Renaissance scholar Robert Brennan discusses the circulation of the ideas about "art" between Italy, Africa and the Middle East.
Detail from Five Medallion Carpet, Egypt, ca. 1500, New York, Metropolitan Museum.
In this talk, I will present a series of case studies from my current book project, which reevaluates sixteenth-century concepts of “art” in light of exchanges between Italy, Africa, and the Middle East. Building on recent studies concerning the circulation of African and Islamic artifacts in Renaissance Italy, my project focuses on a concurrent circulation of words, ideas, and most importantly, people – migrating artists, itinerant intellectuals, and enslaved people, who arrived in Italy with a deep, discursive knowledge of non-European traditions of art making. The talk will focus in particular on three case studies, the first involving a group of Afro-diasporic dancers active in Michelangelo’s milieu in Rome, the second an Egyptian textile artist active in Northern Italy, and thirdly a group of sources that suggest the importance of female embroiderers in the transmission of designs and artistic ideas between Christian and Islamic lands.
Part of the Art History Seminar Series, convened by Mary Roberts, and presented by the discipline of art history at the University of Sydney, with support from the Power Institute.
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Robert Brennan
Robert Brennan received a PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 2016, and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institut) and the University of Sydney. Since 2022 he has taught as Lecturer in Art History at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy (Harvey Miller, 2019), as well as articles in Art Bulletin, Oxford Art Journal, and Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics.