For avid collectors during the gilded age Gentile Bellini’s portrait of a seated Turkish scribe came as a revelation, opening a window onto heretofore unfamiliar elegance, hinting at a connection between their beloved Italian Renaissance and the magnificence of contemporary Ottoman court. This same generation read and swooned over Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam. They traveled to Constantinople, Cairo and Damascus, collecting repoussé brass works, calligraphic tombstones, Iznik tiles and Tabriz carpets. In this rarefied milieu of Calouste Gulbenkian, J Pierpont Morgan and Isabella Stuart Gardner (who swooped up the Bellini), no one was more enthusiastic about the arts of Islam than Bernard Berenson, the high priest of the Italian Renaissance.
Art history
The grand churches of Europe are studied as great works of art and architecture. They continue to fascinate believers, historians, and art historians alike. The great names behind these works are hailed as legends and visionaries blending beauty with devotion to give meaning to the rituals that these buildings were home to. Compared to these monuments, what does India, as a land of great faiths and temples, offer as manifestations of art, architecture, religiosity, ritual, and symbols of power—both divine and human?
Katsushika Hokusai is undoubtedly one of the most widely celebrated artists in the history of Japanese visual culture. A Renaissance man active in the late 18th and early 19th centuries during the Edo period (1603-1868), his vivid prints and illustrations remain unparalleled in their dynamic portrayals of flora and fauna, historic events, mythologies, and contemporary urban life in the metropolitan demimonde known as the ukiyo. Even if someone reading is unfamiliar with his impact on the canon of art history, they will likely know his more famous compositions from their omnipresence in pop culture and museum gift shops, such as the “Great Wave off Kanagawa”.
There exists a well known aphorism in Japan: “everything that has a shape, breaks.” Within the scope of traditional craftsmanship, it can be interpreted as an acknowledgement that all life, including that of objects, is rendered unique when exhibiting evidence of damage, wear, or rehabilitation. As a result, the concept of “repair” is often quite distinct from that of “restoration”. This approach is embodied in the art of kintsugi, literally translated to “gold joinery”, the technical and philosophical exercise of reassembling fractured ceramic vessels with burnished golden seams. These mends do not serve to obscure “scars” created by a break. Rather, they celebrate the object’s storied history, and encourage the holder to reflect on the transient nature of identity.
At a time when the Notre Dame and the Cathedral at Pisa were yet to be constructed, Southern India, ruled by the Chola dynasty, produced great works of sacred art. The bronzes from the era are now housed—as symbols of human creativity at its best—in the museums such as the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Asia Society Museum in New York.
It’s big, it’s heavy, and it’s beautiful. Dora Ching, the Associate Director of the Tang Center for Asian Art at Princeton University, has created a book that will surely become the volume to have if you are interested in Buddhist art from China or the history of photography. This book presents the art found in the Dunhuang (Mogai) Caves (now often called the Thousand Buddha Grottoes) of western China, which boast more than 500 cave temples, every one of them decorated with sculpture, various images of the Buddha, a great number of murals and smaller-scale paintings, and some with caches of invaluable illustrated manuscripts.
Contemporary books about jade tend to be museum or collector’s catalogs. Seeking to establish their credibility, and assuming little knowledge on the part of the reader, they typically begin with timelines, material analysis, and the establishment of provenance using comparisons to photographs in other compilations, especially from primary excavations. As a result, they often have all the charm of dental work. Angus Forsyth, among the greatest and most ambitious collectors of Chinese jade, has taken a different tack.
A discovery in the history of art is a discovery like any other, so wrote in 1913 Friedrich Perzynski, a German art dealer, in Hunt for the Gods, an account of his exploits in China the year before. This was a time of turmoil. A dynasty had just fallen and the capital Beijing was humming with activity, as artefacts from all over the country were resurfacing in the open or in back rooms. Foreign archeologists, dealers and curators, who had been coming in growing numbers, marveled at the remnants of a civilization that only then was starting to be known.
Moïse de Camondo came from one of the most prominent Jewish families in 19th-century Constantinople, but in 1869 at the age of nine he moved with his family to a new promised land for Jews: Paris. At the conclusion of the French Revolution almost a century earlier, France became the only nation in Europe to grant citizenship to Jews. The Camondo family and many others around Europe and Russia, including the Ephrussi family from Odessa, built homes on the Rue de Monceau in Paris’s 8th arrondissement. Edmund de Waal, author of the best-selling memoir, The Hare With Amber Eyes, is a descendant of the Ephrussis and a distant relative of the Camondos. His latest book is a collection of imaginary letters to the late Moïse de Camondo from the archives of Moïse’s former residence, the Musée de Camondo.
Few nations can boast eras of peace and prosperity as long as the Tokugawa period in Japan, which lasted almost 300 years from the 17th through 19th centuries. Pax Tokugawana: The Cultural Flowering of Japan, 1603-1853 by renowned Japanese studies professor Toru Haga offers a detailed and nuanced portrayal of life under the strict rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and how the peace established by the stringent policies of the ruling warrior class defined the zeitgeist of the era.
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