Brooklyn's Renaissance

This book explores and encompass the historical contexts that shaped the city of Brooklyn's cultural understanding in the nineteenth century, and compares this period to the European Renaissance in terms of its cultural development and the economic and patronage practices that developed there. It highlights three defining threads, or backstories, that, in the venerable tradition of Renaissance art, lend perspectival depth and shading to the city. Those threads and how they intertwine signal that Brooklyn's Renaissance engages more than local history. Its roots stretch back in time to the Italian Renaissance and in space well beyond the East River and across the Atlantic. Brooklynites catalyzed their Renaissance, but the city's cultural flowering emerged from these wider historical, economic, and cultural influences. It drew energy from the Atlantic World and its thriving transcontinental exchange that anchored on the US side in the Port of New York, along the docks on both sides of the East River. Brooklyn's merchant patrons of the arts participated actively in this transoceanic exchange. Through commerce they accumulated the private wealth they used to sustain the arts. They modeled their patronage practices on those of the historical Italian Renaissance filtered through the more recent urban renaissances in Northern England, particularly in Liverpool, Britain's gateway for North Atlantic trade. Early America's connections with Liverpool followed the pathways of transoceanic trade, and the ships plying the Atlantic provided the physical conduits whereby expectations that elite families should sponsor high culture came to America and reached Brooklyn.