#   Framed: Pictures from Asia in Eighteenth-Century Europe 

 



    ![abstract horizontal pattern](/sites/g/files/omnuum4936/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/mahindra/files/visualrepresentation.jpg?itok=MyTXkXIv) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **November 17, 2026** 

 05:30PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Sackler Building, Room 422**  



 

 



 

## [VISUAL REPRESENTATION, MATERIALITY, AND MEDIUM](/visual-representation-materiality-and-medium)

## SPEAKER: Kristel Smentek, MIT Department of Architecture

To frame a picture is to distinguish it, to mark it as demanding a form of visual attention that is different from every day seeing. This paper probes the ambivalent European reception of paintings on paper from Asia via their frames: those they traveled with, those they were adapted to fit when they arrived in Europe, as well as those they may have inspired. Works on paper from Asia, notably those mounted in Indo-Persianate muraqqa or albums, offered eighteenth-century Europeans new and different models for framing works of art that challenged European viewing habits. They also arguably informed the distinctive paper frames for old master drawings devised by eighteenth-century European collectors. Notable among these collectors are the English painter, Jonathan Richardson, who owned Mughal paintings, and the French connoisseur, Pierre-Jean Mariette, who documented his encounter with a Persian muraqqa in 1736. The album he saw is still intact, and a visual comparison of its pages with Mariette’s celebrated mounts for drawings suggests he selectively adopted Persian display practices. That he did so, despite his open disregard for Islamic art, is indicative of the complex reception of imported paintings in eighteenth-century Europe and the ways in which display practices bring into view what the disparaging texts of the period obscure.

### About the Speaker

Kristel Smentek is professor of art history in the department of architecture at MIT. She is a historian of early modern European art whose current research focuses on eighteenth-century graphic arts and decorative arts in their transcultural contexts. Her publications include *Rococo Exotic: French Mounted Porcelains and the Allure of the East* (2007), *Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe* (2014), and *Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of the Enlightenment* (2022), the catalog of an exhibition she co-curated at the Harvard Art Museums. She is currently completing *Disorient: Arts from China in Eighteenth-Century France*, a book on the complexities of Sino-French artistic exchange over the long eighteenth century.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Seminar ](/event-type/seminar)
- [ Visual Representation, Materiality, and Medium ](/seminars/visual-representation-materiality-and-medium)
 
 

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