Global Renaissance

Traditionally, the Renaissance has been understood as a strictly Western phenomenon, a period of cultural and technological ‘advancement’ inspired by humanism and antique revival. European art and the wider world 1350–1550 takes a different approach. Informed by the latest scholarship in the field of art history, it explores the significance of the movement of knowledge, ideas and objects for the visual culture of Europe, against the backdrop of a global competition for power and resources.

The book investigates famous works of art from a new perspective, taking account of the complex relationships that bound Europe together with Asia, America and Africa. It also considers lesser-known objects such as ceramics, textiles and featherwork which were widely imported into Europe. Considering a range of geographical contexts from Spain to India, it explores European visual culture in the light of trade, colonisation, conversion and cultural exchange. Individual chapters examine the altarpiece in a global context; cultural encounters on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Americas; European collections of non-European objects; and Venice’s engagement with the Islamic Ottoman Empire and Mamluk Sultanate.

European art and the wider world is the first textbook to consider the Renaissance in the context of global art history. It will appeal to undergraduate art history students as well as a general readership eager to look at canonical works from a new perspective.

In epideictic oratory, ekphrasis is typically identified as an
advanced rhetorical exercise that verbally reproduces the
experience of viewing a person, place, or thing; more specifically, it
often purports to replicate the experience of viewing a work of art.
Not only what was seen, but also how it was beheld, and the
emotions attendant upon first viewing it, are implicitly construed
as recoverable, indeed reproducible.
This volume examines how and why many early modern pictures
operate in an ekphrastic mode: such pictures claim to reconstitute
works of art that solely survived in the textual form of an ekphrasis;
or they invite the beholder to respond to a picture in the way s/he
responds to a stirring verbal image; or they call attention to their
status as an image, in the way that ekphrasis, as a rhetorical figure,
makes one conscious of the process of image-making; or finally,
they foreground the artist’s or the viewer’s agency, in the way that
the rhetor or auditor is adduced as agent of the image being
verbally produced.

This article revisits Anthony Sherley's Relation of his trauels into Persia (1613), reading the text within the larger context of early modern Eurasia. It highlights the ways in which at least one European traveler sought and found not alterity, but commensurable structures, social roles, political ideologies, and personal motivations in the Islamic polities to the east and emphasized these connections to his European readers. Furthermore, in making the case that Sherley's narrative is informed by local actors in Safavid Persia, it maintains that a certain level of Eastern knowledge is present within Western texts from this period and awaits scholarly excavation.

Series Editors: Claire Jowitt, University of East Anglia, UK & John McAleer, University of Southampton, UK

Editorial board: Mary Fuller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; Fred Hocker, Vasa Museum, Sweden; Steven Mentz, St John’s University, USA; Sebastian Sobecki, University of Groningen, Netherlands; David J. Starkey, University of Hull, UK; & Philip Stern, Duke University, USA

Early modern oceans not only provided temperate climates, resources, and opportunities for commercial exchange, they also played a central role in cultural life. Increased exploration, travel, and trade, marked this period of history, and early modern seascapes were cultural spaces and contact zones, where connections and circulations occurred outside established centres of control and the dictates of individual national histories. Likewise, coastlines, rivers, and ports were all key sites for commercial and cultural exchange.

Interdisciplinary in its approach, Maritime Humanities, 1400–1800: Cultures of the Sea welcomes books from across the full range of humanities subjects, and invites submissions that conceptually engage with issues of globalization, post-colonialism, eco-criticism, environmentalism, and the histories of science and technology. The series puts maritime humanities at the centre of a transnational historiographical scholarship that seeks to transform traditional land-based histories of states and nations by focusing on the cultural meanings of the early modern ocean.

O Renascimento é um fenômeno cultural, social, ideológico e político essencialmente europeu. O termo “renascimento” é cunhado na Itália e faz referência à retomada de valores retórico-visuais remontantes à Antiguidade Greco-Romana. Durante muitos séculos, de fato, o Renascimento era considerado, mais que europeu, italiano, e foi somente do longo do século XX que começaram a consolidar-se narrativas, por exemplo, de um Renascimento Ibérico ou Flamengo. Mais recentemente, a partir sobretudo da segunda década do século XXI, surgiram diversas pesquisas em uma nova área: o assim chamado Renascimento Global. Neste episódio discutiremos como esse crescente campo procura aproximar investigações multidisciplinares sobre o renascimento de geografias extra-européias, concentrando-se em intercâmbios artísticos, culturais e materiais entre a África, América, Ásia e Europa.

Convidadas: Amy Buono e Carolina Martínez
Host: Maria Berbara

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWXoRM5myC0