Venice's Mediterranean Colonies: Architecture and Urbanism & Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture 1100-1500 & Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West

Oleg Grabar

MARIA GEORGOPOULOU

Venice's Mediterranean Colonies: Architecture and Urbanism

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 383 pp.; 136 b/w ills, $80.00

DEBORAH HOWARD

Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture 1100-1500

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 283 pp.; 271 color and b/w ills. $60.00

LISA JARDINE AND JERRY BROTTON

Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West

Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 2000. 224 pp.; 87 color and b/w ills. $39.95

ROSAMUND MACK

Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300-1600

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 266 pp.: 101 color ills., 85 b/w. $65.00

The four books under review all deal, in a broad sense, with the artistic contacts that existed from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance between Italy and the Islamic world or, to be more accurate, with the world of the eastern half of the Mediterranean basin. Two (Georgopoulou and Howard) concentrate on Venice, One (Mack) is a broadly based overview spanning three centuries and presumably covering the whole of Italy. The fourth one (Jardine and Brotton) is a more specific consideration of a particular set of images with a somewhat inflated title. All see the arts and the world from the point of view of whatever Italian perspective they have chosen, while the provider of contacts--late Byzantium or the Islamic world under Mamluk, Ottoman, or other guises--appears mostly as a display of available objects, monuments of architecture, and sources of inspiration.

What are these artistic "contacts"? How does one detect them? Through a history of trade that implies an exchange of goods and of taste? Or from the recognition, within any one "style" or "art," of unexpected and necessarily alien details?

In older, intellectually organized, scholarly times, contacts resulted in influences. (1) These evolved from the appearance within a given group of features that were more commonly identified with another group. Thus, the canons for depicting landscape in Persian painting were at some point revolutionized by the ways of Chinese art, apparently a conscious and willful act on the part of the receiver, a neutral or irrelevant one on the part of the giver. Comparable examples occurred with the spread of Gothic architecture, Impressionist techniques in painting, and the use of metalwork designs in ceramics. The problem with the word "influence" is that it works better as a verb than as a noun. As a verb it depicts something quite reasonable and logical, the modification of a given formal entity by a motif or a technique developed elsewhere. But can an influence be a visual morpheme to be isolated like a microbe or an antigen under the microscope? Or is it only an action, the action of transferring a motif to a new group?

Maybe we should avoid the word "influence" unless whatever we are talking about is carefully defined by the willful decisions of artisans, artists, or patrons. (2) We should rather talk about impacts. It is easy to argue that Italian art had a tremendous impact nearly everywhere in Europe after 1500, and French art accomplished the same in the 18th century. To evaluate these impacts is another matter, as it is to choose between possibly conflicting interpretations. Was there a "universal" European art, with secondary importance to be given to individual lands? Or are separate Baroque or later experiments important in their variety more than in their reflection of some alleged common ideal? Thus, impacts may be even more confusing than influences in defining artistic relationships between different cultural groups: they are like transplants, which can become part and parcel of a new entity or be rejected. And, perhaps, the term is too vague altogether.

Other terms were developed more recently in literary studies and in the social sciences. "Interculturality" and "hybridity" imply either certain contexts or certain results derived from historical or cultural contacts that motivate patrons or makers to combine forms from different origins without necessarily adopting all the meanings associated with these forms in the culture of their origin. An older, usually but not necessarily somewhat pejorative, term for this phenomenon was "eclecticism," I shall return in conclusion to the contributions, if any, the books under review have made to the theoretical side of the complicated issue of artistic exchanges, but I will first outline the contribution and scope of each book.

Maria Georgopoulou's book is the account of an interesting and important phenomenon: the architectural and urbanistic transformations introduced by Venice in the empire formed after the conquest of Constantinople in 1204 and maintained until the Ottoman takeover completed with the occupation of Crete in 1669. Although mentioning frequently places like Modon, Coron. and Negroponte in Greece proper, Caneo and Retino in Crete, and, more rarely, the Adriatic colonies of Venice, the book deals primarily with Candia in Crete. It reconstructs quite successfully the topography of the city and the changes it underwent over three and a half centuries. It illustrates the ethnic and religious mix of the population. I was surprised to learn of the almost total absence of data about Muslims or Semitic Christians from Egypt, the Levant, or Anatolia, although information does exist about Armenians. The book provides full support of archival and archaeological documentation, the latter being restricted to the interpretation o f maps and to descriptions recorded before the building boom of the second half of the 20th century rather than being based on actual archaeological investigations.

These are all wonderful achievements, but the real importance of the book lies beyond them, The monuments serve, in the author's view, as examples for a more complicated set of ideas than the mere facts of building churches and civic monuments or of designing suburbs. The main idea is that Venice was a colonial power and, therefore, developed ways of using architecture to impose or symbolize its control over a native and, a priori, alien population. The author tried to apply paradigms and lessons from the European colonial experience of later times (p. 214), but the main conclusion of the book is that Venetian power succeeded in creating a symbiosis between Eastern and Western Christianity and even in using Eastern symbols not as trophies of power but as a way of accepting its cultural continuity with Byzantium, often seen, correctly I believe, as a contact with a legitimizing past. There were no doubt Franciscan and Dominican foundations and new ceremonies in the cities, but the overall picture is one of min imal cultural conflict and of thoughtful adaptation, as is shown in the story of the icon of the Virgin Mesopanditissa, which ended up in Venice.

What is missing from the hook is a sense of the surrounding world of Byzantium in decline yet with a flourishing Orthodoxy, and especially of a Mamluk system about to be replaced by the Ottomans. It is, after all, trading with Muslim countries that made the wealth of Venice. This is a carefully circumscribed book, a bit narrow in its scope, and at times repetitive. The world it depicts is bereft of major monuments that would have succeeded, on expressive or aesthetic grounds, in breaking out of their environment and their functions. It deals ultimately with a provincial development, a type of transformation that does indeed relate to the colonialism of the 19th and 20th centuries. The author is not to be criticized for this impression provided by the book, just as she should not be faulted for the fact that her book deals with a very special instance of contacts between artistic entities--Venice and Crete--which emphasizes the domination of one by the other. Her argument is that the Venetians used their power wisely and intelligently in order to maintain their control over Greek Christians. The problem for the historian of art is that we have no way of evaluating or even hearing the views of those who were dominated.

Global Interests, in spite of its subtitle, consists of three imaginative essays that are linked to each other only through the appearance in all of them of the well-known, but nonetheless striking, series of 15th- and 16th-century medals of ruling princes.

The first essay winds itself from Carpaccio's Saint George series in Venice to Pisanello's medal of John VIII Paleologus, several other medals, and eventually Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors. The point of the argument is that, in every one of the images considered, a cultural frontier was transgressed, and the ethos of the Italian Renaissance is presented as much more complicated than is usually argued; more specifically, the essay proposes that these images, and in particular the medals, were made in order to bring together, unsuccessfully as it turned out, Eastern and Western churches against the growing Ottoman Empire. The second essay argues that the superb huge tapestries (some of which were recently shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) made for the French, Spanish, and Portuguese courts of the 16th century displayed representations with ideological connotations of how the East (essentially the Ottomans, but India and the Americas appear as well) and the West (essentially Latin Christianity) faced each other in struggles and conquests. The point is entirely valid for tapestries in the series dealing with the Conquest of Tunis, and the authors are quite correct in linking them with an earlier event: after the rout of 1396 at Nicopolis, the victorious Ottoman sultan Bayazid requested tapestries with heroic topics from the defeated Philip the Bold. The latter were probably meant to depict the life of Alexander the Great. This early example of a request (which was apparently never fulfilled) demonstrates the common roots for narratives expected anywhere in the Mediterranean area, whereas, over one hundred years later, the series dealing with Tunis (in particular, the tapestry depicting the sack of the city) or the marvelous series made for Joao de Castro in Lisbon are representations of triumphs over "others," aliens of some sort in western Asia, India, or the Americas. And, on the occasion of the marriage in 1572 of Marguerite de Valois and the future Henri IV, there was a pageant that included pri nces, courtiers, and soldiers dressed as Turks or as American Indians, thus transforming "others" into subjects for amusement.

And in a third essay, the authors pick up a little-noted feature of the medals mentioned in the first two essays: the reverse of many of them present an equestrian figure. The result is a fascinating discussion on the ceremonial and symbolic uses of horses from India to Britain in international relations and in demonstrations of prestige. While the authors may have gone a bit too far in seeing "imperial bids for recognition" in representations of horses, which could be simply meant as symbols of wealth, they have provided their well-illustrated arguments with an exciting breadth of information.

This is a book that is fun to read, but it does not describe or present a "Renaissance Art between East and West," as promised in the subtitle. It merely introduces common ideas and shared techniques or motifs, at times even shared artists. Weak on information about the Islamic world, the book would have profited from consulting the recently published survey of the portraits of Ottoman sultans since the 15th century. The superb entries and essays of the latter show, among many other things, how Italian ideas and forms penetrated Ottoman art and are transformed by other traditions and different needs or tastes. (3) For, however attractive and interesting to read, this book does not come to grips with the major issues of artistic relationships between Islamic and Latin cultures, but merely explains some features of Western art through the existence of a contest with the Islamic East or argues for common sources in matters of symbols for rulers, an idea that was a mainstay of the history of art half a century ag o. Or, perhaps, what this book hints at is that the visual and cultural relations between East and West were actually quite limited and appear as minor themes in either cultural sphere.

Rosamund Mack's Bazaar to Piazza is, first of all, a pleasure to peruse. More than half of its illustrations are in color and include many a masterpiece of Italian painting or of objects from the Islamic world. It is superbly researched, with a long and accurate bibliography containing quite a few rare publications dutifully read and assimilated by the author. The core of the book lies in seven chapters listing and discussing examples of Islamic objects shown in Italian paintings or of the transformation of manufacturing techniques eventually to allow Italian artisans to provide the same effects as seen on Islamic objects. The chapters are on silks, carpets, ceramics, glass, bookbinding and lacquer, and inlaid brass work. These chapters are all straightforward, interesting, accurate, and informative. It is curious, as the author herself remarks, that Italian artisans did not try to make carpets with Oriental motifs or in Oriental techniques, while becoming proficient in practically every other technique.

Two of the chapters are more ambitious. One deals with Oriental scripts in Italian paintings. The examples are, for the most part, well known, and Rosamund Mack distinguishes quite properly, if somewhat indirectly, different uses of these inscriptions: simple ornaments serving to beautify something; means to identify a setting or a person as Near Eastern or biblical; depictions of the exotic; perhaps, in a few paintings, possible symbolic or ideological associations. The boundaries between these categories are not always easy to maintain and may not even be discerned except in individual instances. What is more curious is that the use of Arabic letters appears quite early in the 14th century, where it is found sometimes with imitations of the Mongol script, possibly as a result of impressions or objects brought by Italian travelers from inner Asia. And then these inscriptions more or less disappear in the second decade of the 16th century. The phenomenon is thus clearly circumscribed, and it would be interest ing to explore why this was so. It is unlikely that the medieval examples mentioned on pp. 59-61 (and there are many more outside of Italy) had much to do with what happened in the early 14th century, and I doubt very much that the illustrations to Hariri's Maqamat were known in Italy during the Renaissance and would have served as models. What is also needed now is a topography of these imitations of Arabic in order to find out whether they were as localized in space as they were in time.

Another more speculative chapter deals with "the Pictorial Arts," in other words, with images of "Orientals." Illustrated travel books showing people do not appear until the late 16th century and are remarkably uninteresting from an aesthetic as well as an anthropological point of view. There is a smattering of images, drawings or details of paintings, depicting mostly denizens of the Ottoman Empire, including sultans and members of the imperial family, some individuals met accidentally (these are usually among the best drawings). But, if one excepts a small number of Venetian paintings and a few unusual instances elsewhere, the Orient as subject matter or as a backdrop to other scenes is not very apparent in Italian painting. Should one wonder why not?

Part of the answer may be given by the general theme and subtitle of Rosamund Mack's book that the visual knowledge and impact of the Islamic world on Italian art came through trade, that is, through commercial, not cultural, connections. This is indeed how this impact began in the Middle Ages and why it involved primarily the luxury arts, in which the Islamic world became particularly proficient quite early. Eventually, by the 16th century, the roles were reversed; Italy manufactured products in an Islamic manner and had them sold throughout the Near East and even beyond. Thus, the conclusion one may draw from this book, even though it is not the author's, is that, like tourism in our own times, commercial contacts affected the arts only superficially. They are reflected in small details, sometimes very curious ones, but they are not present in the major artistic accomplishments of the Renaissance. Sinan, the great Ottoman architect of the 16th century, was not called to be a con- sultant for the transformat ion of the basilica of St. Peter, and the delicate Persian miniatures of the 15th and 16th centuries were practically unknown in the West. The impact of trade was to enrich the surfaces of some things and the setting of some spaces, not to Inspire artists or patrons. Thus, I would not necessarily share the grand proposition made by the author that, among other things, "Oriental trade and travel contributed to artistic development in Italy and made a permanent impression on Italian taste" (p. 83). Her own work, thanks to its thoroughness, demonstrated, to me at least, the limitations of the impact of trade on art. It raises, thereby, important questions in the areas of taste and society that were indeed affected by trade. And, if not trade, then what can explain the obvious presence of so many features of Islamic origin in Italian art of the Renaissance, at least before the early 16th century? The answers lie, probably, in defining more clearly than we usually do what is and is not included in the notion of ar t, but especially in evaluating the Islamic presence within the mass of Italian art.

This sort of questioning leads directly to Venice and to Deborah Howard's Venice and the East. I had seen it in manuscript form at the request of the publisher and found it then already fascinating to read and illuminating in its novelty. It is a dense and thoughtful book, remarkable both for its learned yet readable text and for its sequences of images, which tell the story on their own. The author traveled through most of the places with which she deals and recorded them visually in the ways in which 15th- or 16th-century travelers could have experienced them. Troubled by terms like "influence" or "borrowing," she chose "cultural transfer" as the theme of her book and acknowledged that she was trying to deal with the "subjectivity" (p. xiv) of art, that is to say, the mentality of the Venetians who saw the East and then transmitted what they saw to their compatriots, or at least to patrons and builders. In a sense, the author's own subjectivity is also at stake, as, for instance, her comparisons of Venice w ith Aleppo, Damascus, and Cairo (p. 7), while powerful and persuasive, are the vision of one person and cannot be assumed for all travelers, now or in the past. Much of the attraction of the book lies in its interplay between careful and thorough scholarly investigations of masses of details in Venice or in the Islamic world, carefully thought-out illustrations, novel and exciting questions, and the author's own Intellectual and actual trips.

The first chapter deals with trade and travel and takes up, one by one, all aspects of travel, from preparations at home in Venice through briefings by experienced travelers to visits to the colonies of Venice, and eventually to the connections with the Muslim world. The mood of the voyage itself and of life in the colonies is sketched in a most vivid manner, such as the remarks on women in a male world (p. 34, following the reference to the tomb of an Italian woman found in China) or the comments on the different perceptions of the same architecture by people from different cultures (pp. 41-42). A second chapter summarizes what can be known of the means by which information on architecture was transmitted. Written statements of orally transmitted memories and impressions predominated, but it is notoriously difficult to transfer them to the actual making or building of something. Drawings and sketches no doubt existed, but these were probably few in number to begin with. Of the few that remain, many are very schematic and relatively late. Arabic books were known, especially scientific ones rather than the religious and literary ones that predominated in the output of books in Arabic. And, once again, I register my doubts that the 13th-century illustrated Arabic manuscripts were known in Renaissance Italy. Objects were numerous, but the ways they had an impact on painting and architecture are difficult to determine. In short, and I may overstate the author's point of view, it is memories of impressions that dominated the process by which Islamic elements came to Venice. If true, the point is of great importance for any study of intercultural relations.

The chapter on the basilica of S. Marco is an exciting attempt to demonstrate how the decoration of the building and much of its contents reflected not the Islamic world of the Near East in general, but quite specifically Alexandria, the city of Saint Mark, whose memories or monuments, even ruined ones like the Pharos, were constantly reproduced in sculpture or in mosaics. The author correctly points out that, as with several objects in the treasury of S. Marco, Islamic and antique connotations were blurred at times, both being in part merely exotic. The problem with these connections, which seem to me justified, is that they imply a sort of Orientalizing, perhaps subconscious, mood on the part of several generations of Venetian patrons and artisans. The argument is persuasive, but is it right?

The following three chapters deal with the merchant city as a whole, the palaces of Venice, and finally the Palazzo Ducale itself. They continue in the same vein and provide or support parallels between Venetian examples and Syrian, Palestinian, or Egyptian ones, even, in the instance of wall decoration, Iranian ones, through the Venetian involvement with the Silk Road. Even though secular architecture has been much more randomly preserved in the Near East than in Venice, the parallels make good sense and, in many ways, are not too surprising. In designing or planning roof platforms for sleeping, corner stairwells, porticoed courts, even street facades (less frequent in the Islamic world for secular buildings), the Venetians and the Mamluks or the Ottomans shared so many forms of behavior, so many activities, and so much technical knowledge that we can almost talk of automatic uses of the same forms, except for two important points.

One is relatively simple. The Islamic world that appears in Venice is that of the Mamluks of Syria and Egypt, not that of the Ottomans of Anatolia and the Balkans, even though the latter were major trade partners with Venice. This is in interesting contrast to the medals and other implements mentioned in the other books under review, which dealt predominantly with the Ottomans. The contrast has something to do with the difference between the visual world of rulers that appears in the medals and was cultivated by Ottoman sultans and the wider spectrum of social groups typical of Mamluk society.

The second point is that very little in the architecture of the Islamic world reflects Venice or, for that matter, much of Italy, except for a short period of time during and immediately after the Crusades and in the curious appearance of some Sicilian features in early Mamluk architecture. (4) The fact that this was a one-way street suggests that the Venetians consciously sought the presence of these features in their surroundings and that either there was nothing in their ways that would interest the Mamluks or that the latter were not aware of the Venetian world. The reason for the Venetian choice, as suggested by Deborah Howard, is that Venice formally saw itself in a "world-wide context" (p. 188). Its cosmopolitan values distinguished it from other cities, and these values had to be exhibited in architecture and in urban design. No Muslim center made this sort of claim at that time except the Ottomans, whose artistic relations to Venice were not, it seems, in architecture.

The last chapter, on the Pilgrim City, is perhaps less persuasive than those preceding it, but its guiding idea is an interesting one. It is that the ultimate objective of Venice's efforts was to become a holy place itself, not only because of the relics of Saint Mark but also because it reflected the Holy Places of Christianity, in particular, Jerusalem. The idea is fascinating to an art historian because it implies that meanings can be given to forms that were not meant to have them and that there is no necessary integrity to the meaning of forms. But much in this chapter is suggestive hypothesis rather than established fact.

Deborah Howard's book is a model in two ways. One is its method of adjusting a variety of written sources and of monuments from the city itself as well as from the world known to that city. The other is that it so vividly projects an idea, a vision. The vision goes beyond the common bag of influences, impacts, borrowings, or assorted hybridities in their intercultural settings. It argues rather that a visual idiom was created by a history of mercantile connections between two cultures. That idiom used many sources and incorporated motifs from the Islamic world, not a particularly original feature, while formulating an attitude toward these motifs that was original because it made them its own. What made this possible in Venice? Why did it not happen in Genoa, whose involvement with trade in the Islamic world was, at least for a while, just as important as Venice's? Did this aspect of the idiom of Venetian art have any effect on the rest of Italy? So many questions, which will now, I hope, find takers in the e ager masses of young academics.

What conclusions can one draw from these four books? First of all, relationships between Italian and Islamic cultures were many and different in kind. More should be known about the differences between regions in Italy in accepting or acknowledging Islamic motifs, and distinctions must be made between periods. Now that both Ottoman and Mamluk studies have developed enormously over the past ten years, it may be useful to separate them rather than seeing all Islamic features as one. A typology of the purposes and accomplishments of such relationships could also be proposed and tested in other areas with intercultural connections. Power, pleasure, wealth, luxury, description, imitation, collecting, ideology were all involved as possible causes or results of visual relationships. But the more curious conclusion is that, after reading these four books, I am less capable than I was before of drawing a simple picture of the influence or the impact of Islamic art on Italian art. The best we can do, at this stage of t hinking and research, is to sketch out a few hypotheses and to point out their values and their limitations. Fuller explanations can emerge only after a number of individual items are studied in all of their details. This task has been partly done for Candia or S. Marco in the books under review. It should be undertaken for the tapestry of the Sack of Tunis, the use of Arabic inscriptions in Giotto, Gentile de Fabriano, and some of Carpaccio's paintings. And all these examples should then be compared with each other from the point of view of relationships between different artistic traditions. We may, then, better be able to sort out influences from impacts or from borrowings. The more complex question at that point is whether these features were major attributes of Italian art or amusing proto-turqueries. Except for the architecture of Venice after Deborah Howard's book, the matter remains unresolved.

But there is perhaps a final and more profound conclusion to draw from these books. Through the device of cultural contacts between supposedly different worlds, they have raised the more fundamental question of art historical classification principles. The history and, to a smaller degree, the criticism of art are based on the assumption that coherent sets of forms, expressions, or subjects exist and can be defined in words or, at the very least, felt through visual experience. Such sets are different from each other and they are usually identified with a period, an area, a medium, patronage, and use, or any combination of these categories of classification. In one of its many frequently contradictory uses, the word "style" is often the term applied to these sets. Or, in an equally confusing manner, the word "art" can be used instead, which seems more factual, almost clinical, in its acknowledgment of the whole creativity of a time or of a place. Even if there are many arguments about the spatial, chronologi cal, or other boundaries between "styles" or "arts," their existence is, most of the time, not questioned. Without them, one of the historian of art's most essential tasks, that of providing a concise identifying label for any work of art he or she encounters, would be impossible. These stylistic or artistic sets evolve, merge with each other, create new stylistic or artistic groups--in short, undergo a variety of modifications, which may reflect two types of factors. Some, like technical inventions or major political or cultural changes, are contemporary with the styles involved and can, most of the time, be identified and pinpointed with some precision, just as their effects can he seen in all or some of the works from the pertinent group. Others, like political pressures, novel curiosities and approaches, and ideological constraints, are from the time of the modern observer and become attitudes toward works of art and their interpretation rather than reasonably objective attributes. The proper equilibrium between the relatively precise information provided by monuments or texts and the ideological or intellectual requirements of contemporary observers and students is not always easy to achieve. This group of books has helped in illuminating the difficulties involved and in providing paths for their solution.

Notes

(1.) An example of this old-fashioned scholarship is Goran Hermeren, Influence in Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

(2.) Oleg Grabar, Trade with the East and the Influence of Islamic Art," in Il Medio Oriente e l'Occidente nell'arte del XIII secolo, ed. Hans Belting, Atti del XXIV Congresso Internazionale di Storia dell'Arte (Bologna: CLUEB, 1982), with some very preliminary thoughts on the subject.

(3.) Selman Kangel, ed., The Sultan's Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman (Istanbul: Isbank, 2000).

(4.) Hayat Salam-Liebich, The Architecture of the Mamluk City of Tripoli (Cambridge. Mass.: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1983), 223-25; and Michael Meinecke, Die mamlukische Architektur in Agyplen und Syrien (Gluckstadt: J.J. Augustin, 1992), vol. 1, 35ff. and 42-44.

OLEG GRABAR is the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art emeritus at Harvard University and professor emeritus in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His most recent book (with Richard Ettinghausen and Lynn Jenkins-Madina) is the Pelican volume Islamic Art and Architecture 660-1250 [Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J 08540].

COPYRIGHT 2003 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning