The Triumph of Pragmatism
"Too big, too hairy," is what Nur Banu, mother of the Ottoman Sultan Murad III (1574-1595) thinks of the two lap dogs delivered to her from Venice.
The merchants immediately respond to their influential client's complaint, appeasing her with a selection of expensive gifts. The principle that the customer is always right helped the merchants of Venice to build a trade empire that lasted almost a thousand years.
Dogs represented an eccentric exception to their usual business. Glassware, spices, carpets, metal products, silk and brocade were their daily bread and the basis for the city's great wealth.
The fact that their customers were often Muslims who were throughout the course of history repeatedly entangled in wars with the Christian world did not faze them in the least. Trade between Venice and the lands of "the Orient" remained virtually undisrupted by the hostilities, even continuing to flourish during the Crusades.
A patron saint from Egypt
In cooperation with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the IMA examines centuries of exchange between the city-state on the Adriatic coast and the so-called Levant.
Two hundred objects have been brought together from some sixty museums, including ones in Berlin and Munich, and will be on display for the public until February 18, 2007 in the galleries of the IMA. The show will then travel to New York.
The main markets for the Venetian merchants were cities such as Damascus, Istanbul and Alexandria. A special relationship tied Venice to the latter city, one that went far beyond mere trade.
According to legend, two Venetian merchants stole the remains of St. Mark from the Egyptian city of Alexandria and brought them back home. St. Mark thus became the patron saint of the Mediterranean metropolis, and the city built the imposing St. Mark's Basilica (consecrated in 1094) in his honor, the bulging onion domes of which echo the Egyptian Mameluk style.
Ambition and didactics
The starting point of the exhibition is the theft of the relics of St. Mark. It ends with the conquest of Venice by Napoleon's troops in 1797, thus covering a period of almost a thousand years. This is quite an ambitious undertaking, whose success inevitably rests on a meaningful choice of emphases to give the viewer orientation.
The organizers have by and large risen to the challenge. Unifying themes are provided by Venice's relations with the Mameluks (1250-1517), who spread out from their base in Cairo to conquer the land stretching from today's Egypt to Syria, and with the Ottoman Empire (1299-1923), which from the early 16th century on encompassed the entire eastern Mediterranean.
The Venetian perspective dominates here. One learns hardly anything about Venice's influence on its trading partners. This highly interesting and didactically well-conceived exhibition therefore reveals only one side of the story.
Fusion of East and West
The influence on Venice of its exposure to the East was mainly commercial in nature. But the close trade relations couldn't fail to leave significant marks on Venetian craftsmanship and art as well. In many areas, a fusion of East and West can be discerned, with Venetian craftsmen and artists incorporating motifs from Islamic art into their own work for several centuries.
Prime examples of these borrowings are the above-mentioned Basilica San Marco and the Turkish-influenced ceramics known as "alla turchesa" in the dominant colors of blue, green and red on white, imitating the wares produced by the Ottoman potters of Iznik (formerly Nicea).
The influence of the Islamic craft tradition is just as evident in the elaborate books produced in Venice, which sported sumptuous decoratively embossed leather covers and "orientalist" miniatures accompanying the text.
One of the most important exhibition pieces is the portrait of Mehmed II (1432-1481) attributed to Gentile Bellini, the only Venetian painter who actually lived for a time on the other side of the Mediterranean, in Istanbul.
Upon request of the sultan, Bellini painted a lifelike portrait – something unheard of in the Islamic world, where representational likenesses were a religious taboo.
Pragmatism takes precedent
Also on view are several paintings showing martyrdom scenes from the Christian story of salvation. These martyrdom scenes anachronistically take place against Muslim decorative schemes from the 15th and 16th centuries, in some cases showing the martyrs surrounded by turbaned aggressors.
This clearly demonstrates that, despite in-depth knowledge of the "other" and lively commercial exchange, certain antagonisms remained; these were however subordinated to a healthy pragmatism: business as usual.
One longs to see this cultural and financial recipe for success revived in today's Venice after visiting this fascinating show.
Susan Javad
© Qantara.de 2006
Translation from the German by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida
Qantara.de
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The Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art
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