Tangible Whispers, Neglected Encounters: Histories of East-West Artistic Dialogues, 14th - 20th Century

by Marco Musillo

The relationship between East and West remains a topic of burning timeliness, particularly in its political dimension. Yet, we can gain a complete understanding of the current tensions only if we consider them within a broader historical framework, spanning from art to diplomacy, from religion to ethnography. The present volume tackles precisely this complex task, offering its reader a rich mosaic of case studies and scholarly research, relating to the mutual approaches between the Euro-American ‘West’, and the Sino-Japanese ‘East’. In the first part of the book, art historian Marco Musillo uses the depictions of Tartars in fourteenth-century Italian frescoes as the starting point of a trajectory leading to eighteenth-century European literature on China. In the second part, the reader is introduced to two cases of diplomatic encounter, one in sixteenth-century Italy between Japanese subjects and local courts, and the other one between Qing China and twentieth-century United States, in the space of the universal exhibition in St. Louis. Finally, the last section proposes three interconnected art historical the screen design of Chinese origin in colonial Mexico, Medieval Christian tombstones in China, and early-modern Filipino sacred sculpture.

Table of Contents

Hot Air and Flying Historiographical Fractures and Interpretation

Part Ethnography
1. From Tartar Faces to Chinese the Transformation of Identities

Part Diplomacy
2. Dancing Venues and Theatrical Early Modern Diplomacy and the Japanese Legation to Europe
3. American Entertainment and Qing Empress Cixi in the St. Louis Exposition

Part Materiality
4. The Routes of the Local Forms and Transcultural Designs
5. Tombstones and “Anomalous” Canons
6. Filipino Sculptures as Eventful Art

268 pages, Paperback

Published November 30, 2018