Between Alexandria and Rome? : reflections on artistic circulation and cross-cultural interaction in Ethiopian painting in the fifteenth century

The paper considers the appropriation of motifs borrowed from European visual culture in Ethiopian panel paintings under the rule of king Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (1434–1468) in relation to a crucial crosscultural dialogue between Ethiopia and the Mediterranean region. It examines the different motivations at work in the process of visual encounters from both the Ethiopian and the Mediterranean cultural perspective. Its conclusion suggests that appropriation of foreign motifs, as well as forms and their assimilation into local visual tradition by fifteenth-century Ethiopian artists, were conscious and crucial parts of visual rhetoric used for representing the King of Ethiopia.