Florence & Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science

The theory of perspective, which allowed Florentine artists to depict the world from a spectator's point of view, originated in Baghdad with an eleventh-century mathematician. Using the metaphor of the mutual gaze, Belting narrates the encounter between science and art, Arab Baghdad and Renaissance Florence, that revolutionized Western culture. In the Islamic world, where theology and the visual arts remained closely intertwined, the science of perspective did not become the cornerstone of Islamic art. Florence and Baghdad addresses a provocative question that reaches beyond the realm of aesthetics and mathematics: What happens when Muslims and Christians look upon each other and find their way of viewing the world transformed as a result?"