Art History, Boundary Crossing, Making Worlds

This study advocates for boundary-crossing approaches in art history, emphasizing the importance of engaging with phenomena that transgress traditional parameters. It highlights how such an approach can provoke new lines of inquiry and challenge existing analytical frameworks, periodization, and aesthetic hierarchies. Using examples from her research on early modern Mediterranean travel imagery, the author demonstrates how artifacts like Guillaume-Joseph Grelot's pen and ink designs of Aleppo (1675) and Melchior Lorck's expansive drawing of Constantinople (1559) exemplify this method. These works, often dismissed for their artistic finish, are re-evaluated for their materiality, global relations, and the processes of making and remaking worlds. The study underscores the potential of transcultural research to foster innovative approaches that acknowledge differences rather than assimilate them, focusing on experimentation, failure, and the edges of things.

Wilson, B. (2019). Art History, Boundary Crossing, Making Worlds. I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 22(2), 411–420. https://doi.org/10.1086/705736