Hello everyone, my name is Andrew Kan, also known as Kan on the Forums, or Superman. It has been a while, but the forum flashes back with some more updates. I didn't know that was in the budget. Heck, I didn't even know we had a budget. Anyway, since the last update on the Forums, we have reached over 95,000 registered forum members. This means we are 5,000 forum members away from reaching an amazing goal of 100,000 forum users. That's significant because we have a little over 200,000 members in freedom, meaning that almost over half of you are using our forums. The forum team and I would like to say thank you to everyone who has registered. However, with all the new members and with how big we've been growing, we've had to expand our forum team, which makes me very happy to introduce our three new moderators, Korean Mamba, Fourth Wall Games, and Savannah. You can check the description for a post where you can welcome them as moderators. However, we don't want to just spend time on the moderators. We wanted to give back to you, the community. We've decided to rehash the trophy system. Did somebody say rehash? Not today, Anthony. Don't. That's odd. Anyway, before this update, we decided that the trophy system was a little outdated. We only had 25 trophies. Now we have over 75 trophies for you to earn on the Freedom Forums. You can check the description for a full list of trophies you can earn. And it's definitely worth your time. These trophies are very fun things just so you can earn and enjoy your time here with us at Freedom. Now, I'm going to pass it over to Ro, so she can give you the members of the month and a few updates. Decrets. If you really look at yourself, you will be speechless. Hey Freedom Family, my name is Ro, and today I'll be announcing the member of the month. But before that, I'd like to read some of the comments from the last forum flash. Because I can't do that on my own time. That is not how YouTube works. This was really nice. Hopefully we'll see more of these on a more frequent basis. I know. Great. I know. Nice video. Ro is back. I need to join this. I know. Love the beginning. We can vlog Ernest and Ro inside his part. The exclamation point, Colin D. I know. Danny, are you okay? I actually don't know. Let's ask him. Danny, are you okay? I hate to burst your bubble, but he's not actually going to answer. It's just a picture. Before I announce the member of the month for September, I would like to give a little shout out to the members of the month for July and August. So for July, we have Nuke. Nuke was actively posting in the forums and was very helpful around the support section. For August, we have Twilight Prince. Hey, welcome. A lot of new members into the forums and reported a bunch of rule breakers. And for the month of September, we have Brigand Thor. Brigand Thor is a well-known member because he's very active around our forums. Especially during the times when the shout box or chat box is in operation. That concludes my part for this month's forum flash. Don't forget to check out the channels of our members of the month. If you want to be a member of the month, you'll know what to do if you actually visit the forums. At least, I don't know, twice a week or something. It's not that hard. Once again, I'm Ro and yes, these are pigtails. Don't judge me. Congratulations to all the members of the month. Also, thank you Ro for asking if Danny's okay. Seriously, do any of you know if has 41 Danny ones okay? Hashtag Danny, are you okay? That's going to be it for this episode of the forum flash. There's one last announcement I'd like to make. On September 20th, at 7 a.m. central time, the mod team and I are going to be answering your questions live on Freedom Central. There will be a forum in the description where you can ask questions or you can ask questions live. We're going to have a segment for that. But I think that's going to be it for this episode of the forum flash. Let us know how do you feel about these new updates? And before I go, there's one last thing I need to tell you. Two point out.


I'm the Director of Science. I'd like to welcome you all in the audience tonight, particularly those who've travelled a long way to be here, and I know a lot of people have travelled a long way to be here, and to Professor Anna Contadini's friends, colleagues and family. I was talking to her daughter, Claudia, earlier, who said that she'd not actually heard her mother give a public address like this before, and she's looking forward to it greatly, to which my thought was, aren't we all? Now, we've got guests from many institutions, from many places tonight. We really appreciate you all taking the trouble to come here. Science inaugurals for me are something special. They have a real sense of occasion. They're often a bit of a challenge, at least initially for the speaker, but they're an intellectual event, they're a celebration, an enjoyable event for the whole community. To make sure it is really enjoyable, just some housekeeping first. If there's a fire alarm, it means there's a fire.  And the other thing is, please do turn off your mobile phones. This is something I, as people know who see me doing these things regularly, I often get wrong, so aha, excellent. There we are, mobile phone off. Or silent. For those of you who really need to keep in touch, but you shouldn't, because Anna's lecture is going to be so good, it doesn't matter who's communicating with you, you don't want to know, you just want to listen to her. Now, I'm very pleased to preside over this inaugural lecture. It's the 10th of the 2011-12-13 inaugural lecture series. Anna is a superb scholar. She's a wonderful colleague. I know her best as the curator of two absolutely brilliant treasures of Sirus exhibitions, but I've also read some of her outstanding book, A World of Beasts, which is great. So I'm greatly looking forward to lecture this evening entitled Transforming Beauty, Artistic and Cultural Contacts Between the Middle East and Europe. I know that it will embody great scholarship. I know it'll also be beautiful, as well as intellectually stimulating. Professor Contedini will be introduced by Professor Robert Hillenbrand, who's on my left here, who's an old friend of Sirus's. Professor Hillenbrand was educated at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. He's been based at the University of Edinburgh since 1971, where he was awarded the Chair of Islamic Art in 1989. He's published over 120 articles on aspects of Islamic art and architecture. He curated one of the largest exhibitions of Persian miniature painting ever held. In his scholarly interest, I hope I've got this right, relate to Islamic architecture, painting, and iconocrography, I can never say that, with particular reference to Iran and Syria. The vote of thanks will be delivered by Professor Lisa Walter-Salmer from the University of Heidelberg. She's currently a senior professor of medieval art history at the Institute of European History of Art. She's come here especially this evening from Heidelberg, so again we appreciate that greatly. Her fields of interest include medieval art manuscripts, image and text, mixed media, political iconography, transmission of iconographic traditions. There's a lot of this iconography here, profane or urban context. We're grateful both to Robert and to Lisa Lottie for being part of today's event. You're a very important partner, so thank you very much indeed. At the end of the evening, you'll be invited upstairs to the reception in the Brunai Suite for some wine and canapes. So, to kick off to introduce Professor Contadini, I'll now pass over to Professor Heidelberg. Over to you Robert. It's cause for celebration that there's a personal chair in Islamic art here now. It's a subject that is very popular with students and the public alike. Think back to the Festival of Islam in 1976 and it's a subject that's seen exponential growth in the last generation. In publication, exhibitions, conferences, museum displays and events galore. And yet, and yet, it's a Cinderella subject in British universities and there's only a handful of universities where the subject is taught. And that's changing slightly. There's good news from the Courtauld. They're adding to their 28 specialists in western art. One specialist in non-western art, Iran. Bingo! And there are also a series of lectures and courses short and long undertaken under the umbrella of museums and universities. So there's no doubt about the interest. Soas is a key player here. It has a rich portfolio of research and expertise in all things Middle Eastern and it is near some of the major collections and research libraries in the world. So here is the obvious place. And it's here too that we have the very first endowed chair of Islamic art, the Nasser David Khalili chair, whose first occupant was Michael Rogers, currently occupied by Doris Beren Sabusseif. And Soas has the advantage of a distinguished record of some 70 years of continuous, serious study of Islamic art. No other institution in Britain has that and over a period of some 60 years, three personal chairs. Let me claim the privilege of age. Age has so few privileges to look back over the decades. The very first personal chair in Islamic art at Soas was held by David Stormrice, aka David Stormreich, an Austrian refugee from Nazism, a man with a rich panoply of skills, linguist, artist and above all iconographer, I'll use that I word for Paul. A man who touched with gold everything he investigated. He it was who established metal work as a serious subject in Islamic art and his series of articles in the Soas Bulletin on that subject are master classes, which are untouched by time. And he did a lot of work also on little known material in Italian collections. That's a connection with Anna. He was succeeded as a personal chair by someone who needs no introduction to this audience. Geza Fehivari, another refugee from Central Europe, this time from Hungary, who also worked on metal work, but not just metal work, ceramics, archaeology, and above all devoted himself to his students. His generous personality, his infectious enthusiasm, his people skills acted as a magnet to draw students to Soas from all over Europe and the Islamic world. In the 70s he made Soas a hub for this subject and he created, founded, fostered a research community which over the years made a quantum leap in research activity in this institution and the impact of that is still with us. And so we turn to Anna, our third holder of a personal chair in Islamic art. She's Italian so she brings once again new blood and I'm constantly surprised by just how international this field is. It's a signal of its liveliness. She's had an Italian education, nicely balanced between music and Middle Eastern studies. Music is the one that got away, but that is the, to the credit of Islamic art. She came to Soas and did a doctorate here in 1992 and moved on to work at the V&A at the Chester Beatty Library at Trinity College Dublin and then came here first as lecturer in 1997 and then successively senior lecturer, reader and professor. Now that smooth ascent hides a formidable drive. I'm reminded of the swan gliding effortlessly over the waters while its feet paddle furiously out of sight. And indeed any professor in today's relentlessly competitive and demanding university world needs to operate over a very wide spectrum, which she does. Her teaching at undergraduate MA and PhD level. Her many-sided administration for Soas. Her service to the field, both in Britain and abroad in France, in Italy, in Germany. Her outreach to the general public exemplified in her curatorial activities. The various exhibitions on Soas collections, on rock crystal, on links between Europe and the Islamic world, all bear testimony to that. But all of this is overshadowed by her research, which has come out in a steady flow over 27 years. She began good and early. Anyway, anyone under 30 in this audience, please take note. Begin early. And that has generated over the decades three monographs, one on Arab painting, a manuscript on animals. Another co-authored on early modern Korans and a third on the art of Fatimid Egypt. But also four edited books, 20 book chapters and numerous articles. It's a remarkable total by any standard. And you know what quality tells her range is wide and is widening all the time. Not for her, the plodding progress to the same well with the same bucket, which brings back a little less water each time. She has wide interests. She's not forgotten the art of Arab painting. She continues with that and the zoological and scientific element is high there. She continues to work on Korans. But for example, recently, she's extended herself into an innovative investigation of some of the extraordinary large bronze sculptures of animals in Islamic art. They're one of the big puzzles. Elusive, exotic, mysterious. And she's started a huge project on the Pisa Griffin and the New York Lion that promises to be an international project of widespread collaboration. And that's not the end of it. She's cast her net still wider to Mughal painting to textiles to enamel glass to chess pieces, you name it. And then, and this is particularly appropriate for an Italian, she's interested in the interplay between the Renaissance West and the Islamic world and specifically in the 15th and 16th centuries in Mamluk Egypt and the Ottoman Empire.  Not fully understanding each other, but looking at each other with curiosity, respect, admiration, and let's face it, deep-seated ignorance. But they have much to learn from each other. And even their misunderstandings can be enlightening. So it's our good fortune that she's chosen that subject rather than any other for this lecture.  Thank you very much Robert for that very kind introduction. Thank you Paul and Lizelotte for coming all the way from Heidelberg. I should also like to thank the musicians for their excellent performance and we will have the opportunity to hear them again later at the reception. Much organisation goes into these events and I'd like to thank Payal Gaglani and Katie Nugent for all their work. And of course the technicians Jeremy, Mohammed and Patrick. It is a great pleasure to have my family and relatives here and so many colleagues, friends and students. And I can see past students, current students and the students who are coming in September. Thank you all for coming. Being Italian it was perhaps inevitable as Robert said, that within my general field of specialisation Islamic art I should have a particular research interest in the relationship between Islamic and European art, especially Italian. Indeed one could say that I was born into it. As my hometown Yezi in the Marches region of central Italy, it is also the birthplace of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Stupor Mundi, the Holy Roman Emperor who embodies so vividly the possibility of contact between these cultures. This is the monument that commemorates his birth, both in Italian and Arabic. His mother Costanza was on her way to being crowned Queen of Sicily when she gave birth to Frederick on the 26th December 1194 in a tent in the main square of Yezi. And in a later chronicle she's indeed represented in a tent having given birth publicly and showing baby Frederick to a group of women. Costanza was the daughter of Roger II, the normal ruler of Sicily and southern Italy to whom we owe the extraordinary palatine chapel in Palermo. Dating from 1143 this has a typical Latin plan and glass mosaics on the walls representing biblical scenes, but at the same time, surprisingly, as we look up, a wooden mucarnas or stalactite formation ceiling covered by splendid paintings executed in an Islamic manner, which also include Arabic inscriptions as you can see here. A great testimony of the syncretic culture of Sicily during the 12th century. Frederick owned Castel del Monte II as striking Middle Eastern resonances with crusader architecture in Syria and also possibly early fortified structures such as the Ribata Monastir in Tunisia. Frederick was also a patron of the arts, wrote poetry both in Provencal and Italian and composed in Latin a famous treatise on falconry, the art de venandi cumavibus, partially based on Arabic treatises. Extending to Arabic, his multilingual versatility allowed him to commit a terrible scene, talking to the infidels rather than killing them and gaining Christian control of Jerusalem by diplomacy. In contrast, it was armed conflict that was used by the peasants. They brought back as booty an imposing bronze griffin and an Andalusian marble capital, both of which they promptly installed on the roof of their new cathedral consecrated in 1118. The griffin on the up-side area and the capital at the end of the north transept. The capital has an Arabic inscription and it belongs to a well-known group of the second half of the 10th century from the splendid Califol city of Madinata Zahra near Cordoba. But it was the griffin that impressed me as a child when my parents took me to visit PISA for the first time. And it is now, as Robert said, at the Centre of Research Project, on which we had an interdisciplinary seminar here in Soas in February. It was, however, while I was studying in Venice that Islamic art became a central interest, not least because of the artifacts preserved there. This represents the fruits of trade and diplomacy reflecting relationships that began long before the Renaissance. Medieval Middle Eastern objects, rock crystals, ivory glass, textiles and metalwork are found in many church treasuries and aristocratic collections and, although some were pillaged, other were gifts and yet others bought. The Gniza documents which record the activities of Jewish merchants in Fatimidu, Egypt give evidence of healthy transmediterranean trade connections as far back as the 11th century. And the historical accounts of the dispersal of the Fatimid treasury from the Califol palaces of Cairo in 1067 specifically talk about precious objects including rock crystals being sold in the market. More significant elements of trade, though, were carpets and textiles and it is not surprising to find that these fed into Italian art. The crucifix by Cimadbue in San Domenico in Arezzo 1265-68 contains perhaps the earliest known examples of Middle Eastern textiles to be found in a Western painting. One at the back of the Christ is possibly Spanish while the other, held by the Madonna, is a Mandil, a fine-hunk chief with epigraphic tiras bands in pseudo-Arabic in Kufic script. Middle Eastern and Spanish Islamic textiles begin to arrive in Italy with increasing frequency in the 13th and 14th centuries as trade with Luca and Pisa grew and in the early 14th century such representation of inscriptions on luxury materials continue in the Giotto frescos in the Scrovegni Chapel of Circa 1305 in Padua. Here we find textiles with pseudo-Arabic inscriptions in both angular and cursive scripts as here and also interestingly other oriental scripts such as the Tibetan-based Pactpa. In the early 15th century we find Hebrew in Andrea Mantegna while Gentilia da Fabriano makes considerable use of Middle Eastern elements. His adoration of the Magi, for example, is full of oriental references, turban men and Arabic or pseudo-Arabic inscriptions on the luxurious textiles. Such inscriptions are also found on halos, for example those of the Madonna and Joseph and also in his Madonna of Humility. There were previously thought by a delicious irony to approximate to and therefore to be unwittingly derived from the Shahada, the Muslim Declaration of Faith. But it is probable that Gentilia's source was rather metalwork. The halo inscriptions resemble Ayubid and Mamluq metalwork both with regard to the layout and decor. Both in the script, the typical thuluth used on metalwork of the period, and in the text, an approximation to the formulaic expressions of good wishes for the Sultan, typically Aidsley, Maolana, Sultan al-Malik al-Adil etc. Nor was the world of material culture the only form of contact and reception in renaissance Europe an interesting Islamic world extended to certain areas of intellectual inquiry, to languages and to disciplines such as medicine and philosophy, and there was further an openness to its technology as witness the widespread adoption of the astrolabe an appropriate example being this one dated 1299 from Fez with Arabic and Latin inscriptions. As is well known, Middle Eastern scholarship, including classical scholarship mediated through Arabic, had provided an important part of Europe's intellectual landscape since the 12th century when Latin translations were made of important texts by such major figures as Alfarabi or Alfarabius, Ibn Sina, Avicenna, and Ibn Rushd of Eruiz. In Italy, the knowledge and teaching of Arabic was fostered by such institutions as the Scholar Medica Salernitana, which flourished in Salerno between the 10th and the 13th centuries. This was the earliest medieval medical school in southern Italy and the city of Salerno was the most important source of medical knowledge in western Europe at the time. Much of this was based on Arabic material, for example, the 11th century Taquimasecha, or Almanach of Health, by the Christian Iraqi physician Ibn Butlan, from which derives the Taquinum Sanitatis. While the book on the properties of plants by Dios Coridis translated from Greek into Arabic by Hunain Ibn Isaac and a Greek collaborator, Estefan Ibn Basel, like that in the 9th century, was then translated from the Arabic into Latin. These two treatises were to remain the basis for pharmaceutical and herbal writing in Europe until the end of the 16th century, accompanied by the increasingly voluminous commentaries of the Italian physician Pierandrea Matteoli. In Spain around 1300, we encountered an important but little known Arabic Latin dictionary, a precious witness to the Arabic spoken and written in Spain, probably commissioned by the religious authorities in order to help in the conversion of Muslims. But in the late 14th century, it was acquired by Nicolod de Nicoli, a Florentine humanist scholar thereby entering the philological world within which the study of Arabic was to develop. During the Renaissance, we witnessed accordingly both growing awareness of its importance alongside the biblical Semitic languages and an increasing humanistic concern with the culture it expressed. Scholars sought fresh manuscripts and produced new editions and translations, and the study of Arabic was recognized as a disideratum alongside that of Greek and Hebrew. The major errors of concern remained medicine and philosophy, and the treatise on medicine canun fitib by Avicenna was to remain on the syllabus of many European universities until well after 1600, with more than one translation being printed in Venice during the 16th century. Unless commissioned by a wealthy patron, works in the original must have been uneconomical to print. We have nevertheless a copy of a Quran printed in 1537-18 in Venice, one of the earliest instances of movable type being created for Arabic. It was in the possession of the Zeo-Ambrogio degli Albonesi, 1469-1540, a renowned scholar of Near Eastern languages, and we can see his annotations and also in some places his interlinear translations in Latin as here, for example. Such intellectual endeavours extended and deepened lines of enquiry and speculation central to Renaissance thinking, and seemed to provide on the intellectual level a parallel to the commercial strands that joined Renaissance Italy to the words of Islam. But do they? We have yet to find evidence to indicate that the aesthetic appreciation of Middle Eastern artefacts was conceptualised in ways connected with the world of ideas and scholarship. Or that the Renaissance scholar perceived the Ottoman desk rug that adorned his studio as products of the culture, the alterity of which demanded intellectual attention. In fact, I find a surprising lack of commentary on the foreign nature of Middle Eastern artefacts. As demonstrated by the humanist Sabada Castiglione in the first half of the 16th century, they could be simply inserted within a list of objects to adorn the home, being in no way contrasted with others from, say, Germany. Similarly, we find Islamic elements, including inscriptions in Thule script as here, introduced without comment in the textile design sketchbooks of Jacopo Bellini, 1424 to 1470. Or Rabesque design simply juxtaposed with trophies in pickle-passos treaties on the art of ceramics and its ornaments. One interpretation, then, might be that of disjunction and elision, with scholarly awareness and intellectual curiosity concentrated upon the past, where the contributions of Muslim philosophers and scientists could be considered as a normal extension of the classical learning they also mediated, while the present was marked, rather, by indifference to the cultural specifics of Middle Eastern societies. Yet they were societies creating artefacts whose craftsmanship and beauty made them immensely desirable in European eyes. Francesco Gabrielli judiciously commented in relation to Pierre Reine that he, and I quote, considered the state of war endemic and recrudescent at stated periods in the society of the early Middle Ages as automatically paralysing international social and economic relations, but on the evidence of medieval texts such a comparison seems false. End of quote. By interpreting the reaction of the West towards the Middle East as fundamentally antagonistic, traditional scholarship of this kind failed to give too due weight to the positive aspects of contact. Without wishing to deny times of tension and the realities of military conflict, for present purpose we may remark upon the simple fact that during the Renaissance trade continued even during period of war if by sometimes different routes, just as it had during the Middle Ages when a whole host of artefacts were acquired and displayed, their beauty often transformed and deliberately enhanced by the addition of sumptuous mounts. Some of the most striking are rock crystal vessels carved in relief. The earliest arriving already in the 10th century are found on the Ambo or Pulpit presented to the Palace Chapel at Achen between 1002 and 1014 by the Otonian Emperor Henry II where we find an extraordinary assemblage of objects including a Roman green glass bowl and also a gate vessels here and here surrounded by chess pieces of the abstract type, six big and highly carved ivory plaques and two rock crystal vessels both carved in relief with vegetal motifs of palmates. Since the early 20th century they have been referred to as cup and saucer, a rather cosy example of domestication although I don't think that they form a related pair. They are differently decorated and the typology of the cup points to it being probably earlier and from a different artistic sphere. As they appeared alongside the other objects from ancient Roman contemporary Byzantium it has been suggested that the Ambo conveys a complex symbolism associating Henry II's rule on one hand with the powerful Roman past and on the other with the sophistication of contemporary Islamic cultures. But I wonder, a conscious association with Islamic world is by no means certain, for if and here certainty eludes us the pieces came by Byzantium as part of the treasure brought 30 years before by Theofano, wife of Otto II that would most probably have been considered Byzantine. Rather, the objects on the Ambo should be considered primarily as part of an aesthetic programme. At the first glance the multi-coloured assemblage of stones seems random a little over the top almost like strolling past the jewellty shops of Night's Bridge. But not only are they combined in an organised manner the very colours are significant It's suggesting an association with the characteristically medieval rhetorical concept of varietas since there is evidence that this was extended to the sphere of material culture. Accordingly, the Ambo could be aligned aesthetically with the deliberately contrastive assemblages of differently coloured gems and rock crystals found on contemporary Crookes gematae such as the Loter Cross, also in Achen to be dated circa 1000. A basket of Fatimid glass and rock crystal objects are similarly found alongside late classical pieces in several church treasuries. Many are now reliquaries and those that arrived in Venice via Acre or Jerusalem might have already served in that function. Some may have formed part of the significant portion of the booty from Constantinople that was systematically divided up among the crusader prelates and went with them to the Holy Land. Thus, lending them an association with holiness that made them particularly suitable receptacles for relics one that could well have been reinforced by the beauty and quality of the vessels and even by symbolic value inspired by the play of light on the rock crystal itself. An extraordinary one that came with its relic already inside it is a bottle in the treasury of San Marco, carved in relief decorated with the palmets and scrolls typical of Fatimid Egyptian production. At some point it was housed in a silver casket, but in the mid-13th century it was mounted on a gold chales by Venetian goldsmiths, as you can see. A transformation that not only enhanced the preciousness of the relic, but also allowed it to be seen and displayed. Gold ribbons encased the bottle without touching it so that its decoration can be seen and appreciated thereby emphasizing the unique value of its holy contents. The bottle has an Arabic inscription carved in relief around the neck with good wishes, a type known on secular objects in the Middle East, and the Latin inscription running around one of the gold bands of the mount which identifies the content, hic est sanguis cristi, this is the blood of Christ. The complex process of transformation that this first group of objects initiates is one affecting both functions and perceptions and it is one that was to evolve and mutate, continuing to do so indeed down to the present day. The process was facilitated by extensive trading networks that responded both to demand and stimulated it. The increase in realisation of the importance of these private or city-sponsored commercial enterprises has meant that the old emphasis on empires, which even when used as seemingly neutral taxonomic tools still carried the implication that there were interactors in the generation and transfer of artefacts as gradually receded. This is not though to dismiss them out of hand. We find, for example, pseudo-coofing inscriptions in southern Italian churches of the 13th century, such as at Otrento, you can see it here, or Anglona, these have parallels in contemporary Byzantine churches, as in Mani, here, it's not very visible, and it is reasonable to see them as resulting from the mediation of Byzantium. Yet any generalised appeal to Byzantium as a bridge between east and west, especially in the transmission of ornament or technique, is problematic, both because the evidence for it may be inconclusive and because it perpetuates an unjustifiably rigid view of geographical and temporal demarcations. We need to look at the Mediterranean less in terms of large-scale power blocks and more in terms of a patchwork of commercial and cultural centres, participating in complex but loosely structured trading arrangements. In this context, the Italian city states, and especially the maritime republics, were to become increasingly important. Middle eastern artefacts were transmitted not only through Sicily and southern Italy, but also through the commercial activities of Genoa, Pisa, Lucca, Siena, Florence, Amalfi, and of course Venice. The documents in the Venetian archives tell us that one of the biggest yearly expenses of the republic, starting already in the 13th century, was the import of precious textiles from various parts of the Middle East, for example Egypt, Syria or Iran. But there were also sources further afield. Textiles from Central Asia and China, especially silk, were imported in great numbers by Florentine and Sainese merchants. The Drapi Tartariae Turchi, mentioned by Dante in the Inferno, where the horrible demon Gerion is rendered beautiful by garments compared with colourful tartar and Turkish clothes. Later, with the rise of the Ottomans, as the new major power of the Islamic world, Turkish centres of production came increasingly to the fore. And after 1453, the newly dominant position of Ottoman Constantinople attracted a strong Italian mercantile presence. The number and activity of Italian merchants and overseas agents engaging trade with the East increased considerably, contributed to the economic growth of the Italian city-states and helping to promote the diffusion of Middle Eastern artefacts. The import of rags, for example, is already documented from the early 14th century and 15th century documents bear detailed witness to Florentine transactions. Orders might even be placed for a particular design, a mark of individuality indicating sensitivity to fashion and taste. For Venice, too, we know of the presence of merchants and agents overseas. Bain or commissioning carpets both for other merchants and for patrician families whom I have required the inclusion of the family coat of arms, as is testified by documents relating to a commission for Lorenzo il Magnifico. The agent Carlo Baroncelli writes in a letter from Istanbul dated 1473 that the table carpets with the coat of arms ordered by Lorenzo was taking a long time to make and that in the meantime he hopes to send him some saluki dogs. Instructions for carpets commissioned by Italian families were very precise. We regard not only to type, but also to dimensions and could give rise to acrimonious disputes. One in the mid 16th century involved demands from the Venetian intermediary in Cairo not just for cash, but also for sausages. To Ottoman Cairo can be assigned this remarkable cruciform carpet. Its surface is divided by bands into a large central square from which emanate four rectangular flaps, but woven into a single piece. When bought by the Vienna in 1883 it was thought to have been a canopy for using processions, but its cruciform shape indicates rather that it was intended to cover a small square table, a use quite alien to the Islamic world, but common in the west. With its Kyren technique, Turkish ornamentations and European shape and function, this commission represents a striking convergence of cultural forces. Let's now concentrate on the responses to the different categories of artefacts as they variously maintain their regional function, inspire emulation, are transformed or are represented in other media. In the west, carpets, for example, were not usually intended to be walked on, although they could be arranged around the bed. Those that are depicted at the feet of the Madonna are special cases that function being to demarcate a sacred space. Documents tell us that they were more normally used to cover furniture, in particular beds, benches, tables and chests, and the visual record testifies to the high regard in which they were held. A scholar saint, an ancient philosopher or a renaissance humanist or merchant is often represented in his studies surrounding not only by books, but also by various symbolic objects, including ones of Middle Eastern origins, such as astrolabies, various types of metal bowls, poem-unders, and typically a beautiful carpet that covers the table, as in the case of the fresco by Domenico Ghirlandaio of San Jerome in his study, where the splendid border of a colorful carpet with pseudo-lettering is visible. Or the frontispiece painting attributed to Botticelli's school, circa 1475, where a small patterned Holbein carpet is represented. Named after Hans Holbein, who depicted this type in his paintings, these Turkish carpets appear a half-century or so before the Lotto carpets, named after Lorenzo Lotto, which I usually presume to be a later variant. Turning to fabrics, although silks and velvets were traded westwards in significant quantities, the visual record points to them more as luxury commodities. Particularly striking is the degree to which they provided an impetus towards the creative development of design. An interest in Middle Eastern ornaments starts to be felt particularly keenly during the Renaissance, with Middle Eastern motifs of notes and starts to be used, for example, by Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer. In the first half of the 16th century, pattern books, such as those of Peter Flurtener and Francesco di Pellegrino, include large sections of oriental motifs called Morresc by Flurtener and Falsona-Rabic by Pellegrino. Such terms are used generically to encompass a variety of styles that are tempting to identify specific origins. Crucially, they form part of the global vocabulary of ornament, no longer tied to specific origins or contexts that can be transferred between media and creatively combined in new ways. As Michael Rogers points out, it is the very eclecticism of Venetian Islamising bookbinding designs that serves as a diagnostic tool to distinguish them from their Ottoman counterparts which have a no-steer unity of design. Let us take, as an example, the binding shown on the poster for the present lecture. This blended Venetian binding contains the document of appointment by Doge Alviso Mocenigo of Girolo Mamula as Procurator di San Marco in 1572. The binding is in Ottoman style with the typical arrangement of a central medallion, corner pieces and field filled by scrolls of arabesque. But apart from the lion of Samark with the Mocenigo coat of arms on the back, it happily integrates elements of Renaissance ornament. The populated border contains birds, insects and grotesque figures. A comparable discussion of Ottoman receptivity to European art and architecture would require another lecture. But let me briefly touch upon one related aspect, the reciprocal imitation and innovation of fabric designs. Ottoman production of silk fabrics was concentrated in the western Italian town of Bursa and Italian merchants traded there throughout the 15th and 16th centuries, but more for raw silk to be taken back to Italy either for the local weaving industries or to be traded on to France or the Netherlands. Early reliance on importing luxury textiles was thus largely replaced by local production. In fact, Italy became a major source of silk fabrics for the Ottoman court and upper strata. One imperial caftan, possibly for Rosemann II, the design of which closely resembles a velvet in Turin, seems to be of 16th-century Italian probably Florentine manufacture. And a velvet is extraordinarily similar to the one worn by Eleonora de' Medici in the portrait of her by Bronzino. Both contain further design elements that could be read as either Spanish or Italian. The suggestion, therefore, is of a constantly shifting pattern of exchanges both at the level of trade and at the level of design, with pattern elements from one part of the Mediterranean being incorporated in a fabric designed in another that might then be exported to an appreciative buyer in a third. While Italians copied Ottoman designs, the Ottomans returned the compliment. In reaction to the market's success of fashionable Italian designs, Ottoman looms began to produce fabrics virtually indistinguishable from them, and the degree of mutual imitation is such that certain pieces are difficult to assign with any certainty to either an Ottoman or an Italian place of manufacture. At the same time, the circulation of style features could inspire local specialisation. Thus, the Ottoman industry developed its own style of brocaded velvets, one that could compare on price in Italy. Typical of the output of Bursa is this chatmah velvet, probably 16th century. Its pattern and original lattice that provides a framework for rows of staggered floral motifs present us with another instance of the complex diffusion of a particular design feature. Its origins are ultimately to be found in East Asia, but it's likely that the Ottomans' adaptation in the 15th century was indebted less to eastern than to Italian models, such as seen in this Italian velvet of circa 1500. A similar complexity concerns the transfer of floral motifs, in this case the carnation, a cognisable species rather than a real hybrid creation. The impetus may have come from illustrating European herbals and books of floral culture, but it's certainly acquired a distinctively Ottoman form taken on a rather abstracted and fan-like shape. By introducing an Eastern note into a rather Italianate format, velvets such as these would have held considerable appeal, filling a particular niche within a common ground of overlapping tastes in Italy and the Ottoman Empire that encouraged the production of goods for export on both sides. The above discussion which touches on acquisitions and exchanges on transcultural cross-fertilisation and competition, as is a move away from traditional art historical scholarship towards, it is hoped, a more productive engagement with the contexts within which artefacts were produced and consumed and also with the ways in which they were perceived, however feint the trace. It may indeed be argued that the very notion of a meaning associated with alterity is suspect and that a middle eastern place of production for a given artefact may be incidental, even insignificant. As we have seen, the international appeal of certain types of artefacts results in an eclectic sharing of features with motifs becoming detached from their original contexts to be integrated creatively within others. But notions of origin will eventually resurface. Certain style features that had been identified by labels such as Arabeske will be brought into play as part of a growing characterisation of the Islamic Middle East, especially in its Ottoman manifestation. At first perceived as a threat in another, it is gradually transformed as we move into the Rococo domain of Turkerie into a world onto which can be projected with increasing extravagance, the various orientalist fantasies that will prove to be such an enduring element in western art. In addition to interpretative challenges, we are still often confronted with basic problems of identification and provenance. And here I should like to conclude by reverting to the Pisa Griffin that so impressed me as a child. Where is it from? What was it for? How was it made? What did it mean to the peasants who captured it? And indeed, what multiple meanings might convey today? These extraordinary bronze with an Arabic inscription of good wishes can be dated by the standard method of stylistic comparison with other objects between the 11th and the beginning of the 12th century. And this has recently been confirmed by the carbon 14 dating of organic samples that we found inside one of the wings. And this is the first public announcement of this finding. The carbon 14 report having arrived on my desk just recently. And one of the exciting aspects of current research is to see how scientific techniques can reach our understanding of this and other related objects such as the Marysha lion. And here you see some of the activities of the Pisa Griffin project team who are proceeding with further scientific analysis. As for how it arrived in Pisa, Monet de Villar suggested that it was seized from Spain most probably after the conquest of the Balearic Islands in 1114. In terms of attribution, however, the Griffin has flown even further as its origins have been located variously in Iran, Egypt, Ifrequia, Spain and southern Italy, demonstrating that with such an object the classical taxonomic approach has certain limitations. But provenance is just one aspect and in order to understand the Griffin better different questions need to be asked concerning material, bronze casting techniques and its original context and function. Here the primary purpose is to investigate its cultural significance, thereby restoring for it a past against which the dislocations of its later trajectory can be plotted. It was long assumed, for example, that it originally functioned as a phantom piece. It's most likely set in being a palace garden. But on an examining the interior through the opening of its belly I discovered a womb, a vessel attached to the back that made no sense as part of a hydraulic system. Nor could it be understood as a container for incense and incense burners are indeed constructed very differently. My hypothesis was that it formed rather part of a bellows driven noise making mechanism and that the bronze was originally a roaring beast. Possibly like comparable Byzantine lions an automaton flank in a throne designed to instill in visitors o and dread. Whether or not the peasants who dismantled it were aware of its function, when mounted on the cathedral it retained acoustic properties for when the wind was blowing through its open belly amplified by the internal resonating vessel it emitted eerie sounds. The griffin was positioned here this is a copy where it would be visible to those coming from the city and in attempting to fathom the cultural field within which it would have been comprehended by its captors it is fruitful to consider the religious understanding of griffins as a potropeic symbols. The piece of griffin might therefore have been thought to have value not just as an imposing victory symbol but above all as a guardian figure over the cathedral and its city. It was eventually taken down and is now a museum exhibit inevitably overlaid with further straight-up meaning acquiring significance both as an ambivalent gateway to a historical memory and as an object to be interpreted in the light of current cultural concerns. At the same time it retains an aesthetic dimension as one of the vast number of artifacts acquired during a rich period of cultural interchange between the Middle East and Europe. About them basic questions still need answers and our interpretations need constant refinement but even when progress is difficult we are still fortunate enough to be consoled by the pleasure and wonder they inspire. Thank you. Dear Emma, distinguished guests, colleagues, first of all I would like to ask you, Anna, and the audience to indulge me for a moment. This is my first experience with the ceremonial final of an inaugural lecture in Great Britain and I must confess that I was quite intimidated by the preparations struggling with an unfamiliar gown and beret, for example. Heidelberg's university gowns are very simple or perhaps I should say they were very simple. Our faculty has only one left after our gowns were destroyed in the student revolutions in 1968. So today I am adorning myself in both plumes with the gown of this prestigious institution source where I have the honor of voicing some words of appreciation. Your inaugural lecture, Anna, is indeed a highly transcultural happening itself. As you mentioned, your knowledge of cross-fertilization among diverse cultures is closely connected by your own biography. Born in Le Marque, you grew up in an era where a multi-layered cultural tradition reached back to the Roman Empire. In Venice, where you studied, you were surrounded by objects coming from east and west reflecting highly diverse contexts with different regions. In this context, you developed your sensitivity for the main topic of your research, the role of artefacts in cultural processes between east and west. Here in London and as your curriculum vita informs us at many other places in the world, mainly as a curator at the Islamic Collection of Jester Beattie Library in Dublin and Victoria and Albert, as well as several times at Heidelberg, you have served as an ambassador underlining the importance of eastern cultures for the west. You just gave us an impressive overview of this fruitful exchange which has come on for centuries. Objects, technology, medicine and philosophy from eastern cultures were, as you have shown in the field of textiles, sometimes so successfully integrated that, for instance, Italian silk production became the centre for Ottoman luxury textiles and was re-imported in the Ottoman Empire. As an art historian, you emphasised the importance of the exchange of objects of cultural processes and you have showed us in another trans-cultural act one inherent in your own interpretation the processes of adaptation, transformation and integration that these objects undergo in their new cultural context. Their origin, as you pointed out, is not the reason for the attractiveness of these objects. Rather, it is their superior craftsmanship, luxurious materials, or simply their rarity that makes them so prestigious. Dear Anna, thank you for your very inspiring lecture. I am sure I speak on behalf of the whole audience and I say that we are deeply impressed. Your precise analysis of the artefacts in combination with your knowledge of cross and trans-cultural processes through which the objects find their form and the narratives that bestow value upon the objects themselves all provides a compelling and clear argument. You guide us to see these artefacts in a very different way. You adopt an active role instead of being silent things. I remember very clearly the physical horror we felt when you explained at our first workshop in 2008 in Heidelberg the mechanism of the Islamic riffing on the roof of the Basilica, which you also mentioned today. In Heidelberg you perfectly imitated the strange noise that is generated when the wind drive into him and suddenly we could understand the fear of the Pisani who believed that probably a menacing spirit was threatening them or the enemy in his own language. This strange artefact became a supernatural and extremely vivid actor. Listening to your analytical and technical explanations we reached a sort of intermediate zone between our existence as contemporaries of the 21st century and the Middle Ages. Who else could create such an enchanting atmosphere that can waste so much more than just sober academic knowledge of an artefact? Your ability to glide into the strangeness of historical found cultural context is based in your knowledge of the objects themselves. Independent but not ignorant of all the so-called turns that art history and nearly all disciplines in the humanities have gone through in the last 30 years. Your first and last parameter of research remains rooted in the artefact. This deep love of the objects of art characterises your teaching, your research and is an integral part of your character. This makes you authentic and gives you your gift as a great storyteller when you're smooth and wonderful, warm, voice, dissects layer by layer, the extremely complicated processes of transcultural interweaving of artefacts. So your analysis is object-oriented and transcultural, political as well as historical, interdisciplinary as well as art historical. In short, you bring together all of the disciplines and turns in your research. Apart from being a scholar specialist in manuscript studies and eastern metal work based on comprehensive archival research, you are of course an active mediator between the culture. You have a great deal of experience as curator as Robert mentioned and the Treasures of Sours project started on your initiative and guidance project which aims to render the school's extraordinary collections accessible to the public. By integrating the practical experience of the artefacts in an exhibition and transmitting the skills of organising and presenting objects for a broader public, your teaching was innovative long before the Bologna process asked for training skills and competencies rather than the mere word learning of facts. The tangible experience of objects means as scholars in the Middle Ages also knew coming in touch with another culture and is the backbone of every form of understanding and probably misunderstanding the other. Anna, so kind and friendly as you are, you are from a very proud region and have the courage of a lion. You are the only art historian I ever met who was eager to see with her own eyes the centre of the famous umbo of Henry II in the Cathedral of Aachen which you just mentioned. Simply irritated by the shape of the spoiler in the centre of this golden artefact. Nearly every art historian and of course all historians were convinced that Henry II reused an antique and contemporary Byzantine artefact to show the idea of the Translatsio Imperii, the translations of the empires. You had these serious doubts about this historical construction and were extremely interested in having a closer look at these artefacts. The only problem was that the umbo is used today as a pulpit at a very high altitude. You managed all problems, even the lightening and so by touching these objects and scrutinising them in situ you were able to falsify our theories. Today you presented the very convincing hypothesis that the spoiler are used not for only symbolic reasons but for the attractiveness of colour and technology so that the principle of aesthetic viarity rather than ideological reasons could be essential for this assemblage. Dear Anna, you have showed us in your lecture the broadness of your field and we all felt how important your experience with transculturality is not only to understand formal cultures but also to reflect on our own position as scholars and individuals who live in an increasingly globalised and transcultural world. So I would like to end this short panagyric with my congratulations. I congratulate you Anna for your professorship but I would also congratulate the School of Oriental and African Studies for having recognised the outstanding qualities of Anna Condadini and appointing her as a professor in this distinguished scholarly community. Now the reception will be going on and you please will go upstairs in the prune suite and there I hope will be some wine and other things. Thank you.


So my original intention for this video was to go on a rant about how one of the worst pieces of advice that anyone can give is that package managers actually make a difference in your distro choice. And the problem with my original video idea is that I've given this advice before. I have made many videos where I have claimed one of the things that you should pay attention to when choosing a distro is the package manager. And I was wrong. So this is something that I've changed my mind on. And as I've thought more about it, I've come to realize that what really matters isn't the package manager that you're using. Now you can have your own favorite package manager, a lot of people like Pac-Man, a lot of people like Apt, you know, some people like DNF, you know, you get the idea. Everyone has their thing that they prefer. But that doesn't mean that any one of them is better or worse than any of the others. And at the end of the day, even if one of them was better than any of the others, it doesn't matter because what truly matters is package availability. And this is something that I think that the whole package manager wars that has gone on forever really kind of misses the point on what people really care about when they choose a distro is can they get the applications that they need? It doesn't matter how you get them. Now it could matter if the package manager is like really, really bad or something like that. Very rare because the vast majority of distros are based on something else to have a very established, very well maintained package manager. So you know, if it's based on art, they're all going to be using Pac-Man. If it's based on Debian, everything's going to be using Apt. You get the idea, right? So at the end of the day, this whole argument that I have used and many others have used about how when you choose a distro, your package manager is one of the premier choices that you need to make is really very wrong headed because the biggest thing that people need to research when they choose a new distro or when they choose a first distro is can they get the packages that they want from that distro, be it through any number of different means. So when you choose a different distro or a new distro, you want to make sure, hey, does it have the version of Kaden live that I need? Does it have the version of OBS that I need? You know, sewn and so forth. And it does all come down to is the package there and is the version that I need there because some distros have much older software. So that does play a role.  If you need something more recent, you'd use something like Arch or Fedora or something like that. So at the end of the day, package managers just do not matter whatsoever. And the thing is, is that this idea that we have that package managers are important distract us from the fact that when it comes to package availability, Linux is pretty much universal these days. And I know that is something that is not always true. So you can make a case that the more esoteric packages are still packaged mainly for Ubuntu or Arch or whatever. But when it comes to mainstream packages, it's no longer the case where you have to be able to use Ubuntu in order to use those things, or you have to use Arch in order to use those things, you know, if you want something, chances are you can get it on any distro you want. And the only thing that's going to change between distros is what version that distros applies. And this is even more of a non factor, really, now that flat packs and snaps and app images are here and have spread across Linux, you can get most of the mainstream stuff that you need from one of those three places. And those things are just diagnostic, you can get those things anywhere. So it makes package managers and even package availability a little less important overall. But I would still argue that the thing that most people should focus on is package availability, version availability, and things like that. The thing is, is if you choose a distro based on its package manager, you are going to be stuck with that package manager for as long as you use the distro. And it doesn't matter how good the package manager is, if you don't have access to the software that you want, then you're going to have some issues. And the distro will not have been a good experience for you. Now, as I just said, some of that harshness of life could be solved by one of the more universal package managers being snaps, flat packs or app images. So those will be more universal. There are some situations where you have to get a package from your distro. And that is when this whole idea that package managers really matter kind of falls apart because those packages have to be there in order for your package manager even get to the point of getting them. So just a really quick video today, I want to just talk about this. And like I said, I've been thinking about it for a while. And I was ranting in my head as I normally do. And I was like, you know, that's a really bad piece of advice to give somebody, hey, choose this distro because it uses this package managers better than all the other package managers. It doesn't really, it's not a good argument anymore. Maybe at one point it was when, you know, there was a big difference between package managers, like, you know, at one point, maybe apt was better than all the rest of them or at one point, Pac-Man was better than all the rest of them. Nowadays, they're pretty much even in terms of the things that they do, their speed and stuff like that. It's what they can have access to that really truly matters. So that is it for this video. If you have thoughts on this topic, you can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Meston or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast, just like all these fine people. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube, you guys are all absolutely amazing without you. The channel just would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you for watching and I'll see you everyone tomorrow. That's not how I usually end a video. How do I end it? I've forgotten how I end videos now. Anyways, thanks for watching. See you tomorrow.