The Mobility Of People And Things In The Early Modern Mediterranean

For centuries artists, diplomats, and merchants served as cultural intermediaries in the Mediterranean. Stationed in port cities and other entrepôts of the Mediterranean, these go-betweens forged intercultural connections even as they negotiated and sometimes promoted cultural misunderstandings. They also moved objects of all kinds across time and space. This volume considers how the mobility of art and material culture is intertwined with greater Mediterranean networks from 1580 to 1880. Contributors see the movement of people and objects as transformational, emphasizing the trajectory of objects over single points of origin, multiplicity over unity, and mutability over stasis.

In the early modern period costume books and albums participated in the shaping of a new visual culture that displayed the diversity of the people of the known world on a variety of media including maps, atlases, screens, and scrolls. At the crossroads of early anthropology, geography, and travel literature, this textual and visual production blurred the lines between art and science. Costume books and albums were not a unique European production: in the Ottoman Empire and the Far East artists and geographers also pictured the dress of men and women of their own and faraway lands hybridizing the Renaissance western tradition. Acknowledging this circulation of knowledge and people through migration, travel, missionary and diplomatic encounters, this Element contributes to the expanding field of early modern cultural studies in a global perspective.

This richly illustrated volume, the first devoted to maritime art and galley slavery in early modern France, shows how royal propagandists used the image and labor of enslaved Muslims to glorify Louis XIV. Mediterranean maritime art and the forced labor on which it depended were fundamental to the politics and propaganda of France’s King Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715). Yet most studies of French art in this period focus on Paris and Versailles, overlooking the presence or portrayal of galley slaves on the kingdom’s coasts. By examining a wide range of artistic productions—ship design, artillery sculpture, medals, paintings, and prints—Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss uncover a vital aspect of royal representation and unsettle a standard picture of art and power in early modern France. With an abundant selection of startling images, many never before published, The Sun King at Sea emphasizes the role of esclaves turcs (enslaved Turks)—rowers who were captured or purchased from Islamic lands—in building and decorating ships and other art objects that circulated on land and by sea to glorify the Crown. Challenging the notion that human bondage vanished from continental France, this cross-disciplinary volume invites a reassessment of servitude as a visible condition, mode of representation, and symbol of sovereignty during Louis XIV’s reign.

In 1479, the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini arrived at the Ottoman court in Istanbul, where he produced his celebrated portrait of Sultan Mehmed II. An important moment of cultural diplomacy, this was the first of many intriguing episodes in the picture's history. Elizabeth Rodini traces Gentile's portrait from Mehmed's court to the Venetian lagoon, from the railway stations of war-torn Europe to the walls of London's National Gallery, exploring its life as a painting and its afterlife as a famous, often puzzling image. Rediscovered by the archaeologist Austen Henry Layard at the height of Orientalist outlooks in Britain, the picture was also the subject of a lawsuit over what defines a “portrait”; it was claimed by Italians seeking to hold onto national patrimony around 1900; and it starred in a solo exhibition in Istanbul in 1999. Rodini's focused inquiry also ranges broadly, considering the nature of historical evidence, the shifting status of authenticity and verisimilitude, and the contemporary political resonance of Old Master paintings. Told as an object biography and imagined as an exploration of art historical methodologies, this book situates Gentile's portrait in evolving dialogues between East and West, uncovering the many and varied ways that objects construct meaning.

This Element examines the material and social mechanisms that enacted mobility in the Renaissance and offers a new way to understand the period's dynamism, creativity, and conflict. It highlights the experiences of a wide range of mobile populations, paying particular attention to the concrete, practical dimensions of moving around at this time.

The Islamic world's artistic traditions experienced profound transformation in the 19th century as rapidly developing technologies and globalizing markets ushered in drastic changes in technique, style, and content. Despite the importance and ingenuity of these developments, the 19th century remains a gap in the history of Islamic art. To fill this opening in art historical scholarship, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean charts transformations in image-making, architecture, and craft production in the Islamic world from Fez to Istanbul. Contributors focus on the shifting methods of production, reproduction, circulation, and exchange artists faced as they worked in fields such as photography, weaving, design, metalwork, ceramics, and even transportation. Covering a range of media and a wide geographical spread, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean reveals how 19th-century artists in the Middle East and North Africa reckoned with new tools, materials, and tastes from local perspectives.

"When a rich man in seventeenth-century South Asia enjoyed a peaceful night's sleep, he imagined himself enveloped in a velvet sleep. In the poetic imagination of the time, the fine dew of early evening was like a thin cotton cloth from Bengal, and woolen shawls of downy pashmina sent by the Mughal emperors to their trusted noblemen approximated the soft hand of the ruler on the vassal's shoulder. Textiles in seventeenth-century South Asia represented more than cloth to their makers and users. They simulated sensory experience, from natural, environmental conditions to intimate, personal touch. The Art of Cloth in Mughal India is the first art historical account of South Asian textiles from the early modern era. Author Sylvia Houghteling resurrects a truth that seventeenth-century world citizens knew, but which has been forgotten in the modern era: South Asian cloth ranked among the highest forms of art in the global hierarchy of luxury goods, and had a major impact on culture and communication. While studies abound in economic history about the global trade in Indian textiles that flourished from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, they rarely engage with the material itself and are less concerned with the artistic-and much less the literary and social-significance of the taste for cloth. This book is richly illustrated with images of textiles, garments, and paintings that are held in little-known collections and have rarely, if ever, been published. Rather than rely solely on records of European trading companies, Houghteling draws upon poetry in local languages and integrates archival research from unpublished royal Indian inventories to tell a new history of this material culture, one with a far more balanced view of its manufacture and use, as well as its purchase and trade"--

This book investigates how ideas of and discourses about Europe have been affected by images of the Mediterranean Sea and its many worlds from the nineteenth century onwards. Surprisingly, modern scholars have often neglected such an influence and, in fact, in most histories of the idea of Europe the Mediterranean is conspicuously absent. This might partly be explained by the fact that historians have often identified Europe with modernity (and the Atlantic world) and, therefore, in opposition to the classical world (centred around the Mediterranean). This book will challenge such views, showing that a plethora of thinkers, from the early nineteenth century to the present, have refused to relegate the Mediterranean to the past. Importance is given to the idea of a distinct ‘meridian thought’, a notion first set forth by Albert Camus and now reworked by French and Italian thinkers. As most chapters argue, this might represent an important tool for rethinking the Mediterranean and, in turn, it might help us challenge received notions about European identity and rethink Europe as the locus of ‘modernity’. Mediterranean Europe(s): Rethinking Europe from its Southern Shores will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in European studies and Mediterranean history.