Global Interests

"I think this expands on the two features of Renaissance scholarship that I’m interested in, and that I mentioned at the beginning. On the one hand, it’s again focused on material culture – so it privileges discussion of coins, tapestries and horses over oil paintings and great works of literature. But it’s also a study that wrenches the Renaissance away from its traditional centre. For example, one of its opening gambits is to tell us about the portrait that Gentile Bellini – a very famous Venetian artist – painted of the Sultan Mehmet II while Bellini was in Istanbul in the 1470s. He’d been loaned to the sultan’s court by Venice as a sort of international relations initiative. Again, we’re being pulled away from our assumptions. What the book shows again and again is the fascination which Renaissance Italians and Renaissance Western Europeans had with the East. The tapestries that the Westerners commissioned, which depict camels and giraffes, and their absolute obsession with Arab horses – it all really fleshes out the exchanges, and the very intricate cultural relationships between West and East during this period. No – although it is published by Reaktion, who pioneered (or re-pioneered, perhaps) the notion that academic books should be beautiful books. And in fact there are some very beautiful illustrations in it – particularly of the tapestries – and I think these are important. Not only do the images enable Brotton and Jardine to develop their arguments in a clear and persuasive way, but they also permit the reader to engage with and question the interpretations that are presented in the book. No self-respecting historian would advance a theory without detailed reference to her documentary sources, and we should expect the same degree of transparency in the treatment of visual and material sources."