Florence and Baghdad is a refreshing appeal to view the genesis of the unconscious visual foundations in both cultures in all their historical complexity and to illuminate their interdependence. -- Die Tageszeitung You will find no better guide through this thicket of philosophy, optics, crafts and theology in East and West than Belting - and certainly no one else could make it so clear that these are not just old problems we can gladly leave to historians... If we look carefully we can still discover that most of what we thought we knew was wrong. Belting gives us a fresh new eye for art and the world. -- Frankfurter Rundschau The connection Belting establishes between long-known facts in the history of science and the origins of the "window view" is a stroke of genius. -- Suddeutsche Zeitung This book is an eye-opener for readers who will come to understand the limitations and drawbacks of the kinds of images that are omnipresent in our society in the form of films and photographs. -- Art: Das Kunstmagazin
Hans Belting is Professor for Art History and Media Theory at the Academy for Design in Karlsruhe, Germany.
It is hard to do justice to the brilliance and complexity of this
book, which provides no less than a complete re-evaluation of the
origins of perspective in Western art. Hans Belting, an
internationally recognized authority on the theory of art from
Hieronymus Bosch to Marcel Duchamp, argues that the scientific and
artistic genesis of linear perspective did not come out of the
Florence of Giotto and Brunelleschi as we are usually told by art
historians, but instead first emerged in eleventh-century Baghdad
in the work of Ibn al-Haytham (965–1040), a mathematician born in
Basra who became known in the West as Alhazen, ‘the Arab
Archimedes’… Florence and Baghdad is a remarkable and brave book
which takes on a highly contentious area of East-West artistic,
scientific and political exchange… It reads like a cross-cultural
Ways of Seeing: it is about art and science, painting and
mathematics, politics and religion, hermeneutics and phenomenology.
Ultimately it is the book of a very fine scholar learning to think
across cultures and resist simplistic separations at a time when
this is most needed.
*Literary Review*
Hans Belting, in Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab
Science, gives an exhilarating new perspective on unexpected
conjunctions; the book is beautifully illustrated.
*The Observer*
Belting at his best writes with an infectious, ingenuous
intellectual excitement… The book’s main remit is to spell out a
sequence of conceptual changes in the meanings of vision and visual
art running from antiquity to Islam and Western Christendom, and in
this it is memorable and convincing… Belting has made a careful,
honorable contribution to contemporary debates about culture
clash.
*London Review of Books*
In many respects this is a bold book, first of all because of its
premise: a veteran art historian dares, after half a century as an
active scholar, to take another look at a classic art-historical
problem—the formulation of linear perspective in fifteenth-century
Florence. It is perhaps the most classical art-historical problem
of all… In Florence and Baghdad, the connection between East and
West has all the excitement of a fresh discovery: in effect,
Belting is relearning, and retelling, the story of perspective,
this time not from Florence for Europeans, but rather on a global
scale for a globalized world.
*New Republic*
[A] lively and erudite book.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Florence and Baghdad is…in large part a meditation on the nature of
symbolic forms and consequently an interrogation of the neo-Kantian
ideas of Ernst Cassirer and Ernst Panofsky… Belting…convincingly
shows how the Arab geometrical approach was taken up in the West
and transformed into a way of portraying spatial depth. Moreover,
unlike Panofsky, his contrasting of Western and Islamic art leads
to an exploration of the different ways in which the two cultures
conceive the ‘gaze.’… Florence and Baghdad is beautifully
illustrated… This frankly difficult book provides challenging
exercises for the mind.
*The Art Newspaper*
In Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, Belting
makes a compelling case that the vision of the Renaissance—a vision
that still holds us today—began not in Florence, but in Baghdad,
with important implications for both cultures… Reproducing the
complexity of Belting’s argument here seems like ‘playing God,’
too, in capturing the majesty of his examples and endless
connections (all wonderfully translated from the original German by
Deborah Lucas Schneider). The combination of illustrations and
verbal explanations on the nature of Islamic aniconism surpasses
any previous discussion I’ve read, making the sometimes daunting
trek through the forest of soaring ideas well worth the trip once
you’ve reached the clearing of Belting’s payoff. The real strength
of Florence and Baghdad is how Belting puts those two worlds on
equal footing—side by side in coming to grips with the same idea in
a way determined by their culture. In first warning himself of the
dangers of Eurocentrism and colonialism whenever you talk of
‘influence,’ Belting warns us of similar mistakes. ‘Linear
perspective is not universal but rather tied to a particular
culture,’ Belting concludes, allowing for the difference of Arabic
versus Christian art while also providing discursive space to
analyze how and why they differ, and what that difference may mean
to us… From Africa to Asia to the Middle East, the Western way of
seeing in perspective—individualized, human-centered
perspective—eliminated all other ways of seeing and, along with
them, ways of cultural being. Hans Belting’s Florence and Baghdad:
Renaissance Art and Arab Science strikes the first blow for
reversing the tide of that visual encroachment, or at the very
least of recognizing the cultural blindness of imposed ways of
seeing and how that blindness continues to keep the Middle East and
West from seeing eye to eye.
*Big Think*
Taking the different concepts of pictures in the two cultures as a
starting point, the author offers a fascinating comparison of the
way Arabs and Westerners look at the world. He explains for example
the ‘prohibition of images’ in Islam and the new importance given
to the subjective view of an observer in the European Renaissance.
This is only one of many differences that have continued to affect
the world to the present day—a fact that makes Belting’s history of
art a highly topical book.
*Geo*
It is at first appropriate to admire Belting’s book as a beautiful
object. It contains a number of fine photos and illustrations, and
it is a pleasure to just browse through it… Belting aspires to be
one of the cultural milestones that change our essential views on
art and visual culture. Florence and Baghdad is not just a
well-written academic study, it is also a book accessible to a wide
audience. Occasionally it even reads like a thriller. The best
thing is, once you finish it, you realize it isn’t just amusing,
but eye-opening.
*Prague Post*
Florentines remain convinced that their compatriots once invented
central perspective. Yet matters were actually more complicated, as
this fascinating book shows: The Arab mathematician Alhazen
(965–1040) had discovered the path of light rays and constructed a
camera obscura long before the Renaissance. He was concerned with
the laws governing vision and not with realistic representations,
which were alien to him as a member of a society without pictures.
In his multifaceted new study, Hans Belting describes convincingly
how artists and scholars turned Alhazen’s theory of vision into a
theory of pictures and made perspective a trademark of the West. He
also explains the significance of geometry for the Islamic
worldview and Islamic art. This book is an eye-opener for readers
who will come to understand the limitations and drawbacks of the
kinds of images that are omnipresent in our society in the form of
films and photographs.
*Art: Das Kunstmagazin*
Belting has expanded our field of vision to include both the
history of art and of science, in both Islam and the West, and by
so doing has given research on central perspective an entirely new
foundation.
*Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung*
Florence and Baghdad rewrites the history of European art…
Belting’s book must be read with care and readers will do well to
consult the illustrations again and again in order to understand
how an Islamic theory of vision, which refuted the theory of little
pictures in the eye, could turn into a technique for producing
paintings used first by Florentines and then all over Europe. You
will find no better guide through this thicket of philosophy,
optics, crafts and theology in East and West than Belting—and
certainly no one else could make it so clear that these are not
just old problems we can gladly leave to historians… Belting’s book
shows that if we look carefully we can still discover that most of
what we thought we knew was wrong. Belting gives us a fresh new eye
for art and the world.
*Frankfurter Rundschau*
Belting demonstrates persuasively how Alhazen’s visual theory was
converted into a pictorial theory in the West between the 13th and
15th centuries and finally led to central perspective… His aim with
this noteworthy book is to make a contribution to the history of
images and move beyond the ‘colonial’ viewpoint of the West.
*Süddeutsche Zeitung*
The connection Belting establishes between long-known facts in the
history of science and the origins of the ‘window view’ is a stroke
of genius.
*Süddeutsche Zeitung*
Belting admits that tracing the genealogy of perspective from
Alhazen via Pelacani to architects and painters of the Renaissance
involves gaps; there are no contemporary documents that prove
specific influences. Yet the chain of evidence is impressive—all
the more so because Belting’s immense erudition reaches beyond the
borders of the field… It will be impossible to go back to the usual
assumption that perspective was part of the lost legacy of
classical antiquity and was merely made available again through
Arabic translations of earlier works. First of all this error
presumes an unrealistically high level of ancient mathematics, and
secondly it depends on the view that Arab culture served only a
mediator between two eras in the West. Perspective plays a key role
in the Western gaze—and through media such as photography and film
it became one of Europe’s leading exports, so to speak, as well as
an instrument of colonization, a norm for the ‘natural’ mode of
seeing. The fact that it is rooted in Arab science is one of the
secrets that Western society has long tried to keep hidden from
itself. Thanks to Hans Belting we now know better.
*Der Tagesspiegel*
At a time when people use the phrase ‘cultural dialogue’ as if it
were a magic spell, Florence and Baghdad is a refreshing appeal to
view the genesis of the unconscious visual foundations in both
cultures in all their historical complexity and to illuminate their
interdependence. While some of the ‘discoveries’ Belting presents
(such as the roles played by Alhazen’s treatise on optics in the
11th century or by the Italian mathematician Biagio Pelacani around
1400) are not new to scholars in the field, the author’s
achievement is to assign them the place they deserve in cultural
history and make these insights available to a broad public. He has
created a scholarly mosaic, accompanied by a wealth of
illustrations, that will captivate readers through its
elegance.
*Die Tageszeitung*
Belting is not concerned with ‘influences’ or ‘derivations’; his
aim is a comparison that will place both cultures on the same level
and reveal the particular character of each. For this purpose he
uses what he calls sudden ‘shifts of focus’ [Blickwechsel] to
contrast his discussion of one pictorial culture with the
differently oriented position of the other. The result is a text
that is well calculated to delight readers and make them grateful
that this other world existed.
*Die Zeit*
The work of Hans Belting defies easy categorization. This foremost
German scholar consistently offers studies of high intellectual
rigor that are genuinely original and thought-provoking, with
cross-disciplinary ramifications. The present work is no exception…
Unusually daring.
*Choice*
Belting easily balances the contributions of two diverse
cultures—European art and Arabic science—in a deeply scholarly yet
captivating manner. He presents the well-documented historical
connection between a mathematic theory sprung from 11th-century
Baghdad and its influence on the use of perspective in
Renaissance-era European artists… The timely translation is
excellent as ideas flow logically, past to present.
*Library Journal*
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