Courtly Mediators: Transcultural Objects between Renaissance Italy and the Islamic World

Description

In Courtly Mediators, Leah R. Clark investigates the exchange of a range of materials and objects, including metalware, ceramic drug jars, Chinese porcelain, and aromatics, across the early modern Italian, Mamluk, and Ottoman courts. She provides a new narrative that places Aragonese Naples at the center of an international courtly culture, where cosmopolitanism and the transcultural flourished, and in which artists, ambassadors, and luxury goods actively participated. By articulating how and why transcultural objects were exchanged, displayed, copied, and framed, she provides a new methodological framework that transforms our understanding of the Italian Renaissance court. Clark's volume provides a multi-sensorial, innovative reading of Italian Renaissance art. It demonstrates that the early modern culture of collecting was more than a humanistic enterprise associated with the European roots of the Renaissance. Rather, it was sustained by interactions with global material cultures from the Islamic world and beyond.

Leah R. Clark is Associate Professor of History of Art in the Department for Continuing Education and Fellow of Kellogg College at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Collecting Art in the Italian Renaissance Court (2018) and co-editor, with Kathleen Christian, of European Art and the Wider World, 1350-1550 (Manchester University Press, 2017).