Biography

Adam Sammut is a historian of seventeenth-century Flemish art. His articles have appeared in Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, Dutch Crossing and Review of Scottish Culture. His PhD thesis (University of York, 2021) was published as a monograph entitled Rubens and the Dominican church in Antwerp: art and political economy in an age of religious conflict (2023), within Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History. Prior appointments include Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of History of Art, University of York (2021–24), Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington DC (2018) and exhibition assistant, Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest (2018–21). In 2023, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Project Summary

Between 1600–1608, Rubens lived and worked in Italy. As a Mantuan court painter, he travelled widely on the peninsula, completing commissions, studying the art of the past and meeting with scholars, scientists and adventurers. Towards a larger monograph entitled Rubens and Islam, this project foregrounds the artist’s Italian sojourn as a site of global encounter. A tangible presence on the peninsula, Islamic civilization was key to the development of Rubens’s enterprise, just like Italian art. Central to this project are Rubens’s Egyptological interests, later expressed in the Hippo and Crocodile Hunt (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), one of four hunting scenes commissioned by Maximilian I of Bavaria for Schloß Schleißheim. Previously interpreted as paragoni with da Vinci and appeals to Neo-Stoic moderation, the Islamic hunters were not “exotic” ornament but a means to actualise Antiquity. Set on the banks of the Nile, the Hippo Hunt was closely informed by Roman Nilotic imagery representing the myth of Isis and Osiris, whose cult fascinated Rubens, to the extent that he would purchase an Egyptian mummy and sarcophagus. The Hippo Hunt also alluded to more recent events in Ottoman Egypt: the surgeon Federico Zerenghi’s hunting of the depicted hippo and its purchase for Mantua, stuffed. This project asks, could Egypt’s translatio imperii from the pharaohs to the Ottomans have served as a paragon of peace for a war-torn Europe, despite crusading rhetoric against the “Turkish menace”?