Home : Book details : Book description

Description of  A New Antiquity: Art and Humanity as Universal, 1400 1600

0271095695 pdf We tend to think of sixteenth-century European artistic theory as separate from the artworks displayed in the non-European sections of museums. Alessandra Russo argues otherwise. Instead of considering the European experience of New World artifacts and materials through the lenses of curiosity and exoticism, Russo asks a different question: What impact have these works had on the way we currently think aboutand theorizethe arts? Centering her study on a vast corpus of early modern textual and visual sources, Russo contends that the subtlety and inventiveness of the myriad of American, Asian, and African creations that were pillaged, exchanged, and often eventually destroyed in the context of Iberian colonizationincluding sculpture, painting, metalwork, mosaic, carving, architecture, and masonryactually challenged and revolutionized sixteenth-century European definitions of what art is and what it means to be human. In this way, artifacts coming from outside Europe between 1400 and 1600 played a definitive role in what are considered distinctively European transformations: the redefinition of the frontier between the mechanical and the liberal arts and a new conception of the figure of the artist. Read more