Celestial & Poetic Bodies: ‘Abbas Ibn Firnas & Cordoban Spaces of Science

Imagines Mundi: The Global Middle Ages (Public Lecture)

Glaire D. Anderson

Associate Professor of Art History, University of North-Carolina at Chapel Hill

Friday, February 26, 2016 @ 4:00pm L140 Conrad A. Elvehjem Building

‘Abbas Ibn Firnas (d. 887), a Cordoban polymath and courtier, is representative of Islamic Iberia's participation in the early Islamic scientific revolution. He is famous for carrying out an early aeronautics experiment that has long been celebrated as the first successful human flight. Beyond the interest for history of science, Ibn Firnas' experiment, which is said to have taken place at the first Cordoban royal villa, also suggests intriguing connections with Islamic art, architecture and visual culture. In my talk I propose that this polymath’s career as a notable Andalusi court intellectual, designer, and ‘maker’ of scientific spaces and objects may illuminate overlooked connections between science, the arts, and design practices in al-Andalus and early Islamic courts.

Glaire D. Anderson is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Her specialty is Islamic art and architecture during the caliphal period, especially Iberia and North Africa. Medieval Islamic and Christian artistic interchange and female patronage are topics of her current work. Anderson is author of The Islamic Villa in Early Medieval Iberia: Aristocratic Estates and Court Culture in Umayyad Córdoba (2013) and co-editor of Revisiting al-Andalus: Perspectives on the Material Culture of Islamic Iberia and Beyond (2007).