Cover: Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, from Harvard University PressCover: Florence and Baghdad in HARDCOVER

Florence and Baghdad

Renaissance Art and Arab Science

Product Details

HARDCOVER

$39.95 • £34.95 • €36.95

ISBN 9780674050044

Publication Date: 08/31/2011

Short

312 pages

40 color illustrations, 71 halftones

Belknap Press

World

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Related Subjects

  • 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

Awards & Accolades

  • A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2011
  • A Big Think Best Art Book of 2011

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