Courtly Mediators
Transcultural Objects between Renaissance Italy and the Islamic World

Courtly Mediators examines Italian Renaissance collecting practices from the perspective of trade, diplomacy, and global encounters.

Leah R. Clark (Author)

9781009276214, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 August 2023

350 pages
25.9 x 18.2 x 2 cm, 0.91 kg

In Courtly Mediators, Leah R. Clark investigates the exchange of a range of materials and objects, including metalware, ceramic drug jars, Chinese porcelain, and aromatics, across the early modern Italian, Mamluk, and Ottoman courts. She provides a new narrative that places Aragonese Naples at the center of an international courtly culture, where cosmopolitanism and the transcultural flourished, and in which artists, ambassadors, and luxury goods actively participated. By articulating how and why transcultural objects were exchanged, displayed, copied, and framed, she provides a new methodological framework that transforms our understanding of the Italian Renaissance court. Clark's volume provides a multi-sensorial, innovative reading of Italian Renaissance art. It demonstrates that the early modern culture of collecting was more than a humanistic enterprise associated with the European roots of the Renaissance. Rather, it was sustained by interactions with global material cultures from the Islamic world and beyond.

1. Diplomatic entanglements: mediating objects and transcultural encounters
2. Mobile things/mobile motifs: ornament, language, and haptic space
3. The peregrinations of porcelain: from mobility to frames
4. Fit for the gods: porcelain in Alfonso d”Este's camerini
5. From the Silk Roads to the court apothecary: aromatics and receptacles
Conclusion: arresting mobility.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], Ceramics: artworks [AFPC], Renaissance art [ACND]