Page 81 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

stand for the Church of Saint Mark in Alexan- by the Great Umayyad Mosque. The details however, was circumscribed by Mehmed's
dria, his pillar, for the Pillar of Pompey, his were rendered exactly — from the black and tastes. As Mehmed's patronage focused on por-
obelisk for the "needles of Cleopatra/' and white marble decoration of the arches and traiture, there were limitations to the range of
so forth. 23 Second, the inhabitants of Bellini's minarets to the blazon of the Mamluk sultan images brought back from the East by artists
Alexandria were not Pinturicchio's motley Qa'it Bay. such as Costanzo da Ferrara and Gentile Bellini,
crowd, but rather based upon the actual The Reception of the Ambassadors spawned which in turn affected the way their models
inhabitants of fifteenth-century Alexandria, derivatives in painting and in tapestry, and ele- could be employed in Europe. Bust portraiture
the Mamluks. ments were freely plundered by artists such as could only be adapted with difficulty to a figural
The Mamluk elite could easily be distin- Carpaccio and Mansueti. On his second trip to scene; full-length studies were more easily
guished from the Ottomans by their costume. the city in 1505, Diirer adopted the Mamluk included but they were not placed in an architec-
The most distinctive contrast was in turbans. As type the Reception had introduced to Venice and tural or environmental setting that was Eastern.
portraits of Mehmed the Conqueror show, late for a few years he abandoned Ottoman figures In the 14905, as Europe made its first contact
fifteenth-century Ottoman taste ran to turbans in his graphic work in favor of Mamluk, though with the Americas, Europe —or rather Venice
wound horizontally around a red, gadrooned the change was cosmetic, not functional. The "the eye of all the West" —produced the first
hat; the Mamluks, on the other hand, favored Reception's greatest influence, however, was in dispassionate record of an exotic locale. Yet this
turbans with a distinct vertical emphasis. These inspiring the "Mamluk" setting of Gentile's did not lead immediately to similar records. In
were often extravagantly tall and sometimes Scuola di San Marco cycle which represented a concept, style, and historical connections the
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equipped with "horns/' Such differences new consciousness in the use of oriental figures Louvre Reception was peculiar to the Venice of
explain why Bellini and his colleague Giovanni for Christian themes. 25 the 1490s. In historical terms it reflected the
Mansueti made limited use of Bellini's Ottoman The Reception seems also to have encouraged close mercantile and political ties between
studies for the Scuola di San Marco cycle. If the the use of oriental settings for comparable Venice and the Mamluks in this decade, but the
city was to be Alexandria, its inhabitants should cycles commissioned by other scuole. Carpac- "Mamluk mode," like the Byzantine fashion
be Egyptians. cio's series of paintings for the Scuola di San before it, was doomed by the Ottoman ad-
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Gentile Bellini's work thus parallels Pinturic- Giorgio was ostensibly set in North Africa, vance. The first two decades of the sixteenth
chio's in adopting both Ottoman and Alexan- but he had no single source comparable to the century were not propitious times for European
drian themes, but in contrast to Pinturicchio, Louvre Reception and resorted to a composite artists and travelers in the Levant.
Gentile does not combine the two. In general Near East drawn from a variety of sources. One The Louvre Reception owed its conception to
Venice had a greater understanding than other was the Louvre Reception; another the first the fact that the Venetians believed that paint-
European cities of cultural differences in the printed travel book with illustrations, the record ings had a testimonial value analogous and
Levant, and such distinctions were deemed of a pilgrimage to Egypt and the Holy Land by equal to that of the written word. Stylistically,
important in the context of history paintings, Bernhard von Breydenbach, Bishop of Mainz, the studied realism of details in the Louvre
because the Venetians regarded the historical which was published in 1486. The woodcuts in Reception, such as the body harness of the mon-
testimony of the visual arts as equivalent to that this volume provided Carpaccio with models for key or the wooden armature of the adobe hous-
of the written word. As a record of an historical human and animal figures, as well as architec- ing, expressed and confirmed the painting's role
event in Alexandria, Gentile's painting, by tural ideas. Carpaccio combined these disparate as attesting to a historical event. This style of
Venetian standards, should convey the peculiari- sources with such an easy grace that he has "inventory" painting was the visual equivalent
ties of at least the place. What enabled Gentile deceived many into believing that he had visited of the chronicle style of Venetian historical
and his colleague Giovanni Mansueti to observe the Near East. 26 writing, but both were to be superseded in the
this principle was the arrival in Venice in the To return to the comparison between Bellini early sixteenth century. Just as Giorgione and
mid-i49os of a painting that accurately por- and Pinturicchio's paintings of 1492, we may Titian displaced the generation of "inventory"
trayed the Mamluk world. note that the artists conveyed their eastern istorie painters led by Gentile Bellini, Giovanni
The importance of this painting —the Recep- themes in different ways and with differing Mansueti, and Carpaccio, so the last great
tion of the Ambassadors (cat. 106) —transcended intentions. Pinturicchio's effort was directed to example of Venetian chronicle writing was
its novelty appeal. It was the first realistic Euro- contemporary concerns at the expense of geo- Marino Sanuto's Chronache. 28
pean portrayal of Mamluks, but more than that, graphical accuracy: the Ottomans were not to be These are some of the factors that explain
it was the first European attempt to depict an masters of Alexandria for another twenty-five why the precedent of the Louvre Reception
exotic locale in all its detail, from the fauna and years. Vice versa, Bellini's concerns were his- was not taken up by Venetian artists until well
flora to the architecture and inhabitants. torical, which led him to emphasize topography into the sixteenth century. The next phase in
Accustomed as we are to photography, it is and regional costume. Pinturicchio's orientalism Europe's visual documentation of the Levant
difficult for us to imagine the impact that this was excerptive; Bellini's was more sustained and was in the 1530$, but then the initiative came —
panorama must have had on contemporaries. better informed. The paradox was that it drew as it had under Mehmed the Conqueror — from
Artists such as Gentile Bellini and Costanzo da on another Italian painting, the Louvre Recep- the Ottoman court rather than from Europe
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Ferrara had brought back portraits and figure tion, rather than the artist's firsthand experi- itself. It was only in the late 15505 that a Euro-
studies from their sojourns in Istanbul, but ence in Istanbul. Geography was the main pean artist —Melchior Lorck of Flensburg —
these were characters abstracted from their factor, but there was also a marked contrast in working for a European patron, produced a
environment. The Reception depicted not just the character of Gentile's Istanbul oeuvre and comprehensive record of Istanbul that ranged
Mamluks, but Mamluks in a Mamluk habitat. the Louvre Reception. The manner in which the from portraits to costume studies and from city
The military elite and a handful of common artist of the Reception combined a historical views to architectural and archaeological studies. 30
folk, including women, were shown against a scene with a panorama was designed to satisfy a The fall of Constantinople in 1453 provoked
backdrop of the Damascus skyline, dominated Venetian patron. Gentile's work in Istanbul, many reactions in Europe, but for a decade or so

80 CIRCA 1492