Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science

Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2011. Hardcover. VG/VG. Lilac boards with black spine. Color-illustrated dust jacket with black lettering. 303 pp. Color and BW illustrations. "In this lavishly illustrated study, Belting deals with the double history of perspective, as a visual theory based on geometrical abstraction (in the Middle East) and as pictorial theory (in Europe). Florence and Baghdad addresses a provocative question that reaches beyond the realm of aesthetics and mathematics: What happens when Muslims and Christians look upon each other and find their way of viewing the world transformed as a result?"- website Contents include: 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 and 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.