Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West (review)

This book attempts to repair what the authors claim is a deficiency in our view of the Renaissance whereby the significance and influence of the East (broadly identified) has been minimized, or erased, since the nineteenth century. This deficiency is largely attributed to scholars of the early Renaissance such as Burckhardt, the later Freudian analysis of civilization and the recent "new historicism." Instead, following the Italian scholarly "detective" Carlo Ginzburg, a "new" kind of historical methodology is offered for "reading" a range of Renaissance artefacts such as commemorative medallions, tapestries and equestrian paintings, which avoids the iconographic approach of critics like Gombrich and Panofsky of the Warburg School. Rather than interpreting a painting such as Holbein's The Ambassadors (1533) in terms of Eurocentric myth, symbolism or humanist narrative, an alternative account is proposed whereby the precise contents of the painting are stitched onto the intricate political negotiations then going on between the courts of England, France and Rome. Implicit in these negotiations was the wider commercial and imperial context of the time, which included the Ottoman Empire with its trading capacity and links further East. These are given recognition in the painting, the authors argue, by the Turkish rug behind the sitters. Using several other examples, the book maps specific historical events onto surviving objects with a view to stressing (or uncovering) the Eastern effect on the development of the European Renaissance, to the extent of positing the Renaissance as a shared social space occupied by a wider range of peoples than has been previously supposed.

The evidence and arguments offered about this co-existence are convincing to the point where it seems inconceivable that serious scholars have previously ignored (or discarded) the apparently rich Eastern connections in some Renaissance source material. And, it is here that the foundational conceit of the book looks most unreliable because one wonders to what extent such connections have been actively "repressed" (as the authors assume) or simply under-emphasized—a subtle but important distinction. Other than some generalist assumptions about Western European imperialist superiority, the authors offer little hard evidence that the state of affairs they seek to redress actually exists. In effect they claim the influence of the East during the Renaissance has been systematically buried since the nineteenth century only to be "excavated" (p. 184) at this late stage. While this may be the case, the cultural history of Europe, at least from the mid-nineteenth century, suggests that, in fact, the East has exerted a strong grip over European minds in the fields of art, design, mathematics and metaphysics, to name but a few, and that Eastern artistic objects have been highly prized and widely assimilated. Therefore, while the book recycles the assumed conflation between "barbarism," "exoticism" and "The East" without presenting it as having a substantial factual base, the impression is created of a general derogation of the East by the West that is not historically accurate. This leaves one feeling that, although "Global Interests" may offer a refreshing emphasis on East/West interaction in the period and a valuable reassessment of some artistic forms such as tapestry, to claim that it is "groundbreaking" or "highly provocative" (as the book itself does) seems to be overstated. And while the methodology of analyzing visual arts in terms of power relations throws up useful insights, it cannot supplant more aesthetic readings without reducing works to dry political fact-sheets. What's more, such "power-based" analysis can hardly be called "new" in the light of a long tradition of similar criticism going back through Foucault to Marx. Given the academic provenance of the authors, one would have expected a much tighter, more securely grounded case that did not leave non-specialists, like myself, questioning the very basis of the book's thesis.