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About this talk

Around 1490, an Egyptian artist known as 'Sabadino' migrated to Ferrara, Italy, and set up a workshop under the patronage of the ruling Este family. Sabadino produced carpets of a distinctive type that seems to have emerged in Mamluk Egypt around the middle of the century, and was already highly prized across the Mediterranean. Although the general outlines of his career in Ferrara were made known through archival research in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Sabadino has received little sustained scholarly attention. This talk provides an overview of Sabadino's activity in Ferrara, focusing in particular on how his work came to be interpreted in light of canonical themes of Renaissance art theory, such as the rebirth of antiquity, the social status of the artist, and the figure of the polymath. The aim is both to contribute to scholarship on this understudied artist, and to reevaluate the implications of artistic migration for wider understandings of the relationship between Italian and Islamic art in this period.

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