The discreet charm of the old Indies: Congo, Brazil, and colonial fantasy in a French baroque tapestry

Kantorowicz Lecture

Lecture by Cécile Fromont (Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Faculty Director of the Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at 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 Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Faculty Director of the Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at Harvard University. Her writing and teaching focus on the visual, material, and religious culture of Africa and Latin America with a special emphasis on the early modern period (ca 1500-1800), on the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic World, and on the slave trade.

Presented by:
Forschungszentrum Historische Geisteswissenschaften der Goethe-Universität in cooperation with the research center “Normative Ordnungen” and the Institut Franco-Allemand. With the kind support of the Friends and Sponsors of Goethe University