Papers presented at "The itineraries of art: topographies of artistic mobility in Europe and Asia, 1500-1900," the second annual conference of the German Research Foundation Research Unit 1703 "Transcultural Negotiations in the Ambits of Art," held May 23-25, 2013 at the Kunsthistorisches Institut of the Freie Universität Berlin, and at the Museum für Asiatische Kunst Berlin.

Includes 24 color plates (pages 289-312).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / Karin Gludovatz, Juliane Noth and Joachim Rees -- Acknowledgements / Karin Gludovatz, Juliane Noth and Joachim Rees -- Introduction / Juliane Noth and Joachim Rees -- When Routes Entered Culture / Christian Kravagna -- Half modern, half something else / Martin Beck -- Tracking the Routes of Vision in Early Modern Eurasia / Monica Juneja -- Why Was There No Chinese Painting of Marco Polo? / Eugene Y. Wang -- Geo-Narrative in Seventeenth-Century China / Elizabeth Kindall -- Historicity and the Route / Sophie Annette Kranen -- Itinerary and Painting Lineage / julia orell -- Seen from a Boat / Juliane Noth -- Harbouring Expectations / Joachim Rees and Nora Usanov-Geissler -- Transcultural Ballast / Evelyn Reitz -- Suspected Prospects / Ulrike Boskamp -- Plates / Karin Gludovatz, Juliane Noth and Joachim Rees -- List of Contributors / Karin Gludovatz, Juliane Noth and Joachim Rees -- Index / Karin Gludovatz, Juliane Noth and Joachim Rees.

While recent scholarship dealt with the economic and political historio-graphies of road systems, this book focuses on routes as stimuli of cultural transfer and artistic production. Framed in the historiography of longue durée, routes may be addressed as trajectories that cut across cultural geographies and periodizations. With focus on the early modern period, the volume foregrounds an unprecedented expansion and transformation of route-networks. New combinations of transcontinental routes profoundly affected cultural topographies and symbolic paradigms. The rise of Asian and European port cities as nodes of maritime systems and prosperous cultural contact zones is closely linked to these shifts; routes, hubs, and the fabrication of collective imaginations about them therefore constitute the central themes of this book.