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Florence and Baghdad
Renaissance Art and Arab Science
Hans Belting
Harvard University Press, 2011

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?

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front cover of Passing Strange and Wonderful
Passing Strange and Wonderful
Aesthetics Nature And Culture
Yi-Fu Tuan
Island Press, 1993

In this rich and rewarding work, Yi-Fu Tuan vividly demonstrates that feeling and beauty are essential components of life and society. The aesthetic is not merely one aspect of culture but its central core—both its driving force and its ultimate goal.

Beginning with the individual and his physical world, Tuan's exploration progresses from the simple to the complex. His initial evaluation of the building blocks of aesthetic experience (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch) develops gradually into a wide-ranging examination of the most elaborate of human constructs, including art, architecture, literature, philosophy, music, and more.

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