Desiderata for the Study of Early Modern Art of the Mediterranean

Abstract

Deploying “Mediterranean” as a frame allows us to articulate significant historical questions that studies of culture construed as monolithic entities do not recognize. But what does it take to develop a multi-faceted understanding of the dynamic processes of identity formation? This chapter offers a brief literature review of the ways in which Mediterranean studies have entered art history, locating a revisionist trend in the scholarship beginning in the 1970s, when the term Late Antique was re-deployed to pursue concerns with transcultural processes. Current scholarship brings art history into alignment with neighboring disciplines and encourages intra-disciplinary discussion on how to organize research, which sources to use, what kinds of order to seek, how to rethink the category “art” from a more pluralistic perspective, how to study exchanges of philosophical or ideological contexts as well as the circulation of objects, and how to resist notions of fixed truths.

This paper this chapter is based on was not one of the pre-circulated essays that formed the basis for the round-table, but was presented as part of the earlier session, “Mediterranean Studies at CU Boulder.”