Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science - Rilegato

Belting, Hans

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0674050045 ISBN 13: 9780674050044

Casa editrice: Belknap Pr, 2011

Riassunto

The use of perspective in Renaissance painting caused a revolution in the history of seeing, allowing artists to depict the world from a spectator’s point of view. But the theory of perspective that changed the course of Western art originated elsewhere—it was formulated in Baghdad by the eleventh-century mathematician Ibn al Haithan, known in the West as Alhazen. Using the metaphor of the mutual gaze, or exchanged glances, Hans Belting—preeminent historian and theorist of medieval, Renaissance, and contemporary art—narrates the historical encounter between science and art, between Arab Baghdad and Renaissance Florence, that has had a lasting effect on the culture of the West.

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). How could geometrical abstraction be reconceived as a theory for making pictures? During the Middle Ages, Arab mathematics, free from religious discourse, gave rise to a theory of perspective that, later in the West, was transformed into art when European painters adopted the human gaze as their focal point. In the Islamic world, where theology and the visual arts remained closely intertwined, the science of perspective did not become the cornerstone of Islamic art. 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?

Su questo libro

Recensione:

"It is hard to do justice to the brilliance and complexity of this book, which provides no less than than a complete re-evaluation of the origins of perspective in Western art...[It] is a remarkable and brave book."
-- --Literary Review, November 2011
"The book's main remit is to spell out a sequence of conceptual changes in the meanings of vision and visual art running from antiquity to Islam and Western Christendom, and in this it is memorable and convincing." --Julian Bell, London Review of Books, 25 October 2012

"Hans Belting, in Florence and Baghdad, gives an exhilarating new perspective on unexpected conjunctions; the book is beautifully illustrated." --Marina Warner, The Observer, 25 November 2012

L'autore:

Hans Belting is Professor for Art History and Media Theory at the Academy for Design in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Belknap Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0674050045
• ISBN 13: 9780674050044
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 303