|
Pragmatism is probably the term that best defines Venice’s relations with the Muslim Middle East.
Venice’s special relationship with the Islamic world and its influence on art and culture, is the focus of a new exhibition titled, “Venice and the Orient” which is currently running at L’Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris until February 18, 2007.
It features some 200 works, including paintings by great Venetian artists like Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Gentile Bellini and Paolo Veronese.
The show is organised together with New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it will move in March, 2007.
The aim is to reveal how the Near East came to influence the city’s artistic and artisan output so profoundly that even experts sometimes struggle to fathom whether works are Venetian or Oriental.
It also highlights the fact that the Islamic world was an ‘exporter’ of technology, skills, science and culture throughout the Middle Ages.
“Venice and the Orient” covers a period that goes from 828, when St. Mark’s relics were stolen from Alexandria and taken to Venice, to the dissolution of the Venetian Republic at the end of the 17th century.
“Pragmatism is probably the term that best defines Venice’s relations with the Muslim Middle East,” said the curator of the exhibition, Stefano Carboni. “The city maintained diplomatic relations with the Islamic world even during the Crusades, when it was a staging area for Christian campaigns. “Despite all the wars, Venice remained a privileged partner, thanks to an almost perfect balance between religious spirit, chameleon-like diplomacy and acute business sense”.
Carboni explained that Venetian artists were inspired by the objects, materials and stories the city’s traders brought back with them from cities like Damascus, Alexandria, Cairo and Constantinople. A series of paintings of Ottoman sultans and the members of other Islamic dynasties, like the Safavids of Iran, are shown alongside historic paintings of Venice’s Doges (dukes).
Some Venetian artists, like Bellini (circa 1429-1507), even went to the Middle East to ply their trade.
Bellini spent two years in Constantinople and his works frequently displayed Oriental influences afterwards.
His portrait of Sultan Mehmet II - the man who conquered the city in 1453 thus ending the Byzantine Empire - is one of the highlights of the show. The exhibition also features examples of Venetian ceramics, glasswork, weapons, carpets, furniture, coats of arms and luxury goods which have an Eastern flavour. The works on show come from some of the world’s top museums, including the British Museum of London and Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera.
|
|
