The Discreet Charm of the Old Indies. Kongo, Brazil, and Colonial Fantasy in a French Baroque Tapisserie

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.

Please register by May 19, 2025.

In cooperation with the Forschungszentrum Historische Geisteswissenschaften/Frankfurt Humanities Research Centre