Book talk, Transcending Patterns: Silk Road Cultural & Artistic Interactions Central Asian Textiles
Channel: eastasianarthistory
Date: 15/07/2020

Mariachiara Gasparini discusses textile history across across and beyond the Silk Road between the 7th to 14th centuries.


Buy the book: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/transcending-patterns-silk-road-cultural-and-artistic-interactions-through-central-asian-textile-images/
Learn more: https://eastasianarthistory.org/2020/07/15/transcending-patterns/



In Transcending Patterns: Silk Road Cultural and Artistic Interactions through Central Asian Textiles, Mariachiara Gasparini investigates the origin and effects of a textile mediated visual culture that developed at the heart of the Silk Road between the seventh and fourteenth centuries. Through the analysis of the Turfan Textile Collection in the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin and more than a thousand textiles held in collections worldwide, Gasparini discloses and reconstructs the rich cultural entanglements along
the Silk Road, between the coming of Islam and the rise of the Mongol Empire, from the Tarim to Mediterranean Basin.

Exploring in detail the iconographic transfer between different agents and different media from Central Asian caves to South Italian churches, the author depicts and describes the movement and exchange of portable objects such as sculpture, wall painting, and silk fragments across the Asian continent and across the ages. Gasparini’s history offers critical perspectives that extend far beyond an outmoded notion of “Silk Road studies.” Her cross-media work shows readers how certain material cultures are connected not only by the physical routes they take but also because of the meanings and interpretations these objects engage in various places. Transcending Patterns is at once art history, material and visual cultural
history, Asian studies, conservatory studies, and linguistics.