Did the Italian Renaissance Begin in Baghdad? | Picture This | Big Think
Did the Italian Renaissance Begin in Baghdad?
The Italian Renaissance remains one of those amazing hinges of human history where civilization made a great leap that continues to be felt today. For German art historian Hans Belting, this “quantum leap consistent in the way perspective introduced the gaze into the picture and thus, at the same time, the human subject doing the gazing.” Works such as Piero della Francesca’sFlagellation of Christ (shown above), a masterful maze of mathematical perspective put into paint, pull the viewer in and create another world of twists and turns full of figures more human than art had offered ever before. Before this type of gazing, however, Belting argues that the artists of the Renaissance turned their gaze East—to the mathematical theories of perspective originating from Arab culture, specifically those of Alhazen, a Muslim polymath working at the turn of the first millennium to understand and improve upon the ancient mathematicians’ ideas. In Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, Belting makes a compelling case that the vision of the Renaissance—a vision that still holds us today—began not in Florence, but in Baghdad, with important implications for both cultures.
Belting, Professor for Art History and Media Theory at the Academy for Design in Karlsruhe, Germany, and renowned historian and theorist of art ranging from medieval times to today, takes us back to the long-forgotten, even in the days of the Renaissance, work of Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham, known in the west more simply as Alhazen. Born in Basrain what is today’s Iraq and educated in Baghdad, Alhazen translated, studied, and even corrected the ideas of ancient mathematicians such as Euclid and Ptolemy. Alhazen later used his findings in the worlds of optics and perspective to invent (Belting argues) the camera obscura, a tool used hundreds of years later by the Renaissance artists and their artistic descendents.
