The Silk Roads: Art and Architecture

Excellent two day online course from ARTScapades looking at the history of the Silk Roads and how ideas as well as goods travelled along them.

Susan Whilfield from the University of East Anglia guided us through starting with an overview of the history of the routes and the religions which operated along them. She pointed that the routes were a lot wider than usually thought and stretch into Japan at one side and Scandinavia at the other.

She then went on to talk about silk itself and how its trade and production travelled along the routes starting in China. She talked about the different qualities of silk that were produced.

One the second day she looked at the role of pilgrimages, both Christian and Buddhist, in spreading ideas and bringing goods and souvenirs back. I was fascinated by a Buddhist statue which had been found in Scandinavia with signs that it had been displayed in the same was as they displayed Norse gods.

Finally she focused on four objects looking at their travels and what they say about the transfer of taste and technology. She used a glass bowl from the Mediterranean found in Southern China, the aforementioned Buddha, a dagger and sheath found in a grave in Korea in the  gold and cloisonne style of Central Asia and finally the shoulder clasp found at Sutton Hoo which again in the gold and cloisonne style and which contains garnets from South Asia, Sri Lanka and Central Europe.

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