'Marco Polo and all that: Italian art and Mongol Asia'

Italian contact with the territories of the Mongol Empire is a particularly clear case of sudden and accelerated cultural interaction. Before the Mongol rise, Italians had little direct contact with central and eastern Asia. With the so-called Pax Mongolica, Italians became participants in Asian trade, and Italian port cities served as gateways into Europe; Marco Polo is only one famous figure in a larger economic and cultural shift. Yet this accelerated contact also coincides with a period of rapid and fundamental artistic change in Italy. The goal of this talk is to suggest that contact with Mongol territories also mattered for trecento art, as Italian artists responded to new objects, images, and materials to develop new forms of their own.

Professor Anne Dunlop FAHA holds the Herald Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, where she is also Director of the Australian Institute of Art History. She is a specialist of trecento and quattrocento art, with a particular interest in early secular art, the materials of painting, and, most recently, the links between Italy and Mongol Eurasia. Her books include The Mongol Empire in Global History and Art History (2023); Antipodean Early Modern (2018); The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c.1250-1750 (2014, 2015,co-edited with Christy Anderson and Pamela H. Smith); and Painted Palaces: the Rise of Secular Art in Early Renaissance Italy (2009)