Fashioning Immersive Displays in Egypt and Beyond

Abstract

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Among the collectors who lent works of Islamic Art to the 1865 and 1869 retrospective shows of the Union centrale des beaux-arts appliqués à l’industrie in Paris, two groups can tentatively be differentiated in terms of display. On the one hand, were art lovers who typically kept their pieces in glass cases and cabinets, such as the Marquess of Hertford, or alternatively were to install “treasure chambers” (in German, Schatzkammer), as the Rothschilds famously did. Alphonse de Rothschild, who exhibited “Arab” enamelled glass in 1865, had his precious specimens, together with rock crystal, carved ivories and medieval enamels, locked in a mezzanine room at his hôtel particulier [private mansion] on 2 Saint-Florentin Street in Paris. The smoking room created in 1889 by Ferdinand de Rothschild at Waddesdon Manor for his valuable Renaissance Museum, visually epitomises how objects, such as the famous Palmer Cup (a thirteenth-century enamelled glass beaker from Egypt or Syria mounted on a French silver-gilt foot) and a Mamluk mosque lamp, were presented: they were lined up and protected under glass.1 (Fig. 87) On the other hand were artists, architects and would-be designers who engaged in arranging immersive displays for their curios and pieces of salvage. Some of the atmospheric rooms they created were rather casually conceived. In the studio of Mariano Fortuny y Marsal in Rome, the bricà-brac coexisted side by side with valuable collectibles and some of them performed mundane