Author:
North African Baroque: Converting to Islam and Commissioning Art in the Ottoman Maghrib (Genoa-Tunis-Tripoli, 1730s)
Achille Marotta, a Max Weber Fellow, will share his insightful perspective on North African Baroque, based on a forthcoming paper. After the presentation, whose abstract is below, we will have a group discussion led by M’hamed Oualdi (HEC) and Marco Pomini (Johns Hopkins University).
June 16th, 17:00-18:00, Seminar Room 4, Badia Fiesolana (EUI).
The event will be held in person and online. Please register here: https://apps.eui.eu/EventRegistration/?eventId=588064
How should we interpret the presence of Italianate art and architecture in the mosques of Ottoman Tunis and Tripoli? Contrary to interpretations that treat this as influence between two distinct entities, this paper reconstructs a network of production that crossed confessional boundaries in the early eighteenth century. Islamic artefacts were commissioned by Maghribi Muslims for construction by Christian artisans in Genoa, and were shipped across the Mediterranean for assembly in the mosques. Drawing on documentary sources from Genoa and Tunis alongside close artifactual analysis, the paper traces the lives of Genoese converts to Islam who maintained multi-local networks spanning hundreds of nautical miles across the sea. The commissioning of these objects, meanwhile, underscores a pre-existing Maghribi gusto for the Baroque, forming a shared community taste that had no equivalent in Southern Europe.