Art and Frontier

How vibrant cultural and material exchanges at the Black Sea frontier shaped European art and material culture in the Middle AgesBeginning in the thirteenth century, a new site of commercial and cultural exchanges formed in the Black Sea region at the meeting place of sea and land, steppe and settlement. A dynamic cultural crossroads marked by political change, shifting trade networks, and human mobility, this frontier shaped the future of European art and material culture for centuries to come. Art and Frontier argues that artifacts circulating in this region shaped tastes from east Asia to western Europe in a period of nascent globalization, where hubs of commerce catered to elites’ greed, ambition, and desire for luxury art.Ittai Weinryb examines the place of art and material culture at a time when consumption and production intensified dramatically in the later Middle Ages. As Genoese and Venetian trading posts on the Black Sea shores transformed the region into a commercial frontier, it became a dynamic contact zone where traveling merchants interacted with local communities and Mongol elites. Through these encounters, the territory came to be seen by Europeans as a profitable region that could be integrated into global trade networks, bringing the aesthetics of mercantilism at the Black Sea frontier into the heart of interiors around the Mediterranean. By tracing how artifacts originating in the Black Sea entered Italian domestic life, Weinryb demonstrates how European expansion fundamentally altered artistic identity, consumption, and concepts of heritage. Art and Frontier make a bold case for the entangled histories of humans, animals, and things on and off the shores of the Black Sea.Beautifully illustrated, Art and Frontier looks at fashion, materials, craft-technologies, and forms of brand-making, revealing the lasting impact of exchanges between the newly formed Mongol world and the emerging proto-capitalist culture of late medieval Italy.