With this important book, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600, Rosamond Mack has joined a growing number of scholars who have challenged the well-known model of the Renaissance as an exclusive and singular moment of genius and invention centered in Italy. According to this familiar standard, the Renaissance signaled both the definitive emergence of European civilization and the irreparable rupture between East and West. Scholars such as Jerry Brotton, Charles Burnett, Anna Contadini, Deborah Howard, Lisa Jardine, Gülru Necipoglu, and Julian Raby, to name a few, have countered this paradigm by viewing the period’s achievements in a broader, global context, pointing to the crucial role of trade in shaping Renaissance identity and by arguing for a more integrated and expansive definition of the Renaissance. Now, Mack contributes to this shift by focusing on the decorative arts connected with the international luxury trade, in particular, commerce between the Islamic world and Italy.

This is a splendid, lavishly illustrated volume with a strong visual emphasis that serves as a corrective for the neglected treatment of Italian decorative arts and argues for the centrality of Islamic imports in the development of local Italian production. While the focus may take its cue from newer literature that promotes the value of the “decorative” and “minor arts,” Mack’s approach is traditional, expository art history. She divides her material by medium, devoting individual chapters to patterned silk, carpets, ceramics, glass, bookbinding and lacquer, and inlaid brass. She clearly and systematically traces the stylistic and technical development of each medium, often locating sources in the Islamic world, while drawing excellent visual comparisons between the Eastern imports and their Italian adaptations. It therefore comes as no surprise that her categories parallel the leading media in the Islamic visual arts, and that the organization of these chapters closely follows the familiar division of material found in survey handbooks on Islamic portable arts. Although the study of portable arts has occupied a central position in the scholarship of the Islamic visual arts, these mediums are still the exception in literature on Italian Renaissance art, where, as the author points out, decorative arts have taken a back seat to fine arts. In her book, Mack rectifies this disparity and shows that during the Renaissance the decorative arts enjoyed a comparable status to more large-scale works. When she turns to Italian Renaissance painting in two chapters, “Oriental Script in Italian Paintings” and “The Pictorial Arts,” she is not interested in these works as masterpieces of innovation in naturalism, illusionism, and human form, but rather as documents recording the existence of actual luxury objects that, like the paintings in which they are represented, filled and defined Italian interior spaces. To be sure, the presence of Islamic textiles and objects in Italian paintings had been noticed long ago, but Mack lends particularity and concreteness to the ties between Eastern objects and their Western setting that had previously been explained in vague and general terms.

Bazaar to Piazza is at its best when it explores the lives of specific works in depth, such as the “Alhambra Vase” (53). This vase was made in Islamic Spain during the fourteenth century, where it embarked on a fascinating journey that took it from Venetian Cyprus to Sweden. While the work has been continuously misidentified, it nevertheless carried the specificity and aura of a coveted work, held in highest esteem by its noble owners and viewers. Interestingly, a number of Mack’s Islamic prototypes predate the year 1300, which suggests historical continuities with earlier Islamic portable arts from well before the Renaissance and provides an even greater reason to encourage fluidity of categories and labels in both time and space.

With this in mind, we might ask, is it really constructive to include the term “Oriental” here? Mack justifies the use of the word by saying that “Italians understood little about the different geographic and artistic origins of the foreign objects they admired in the contemporary context” (1). Whether or not this is accurate, in light of the contemporary discourse of Orientalism, this expression cannot help but conjure negative connotations. Similarly, the perpetuation of such twentieth-century terms for Western Anatolian carpets as “small pattern Holbein carpets” and “large Holbein carpets,” named after the artist who depicted them in paintings, might also be reconsidered.

A book of this kind, which will be used by specialists and students of both Italian and Islamic art, will inevitably undergo double scrutiny. Readers outside the world of Islamic art would benefit from a fuller explanation of the “Muslim prohibition against human imagery” (157), as not to perpetuate one of the greatest misconceptions about visual representation in Islamic art. These readers would also benefit from references to and contextualization with other works on Italian decorative arts, such as those we find in Cristelle Baskins’s Cassone Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modern Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). It is probably no coincidence that cassone painting abounds in representations of non-Italians. Scholars of Islamic art may wish for more information regarding the reciprocity of exchange. While Mack shines her spotlight on Islamic portable arts, the beam also illuminates the perception and effect of Islamic art on Italian culture. Aside from the imports of brocaded velvet and Venetian glass into the Islamic world, she focuses more on what the West gained from the East, following the model of “influence” in which the East is posited as the “donor” and the West as the “recipient.” Finally, all readers would benefit from an expanded consideration of interpretation and meaning. Mack concludes that trade did not necessarily promote deeper cultural understanding between the Islamic cultures and Italy, and that the original meaning of Islamic objects and their functions were often misunderstood or reinterpreted by the Italians. Is the neutral, “secular” appearance of Islamic objects enough to explain their adaptation by the West, as has often been proposed and is mentioned again here? To her credit, Mack suggests that the possession of Islamic objects and textiles signified wealth and status, and that representations of figures wearing Islamic robes often carried historical and theological associations with the Bible and the Holy Land, especially when these figures were juxtaposed with others dressed in up-to-date Italian fashion. It is precisely how these Eastern material objects changed in meaning and participated in shaping new cultural significance and identity that is so interesting. Meaning may be complex and elusive, but it is never absent. It must be patiently unwrapped according to the specific contexts of the individual objects and their interaction with other cultural formations. Specifically, as Brotton has asked in his book, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), what was the interplay between art, philosophy, and science in these cultural interactions?

Mack states that one of her goals for this book is to stimulate further discussion. She has, in fact, exceeded this goal and should thus be congratulated for assembling so much wonderful material. Bazaar to Piazza is an invaluable resource to scholars and students, and the richness of documentation here will be mined by them for a long time to come. In classrooms and museum galleries, the objects shown and described here can provide the basis and inspiration for an integrated study and exhibition of Italian and Islamic art, allowing us to extend the disciplinary boundaries of the Renaissance both historically and geographically. Mack’s book is a valuable lesson in how much we stand to gain by exploring connections and collaborations, a lesson that cannot be overemphasized in the world today.