Beatrice Campi – “An introduction to early Safavid jewellery”

An often discarded topic, recipe Safavid jewellery to this day keeps puzzling  many Safavid and Iranian art experts. Does such a thing as Safavid jewellery exist? And if so, nurse why did this production not share the same fame of Ottoman and Mughal jewellery, viagra given that the Islamic Gunpowder Empires ruled concurrently over the Islamic territories and must have clearly been exchanging goods and diplomatic gifts among each other? This talk will try to unravel some of these questions and will mostly focus on the origins of the Safavid jewellery tradition.

Beatrice Campi is an alumna of the Postgraduate Diploma of Asian Arts (a. a. 2012/2013) and a Master Graduate in History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies). In 2014, she graduated with Distinction writing an MA dissertation on The Bejewelled Aesthetic of the Three Great Islamic Empires in the 16th-17th Centuries. Her research focuses on the earliest developments of the Islamic Gunpowder Empires’ fashion to heavily encrust all sorts of daily objects and personal accessories, including jewellery, vessels, and weapons. She is particularly intrigued by the different degrees of artistic indebtedness and independent experimentation of each Islamic Empire. Her passionate interest in Islamic and Indo-Islamic art had already started to flourish at the time of her undergraduate studies (BA) in Venice, where she successfully got a combined degree of Islamic Art and Eurasian languages (Persian and Hindi). In the past two years, she has been working at Christie’s as a Client Service Representative, working side by side with several specialist departments especially Islamic Art and Jewellery. She has also presented the proceedings of her researches at various academic conferences and courses, such as the SAMS (Society for Archaeological Masters Students) Annual Conference II 2014, Institute of Archaeology, UCL; the BIPS (British Institute of Persian Studies) Glasgow Workshop 2015; and the short course Traditions of Gems & Jewellery: Asia and the Middle East, Postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art, SOAS University.