Florentine Arabic

Can we use the KHI Photothek for Islamic art history? This digital humanities project aims to answer this question. The "Florentine Arabic" website collects two hundred KHI photographs that link to Islamic art history. They include images of Arab-Norman sites in Palermo, Mamluk metalwork and Fatimid ivories in Florentine collections, and Italian Renaissance paintings and sculptures that include illegible Arabic lettering. The photographs are digitally "removed" from the physical boxes that categorized them by medium, period, and artist. The site rearranges the photographs to highlight the density and prevalence of illegible Arabic lettering in Italian art as well as trade networks and spiritual connections to Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Istanbul. In doing so, the project questions epistemologies of art history that cleaved the Mediterranean region into two fields of study. The project also demonstrates how photographs of art communicate layers of knowledge. 

Alex Dika Seggerman is Associate Professor of Art History at Rutgers University-Newark. She received her doctorate from Yale in 2014 in the history of art. Before arriving at Rutgers, she held postdoctoral fellowships at Smith College, Hampshire College, and Yale University. She was a Visiting Scholar at the KHI Photothek in Fall of 2024. Her scholarship investigates the intersection of Islam and modernism in art history. She is author of Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) and co-editor of Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2022). Dr. Seggerman’s work has been supported by the Historians of Islamic Art Association, the American Research Center in Egypt, the Barakat Foundation, the Millard Meiss Fund, the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. She was the 2023-2024 Patricia and Phillip Frost Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Museum of Asian Art.