Macgeorge Fellowship Lecture
Dr Stefano Carboni Director and CEO, Art Gallery of Western Australia
This lecture explores one of the most intriguing books of the medieval Islamic world. The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existing Things is an encyclopedia of the natural world written by the legal scholar Zakariya ibn Muhammad al-Qazvini (1202-83), who worked under the late Abbasids and the early Mongol Ilkhanids in Iraq. The book was extremely popular and is known in many surviving manuscripts, virtually all of them heavily illustrated. The text describes such things as survival from shipwrecks, encounters with giant whales, people living in trees, dog-headed people, giant birds, pirates, and pygmies. It condenses all kinds of accurate as well as plainly fanciful information that the author gathered from previous sources and from descriptions by Arab travelers who journeyed across the seas.
Dr. Carboni has been working on the Wonders of Creation for several years and he examined this extraordinary manuscript in detail in a book published in 2015. This lecture will focus on one of the most important early copies, produced in the first decades of the 14th century probably in Mosul (British Library Or. 14140). The lecture will address the manuscript in general and the role of wonders and images within it, setting this against the background of book production under the Ilkhanids: its painters create lively illustrations that were new and distinct from the conventions of natural history imagery that became standard for Qazvini’s text, giving this manuscript a special place both in the history of the book and in the history of medieval Islamic art.
Dr. Stefano Carboni is an internationally recognised curator and scholar of Persian and Islamic art. He has served as Curator and Administrator of the Department of Islamic Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as Visiting Professor of Islamic Art at the Bard Center of New York University, as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the American University in Cairo, and mostly recently as Director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Western Australia. His many catalogues and books include The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Ilkhanid Painting (2015); Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797 (2007); and The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Arts and Culture in Western Asia, 1256-1353 (2002), which was awarded the College Art Association of America’s Alfred H. Barr Prize for best museum catalogue published in that year.
This event is supported by the Macgeorge Bequest and the Islamic Museum of Australia
Event Details
Date: Tuesday, 13 August 2019
Time: Lecture: 5.30pm-6.30pm; Reception 6.30pm-7.30pm
Venue: Islamic Museum of Australia 15a Anderson Road THORNBURY VIC 3071
Enquiries: Professor Anne Dunlop anne.dunlop@unimelb.edu.au
Bookings: Bookings are essential for this free public lecture. Register at http:// alumni.online.unimelb.edu.au/scarboni
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