Читать книгу Art in Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 22

One of the principal effects of contemporary globalization on art history has been to bring about a reappraisal of that cornerstone of the Western canon, the Renaissance, moving away from an exclusive focus on Italy and the classical heritage. Part IB reflects the recently emerged art‐historical interest in cultural developments during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the newly discovered lands to the west across the Atlantic. This present cluster of short texts making up IA5 offers documentary testimony to relations during the same period between Italian city states and the Islamic empires to the east: the Ottomans in present‐day Turkey, and the Mamluks in modern Egypt and Syria. As already shown by IA1 and IA3, Venice had been a gateway to the East for many years, to the Christian empire of Byzantium, and further afield, via the Silk Road, to China. With the final fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, a new chapter opened in these interactions, as Venice and other Italian city states strove to reach an accommodation with the emerging Islamic powers in the eastern Mediterranean: an area which was then one of the principal hubs of commercial and cultural exchange in the world (others being the Islamic maritime nexus linking Arabia, East Africa and southern India, and the Chinese sphere in East Asia). The extracts are presented chronologically. We have listed our sources after the introduction to each text.