Federica Gigante
Research interests
I am an (art) historian of the material and intellectual exchanges between the Islamic world and Europe. I am interested in how things, people, and ideas moved across the Mediterranean and were adopted and adapted in new cultural contexts. I specialise in Islamic art and Islamic scientific instruments and worked for several years as a museum curator.
My PhD thesis – Importing, Trading, and Collecting Islamic Artworks in Seventeenth-Century Italy: the Cospi Museum and the Bologna Collection – which was jointly supervised at The Warburg Institute (Charles Burnett) and SOAS (Anna Contadini), explores the Islamic art collection of Bologna. In particular, it examines the dynamics and mechanisms that allowed Islamic artefacts to travel from the Islamic world to Italy in the early modern period and the connected knowledge that came with them through mercantile, collecting and gift-exchange networks focusing on the collection of Ferdinando Cospi and their patrons, the Medici family.
My current project focuses on the role of Muslim galley-slaves in the transmission of Islamic material culture and technical and scientific knowledge in Europe in the early modern period. My research has been supported by the Royal Society, the Renaissance Society of America, the Iran Heritage Foundation, the Delmas Foundation, the Max Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, and the Research Center for Anatolian Civilisations of Koç University in Istanbul.
Research areas
Islamic art in Europe; cross-cultural exchanges between the Islamic world and Europe; history of collecting; astronomical instruments from the Islamic world; astrolabes and celestial globes; Islamic metalwork; the circulation of technologies and decorative vocabulary across central Asia and the Mediterranean.
Faculty / College address:
Exeter College
The Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
Current Projects:
PI of ERC Starting Grant UNSEEN, Unveiling Networks: Slavery and the European ENcounter with Islamic material culture (2025-30)
Hanna Kiel Fellow, I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Galley Slaves and the Circulation of Islamic Material Culture, Knowledge and Scientific Practices in Early Modern Italy
In the Media
The Guardian - ‘Extraordinary’: Islamic and Jewish science merge in 11th-century astrolabe
The New York Times - This 1,000-Year-Old Smartphone Just Dialed In
The Times - Thousand-year-old star chart shines light on Jewish-Arab
Der Welt - So wanderte das 1000 Jahre alte Astrolabium von Hand zu Hand
Scientific American - ‘How a Rare Islamic Astrolabe Helped Muslims, Jews and Christians Tell Time and Read Horoscopes’
El País - ‘Descubierto un astrolabio andalusí que usaron musulmanes, judíos y cristianos’
Le Monde - ‘Un curieux astrolabe médiéval gravé d’inscriptions en arabe et en hébreu’
La Repubblica - ‘L’astrolabio della pace. Scritto in caratteri arabi, ebrei e latini nell’anno Mille: “Indica che la convivenza è possibile”’
Interview with Bayt al Fann
Exhibitions:
Cultures in Conversation: Precious and Rare Islamic Metalwork from The Courtauld, History of Science Museum, Oxford, and online, 9 October-10 January, 2020-21
From Istanbul to Oxford – the Origins of Coffee-Drinking in England, Ashmolean Museum, 28 September-15 March 2019-20
Dimensions: The Mathematics of Symmetry and Space, Ashmolean Museum, 16 March-9 June 2018
Forthcoming Publications:
Islamic Objects in 17th-Century Italy: Ferdinando Cospi, the Bologna Collection and the Medici Court, Edinburgh University Press
“Casaubon on Arabic and Turkish Coins: a European Network of Exchange”, with Andrew Burnett, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 87
“An Islamic Tent Fresco in the Church of St Antonio in Polesine in Ferrara”, The Burlington Magazine
“The Construction of Celestial Globes According to al-Sufi’s Tradition”, in Ulugh Beg’s Manuscript of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī, Book of Fixed Stars (Arabe 5036), Müller und Schindler
