“Marco Polo’s Tomatoes, or on Cross-Cultural Exchange in Early European Art”, Professor Anne Dunlop

Date: Wednesday, 4 May, 2016
Time: 6:45–7:45pm
Venue: Old Arts Public Lecture Theatre, The University of Melbourne (map)
RSVP: Free event, registration required. Register here.

In the last decades, the question of cross-cultural contact and exchange has emerged as a major field of research in Art History and the humanities in general. This work is driven by the need to understand the early history of our own global moment, but it is also part of a larger and more ambitious project: the attempt to write a global history of art, one that does not privilege Western production at the expense of other cultures. The importance of the project is clear, but there are many competing, and conflicting, ideas about how such a history should be written.

To explore the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches, this lecture will focus on a limit-case: the possibility that renewed contact between Italy and Eurasia after the rise of the Mongol Empire had an impact on European art. On the one hand, it is clear that this was a moment of renewed and intense contact and exchange: Marco Polo travelling to China is only one famous example of a much larger phenomenon. Artists, materials, technologies, and objects travelled across Europe, Africa, and Asia as they had not done in a thousand years. It is also clear that there were fundamental changes in Italian art in the years around 1300. Yet how can we determine cause and effect, given the limited historical evidence that survives? The challenge is to avoid anachronistic interpretation, what will be discussed here as the danger of Marco Polo’s tomatoes.

Anne Dunlop was appointed to the Herald Chair of Fine Arts in the School of Culture and Communication in 2015. Her research and teaching focus on the art of Italy and Europe between about 1300 and 1550, including the role of materials and technology in the making of art, and the relations of Italy and Eurasian in the years after the Mongol Conquests.

“A state of excitement? WA’s heritage of European emotions”, (Professor Susan Broomhall, UWA)

Date: Tuesday 10 May, 2016
Time: 5:45pm – 7:00pm
Venue: The University of Western Australia, Hackett Drive, Crawley, 6009 WA
Booking: Free event. RSVP online here, 08 6488 3858, emotions@uwa.edu.au

Professor Susan Broomhall, from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, examines the long history of emotional contact between our continent’s western edge and Europe, stretching back well before British settlement in 1829. From medieval maps to early exploration, these lands and their peoples have been the subject of curiosity and wonder, greed and envy, fear and anger: a site of European competition far away that has shaped the borders of our state and of profound, sometimes difficult, interactions with local peoples. The heritage of these emotions has continuing impact on the state today, from geographic markers, the location of towns and cities to our cultural institutions and social orientations.