The catalogue accompanying the exhibition Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797 details Venice’s role as a commercial, political, and diplomatic hub, strategically situated at the center of Mediterranean trade, and examines how the city absorbed artistic and cultural ideas from the Islamic world. With its rich essays on the historical and cultural background, focused studies on individual media, and technical examination of paint pigments, textile weaves, metalwork inlay, and lacquer and glass production, the catalogue is an impressive showcase of the resources compiled by its editor, Stefano Carboni, who also served as the exhibition’s curator.

Carboni eloquently guides the reader through the major themes and contributions of the catalogue in his introductory essay, “Moments of Vision: Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797.” The essay is organized around momentous dates, beginning with 828, the year the relics of St. Mark were purloined from Alexandria by “two merchants from the emergent and ambitious city on the lagoon” (13), and ending with the demise of the Serenissima Republic in 1797. Carboni emphasizes his preference for the term “pragmatism” to describe Venice’s attitude toward the Islamic world, as the city always managed to balance its mercantile interests, which lay with the Islamic world, against its religious allegiances with Europe. The catalogue is offered as a corrective to the prevailing visions of antagonism between East and West. Carboni and the other contributors to the catalogue make it clear that Venice’s relations with the Islamic world were different from those of other European powers, as the Serenissima was poised on the threshold of the two worlds, and its economy depended on its mercantile relationships with the East. Carboni emphasizes the fact that during the period under consideration the times of peace between Venice and the Islamic world were longer than the periods of antagonism. Furthermore, he argues that the Venetians’ direct and intimate knowledge of the Islamic Middle East makes it incorrect to speak of “Orientalist curiosity” in the case of Venice, or to interpret the Mamluk and Ottoman figures in Venetian paintings as the fear-provoking Muslim enemy. Carboni’s correctives prevail throughout the catalogue.

The eighteen essays are divided into two sections: “The Cultural and Historical Context” and “The Decorative Arts between Venice and the Islamic World.” They are followed by catalogue entries on the works from the exhibition. Jean-Claude Hocquet’s “Venice and the Turks” introduces the historical context by tracing the appearance of Turkic groups on the stage of the Islamic world and eventually in the Mediterranean. Giovanni Curatola in his short study “Venice and the Islamic World in Light of Archival Documents” reveals what a large percentage of Venice’s trade was with the Ottomans, while the latter’s mercantile relations with the Serenissima could hardly be characterized as crucial to its economy. This imbalance in trade naturally created a power dynamic in favor of the Ottomans.

Deborah Howard’s “Venice as an ‘Eastern City’” weaves a rich fabric of the city’s “Eastern” aspects, replete with details of the lives of individual Venetian merchants, their belongings, aspirations, and attitudes. She provides a beautifully complex picture of the shared culture among Venice’s elite trading families who commissioned or imported many of the works included in the catalogue and exhibition. She cites four reasons for the emulation of Eastern motifs in Venice: to consolidate a cohesive upper-class identity, to emulate Alexandria in order to create a more authentic setting for St. Mark’s relics, to fulfill the city’s aspirations to embody the justice and wisdom of Solomon, and to create an appropriate setting for the endless numbers of pilgrims that departed for the Holy Land from Venice.

Howard’s second essay, “Venice and the Mamluks,” provides an informative overview of the relations between the two Mediterranean powers, and balances the contributions of Hocquet and Julian Raby (“The Serenissima and the Sublime Porte: Art in the Art of Diplomacy, 1453–1600”) that place the Ottomans at the fore. Raby’s study is a tour de force of careful archival research, brilliant cultural contextualization, and conscientious and creative art-historical analysis. By focusing on individual patrons, structures of gift exchange, and the classes of objects that moved between the two polities, Raby provides a sensitive and vivid interpretation of the essential role played by gift exchange in Venetian-Ottoman diplomacy. Howard’s and Raby’s nuanced and meticulously documented studies stand in marked contrast to Michael Barry’s impressionistic essay, “Renaissance Venice and Her ‘Moors,’” which tries to illuminate the allegorical meaning of Middle Easterners found in Venetian paintings.

The “Historical and Cultural Context” section also includes an essay by Catarina Schmidt Arcangeli titled “‘Orientalist’ Painting in Venice, 15th-17th Centuries,” and a technical comparison of pigments from Venetian and Islamic paintings by Barbara Berrie. Arcangeli’s essay is a descriptive overview of the appearance of Islamic objects and figures in Venetian paintings from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. She asserts that the “Orientalism” of Venice is different from that of other areas in Europe given the city’s close contacts with the Islamic world, but does not define the Venetian version of Orientalism. In the end, her descriptions relegate the Islamic objects and figures in the paintings to the realm of the everyday exotic, and robs them of any ideological significance they may have had. The detailed historical background provided in the earlier parts of the catalogue, as well as a growing knowledge of the multiplicity of Venetian attitudes toward the Islamic world (see, for example, Bronwen Wilson, The World in Venice: Print, The City and Early Modern Identity, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005; and Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), raise possibilities for how the Venetian paintings could have been interpreted in a more rigorously contextualized manner.

The essays in the second part of the book discuss the influence of Islamic art on Venetian production of “decorative arts” including textiles, metalwork, lacquer, glass, and ceramics, and provide useful surveys of Islamic objects in Venetian collections. The breathtaking images accompanying these essays are a feast of the shared visual culture of the Mediterranean detailed in the first half of the catalogue. Walter Denny’s “Oriental Carpets and Textiles in Venice” surveys the use of these materials in Venetian contexts, and emphasizes the importance of Venice in the distribution of Islamic—especially Ottoman—carpets to the rest of Europe. Unlike carpets, which seem to have flowed exclusively from East to West, luxury silk products were also imported from Venice to the Islamic world. Curatola’s second essay, “Venice’s Textile and Carpet Trade: The Role of Jewish Merchants,” explores the intermediary position played by this often neglected cultural group.

Of all the essays in the “decorative arts” section, Sylvia Auld’s “Master Mahmud and Inlaid Metalwork in the 15th Century” is the most concerned with the “why” behind Venetian interest in Islamic artifacts. Tracing how inlaid metalwork objects would have traveled to Venice, she argues that the appeal of these pieces lay not only in their workmanship but also in the “complexity of design and an ability to create a sense of wonder in the viewer” (215), and that the perceived association between these objects and the luxury goods such as spices and perfumes they contained enhanced their value. The second half of Auld’s essay focuses on the work of Mahmud the Kurd.

Ernst Grube’s “Venetian Lacquer and Bookbindings of the 16th Century” attempts to answer the questions of why the fashion for gilded lacquer decoration occurred in this period, and what models were used by Venetian craftsmen. Rosa Barovier Mentasti and Carboni’s “Enamelled Glass between the Eastern Mediterranean and Venice” details the history of enameled glass production from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. While in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries such objects appear to have been imported into Venice from Egypt, from the fifteenth century onwards, Venice exported enameled glass to the Islamic world, culminating, ironically, in the mosque lamps commissioned by the Khedive of Egypt in 1867. The final essay on the decorative arts, by Maria Vittoria Fontana, traces, as its title indicates, the “Islamic Influence on the Production of Ceramics in Venice and Padua.”

The technical studies dispersed throughout the catalogue, while claiming to be inconclusive due to the small amount of material surveyed, point the way forward to exciting research that might help distinguish Islamic and Venetian material for which provenance is otherwise difficult to establish. The book concludes with a comprehensive catalogue of the works in the exhibition, along with a selection of entries from the diary of Marin Sanudo the Younger (1476–1533), the highly observant senator whose testimonies permeate the pages of the catalogue.

As is clear from the breadth of material covered by the essays, Venice and the Islamic World contributes significantly to the growing scholarship on cross-cultural exchange in the early modern Mediterranean. The sheer variety of objects examined here brings to life the particularly rich and long-lasting intercultural relationship between Venice and her Eastern trading partners, and the documentation of individual interactions suggests that these relationships were rather complex. With the repeated emphasis on Venice’s unique situation, however, the essays create the impression of a peaceful Mediterranean rarely troubled by war, an era with no calls to crusades or conversion polemics. Yet the exquisite objects examined are interesting precisely because many were created or collected during periods of conflict: they attest to the resilience of mercantile and cultural exchanges. The authors whet our appetite by alluding to Venice’s intimate and colorful relationship with the Islamic world, especially in the early essays in the catalogue; but the nuances of that relationship are not, for the most part, brought to bear on the material examined in the rest of the catalogue. Perhaps the fascinating dynamics evoked by the book could be explored even further, with a more multifaceted approach, especially as it pertains to the issue of “Orientalism.” Venice and the Islamic World leads the reader down an intriguing path, and one wishes it would guide us even further.