by Jon Lackman | 21 September 2007 | Islamic, Medieval, Renaissance
In caa.reviews, Dorothy M. Shepard summarizes the recent “Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797″ symposium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which mounted an exhibition on the topic):
James Harper of the University of Oregon gave the last paper of the morning. Titled “Iron Curtain and Global Village: The Historiographic Positioning of Venice and Islam,” it was easily the most thought-provoking and well-received paper at the symposium. Harper considered what the exhibition might teach in terms of varying attitudes toward the Turks as gleaned from Venetian art of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. He traced this first in Venetian painting, noting the evolution from Gentile Bellini’s positive view of the Turks through a stage of suspicious views to Dürer’s negative treatment showing the anti-Christ as a turbaned king. The exhibition concluded with images meant to allay Western fears, especially the ship figurehead of a Turk in chains. Harper then looked at the decorative-arts component of the exhibition and found that it told another story, one of extensive trade between Venice and the Islamic East and the cultural exchanges, along with the sharing of skills, materials, and ideas, that resulted from it. He used two terms to explain these attitudinal differences. His “iron curtain” model is based on the period’s alternation between military conflicts and truces. This view sees rivals with clashing ideologies as believing that they are not just in a military struggle but in fact in a fight for survival. His second term, “global village,” refers to the Mediterranean as an area of exchange and emphasizes the fruitful sharing of information and technical skills seen in the decorative arts. The Venice and the Islamic World exhibition fits well into the “global village” model, he feels, as it shows such complete mastery of some techniques that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between Venetian and Islamic pieces of glass, book covers, textiles, etc. Venetian paintings in the exhibition seem to fit into the “iron curtain” model, not only when they exhibit suspicion and distrust of the Islamic East but also when their allegiances are to Western artistic theory and practice. This was true even when the Venetian artists included figures in Eastern dress, buildings decorated in Islamic style, and Eastern cityscapes. Harper concluded that painters were restricted by their intellectual theory to the “iron curtain” model, while the artisans had more freedom to absorb new ideas and techniques, whatever the source, which made them part of the “global village.”
