This illuminating exhibition catalogue interrogates the entanglement of the Islamicworld with European visual culture during the medieval period and Renaissance, fromthe 9th century to the end of the 17th. It traces and reveals this interconnectednessthrough works of art that reflect the intense environment of contact, influence andexchange which developed over centuries between the two cultures. It also exploresthe reception of the image of ‘Islam’ in Europe, as highlighted by an important paintingof the Supper at Emmaus, painted in the so-called ‘Oriental Mode’ by the Venetianartist Giovanni Mansueti (c. 1465–1527) in the last decade of the 15th century.Islam in Europe presents a survey of artistic production in the medieval Islamic world andthe many ways it altered the trajectory of European visual culture. Opening with earlymedievalobjects produced by Muslim artisans and known to have been exported in largenumbers to medieval Europe, the catalogue explores the crosscurrents of visual cultureat the nexus of Islam and Christendom which were already well developed by the 10thcentury. It continues with artworks produced under the aegis of the Umayyads (711–1031)and later Islamic dynasties which ruled large swathes of the Iberian Peninsula until 1492,and the influence of Islamic rule on the development of a distinctive visual culture inmedieval Spain.A central group of objects traces the breathtaking force with which refined exportwares from Mamluk Egypt and Syria, Central Asia and Anatolia flooded the Italian marketduring the 14th to 16th centuries, revolutionizing European aesthetics as well as the tastefor (and very definition of) luxury goods. This section of the catalogue includes objectsthat chart the rise of European textiles, metalwork, ceramics and other arts specificallyemulating Islamic designs.The catalogue concludes with a group of important early textiles spanning the 13thto 17th centuries. It explores how and why European artists started to incorporate lavishIlkhanid silks into their imagery, and how Italian weavers began to imitate both theseearly imports, and later also Ottoman velvets flooding the market in the 15th century, withvoracious appetite. One of the catalogue’s key foci is an important group of rare Anatoliancarpets woven between the 15th and 17th centuries and richly imitated both by Europeanpainters including Titian and Holbein, and by local weavers vying for control of themarket in luxury furnishings.The catalogue presents 60 works of art, which have taken a decade to bring togetherand are presented in this way for the first time. Together the works elucidate the completeintegration of Islamic art and artisanal technology into European visual culture duringa period of extraordinary efflorescence. A brief introductory essay explores questions ofentanglement in the medieval world and proposes a new lens through which to examinethe artistic production of the period. The catalogue closes with a new essay by MichaelFranses analyzing the importance of the only firmly dateable ‘Lotto’ Arabesque carpet stillin existence, acquired by The David Collection, Copenhagen, in 2022.
