Hans Belting, a prominent theorist of medieval and Renaissance art, taught at the Academy for Design in Karlsruhe, Germany, until his 2002 retirement. His Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science is the culmination of a distinguished career.
Surprising this reader (a political scientist with very limited knowledge of art history), the book stood out for its utter erudition, especially as Belting made a compelling case: to effect a blickwechsel — a German word that means both changing the way one looks at something and exchanging glances with that something.
How we see tensions between the rise of the East (here represented by Baghdad) and the West (here represented by Florence) may be due to the simple fact that we see the world differently even when we have so much in common. Belting highlights what those differences are, which focus on our "perspectives", a mathematical term and a term of art dealing with aesthetics.
He then provides a careful examination of the original medieval conception of perspective that was developed in Baghdad by the Arab mathematician Abu Ali Al Hassan Ibn Al Haytham (965-1040), better known as Alhazen. Hence, what was a purely mathematical concern, dealing with the propagation of light rays, evolved during pre-Renaissance Europe into a concept which was entirely different. Belting honours Al Haytham by devoting Chapter 3 of his opus to the Arab scientist's pivotal text, Kitab Al Manazir (Book of Optics), which closed "the gap between mathematics and empirical observation" (p92).
Yet as the Renaissance saw light, influential figures such as the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, who designed the dome of the cathedral in Florence — a masterpiece in its own right — and the artist Leon Battista Alberti — who designed the façade of the marble-clad Santa Maria Novella cathedral in Florence — altered the very definition of perspective as originally conceived by Al Haytham.
No longer was it an elegant mathematical observation that calculated dimensions, even if careful scientific rules were duly applied, but an adaptation in which images became final destinations. Over time, "the contrast between Arab visual theory and western pictorial theory [evolved] for cultural rather than scientific reasons. In Middle Eastern culture, making pictures in the western sense was long regarded as taboo, while in the West it was celebrated as the royal road to knowledge," (p28), Belting writes.
Renaissance artists, whose works are illustrated throughout the book, clearly used principles developed by Al Haytham, but they also introduced new ways to look at pictures. A viewer was drawn towards the illustration and, strangely, felt that the image looked back as a new pictorial theory evolved.
Belting devotes chapters 4, 5 and 6 to the dynamics of Western visual representation, examining works by Giotto, Pelacani, Ghiberti and others, all of whom invented or defined pictorial theory, which introduced non-religious and therefore non-ideological points of reference. Importantly, this discussion correctly asserts that while such interpretations were foreign to the Baghdad school, they were equally alien to the Florence school, which distinguished itself from pre-Renaissance interpretations.
What emerged were different concerns that evolved into cultural blindness that, in turn, imposed particular ways of seeing things. Consequently, seeing eye to eye became complicated, as cultural dissimilarities stressed variations, calculating light in Baghdad but evaluating the human gaze in Florence.
In Chapter 6 of his book, Belting masterfully illustrates this segregation, in the shape of the Mashrabiyyah, "a window through which the gaze can ‘see'" (p252). The Mashrabiyyah are the carved wooden screens for windows and balconies that are still seen throughout the Middle East. In Baghdad, a screen, which is "porous, but not for the gaze — at least not in principle … is porous for light, a shift that also reverses the direction between inside and outside" (p253). Needless to say that the viewer who looks through a Mashrabiyyah sees the ever-shifting patterns that light produces throughout the day, rather than any fixed pattern that merely relies on light as a means to an end. This is truly a brilliant illustration of how the East and the West see things and how one may interpret cultural flexibilities that spill over into socio-political arenas.
The Mashrabiyyah comparison allows Belting to opine how windows might not always be windows and how perspectives are not always perspectives, which leads him to conclude why we all see things differently even when we are looking at the same thing. This is the author's real blickwechsel, pointing out to pivotal concepts that have dramatically different meanings, whether one is in the East or in the West.
Every reader who invests the necessary time to "absorb" this densely written, heavily documented and profusely illustrated book will be challenged to rethink his own methodology, perhaps even experience his or her own blickwechsel.
Dr Joseph A. Kéchichian is the author of the forthcoming Legal and Political Reforms in Saudi Arabia (2012).
Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science By Hans Belting, Translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 303 pages, $39.95
