**This class will be taught In-Person**
The Italian Renaissance, that quintessential flowering of European culture, would have been impossible without the prior flowering of Islamic cultures and their links to civilizations of the East. Philosophy, science, math, astronomy, medicine—even the linear perspective that dominated European painting, architecture and townscape for four hundred years—were fed by a culture of intellectual inquiry unconstrained by the kind of religious dogma that crippled comparable explorations in the Christian West. In this far-flung global history, for example, the Arab math behind European perspective traversed the Silk Roads from India via Persia and Turkey, synthesizing the Greek mathematical tradition en route.
WEEK 1: The Italian Renaissance has international origins and would be inconceivable without Islamic contributions through the Silk Roads, Ottoman Empire, Muslim Spain and cosmopolitan Venice--evident in astronomy and medicine, translations from Greek humanist texts, and in the paintings of Alberti, Mantegna, Van Eyck, Holbein and others.
WEEK 2: Behind the glorious achievements of the Renaissance are centuries of both conflict and harmony between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, including wars, crusades and colonization, as well as diplomacy and alliances, trade and commerce, art and architecture, philosophical and theological dialogue.
WEEK 3: A revolution in 11th-century Arab optical science develops linear perspective, which while not related to the individual gaze of the West, ultimately lays the groundwork for 400 years of western aesthetics.
WEEK 4: Alhazen’s work is translated from Arabic to Latin c.1200, from Latin to Italian c.1350, is widely read as artists begin to experiment with 3-D architectural forms, and by the early 15th century is translated by painters and architects from mathematical abstraction into full-blown linear perspective and urban form.
WEEK 5: The legal, economic and political individual, social basis for single-point perspective, emerges with the 11th-century emergence of market towns against the feudal system, along with secular and canon law and the new vernacular literatures like Italian.
WEEK 6: Venice, with commercial links from the Baltic to China, and its core relations in trade and conflict with the Ottoman Empire, is economically and culturally the pivot between East and West and between Renaissance and Enlightenment.