From the early thirteenth century traders from Italian mercantile families started travelling eastward, to the European frontiers, to areas such as Crimea in the northern Black Sea region, where commercial outposts served as markets for trading goods with Eurasia and beyond. The lecture centers on the experience of those traders, focusing on metalwork and the way it shaped discourse regarding art, heritage, and the indigenous, both in the European frontiers and “back home” in Italy’s Early Modern domestic spaces.

Ittai Weinryb is an associate professor at the Bard Graduate Center. He is currently completing a book on art and material culture circulating in the Black Sea region during the Middle Ages and Early Modern period and another monograph which centers on the sentiment of Hope as a category of artistic creativity. He is the co-editor of the book series Art/Work which is set to narrate a new history of art founded in the study of objects, materials, and technology. He is the author of The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages (2016) and of Die Hildesheimer Avantgarde: Kunst und Kolonialismus im mittelalterlichen Deutschland (2023), and the curator of the exhibition Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place (2018).