Acknowledgments

This book builds on the lectures I gave as LUCIS Fall Fellow at the University of Leiden in 2017, thanks to an invitation kindly and generously arranged by Léon Buskens. Entitled “Taking things seriously: Patterns of art consumption across the modern Mediterranean,” the talks were meant to be published in the following year and thus this text has been long overdue. The pandemic of Spring 2020 offered the opportunity to postpone its finalisation no longer.

I have kept fond memories of the days spent in Leiden, and the rich exchanges I have had with colleagues and students from varied origins and disciplines, during the lectures, but also, and more importantly, afterwards, during the convivial culinary moments that followed each talk, a (Dutch?) tradition that I am keen to replicate whenever possible. The issues discussed in the book benefitted from extended stays at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Research Department in London, to which I was associated as visiting fellow from 2015 to 2019, and from privileged access to the vast resources of the museum in the matter of acquisition and provenance of Middle Eastern artefacts. The book furthermore incorporates material from previous research, collected in particular during a visiting fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 2010.

Presentations of parts of the text at successive seminars and lectures in Paris, London, Cambridge, Zurich, Cairo, and Athens triggered inspirational exchanges. I am particularly indebted to François Pouillon who agreed to read a large part of the working draft of the book at a crucial moment in its development. Many persons provided help and support along the way at libraries and archives, and made useful suggestions. I shared with a number of colleagues and students the pleasure of recurrent visits to Historic Cairo, and the delight at the inexhaustible discoveries the city provides. For their contribution one way or another to this book, I wish to thank all my colleagues at InVisu, the research centre where I am based in Paris, as well as Frédéric Abecassis, Ghislaine Alleaume, Sylvie Aubenas, Naby Avcıoğlu, Dina Bakhoum, Laurent Bavay, Hélène Bendejacq, Ronan Bouttier, Moya Carey, Thomas Cazentre, Angelos Dalachanis, Marie-Christine David, Petra de Bruijn, Khaled Fahmy, Anna Ferrari, Sarah Fathallah, Francine Giese, Sami di Giosa, Xavier Granier, Fuchsia Hart, Elina Heikka, Suzanne Higgott, Abbas Hilmi, Matjaz Kacicnik, Yannick Lintz, Briony Llewellyn, Helen Mc Lallen, Adam Mestyan, Nicolas Michel, Pascal Mora, Karima Nasr, Joanna Norman, Elke Pflugradt, Thierry Rambaud, Ella Ravillious, Mariam Rosser-Owen, Ola Seif, Alice Sidoli, Petra Sijpesteijn, Laure Soustiel, Tim Stanley, Deniz Türker, Arnoud Vrolijk. I am deeply grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on an earlier version of the manuscript. Last but not least, my profound gratitude goes to the many libraries, archives, and museums that are increasingly opening up their collections and making available online high definition images of the artworks they keep, or do promptly forward copies of excellent quality on demand, thus rendering a major service to academic research. They include the library of Institut français d’archéologie orientale in Cairo, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the library of Institut national d’histoire de l’art, and the documentation centre of the Department of Islamic Art at the Musée du Louvre, all in Paris, the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Châlon-sur-Saone, the Institut français du Proche-Orient in Beirut, the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Leiden University Libraries, the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva, the Wellcome collection, London, the National Gallery of Art, the Archives of American Art, and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, the Cooper Hewitt Museum, New York, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, Cornell University Library and Akkasah: the Center for Photography of New York University Abu Dhabi.