the size, material, its formal description. And finally, they had a full translation of the inscriptions and the tentative interpretation of the iconography displayed on the flags. The publications concerning the Ottoman banners that reached Rome go beyond the mere translation of inscriptions to offer a tentative explanation of all aspects of the objects. The other studies did not have yet any art historical focus. They were made possible by the interplay between antiquarianism and orientalism describing the introduction and path the way for later publications on other objects from the Islamic world. In the course of enlightenment, the growing awareness that the Islamic world had a material and visual culture of its own. And the presence of persons provided with the skills to read the inscription, led to rethink objects that until then were not investigated as is a very shown with the mantel of Roger the second or the chair of St. Given specific historical circumstances, in Spain it was possible quite early to assemble the remains of Islamic antiquity under one single umbrella. The term Arab started to be used as a collective designation for what was produced during the Muslim rule in the Beryam Peninsula. But instead, there was not yet a collective definition for leveling the provenance of the objects. The division between Arab, Turkish and Persian material culture will become familiar only in the 19th century. So later, as for instance, with the work Monument Arab Persant at Turk du Cabinet de Mosé Le Duc de Blacca et d'autres Cabinets which in Paris in 1828 by Reynaud. However, a fundamental step in the recognition that specific objects originated from Islamic lands took place the late 17th and during the 18th century through the interpretation of their inscriptions. The understanding of the objects allows scholars to know them better, but it had at the same time far reaching implications for the way they were perceived in Europe. So, now perhaps, Isabel will say a final word on this change of perception, what it meant for the objects afterwards. Don't worry, I'll keep it very brief. But one point I would like to make again here at the end is that we talked, of course, in the case studies we talked about object rediscoveries in terms of what seems like a very, like a narrative of a very enlightened progress. So objects are freed from false beliefs and reattributed to their real origins. So it seems like a progress like a progression. This, however, is only part of the story, of course, the fixation on origins, which arguably still prevails in art history, was a component of the teleology of enlightenment which may of course be questioned as well. Orientalist studies gave Islamicate material culture and anchoring in a modern European geography of knowledge, centered on questions of patronage techniques, artists style and iconography. And we all know very well that in recent years researchers increasingly moved away from this strict focus on origins to scrutinize also trajectories of objects and object biographies. So the functions and meanings they assumed at different stages of their lives. But in the volume, we tried to single out this very moment in which the focus on origins came came to the fore. And we tried to analyze what it actually meant for the study of objects within the emerging historical disciplines. This moment lastly also appears highly significant for another reason, which we alluded to already, which is that the Orientalist claim laid on objects. So this object appropriation by the Orientalist scholar scholars meant conceptually extracting these objects from a local heritage. And this at a time when local and national European identities and ideas of cultural heritage were forged. So regarding material culture, we argue that this is one of the moments in which Oriental and Western were taken apart and opposed. And I'll stop at this. Thank you. Well, thank you very much, Isabel and Mattia for this very interesting comprehensive discussion of the subject, especially for highlighting how interpretations are multiple and complex and produce a, you know, a multi-colored picture that needs to be further studied as you said. And also thank you for your clarity of exposition. Very well done. While I'm waiting for questions and comments, I see there is already something in the chat, but why we're waiting for more. Can I ask a couple of questions to you? So to Isabel, you know, you talked about the mystification when talking about the Cathedral of St. Peter in Venice and that it caused a stir when, you know, fix and discover that those were chronic phrases. So I wonder whether you can say something about what the consequences then were of this demystification, not just on the scholarly community, but maybe on the church authorities and other communities. Thank you very much. Obviously I focused more on the Orientalist community and I know that this demystification caused quite a stir because also of correspondence of Tysen's letters in which he mentioned how fiercely this is judged or criticized by the Catholics. So I haven't yet gone into further research about the reception actually of Tysen's work locally in Venice, which would be the next step to take. Yeah, the Cathedral is still there. Yes, it is. It hasn't been removed. No, it hasn't been removed. It's still there and it's in the southern Isle of the church. I actually thought it was in the apps. It is not. It's not that prominently positioned. But, yeah, it's, as I said, it's the next step I will try to investigate how how this was actually received locally in the church if it changed something in the liturgical use of this chair or not. Thank you and very briefly to Mattia. If I may add something on this. Well of course it will be very interesting to know how local church authorities reacted about, let's say this new reading of the object as not being the relic of some Peter but an Islamic tombstone and an object assembled much later. And perhaps who knows future work will unveil this aspect but I think what is very relevant on this moment and Isabel mentioned it with regard to the cathedral in the correspondence between Asimani and Tysen, but it also happens in the case of the veil of Saint Anne is a sort of effort to yes decipher the inscription but still negotiate the new meaning with the old interpretation of the object. So for instance there is a for a few decades the veil of Saint Anne I mean the inscription on the veil of Saint Anne which is Arabic of course was interpreted as Coptic. Because Coptic gave the possibility to, yes, I mean it is an oriental language it can be read. But still it's connected with Christian antiquity and so with Chris later antique Egypt, and so perhaps the relic can remain a sort of authentic relic. While basically accepting that that was Arabic, and the date was 11th century made the identification of the textile with Anne the mother of Mary completely impossible. So sure there is more to do but there is also this first, let's say effort to negotiate the two, not the old tradition and the new readings. Thank you very much. Just a quick question to you. When talking about the publications of the banners, their inscriptions, and then they were sent to Rome, and this was to aim spreading highlighting the European victories against the Ottomans. But they also contributed to a new approach towards Islamic objects you said. So, at what point to do they then become objects of scientific enquiries is it with the enlightenment or is it a process and add the two phenomena you know the trophy and the study of the objects. Do they run in parallel. So on the one hand, these publications were useful in order to make people know that these objects were conquered and donated to specific churches by specific patrons of course, through other specific persons in Rome. At the same time, in producing an accurate description of these objects, they became an object of study and the publications reveal the accuracy of the observations on the flag. I mean, of course, there are some mistakes and inaccuracy like for instance, the, the silk, which is the material, the main material of the large banner in Loreto was interpreted as Pelo de Camelo so camel hairs. And of course there were some mistakes, not for the inscriptions descriptions were very well understood and very well interpreted. And so, in, in the same moment they arrived and they became an X photo, they also became an object of study. And so it's an interesting, of course, there were other reasons than academic reasons so to speak, or scientific reasons for investigating this object, but the final result was the production of a work that includes really it's, it looks like a catalog, an entry of modern catalog. So with all the information that you need to know about this object. Very interesting. Okay, we have some question and comments in the chat. Victoria, I knew, can I ask please why when there were centers of extraordinary excellence in translation in the Arab world and in Europe contemporaneous to the 1114th century, there were some very early medical and philosophical works from the Greek and Arab worlds through which European scholars and humanists were able to read and understand these great works in Latin and some of whom would have been attached to important sources of churches. There seems to be such a gap of centuries until there is the ability to read and understand these Arabic inscriptions on objects entering the major European collections of the medieval period, or to realize they were of importance. If I may, I think one good example to this really intriguing question would be to mention again the coronation regalia of the Holy Roman Empire because one wonders these objects the mantle was used for centuries in coronation ceremonies why did nobody notice the Arabic inscription and they, we actually know they didn't notice them because of amongst others written records about the disputes during the time of the Reformation between Nuremberg, the Protestant city which was the keeper of the of the regalia and Catholics who were trying to dispute the possession of the of the regalia to the city of Nuremberg and in these there are arguments being exchanged which all center about the attribution of the objects, Arabic inscribed objects mantel stockings and so on to Charlemagne and that this would have been a moment in which looking at an Arabic inscription and noticing it and saying, oh, well, this was made in Sicily in the 12th century, century would have greatly helped arguing against an attribution of the objects to Charlemagne and improv the ninth century who was canonized and, and therefore these objects were considered as relics. So this would have helped them it would have helped them to notice the Arabic inscription, but they didn't see it. They just simply did not see it and in the in the pamphlets from the 1620s, where the Arabic tries to argue why the mantle of Roger the second cannot be a relic of Charlemagne and nobody mentions the inscription, nobody sees it, and that is also the case in the early 18th century with reproductions of these objects. inscription has been read at the time the reproductions one had been read when the reproductions were made, but other inscriptions hadn't been read, and these were not reproduced, nobody saw them, while looking carefully at the objects to make reproductions. So it's a, it's a very strange case of, you can only see what you expect, and what you know, and you can't see the rest. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, it is a great question, of course, and I, and I think possible answer is that it was not enough to know the original languages or to know Arabic. I wanted to have the mental, so to speak, inclination to look at these objects. As I mentioned in introduction, it is the sum of different, let's say conditions or circumstances that took place in the age of enlightenment that allow to look with new eyes at old objects. So of course you need to know languages, you need to have this paleographic kind of expertise, exceptional in the case of Tixson, you need to have more people who know Arabic that go around and look at things. But at the same time, for instance, the fact that objects started to be considered a possible source for historical inquiry took place only in the late 1718th century. So this is the moment in which, for instance, coins started to be a sort of, were considered a more reliable source for writing history than other written sources, because there was not any mediation in between. No, it was not someone speaking of not later off early Roman emperors, but the Roman emperors themselves, coining the coins, minting the coins, giving us the information about themselves. And I think this new idea helped help it in, let's say, making objects more attractive also to scholars. And this took place only in the 18th century. I mean, before that, objects were very important. I mean, Anna Contadini is working and worked a lot on the Renaissance perception and admiration of Islamic objects, because they were central but for other reasons. But to take objects as a possible source of information and therefore to look at the inscriptions, it meant another vision of objects themselves and the way history was written. Thank you very much. So please write your comments in the chat. We have Karen Pinto says terrific work. Sophia Vassilopoulou, how great new results revealing the gap between medieval early modern and 18th century regarding the contextualization of objects. Thank you so much for this work. I'm on a mirror. Thank you very much for your talk and above all for this extremely timely book. My internet connection is poor tonight so apologize if I missed it but could you tell us about the cover image for the latter which I for one find most intriguing. So the cover of the book. As I said, the cover of the book. I mean, involves Tixen by the way, because basically is the one of the drawings of the veil of scent and sent to Tixen for an interpretation in the 18th century. However, when this drawing was done, there was not a full knowledge that this detail came from the textile that was in sent on so the story is very complicated. A final interpretation came out only in the 19th century accepted by everyone. There were two different lines of inquiry on these objects, one through the drawing Maria Victoria Fontana wrote an article on on on this aspect, and the another one by looking at the object in after in southern France. So yes, it's a it's a detail. It's a detail, by the way, very interesting also because that part of the textile is was ruined afterwards so was half lost. So we still have an image of how it looked like before it was ruined. So for this reason, I think it's quite interesting relating to Simon's observation that there is a sort of, you know, the drawings on the figures on the drawing that they're trying to it. They're trying to modernize the past, because they're not obviously exact drawings. So there is sort of this idea of reproducing it in a way that can be that is part of the visual sort of culture of the time. Yes. And how not to mention in this regard the baptister and the early, the earliest depiction of the baptister that focus very much on the figurative freezes of the baptister. And not fully convincing, let's say, in replicating the Mamluk style of the baptister, looking instead more Renaissance like figures, and the same can be said about an object that is in Bologna, for instance, which is the HP Ewer that was reproduced in a catalog in the 17th century, and the reproduction of this Ewer misses, for instance, the inscription, which is a very interesting. I mean the description was there was very visible but was not replicating the drawing. The figures on the Ewer are basically given a sort of early modern Italian looking, which is also interesting. Don't worry, Isabel, we are fine. The Ewer says, please excuse me, I have a very desperate baby, she has a four month old baby. There is another question or point from Klaus Peter Hasse. Thank you very much for new lights on the intriguing functions and studies of finding foreign objects in European collections. And mainly she remains the high evaluation of their aesthetic qualities, the recognition of their value. And perhaps this is a very, very important point because the priority, so to speak, taken by paleographers and early Orientalists, I mean with Orientalists here, I mean people who master their Oriental languages, perhaps move to the foreground the aesthetic appreciation of the objects. I mean they were really interested in the details of the inscription in the contents of the inscription, and perhaps less interested in the technique and the technical aspects and in the aesthetic qualities. Though we know that they were very much appreciated, I mean they were before and they kept being so into the 19th century. Thank you. Valerie Gonzalez, thank you very much for this very informative talk. The so-called seal of Solomon appears frequently in these materials, sometimes very prominently. Did you find any interpretation of this pattern in these period sources? Well, thank you Karen. Yes, it's through also on the flex you have the Solomon seal. And well, what I can, there is not an interpretation really, but is identified as such already in the late 17th century. So if you read these pamphlets published on the Ottoman banners in the description of the iconography, there is the Zulfika, of course, which is very visible and very difficult to interpret. In fact, they did mistakes in this interpretation. There were medallions and other stuff, but also the Solomon seal is mentioned, though I mean no interpretation is really offered. For instance, one interpretation which is interesting is that one of the, there are four medallions which look like the other ones, and these are interpreted as the, let's say, what is left by the horse of Muhammad during the night journey, sort of similar. So there are a lot of sort of stretching the evidence and sort of misinterpretation of the iconography. Whereas for the inscriptions, they were very strict and very reliable. For the interpretation of the iconography, there was more freedom to invent meanings. And the Solomon seal is described as a Solomon seal. And that's it. I mean no interpretation is given. Thank you. And Miriam, yes, I did read the first question by Toria. Is there any other question? So Philip Zabel says, thank you so much for the wonderful presentation. If I got it right, Mr. Guidetti talked about a church window that displays Arabic inscriptions. Was this a singular case? And was it a pseudo script or legible, especially in light of the reproduction shown, the Turkish finial, where the Arabic letters were interestingly given. This would seem very interesting. Thank you very much. Yes, thank you. Well, the one I mentioned is dated, well, first of all, is in the church of the Santissima Nunziata in Florence. It's a glass window. We know at least two cases of glass windows with Arabic letterings. One is in Milan, but it's a pseudo inscription, apparently, and one is in Florence in Santissima Nunziata. And it's not a pseudo inscription in the sense that it is legible. And it has to do with contemporary Mamluk motto of the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt. And the one in Florence was produced in the second half of the 15th century. So more or less 1460s, which you're right. It's very interesting at the light of later interpretation of the text of the final in Venice, in the sense that it's a very early transposition. Transparency of the of the inscription Arabic inscription into the European artwork. It's interesting, but it deals with another aspect, I think, I guess, which is the diffusion of Islamic artistic aspects into European art. I mean, what we are dealing with in most part of the volume is to deal with the documentation of objects, right? Whereas in the case of the window, we would have a sort of European artwork replicating an Islamic artwork, which is, which pertains to another domain. So I agree with you that to have an exact and precise accurate replica of an Islamic inscription into European artwork suggests that someone there was able to make sense of it. So, yes, and that starts perhaps even earlier if we want to consider the Renaissance 15th century. Thank you. There are some. Thank you. Thanks for sharing your work in this interesting presentation Miriam. Alizon, thank you for this fascinating work. Any further points or questions? Otherwise, we just say thank you so much, Mathia and Isabel. And it was a really interesting and Isabel coming back. Thank you so much. And a virtual applause. And see you soon. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Thank you, Anna. Thank you, Isabel. Bye. Thank you. Bye bye.