- Introduction: Describing a Culture: Blickwechsel (Shifting Focus / Exchanging Glances)
- 1. Perspective as a Question of Images: Paths between East and West
- What Is a Symbolic Form?
- Arab Mathematics and Western Art
- Geometry and Decorative Art: The Arabesque
- The Globalization of Perspective
- Blickwechsel: Orhan Pamuk and Perspective as a “Betrayal”
- 2. The Taming of the Eye: Criticism of Seeing in Islam
- Religion and the Prohibition of Images
- Images as a Betrayal of the Living Creation
- The Koran as Scripture and Script
- Under the Gaze of Allah: Pictures as Narrative
- Blickwechsel: Pictures with a Living Gaze
- 3. Alhazen’s Measurement of Light and the Arab Invention of the Camera Obscura
- Alhazen’s Book of Optics, the Perspectiva
- Distance from Ancient Visual Culture
- Pathways of Light and Properties of Objects
- Mathematics and Geometry in Islamic Art
- Blickwechsel: Kepler Rediscovers the Camera Obscura
- 4. Perception as Knowledge: A Theory of Vision Becomes a Theory of Pictures
- Scholasticism and the Conflict over Perception and Epistemology
- Before Perspective: The Gaze in Giotto’s Painting
- Pelacani’s Invention of Mathematical Space
- Ghiberti’s Commentaries and Piero’s Mathematical Art
- Blickwechsel: Alhazen or Euclid? The Option for Vitruvius
- 5. Brunelleschi Measures the Gaze: Mathematical Perspective and Theater
- Two Inventors in Florence
- Physical Space: The Architecture of the Gaze
- “Prospects” on the Stage
- Panoramas in Urbino
- Blickwechsel: The Geometry of the Muqarnas
- 6. The Subject in the Picture: Perspective as a Symbolic Form
- Stealing an Emblem: The Eye as Representative of the Gaze
- Nicholas of Cusa and the Sovereignty of God’s Gaze
- The Subject as New Narcissus
- The Horizon and the View through a Window
- Blickwechsel: The Mashrabiyya as a Symbolic Form
- Conclusion: Comparing the Gaze in Different Cultures
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
Florence and Baghdad
Renaissance Art and Arab Science
Product Details
HARDCOVER
$39.95 • £34.95 • €36.95
ISBN 9780674050044
Publication Date: 08/31/2011
Awards & Accolades
- A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2011
- A Big Think Best Art Book of 2011
Share This
Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library
I Tatti Renaissance Library
Loeb Classical Library
Murty Classical Library of India