Venice & The Islamic World

The MET has a beautiful exhibit on the interaction in textiles, art, brass, glass and ceramics between Venice and Syria, Iran, Turkey and Egypt. The artwork made me think of how for so long, art has been created by interactions between different cultures. This art is then traded, and considered exotic by where it is not made. Islamic art has always fascinated me, the large floral motifs of Turkish coats, the delicate shapes of Syrian glass, the elegant Persian carpet and the beautiful hand bound leather journals of Egypt.

In a sense this entire show is an essay on how that integration played out in art. Sometimes the dynamic is straightforward, a simple matter of placement. An exquisitely illustrated 17th-century manuscript made in Shiraz, in Persia, ends up in Venice. Fragments of a painted Venetian glass beaker lie in a Jewish cemetery in Syria. How? Why? Things traveled; that’s all.

Frequently, though, cultures are overlaid. The gold-patterned cloak worn by the Virgin in a 14th-century altarpiece by Stefano Veneziano is modeled on sumptuous textiles then entering Venice from Persia. This reference to a luxury import would surely have tickled the painting’s merchant-patron. That the cloth depicted was “foreign” made it exotic enough for heaven.

Elsewhere the play of influence is more complex. One of the exhibition’s oldest objects, a glass cup from the treasury of St. Mark’s cathedral, has a multiethnic pedigree. Its emerald-green bowl was probably made by Islamic craftsmen in Egypt or Iran. It then traveled to Constantinople, where a Byzantine metalworker fitted it with a gilt-silver mount. Finally this cup that might well have had secular origins found a sacred home in Venice.