Author:
Belting, Hans.
Edition Statement:1st English language ed.
Imprint:Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
Description303 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 25 cm.
Note:Originally published: Florenz und Bagdad : eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks. München : Verlag C.H. Beck oHG, 2008.
Note:Introduction: describing a culture: Blickwechsel (Shifting focus / exchanging glances) -- 1. Perspective as a question of images: paths between East and West. What is a symbolic form? -- Arab mathematics and Western art -- Geometry and decorative art: the Arabesque -- The globalization of perspective -- Blickwechsel: Orhan Pamuk and perspective as a "Betrayal" -- 2. The taming of the eye: criticism of seeing in Islam. Religion and the prohibition of images -- Images as a betrayal of the living creation -- The Koran as scripture and script -- Under the gaze of Allah: pictures as narrative -- Blickwechsel: pictures with a living gaze -- 3. Alhazen's measurement of light and the Arab invention of the Camera Obscura. Alhazen's book of optics, the 'Perspectiva' -- Distance from ancient visual culture -- Pathways of light and properties of objects -- Mathematics and geometry in Islamic art -- Blickwechsel: Kepler rediscovers the camera obscura -- 4. Perception as knowledge: a theory of vision becomes a theory of pictures. Scholasticism and the conflict over perception and epistemology -- Before perspective: the gaze in Giotto's painting -- Pelacani's invention of mathematical space -- Ghiberti's 'Commentaries' and Piero's mathematical art -- Blickwechsel: Alhazen or Euclid: the option for Vitruvius -- 5. Brunelleschi measures the gaze: mathematical perspective and theater. Two inventors in Florence -- Physical space: the architecture of the gaze -- "Prospects" on the stage -- Panoramas in Urbino -- Blickwechsel: the geometry of the 'Muqarnas' -- 6. The subject in the picture: perspective as a symbolic form. Stealing an emblem: the eye as representative of the gaze -- Nicholas of Cusa and the sovereignty of God's gaze -- The subject as New Narcissus -- The horizon and the view through a window -- Blickwechsel: the 'Mashrabiyya' as a symbolic form -- Conclusion: comparing the gaze in different cultures.
Bibliography Note:Includes bibliographical references and index.
