The Globalization Of Renaissance Art

An interdisciplinary group of scholars evaluates the global discourse on Early Modern European art.

More than ever before, the Renaissance stands as one of the defining moments in world history. Between 1400 and 1600, European perceptions of society, culture, politics and even humanity itself emerged in ways that continue to affect not only Europe but the entire world. This wide-ranging exploration of the Renaissance sees the period as a time of unprecedented intellectual excitement and cultural experimentation and interaction on a global scale, alongside a darker side of religion, intolerance, slavery, and massive inequality of wealth and status. It guides the reader through the key issues that defined the period, from its art, architecture, and literature, to advancements in the fields of science, trade, and travel. In its incisive account of the complexities of the political and religious upheavals of the period, the book argues that Europe's reciprocal relationship with its eastern neighbours offers us a timely perspective on the Renaissance as a moment of global inclusiveness that still has much to teach us today.

This companion examines the global Renaissance through object-based case studies of artistic production from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe in the early modern period. The international group of contributors take an art historical approach characterized by close analysis of form and meaning as well as function, and a focus on questions of cross-cultural dialogue and adaptation. Seeking to de-emphasize the traditional focus on Europe, this book is a critical guide to the literature and the state of the field. Chapters outline new questions and agendas while pushing beyond familiar material. Main themes include workshops, the migrations of artists, objects, technologies, diplomatic gifts, imperial ideologies, ethnicity and indigeneity, sacred spaces and image cults, as well as engaging with the open questions of "the Renaissance" and "the global." This will be a useful and important resource for researchers and professors alike and will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, material culture, and Renaissance studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at http: //www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license

This title was first published in 2000: Michelangelo gave his painting of "Leda and the Swan" to an apprentice rather than hand it over to the emissary of the Duke of Ferrar, who had commissioned it. He was apparently disgusted by the failure of the emissary - who was probably more used to buying pigs than discussing art - to accord the picture and the artist the value they deserved. Any discussion of works of art and material culture implicitly assigns them a set of values. Whether these values be monetary, cultural or religious, they tend to constrict the ways in which such works can be discussed. The variety of potential forms of valuation becomes particularly apparent during the Italian Renaissance, when relations between the visual arts and humanistic studies were undergoing rapid changes against an equally fluid social, economic and political background. In this volume, 13 scholars explicitly examine some of the complex ways in which a variety of values might be associated with Italian Renaissance material culture. Papers range from a consideration of the basic values of the materials employed by artists, to the manifestation of cultural values in attitudes to dress and domestic devotion. By illuminating some of the ways in which values were constructed, they provide a broader context within which to evaluate Renaissance material culture.

This important and innovative book examines artists' mobility as a critical aspect of Italian Renaissance art. It is well known that many eminent artists such as Cimabue, Giotto, Donatello, Lotto, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian traveled. This book is the first to consider the sixteenth-century literary descriptions of their journeys in relation to the larger Renaissance discourse concerning mobility, geography, the act of creation, and selfhood. David Young Kim carefully explores relevant themes in Giorgio Vasari's monumental Lives of the Artists, in particular how style was understood to register an artist's encounter with place. Through new readings of critical ideas, long-standing regional prejudices, and entire biographies, The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance provides a groundbreaking case for the significance of mobility in the interpretation of art and the wider discipline of art history.

In this lavishly illustrated study, Belting deals with the double history of perspective, as a visual theory based on geometrical abstraction (in the Middle East) and as pictorial theory (in Europe). Florence and Baghdad addresses a provocative question that reaches beyond the realm of aesthetics and mathematics: What happens when Muslims and Christians look upon each other and find their way of viewing the world transformed as a result?

How global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present, combating modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism. If European modernism was premised on the new—on surpassing the past, often by assigning it to the “traditional” societies of the Global South—global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present. In this account of what globalization means for contemporary art, David Joselit argues that the creative use of tradition by artists from around the world serves as a means of combatting modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism. Modernism claimed to live in the future and relegated the rest of the world to the past. Global contemporary art shatters this myth by reactivating various forms of heritage—from literati ink painting in China to Aboriginal painting in Australia—in order to propose new and different futures. Joselit analyzes not only how heritage becomes contemporary through the practice of individual artists but also how a cultural infrastructure of museums, biennials, and art fairs worldwide has emerged as a means of generating economic value, attracting capital and tourist dollars. Joselit traces three distinct forms of modernism that developed outside the West, in opposition to Euro-American modernism: postcolonial, socialist realism, and the underground. He argues that these modern genealogies are synchronized with one another and with Western modernism to produce global contemporary art. Joselit discusses curation and what he terms “the curatorial episteme,” which, through its acts of framing or curating, can become a means of recalibrating hierarchies of knowledge—and can contribute to the dual projects of decolonization and deimperialization.

A team of specialists addresses a foundational concept as central to early modern thinking as to our own: that the past is always an important part of the present.