Matters of Imagination: Reading an Image and Text Archive in the Long Eighteenth Century (HAA Colloquium)

In 1834 Pope Gregory XVI received five architectural drawings of a new Catholic church in India, an oil painting depicting its consecration ceremony, and a letter from the church’s patron, Begum Samru. Sovereign ruler of her territory, Begum Samru was a devout Catholic, and a powerful political player in northern India. The church was only one of her many architectural commissions and the painting part of her larger investment in portraiture. On receiving the drawings and painting, Pope Gregory had them framed and hung in a private antechamber in the Quirinale. Art historian Michael Ann Holly posits that materiality is the “meeting of matter and imagination, the place where opposites take refuge from their perpetual strife” which invokes, “corporeality, physicalness, substance, voluminosity, texture, tangibility, thingness, touchability.” This exposition of materiality allows me to probe the triangulated web of objectness and subjecthood in the encounter between Begum Samru and the Pope. I ask what archival materiality reveals but also what is forecloses or obfuscates. This colloquium is a dry run for a presentation at “Materialities: Archival Textures in Eighteenth-Century India,” a two-day symposium at Pomona College. About the Speaker: Mrinalini Rajagopalan is a Professor in the Department of History of Art & Architecture. Read her profile here: https://www.haa.pitt.edu/people/mrinalini-rajagopalan About the Image: An oil painting commissioned by Begum Samru