Courtly mediators: Italian, Ottoman, and Mamluk gift exchanges

Venice’s international mercantile connections have led many scholars to focus on the maritime republic as the main source for ‘eastern’ encounters in fifteenth-century Italy, but the court of Naples has received little attention, which had a steady flow of diplomatic embassies from the Ottoman, Mamluk, and Tunisian courts.

Naples was a gateway, serving as the diplomatic contact zone for Eastern and Western ambassadors as well as a point of exchange for goods coming in and out of Europe. Records show that foreign embassies were recurrent throughout Aragonese rule, proffering gifts of animals, as well as textiles, metalwork, ceramics, and other precious objects.

This paper will discuss how these material goods were not merely stationary objects in Renaissance princely collections but pointed to broader cross-cultural activities, acting as material memories of encounters, mercantile routes, and territorial expansion.

Early modern objects were mobile, circulating and travelling long distances through trade and diplomacy, while such artefacts could also be arrested in time when placed in a collection or a domestic space, often framed in their new settings through mounts or frames, producing new transcultural objects and leading to new practices.

The lecture will be chaired by Professor Scott Redford.

Speaker biography

Leah R Clark is an Associate Professor and Director of Studies in the History of Art in the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford as well as a Fellow at Kellogg College. Her research has explored the mobility and collection of art objects in the fifteenth century, while her more recent work has looked to the global exchange of objects with particular attention to their associated sensorial practices.

Her publications include Courtly Mediators: Transcultural Objects Between Renaissance Italy and the Islamic World (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Collecting Art in the Italian Renaissance Court: Objects and Exchanges (Cambridge University Press, 2018), European Art and the Wider World 1350-1550, co-edited with Kathleen Christian (Manchester University Press, 2017).

She has received awards and fellowships from a variety of institutions including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Italian Government, the Gulbenkian in Lisbon, and the British Academy.

Contact

Email: rw51@soas.ac.uk.

Image: Ferraiolo, Ottoman Embassy of 1494, Cronaca della Napoli Aragonese, c. 1498. The Morgan Library, New York, MS M.801, 104v. Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.