Focusing on a small hardstone vase likely created in Byzantium around the year 400, this talk traces the transformation of an agate nodule into a vessel and, in the seventeenth century, into a speculative investment. It seeks to illuminate the important role that media, materiality, and exoticism played in this early modern nexus, which saw the artist-diplomat Peter Paul Rubens, the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, and the ill-fated, Jakarta-bound Dutch East India Company ship the Batavia play signal parts.
Yael Rice is associate professor of the History of Art and of Asian Languages and Civilizations at Amherst College in Massachusetts. She is a specialist in the art and architecture of South Asia and Greater Iran, with a particular focus on manuscripts and other portable arts of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. Among her recent publications, she is the author of The Brush of Insight: Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court (University of Washington Press, 2023), which was a recipient of a Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant. She is also co-editor of Readings on Painting: From 75 Years of Marg (Marg, 2024) and guest editor of a special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture on “The Urgency of the Digital” (July 2025).
Co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History and the South Asia Institute
Event Details
Free and open to the public
A small reception will begin at 3:00