Jacopo Gnisci

Jacopo is the Chair of the History of Art department’s Boards of Examiners and a Lecturer in the Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South as well as a and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Africa, Oceania, and the America at the British Museum. He is currently the co-Principal Investigator the projects Demarginalizing medieval Africa: Images, texts, and identity in early Solomonic Ethiopia (1270-1527) (AHRC Grant Ref. no. AH/V002910/1; DFG Projektnummer 448410109). Formerly, he co-dicrected other projects including Material Migrations: Mamluk Metalwork across Afro-Eurasia (Gerda Henkel Stiftung). Jacopo sits on the editorial board of several journals for medieval and African studies including Gesta, Aethiopica: International Journal of Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies, and the Rassegna di Studi Etiopici and currently serves as an Associate of the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA). His research has also featured in the media, in newspapers such as the New York Times and the Evening Standard. He has worked at Dallas Museum of Art and UT Dallas, the University of Hamburg, the Vatican Library, at the University of Oxford, and the British Museum. He has received several awards including a Getty/ACLS Fellowship and a gold medal from the Sheherazade Foundation. Jacopo has been carrying out fieldwork in East Africa for over 10 years.

Research

Jacopo’s research focuses on the history of manuscript illustration, on the art and architecture of Ethiopia and Eritrea, and on the marginalization of African art in Western institutions. He has covered on a range of topics including the interconnections between art and the liturgy, the transmission and reconceptualization of visual culture through portable objects such as medieval manuscripts, and the relationship between text and image and the creation of sainlty images, the significance of materiality and space in religious contexts, repatriation, the representation of Africans in pre-modern Western art, and the intersection of racism and scholarship in the late ninteenth century. He has moreover published studies on the use, significance, and/or symbolism of icons, metalwork, and ecclesiastical vestments in Ethiopia, and has been the first author to have an article on East Africa published in The Art Bulletin. His research has featured in documentaries, magazines, such as the Pitt Rivers and Apollo magazines, and newspapers such as the New York Times. He has been involved in several exhibitions, including Africa and Byzantium (2023-24) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Peace, Power and Prestige: Metal Arts in Africa (2020) at the Harn Museum of Art and Languages of God: Sacred Scripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea (2019) at the Bodleian Libraries, which was co-curated with members of the Ethiopian and Eritrean diaspora. The latter exhibition was accompanied by the publication of the volume Treasures of Ethiopia and Eritrea in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (2019), which he edited.

Jacopo has been invited to talk at a wide range of institutions, including the University of Oxford, NYU, Dumbarton Oaks, Yale, The Musée du Louvre, Harvard, the University of Cambridge, and the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures.

Specialisms
Medieval art and architecture of Africa; Illuminated manuscripts; Ethiopian and Eritrean art.