Global before 'globalization': The West of the Silk Road. Trade, mission, art.

Based on my book 'East-West Artistic Transfer through Rome, Armenia and the Silk Road: Sharing St. Peter's' (Routledge 2022), Armenia becomes the focus of a history of the Western Silk Road (Cilicia to Tabriz) from the perspective of the exchange of art, trade and mission in the Middle Ages and early modern period. This region has always been one of the most important international transit areas for long-distance trade between Europe and Asia, especially since the Crusades and under Mongol rule. As a center for the daily exchange of people, ideas, goods and religions, it was global before globalization, and the Christian cultural monuments of the Middle East and Anatolia are in great danger. This makes it all the more important to take a closer look at this region, which is now coming back into focus as part of China's new Silk Road.my lecture starts in Rome with Old St. Peter's and the little-known 'compounds' of the pilgrims of the East and Orient, especially Ethiopia and Armenia (both the oldest churches in the world) and then paves the way to the arts (Momik, Giotto, Minas, Domenico Veneziano, Dürer), trade, missions and luxury fabrics, inscriptions and symbols that traveled in both directions and intensively enriched and forever changed cultures. The course leader is an art historian, currently living in Cambridge, U.K. She has published on the Italian Renaissance and on topics related to her current field of research, the cultural transfer between Europe and the western section of the Silk Road, in particular Armenia. She is a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge and has been a researcher at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck Institute), in Rome.

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