Ling U

Femke DIERCKS is Head of Decorative Arts and curator of European Ceramics at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. She has been with the museum since 2009 and previously worked on the catalogue: Paris 1650-1900. Decorative Arts at the Rijksmuseum. In 2015 she co-curated the exhibition Asia in Amsterdam. Luxury in the Golden Age with Jan van Campen and Karina Corrigan (Peabody Essex Museum, Salem Mass.) She is currently working on an exhibition about the Dutch interior in the Seventeenth Century and the Delftware collection of the Rijksmuseum.

In the past few decades, the narrative around Dutch Delftware has changed from one describing merely a Dutch cultural icon to a broader story connecting to a much larger art world. Renewed attention is being paid to the Asian sources for Delftware, both in terms of decorations (prints) and shapes. And the story of the ‘invention’ on Delftware has shifted from a Dutch success story to a pan-European effort. In this lecture I would like to address the ongoing challenges for researchers and museums to celebrate the Dutch fascination with ceramics, without avoiding the larger and often darker global context that this development was a part of.

Alessandra DI CROCE
Alessandra Di Croce’s research focuses on early-modern visual and material culture, investigating how artifacts and art objects can help addressing historical questions regarding ideology, power, cultural and religious identity. She has published in Italian journals and, more recently, in the edited volume Re-Thinking, re-Making, re-Living Christian Origins (Rome 2018). She is currently working on a book entitled Fragments of Truth. Evidence and Imagination in post-Tridentine Representation of Christian Antiquity.