ABSTRACT
Oluf Tychsen (1734–1815), professor of Oriental languages at the Universities of Bützow and Rostock, formed part of a wide-ranging network of European scholars involved in the “rediscovery” of objects from Islamic Lands in Enlightenment Europe. This article focuses on Tychsen’s involvement with one particular group of objects: garments with Arabic inscriptions from Norman Sicily. One set of these consists of the famous mantle, alb and stockings, used for centuries as coronation garments of the Holy Roman Empire. A second set comprises the Sicilian royal garments discovered when the royal tombs in the cathedral of Palermo were opened in 1781. By the eighteenth century, the coronation garments’ Sicilian origins had been forgotten. Tracing Tychsen’s contribution to the decipherment of the garments’ inscriptions and the ensuing attempts to localise the garments’ medieval production, the paper first aims to shed light on the methods and media of scholarly interchange. Turning to both published sources and archival material from Tychsen’s estate, special emphasis will lie on the use of prints and drawings as intermediaries in the interpretation of these “Oriental” objects. Secondly, I propose to focus on Tychsen’s highly interesting misreading and misinterpretation of these objects, which, as I shall argue, are particularly revealing in terms of modern preconceptions about self and other, and Islamic and European cultural identities.
