We’ve just released Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, a new book from the German art historian Hans Belting. The book’s title stresses conjunction, but it also clearly highlights things we’re perhaps more accustomed to seeing considered in opposition. Art and science; the Renaissance and the Middle Ages; Christianity and Islam. Much of the implied contrast is conveyed by Jill Breitbarth’s jacket design for the book. The geometrically ornate arabesque, reproduced from the tile decoration of an Egyptian mosque, set against the lush realism of the 16th century oil painting beneath it.
The juxtaposition of the images obviously highlights the flatness of the tiling against the painting’s use of perspective. In traditional Arab art the viewer isn’t meant to look through the surface – the surface is the art. In the painting underneath, though, our eyes are clearly directed past the surface, into the distance, the background. Belting shows that the relationship between these two styles and also between the cultures that they represent is far more complex than opposition. Florence and Baghdad, then, is about perspective, and about the gaze, but not just in the artistic or theoretical senses of the words. What Belting gives us is also a study of these two cultures gazing at one another.
Belting reveals the sensational fact that the “invention” of perspective in the West is actually due to a discovery that had already been made in the Arabic World centuries before the Renaissance. The Arab mathematician Alhazen developed an optical theory—in the middle of a culture largely devoid of images—which later formed the basis for Western perspective painting. Belting explains why Islamic art wasn’t influenced by the discovery, due to its religious, cultural and scientific contexts. He also explains why the effects on European art didn’t appear until later:
The rationalism dominant in the era when Arab science reached its peak could not bear fruit in the West until the modern period, since it was based on scientific experiments liberated from every kind of theological baggage. During the epoch that we in the West call the Middle Ages, the subjects of mathematics and astronomy were popular in the Arab world, which had not yet come under the kind of dogmatic constraints so prevalent later.
As Belting puts it elsewhere: “The Arab theory of optics was known at European universities by the thirteenth century, but it did not become a theory of pictures until the fifteenth century. The grounds for its transformation were not scientific but cultural.”
There’s much to digest here. Work like Alhazen’s came from a period when Arab societies were open to scientific inquiry that was remarkably free of theology in a way that Christian science and society were not. At the time of Alhazen’s development of the theory of perspective, there was simply too much “theological baggage” for the concept to yet begin to influence Western art. What should also be clear from Belting’s study is the inaccuracy of the notion of Arab writers as just preservers of Greek knowledge during the “Dark Ages.” They were actually making serious advancements.
So, while virtually rewriting this chapter of art history, Belting also offers a discerning comparison between Arabic and Western culture, opening our eyes to the images that have surrounded us since the beginning of the Modem Age and essentially pioneering a new area of cultural studies: the comparison of the visual perceptions of Western and Islamic culture. Or, more generally, the cultural comparison of the gaze. The differences between the pictures developed in these two cultures, between Renaissance art and Arabic science, reflect their different practices with regard to visuality. The differences involve, as Belting notes, “not just art but also a mind-set and relationship to the world.”
Belting’s study of those differences is an important new work of scholarship that’s also an intellectual and historical adventure. And, if we can add modestly, the book is a simply stunning object, heavily illustrated, full color throughout, and sure to give us a new perspective on art and the world.
