'Courtly Mediators: Transcultural Objects between Renaissance Italy and the Islamic World'

Kellogg Arts Fellow Dr Leah R Clark’s latest book examines Italian Renaissance collecting practices from the perspective of trade, diplomacy, and global encounters and reveals what it means to look at Italian Renaissance courts from a global perspective, providing a reassessment of a culture we thought we knew so well.

In Courtly Mediators: Transcultural Objects between Renaissance Italy and the Islamic World, Leah provides a new narrative that places Aragonese Naples at the centre 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.

Courtly Mediators 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.

Courtly Mediators: Transcultural Objects between Renaissance Italy and the Islamic World is published later this month (July 2023) and will be available to buy here.