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Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Kantorowicz Lecture of the Frankfurt Humanities Center (FZHG): Harvard Art Historian Cécile Fromont examines a baroque tapestry and its embeddedness in Atlantic Colonialism
FRANKFURT 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.
The Discreet Charm of the Old Indies. Kongo, Brazil, and Colonial Fantasy
in a French Baroque Tapestry
May 21, 2025, 6:15 PM, Cas. 1.812,
Campus Westend, Goethe University
Cécile Fromont is professor in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Harvard University and Faculty Director of the Cooper Gallery at the Hutchins Center at Harvard.
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). She collaborates internationally with museums and other public-facing institutions around the world, most recently, at the 2023 Venice Architectural Biennial, and lends her expertise to news stories and media productions in venues such as Netflix, NPR, PBS, Arte, the New York Times, and Le Monde.
In Cooperation with the Research Center Normative Orders and the Institut franco-allemand de sciences historiques et sociales (IFRA-SHS). This event is free and open to the public.
The annual Kantorowicz Lectures in Political Language commemorate Ernst Kantorowicz, who was an eminent historian at the University of Frankfurt before being forced into exile in 1934. Kantorowicz later became one of the most internationally influential humanities scholars at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a scholar whose work work on political theology, sovereignty, and medieval history remains influential today. The lecture series was launched in 2011 and focuses on dimensions of “political language”, broadly undersood. It features renowned guests from Germany and abroad, such as the philosopher and historian Quentin Skinner, the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, the composer, director and art theorist Heiner Goebbels, and, most recently in 2024, the historian Monika Dommann.
Kontakt: Dr. Nathan Taylor, Geschäftsstelle des FZHG, n.taylor@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Website: https://fzhg.org/
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