Tangible whispers, neglected encounters : histories of East-West artistic dialogues, 14th-20th century / Marco Musillo.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-266).

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 explorations: the screen design of Chinese origin in colonial Mexico, Medieval Christian tombstones in China, and early-modern Filipino sacred sculpture.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Hot Air and Flying Dragons: Historiographical Fractures and Interpretation

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

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

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

本書由上篇藝術原理和下篇藝術門類組成. 上篇討論了藝術起源與發展, 藝術本質與特徵, 藝術與環境, 藝術的功能與作用, 藝術創作與作品, 藝術鑑賞與評論等藝術理論的基本問題. 下篇討論了音樂, 美術, 舞蹈, 戲劇, 電影電視與網絡藝術, 文學這六個重要的藝術門類的歷史發展, 基本類型, 主要特徵.