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Speaker: Cécile Fromont (I Tatti / Harvard University)
A tropical menagerie set in a lush landscape surrounds almost imperceptible human characters and architectural structures in the eight tableaux of the Old Indies, a Baroque tapestry from the French Royal Factory of the Gobelins. Interrogating the sources, provenance, and reception of the visual program that made their success from the 17th century to today, this talk sheds light on the long-forgotten African sources of their iconography and analyzes the long-invisible colonial dimension embedded in their alluring exotic tableaux. It puts into dynamic dialogue the context of their creation in the ebbs and flows of the early modern Atlantic World with the contemporary debates about their display as historically and socially charged objects of European artistic patrimony.
Cécile Fromont is an art historian specializing on the visual, material, and religious cultures of Africa, Latin America, and Europe in the early modern period (1500-1800). Her scholarship sheds light on the cross-cultural ebbs and flows that unfolded during this period across and around the Atlantic Ocean. She is the author of several award-winning books, including The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (2014) and Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (2022).
Image: (The Two Bulls, from the series Small Indies), 1723-30, tapestry, Museu de Arte de São Paulo
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