Flotsam

Fricke, Beate (19 March 2020). Flotsam (Unpublished). In: Material Culture in Transit. Bern. 19.-20. März 2020.

Objects like the celestial globe in the Henry Moser collection have lost their original cultural context. Once they entered the art market and are bought and brought into another culture, it is hard to trace their original provenance, identify former owners and makers, and locate the site of their production. However, we can reconstruct their former use and speculate about the knowledge culture they were produced for. I would like to contextualise the Persian celestial globe with astrolabes and armillary spheres, with tools for teaching astronomy and manuscripts about the celestial spheres that were brought to the West already in the Middle Ages. A close-reading of the object itself will help us to understand how knowledge in the past was mediated through such objects and what we can learn from the past by a look upon such an object in the present.

Item Type:

Conference or Workshop Item (Speech)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Art and Cultural Studies > Institute of Art History > Ancient and Medieval Art History
06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Art and Cultural Studies > Institute of Art History

UniBE Contributor:

Fricke, Beate

Subjects:

700 Arts

Funders:

[18] European Research Council

Projects:

[1268] Object histories - Flotsam as early globalism
[1266] Global Horizons in Premodern Art

Language:

English

Submitter:

Beate Fricke

Date Deposited:

09 Jan 2020 09:01

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 15:34

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/137169

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