To Represent, or Not: An Ideology of the Image in the Kingdom of Ethiopia with Claire Bosc-Tiessé

In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Claire Bosc-Tiessé (National Center for Scientific Research and School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in France / Clark Fellow) will look at what Ethiopians, depending on their position in society—rulers, high-ranking lay or religious dignitaries, parish priests or ordinary believers, women or men—did with their images and in their images: how they thought about them, how they made them or had them made, what they represented or what they did not represent, how they placed and moved them in space. Through a corpus of images dating from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, she will observe material transformations and changes in use, and how this tells us about the importance attached to a singular object, what might be expected of its visual effect, about the religious character ascribed to it, its use in strategies of power and, finally, about the status of the image in the Kingdom of Ethiopia more generally. 

Presented in person in the Clark auditorium. A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.

Image: The Virgin Mary in a manuscript of The Miracles of Mary (detail), 17th century. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Eth. d’Abbadie 114.