The book comes as an interesting surprise and a significant academic work due to the multidisciplinary perspective on the strong riverine ties that connect the Mediterranean seas. This system of connections encompasses the Western Mediterranean through the Sea of Marmara, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and the hinterland. In this concise study, different authors use a wide range of sources to reconstruct the artworks, spaces, and stories that characterize the territories north of the Danube, such as Poland, Eastern Hungary, and parts of Transylvania; the Adriatic and Eastern Mediterranean, namely the Dalmatian and Illyrian coasts; and the Black Sea, which includes its eastern neighbors. In the introduction to the book, the editor cites Evliya Çelebi, a seventeenth-century Ottoman traveler who described the rivers as a system of capillaries, flowing gently one into the other, swelling the seas as they connect the world.
One of the keys to comprehending the spatial and historical contexts in which the Mediterranean system must be understood is the examination of political, artistic, and economic influences. The principalities, kingdoms, and fiefdoms examined in this work embodied this essential hybridity. They were employed as a kind of buffer or cultural switch system that could assimilate, translate, and particularly link the cultures of Central Asia with those of Western Europe. This role was of main importance because these principalities straddled cultures and religions, the majority of which were Eastern Orthodox (with the exceptions of Hungary, Dalmatia, and Poland) and Slavic-speaking (excluding Romania). The historical time frame encompasses an extremely wide period from 1300 to 1700, which includes two major art movements in the West, the Renaissance and the Baroque.
The volume is divided into three main parts. In the first, “The Adriatic,” the authors provide a geographical background of the Adriatic as a cultural system, with a general overview of the military architecture in Dalmatia. The essays by Darka Bilić (“Daniel Rodriga's Lazaretto in Split and Ottoman Caravanserais in Bosnia: The Transcultural Transfer of an Architectonic Model”) and by Joško Belamarić (“The Villa in Renaissance Dubrovnik: ‘Where Art Has Tamed Wild Nature’”) raise questions about architecture by analyzing closely migration and architectural models in Dalmatia.
In the second part of the book, “The Black Sea from the Dardanelles to the Sea of Azov,” the authors declare how reverberations of the classic sites beyond Mediterranean shores and into the Continent are fundamental to understanding the concept of the connectedness so widely portrayed by Braudel. The sources investigated in this chapter enlighten readers about the mobility of population, the circulation of ideas and Renaissance models in architecture, but also of the artistic language in the northern Black Sea shores, that indicates how the Danube regions was not isolated from the cultures of the Mediterranean shores. Collectively, these components provide a solid insight into the historical ties that existed between Venice and the Danube.
The final chapter, “The Danube and Beyond,” offers a final set of summative reflections. The multifaceted approach reveals mobility and cultural transfers in many artistic fields in the Danube area and beyond, and provides a wealth of anthropological knowledge on architectural and artistic exchanges, on sociability, on the roads of communication and merchant networks, on politics, and on lifestyle, as specified in the essay by Alexandr Osipian about Ottoman and Persian luxury. Ultimately, the book delivers what its title promises. It sheds light on the Western Mediterranean area, assuming a transregional approach with a wide appeal. Here the attempt to reconstruct the culture of these fluid spaces is tangible and needs to be studied: this fascinating world was, in effect, characterized by a complex period of unstable and short-lived hegemonies, and connections between different artistic and architectural fields created new historical categories of regional identities, as well as originality.
