Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange

The Mongol period (1206-1368) marked a major turning point of exchange ? culturally, politically, and artistically ? across Eurasia.

The wide-ranging international exchange that occurred during the Mongol period is most apparent visually through the inclusion of Mongol motifs in textile, paintings, ceramics, and metalwork, among other media. Eiren Shea investigates how a group of newly-confederated tribes from the steppe conquered the most sophisticated societies in existence in less than a century, creating a courtly idiom that permanently changed the aesthetics of China and whose echoes were felt across Central Asia, the Middle East, and even Europe.

This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, fashion design, and Asian studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 license.

"[Shea] concludes with an account of the impact of the importation of panni Tartarici (Tartar cloths) to Venice and other Italian city-states, and the representation of Mongol elites found in thirteenth-century Italian images. Far from seeing these as a kind of European proto-colonial discovery of the Asian other, Shea frames these images as evidence for Mongol influence on the cultures of the Mediterranean world, an important account that is often absent from the art history of the period."

--CAA Reviews