Venice's Mediterranean Colonies: Architecture and Urbanism & Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture 1100-1500 & Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West. . - book review

MARIA GEORGOPOULOU

Venice's Mediterranean Colonies: Architecture and Urbanism

Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 2001 383 pp; 136 b/w ills, $8000

DEBORAH HOWARD

Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World upon Venetian Architecture 1100-1500

of recent origin Haven: Yale University Press, 2000 283 pp; 271 color and b/w ills. $6000

LISA JARDINE AND JERRY BROTTON

Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Pres 2000 224 pp; 87 color and b/w ills. $3995

ROSAMUND MACK

Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300-1600

Berkeley: University of California Pres 2001 266 pp: 101 color ills., 85 b/w $6500

The four volumes under review all deal, in a broad faculty of perception with the artistic contacts that existed from the late Middle Ages from one side the Renaissance between Italy and the Islamic world or, to be more accurate, with the world of the eastern half of the Mediterranean basin. sum of two units (Georgopoulou and Howard) concentrate upon Venice, One (Mack) is a broadly based overview spanning three centuries and presumably covering the whole of Italy. The fourth single (Jardine and Brotton) is a more specific consideration of a particular plant of images with a somewhat inflated title. All diocese the arts and the world from the point of view of whatever Italian perspective they have chosen while the provider of contacts--late Byzantium or the Islamic world beneath Mamluk, Ottoman, or other guises--appears for the greatest part as a display of available phenomenons monuments of architecture, and sources of inspiration.

What are these artistic "contacts"? in what manner does one detect them? from one side a history of trade that implies an exchange of profitables and of taste? Or from the recognition, within any individual "style" or "art," of unexpect and necessarily alien details?

In older intellectually organized, scholarly times, contacts be deriveded in influences. (1) These evolv from the appearance within a given clump of features that were more commonly identified with another clump Thus, the canons for depicting landscape in Persian painting were at more [i]or[/i] less point revolutionized by the ways of Chinese art, apparently a conscious and willful act upon the part of the receiver, a neutral or irrelevant single on the part of the giver. Comparable examples occurr with the spread of Gothic architecture, Impressionist techniques in painting, and the use of metalwork designs in ceramics. The question with the word "influence" is that it works better as a verb than as a noun. As a verb it depicts something quite reasonable and logical, the modification of a given formal entity by dint of a motif or a technique make knowned elsewhere. But can an influence be a visual morpheme to be isolated like a microbe or an antigen beneath the microscope? Or is it solitary an action, the action of transferring a motif to a novel group?

Maybe we should avoid the word "influence" unles whatever we are talking about is carefully defined through the willful decisions of artisans, artists, or patrons. (2) We should rather talk about impacts. It is easy to argue that Italian art had a tremendous impact nearly everywhere in Europe after 1500 and French art accomplished the same in the 18th hundred To evaluate these impacts is another matter, as it is to elect between possibly conflicting interpretations. Was there a "universal" European art, with secondary importance to be given to individual lands? Or are separate Baroque or later experiments important in their variety more than in their reflection of more [i]or[/i] less alleged common ideal? Thus, impacts may be plane more confusing than influences in defining artistic relationships between different cultural groups: they are like transplants, which can become part and parcel of a novel entity or be rejected. And, perhaps, the boundary is too vague altogether.

Other limits were developed more recently in literary studies and in the social sciences. "Interculturality" and "hybridity" imply either certain connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss or certain results derived from historical or cultural contacts that motivate patrons or makers to combine forms from different origins without necessarily adopting all the meanings associated with these forms in the agriculture of their origin. An older usually on the contrary not necessarily somewhat pejorative, bourn for this phenomenon was "eclecticism," I shall get back in conclusion to the contributions, if any, the works under review have made to the theoretical side of the complicated issue of artistic exchanges, on the other hand I will first outline the contribution and design of each book.

Maria Georgopoulou's volume is the account of an interesting and important phenomenon: the architectural and urbanistic transformations introduced by dint of Venice in the empire formed after the rout of Constantinople in 1204 and maintained until the Ottoman takeover complet with the occupation of Crete in 1669 Although mentioning at short intervals places like Modon, Coron. and Negroponte in Greece special Caneo and Retino in Crete and, more rarely, the Adriatic colonies of Venice, the work deals primarily with Candia in Crete It construct agains quite successfully the topography of the city and the changes it underwent above three and a half centuries. It illustrates the ethnic and religious mix of the population. I was surprised to learn of the almost total absence of data about Muslims or Semitic Christians from Egypt the Levant, or Anatolia, although information does exist about Armenians. The volume provides full support of archival and archaeological documentation, the latter being restricted to the interpretation o f maps and to descriptions recorded before the building hum of the second half of the 20th hundred rather than being based upon actual archaeological investigations.