The Age of Exploration: 1400 to 1600
In 1400, Ming China was still a great naval power, sending out vast fleets on expeditions of trade and exploration that far exceeded anything Europe then mounted. Having touched the shores of Sri Lanka, Persia, and even distant northern Australia, the Ming pulled back: a great expedition of 1433 to the Middle East and East Africa was the last such Chinese effort, and in 1436 the emperor forbade further journeys or construction of blue water ships.
It thus fell to Europe’s schooners and frigates, not to Chinese junks, to map the oceans and open the world to intellectual and cultural intercourse, as well as to economic exploitation and colonization. The Age of Exploration by Europeans was different from all others, therefore, in having the lasting effect of linking the world’s oceans into unified navigational and trading systems.
It was also the second half of a two-part response to the new geopolitical reality of Islam.
Now, with an even greater Muslim power rising in the east—the Ottoman Empire—Europeans sought a way around the immovable Islamic world to the markets of India and China.
The new approach to an old problem was made possible by key navigational innovations, including the magnetic compass, astrolabe and portolan chart, stern-mounted rudders, and triangular lateen sails. Those technological breakthroughs combined with new astronomical knowledge acquired from Muslims ... made maps more accurate and ocean-going navigation somewhat less perilous to crews and investors.
The effort was also partly inspired by the famous journals of Marco Polo and visions of Asia as a land of vast wealth, by dreams of mythical empires such as Atlantis or the lost Kingdom of Prester John, and by a more immediate desire to reach the sources of African gold suspected to exist somewhere along the Guinea coast.
Exploration, Age of (c. 1400--1600). In Greenwood Encyclopedia of International Relations.
World Map
Art in the Age of Exploration
Ebooks from the library's online catalog:
- Cultural contact and the making of European Art Since the Age of Exploration edited by Mary D. SheriffCONTENTS: Cultural contact and the making of European art, 1492-1930 / Mary D. Sheriff -- On the peripatetic life of objects in the era of globalization / Claire Farago -- Remapping Dutch art in global perspective : other points of view / Julie Hochstrasser -- Travel and cultural exchange in enlightenment Rome / Christopher M.S. Johns -- The dislocations of Jean-Etienne Liotard, called the Turkish painter / Mary D. Sheriff -- Images of uncertainty : Delacroix and the art of nineteenth-century expansionism / Elisabeth A. Fraser -- Gauguin in black and blue / Carol Mavor -- A different shade of modernism : difference and distinction in Pedro Figari's representations of black bodies / Lyneise E. Williams
- Images of Thought: Visuality in Islamic India 1550-1750 by Gregory MinissaleThis book does not tell a story, at least not the kind of story of characters and events that has been told in art history many times. Instead, it tries to understand how visual language works using a number of paintings produced in India, and to a lesser extent, Iran. …The approach taken here is inspired by anthropology. The aim is to encounter and explore a culture, and to understand different ways of picturing things. --Introduction
- Italian Renaissance Art : Understanding its Meaning by Christiane L. Joost-GaugierContents: Introduction: The Italian Renaissance - An Idea Rather than a Period Chapter 1: What a Difference a Hundred Years Makes Chapter 2: How it All Started - Florence and Umbria Chapter 3: What Happened Next in Florence Chapter 4: Looking for the Renaissance in Siena and Southward to Sicily Chapter 5: Searching the Renaissance from Northern Italy Back to Umbria Chapter 6: The Triumph of the Intellectual Avant-Garde - The High Renaissance Chapter 7: Some Other Artists of the High Renaissance Chapter 8: The Swan Song of Renaissance Art Chapter 9: The Break and the New Avant-Garde - Early Mannerism Chapter 10: What Was the Italian Renaissance? Conclusions
- Sinan's Autobiographies: Five Sixteenth-Century TextsCritical edition of Sinan's five autobiographical texts.
Written in the second half of the 1580s, these five texts on Sinan’s life and works are unique sources without any equivalent in the history of Islamic architecture. Each of them includes a brief biographical section, outlining Sinan’s recruitment as a Christian boy from a village of Kayseri under Sultan Selim I and his initial training in carpentry as a novice in Istanbul, followed by his promotion through the ranks of the Janissaries during the reign of Sultan Süleyman I, whom he arduously accompanies to “many a ghaza” (war on behalf of Islam) as a foot soldier, building several bridges and war ships along the way. The texts then narrate Sinan’s achievements as chief architect under three sultans (Süleyman I, Selim II, and Murad III) and group the monuments created during his tenure according to various building types. --Preface - Western Art and the Wider World by Paul WoodThe Renaissance was a period before the age of the modern empires, when the lineaments of West and East hardened into cultural and racial stereotypes that have only begun to be questioned in our own day. Nonetheless, the sense of those interactions between continental Asian civilizations and the increasingly dynamic western Eurasian peninsular was about to undergo truly epochal transformation. Since biblical times, indeed earlier, the eastern Mediterranean, spreading westwards into Europe and eastwards into Asia, had been the crossroads of the world. In 1488, however, the Portuguese navigator Bartholomeo Diaz rounded the southern tip of Africa; in 1498, Vasco da Gama reached India; before that, in 1492, the Genoese Christopher Columbus sailed west and stumbled across America. By 1522 a fleet under Ferdinand Magellan had sailed all the way round the globe. A new horizon was, with remarkable rapidity, being drawn around a new world.
From Chapter 1: Renaissance and Old World
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