PARIS-
Nothing could be more evocative of Venice than Murano glass–or could it? In fact, the famed Italian glassblowers learned their craft from artists in the Middle East.
An exhibit in Paris, slated to move to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in the spring, shows just how much Venice owes to the Arab world. Perched on the Adriatic, the city was for centuries at the center of trade routes between Europe and the Middle East.
That strategic location gave Venice’s craftsmen exposure to treasures of Islamic art, from ceramics to glass to metalwork. Through Venice, Christian Europe and the Islamic world had a rich cultural dialogue during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, though their civilizations were often at war.
The exhibit at the Institut du Monde Arabe, or the Arab World Institute, puts a 16th-century ceramic plate from Turkey next to one made on the Italian peninsula about 50 years later. Both are covered with delicate vines of red and blue flowers. To the untrained eye, they are nearly identical.
For some works on display, not even the experts can tell them apart. A 12th-century brass platter with fine engraving bears the tag: “From the Muslim Middle East or Venice.”
“People are very surprised,” said Aurelie Clemente-Ruiz, associate curator. “Most visitors had no idea that the two forms of art were so close … or that many objects were made in the Islamic world first, before the Venetians imitated them.”
Venetian artists also had admirers in the Muslim world. In the 15th century, the painter Gentile Bellini went to Constantinople, where he painted the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II.
In most cases, though, the artistic exchange flowed the other way.
The best example of Venice “borrowing” Middle Eastern artistic techniques is Murano glass, named after the island in the Venetian Lagoon where glassmakers were relegated out of fear of fires.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, Syrian craftsmen perfected the art of glassmaking, “inventing a totally new finesse, elegance, transparency and beauty,” said Clemente-Ruiz. “Of course, when the Venetians discovered that, they were blown away … and Venetian glassmakers started imitating their work.”
When the Syrian art of glassmaking declined because of conflict in the Middle East, the artists of Venice gained the upper hand. Before long, they were exporting their glass to wealthy Muslims.
Stefano Carboni, the exhibit’s curator, describes Venice’s relationship with the Muslim world as pragmatic.
“Venice was the first European city, and in many ways the only one, that understood and appreciated Islamic philosophy and sciences, that opened a dialogue with the Muslim world in which technical and artistic exchanges had a place as well,” he wrote in the catalog.
Though Venice took part in the Crusades, it managed to keep up relatively good ties with Arab rulers. That sometimes irritated Venice’s European neighbors, who accused the city of duplicity. But Venice’s pragmatism ensured that trade could go forward–and kept alive an unusual artistic dialogue.
“Venise & l’Orient” ends Feb. 18 at the Institut du Monde Arab. It runs March 27 through July 8 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as “Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797.”
