Connecting Historiographies, Challenging Assumptions

Abstract

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. It was by sheer accident that I came across the topic at the origin and core of the present book. As an architectural historian interested in the working of modernity in pre-Nasserist Egypt, in the early 1990s I was fortuitously given access to an unprecedented resource on the making of Khedivial Cairo: the private papers of French architect Ambroise Baudry (1838–1906), who had been active in the city from 1871 to 1886. For the first time ever, the architectural fashioning of modern Cairo could be viewed and experienced through primary sources, instead of secondary, and mostly indirect, ones. Baudry’s carefully kept archive, then in his descendants’ hands, consisted of an extensive collection of correspondence (about 800 letters to family, friends, mentors and clients); an accounts’ ledger detailing commissions, costs, collaborators and contractors on an almost year-by-year basis; and sets of photographs and architectural drawings, a number of which were acquired in 2000 by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.1 The archive also contained documentation on his art collections: Baudry was an early enthusiast and proud owner of valuable Islamic objects from Egypt and Syria, among other high “curiosities,” the then current shorthand term for non-Western artworks. A selection of his Iznik tiles and Mamluk woodwork is now housed in the Musée du Louvre in Paris; while the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds carved and inlaid woodwork from his collection too. Most remaining pieces were dispersed in 1999 and 2000.2 The papers revealed a fine artist who gave birth to one of the most original and alluring form of Mamluk-inspired architecture conceived during