by Jon Lackman | 24 May 2006 | Islamic, Renaissance
The “Bellini and the East” exhibition, which examines artistic exchange between Venice and the Ottomans, is getting a lot of attention at the National Gallery in London. (It was recently at the Gardner Museum in Boston; catalog by Yale UP.) Most critics try to draw a lesson for today’s relations between Islam and the West. Novelist Orhan Pamuk writes: “Another painting rightly attributed to Bellini takes us away from scholarly disputes and concerns about political correctness to suggest a more humane east-west story, and with extraordinary elegance. This marvellously simple watercolour, no larger than a miniature, shows a young artist or scribe sitting cross-legged … As I gazed down at the painting, the distance between me and it seemed to be the same as the distance between the painter and his blank sheet of paper. I was looking at Bellini’s small painting in just the same way that a sultan might, in a private moment, look at a miniature illuminating the thick and heavy book in his hand. I, too, was gazing downwards like the painter in the painting. What distinguishes Islamic painting from western painting after the Renaissance, as much as religious prohibitions and perhaps even more than that, is this secretive downward gaze that Bellini captures so profoundly in this portrait.” Other commentators include April Austin, Peter Campbell, Richard Dorment, Jonathan Jones, Ron Margulies, Modern Kicks, and Peter Walsh.
