Collecting in the Early Modern World: Approaches, Methodologies, and Future Directions

What does it mean to study collecting in an expanding field of a ‘global Art History’? This talk stems from the conclusion of one project (Courtly Mediators: Transcultural Objects between Renaissance Italy and the Islamic World, Cambridge University Press 2023) and the beginnings of another that reconsiders how we categorise early modern collecting practices. The history of collecting has long been dominated by European narratives, employing categories that are Eurocentric and biased within nineteenth-century museological perspectives. But what would the history of early modern collecting look like from a sensory perspective? Approaching collecting in the early modern world through the senses has the potential to re-orient Eurocentric and ocularcentric art historical methodologies. The mobility of transcultural objects provides a productive avenue to consider how sensorial engagements activated the performative potential of images and objects, turning ‘viewers’ into ‘beholders’ during this expanded era of global interaction, from Mughal India to ‘Renaissance’ Italy. Such beholding practices reveal possibilities of virtual worlds conditioned by positionality and subjectivity, moving away from one ideal viewer or collector, which invites, as I will argue, more nuanced interpretations of collecting practices, transculturality, and world making.

Leah R. Clark is an Associate Professor and Director of Studies in the History of Art in the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford as well as a Fellow at Kellogg College. Her research has explored the mobility and collection of art objects in the early modern world, while her more recent work has looked to the global exchange of objects with particular attention to their associated sensorial practices. Her publications include Courtly Mediators: Transcultural Objects Between Renaissance Italy and the Islamic World (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Collecting Art in the Italian Renaissance Court: Objects and Exchanges (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and European Art and the Wider World 1350-1550, co-edited with Kathleen Christian (Manchester University Press, 2017).