West Meets East

“Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797” is another spectacular exhibit — the kind of full-dress, soup-to-nuts affair we have come to expect from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Opulent and luxurious, the show is rich with first-rate carpets, calligraphy, ceramics, glassware, metalwork, and bookbindings, as well as arms and armor — Venetian quivers and parade shields that are made of lacquered and polychromed wood, leather, and papier-mâché, or of etched and engraved gold and silver, all intricately decorated with Islamic-inspired arabesques.Among the 200 works in this treasure trove are an extravagant “Collector’s Cabinet” (1565–1680) that, with its pillars, arches, and balconies, resembles a palace on the Grand Canal, and a dazzling ecclesiastical cope embroidered out of red-and-gold silk and velvet. This stunning vestment was used by the clergy of Venice’s Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. I could not help but imagine how glorious it would have looked, candlelit, moving below Titian’s magnificent “Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin,” the large, mostly red-andyellow painting that hangs above the Frari’s altar. I was also astonished in the show by a pair of ebony doors (c. 1575–1600), which, adorned with mother-of-pearl, gold, and semiprecious stones, look like a giant, elaborately decorated medieval book cover. Equally amazing are a number of gleaming, gilded caskets. One Venetian casket (late 16th century) is particularly spellbinding. Its frame is lacquered wood, gold, and silver. Yet it has oval windows made of beveled rock crystal. Inside, a rainbow of light dances across the casket’s gilded silver floor, creating a miniature wonderland that is as hypnotic as the sparkling reflections on Venetian water.“Venice and the Islamic World,” organized by Stefano Carboni, curator and administrator in the Met’s department of Islamic art, is a fascinating story — an account more of West meets East than of East meets West. Broad and sweeping, it explores the period between 828, when two Venetian merchants carried home from Alexandria the stolen relics of St. Mark, to 1797, when the Venetian Republic fell to Napoleon. Legend has it that to circumvent the Saracen custom agents, the body of the Evangelist was packed with ham and other cuts of pork, which was as offensive to the Saracens as it was to the Jews. The exhibit covers nearly every facet — including trading, artistic influence, printing, politics, science, philosophy, and diplomacy — of the relationship between the Serene Republic and the Mamluk, Ottoman, and Safavid empires. Although there was some cross-pollination (evidence suggests that the sultans adored, among other things Italian, Parmesan cheese), the Islamic world, it appears, took Venice captive.However, “Venice and the Islamic World” can at times feel more like an illustrated lecture about how Venice became the gateway to the Orient and the “bazaar of Europe,” controlling the Mediterranean and, with it, the flow of Near Eastern goods, ideas, and influence — than an art exhibit. Some points, such as that Venetian painters had a firm understanding of Muslim dress, are overstated. Others, such as the magic of Venetian light, are understated. By the time I arrived at the humdrum grouping of paintings “Four Portraits From a Series of Ottoman Rulers” (c. 1578), painted by an anonymous artist from Verona, in which the rulers’ billowing, white turbans rise like hot-air balloons, I felt the show was in need of some anchorage and some editing.The last object on view in the exhibit is “Stern Decoration From the Bastarda of Commander-in-Chief Francesco Morosini” (mid-17th century), a rather pedestrian, 10-foot-long, carved-wood figurehead. Chained, half-naked, and bareheaded, the Turkish slave is twisted in the fashion of the figure of Twilight from Michelangelo’s Tomb of Lorenzo di Medici. The “Stern Decoration” was both a symbolic and talismanic reminder of the expected victories of the Venetian navy. Here, the carving illustrates, rather ham-fistedly, the relationship between Venice and the Islamic world during the 17th century. As with many of the objects on view, the artwork feels secondary to the point it makes. What’s missing in the show is the kind of dance, or give-and-take, between objects that was so alive in an exhibition such as the Met’s recent “Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams, His Art and His Textiles.”One of the other things lacking in the show — which also has maps, illuminated manuscripts, travel diaries, astrolabes, mosque lamps, an incense burner, and a virginal — is a firm showing of Venetian painting. Most of the paintings seem to have been included because they show Muslim figures in Near Eastern Islamic costume or Oriental carpets or textiles, such as the decorative, Islamic-influenced or Islamicmade fabrics that Venetian painters chose to depict as the Virgin’s mantle.Strong paintings do exist in the exhibit. They include Antonio Vivarini’s “Saint Peter Martyr Attempting to Burn His Cloak” (c. 1440–50), Paolo Veronese’s “Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto” (c. 1571–72), Vittore Carpaccio’s “The Sermon of Saint Stephen” (c. 1514) and the “Stoning of Saint Stephen” (1520), Francesco Guardi’s “Odalisques Playing a Mancala Game in the Harem” (1742–43), and Giambattista Tiepolo’s “Two Orientals Under a Tree” (c. 1742–45). But to include Lorenzo Lotto’s clunky family portrait “Giovanni Della Volta With his Wife and Children” (1547), simply because one of its objects is an Oriental carpet, feels antithetical. Missing from the show are Giorgione, Titian, Pisanello, and Tintoretto, as well as Jacopo and Giovanni Bellini — artists for whom exoticism, especially in Giorgione’s “Three Philosophers” or a Titian odalisque, could have easily been argued.One of the best paintings on view is Gentile Bellini’s “Portrait of Sultan Mehmet II” (November 25, 1480). Gentile, who was the official painter of the Venetian Republic, spent 1479–80 at the court of Sultan Mehmet II in Constantinople and did a number of portraits, including gorgeous bronze medals of the sultan, which are also at the Met. The artist is said to have returned to Venice shortly after he showed the sultan a painting of the severed head of St. John the Baptist. The sultan found the painting’s naturalism wanting and ordered a headsman to sever the head of a slave. “This,” he said to Gentile, “is how a freshly severed head should look!”A beautiful combination of Renaissance naturalism and Orientalism, the portrait of Mehmet II emits a golden Venetian light and is strikingly clear, as if the sultan were an emblem, a precious gem, and a man. His aquiline nose and pointed beard rock the head from side to side, which glows like a star in the blackness. The sultan is a mountain, peaked with a red velvet volcano. His white turban drifts from out of his ear like a smoking genie from out of a bottle, and it floats around his head like a cloud. An arch, bright as a crescent moon and tight as a tuning fork, holds him in the blackness. Filled with mysterious lightness and architectural strength; jewel-like and exotic, the painting exists somewhere between East and West, and it conveys the wonders of the Orient and of the Serenissima.Until July 8 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).

West Meets East

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