Today people worry about the clash of Islam and the West, said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. But in medieval Venice, they merged harmoniously in a long process of mutual intellectual influence and artistic exchange. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's sprawling new exhibition 'œre-creates the spectacle of two different cultures meeting in one fantastic city, where commerce and love and beauty, those great levelers, unite them in a fruitful bond.' Venetians borrowed and even stole from Islamic models: 'œAn inlaid brass bucket designed as a bath accessory in the Near East became a holy water dispenser in Venice,' while silk slipcovers were converted into ecclesiastical robes. Meanwhile, the city's merchants introduced Eastern treasures to mainland Europe, and its painters and glassworkers sent luminous creations in the other direction. All these creative streams met in a 'œgiant, clamorous Costco-on-the-Rialto' that thrived for nearly a millennium.
Shows of this scope 'œtypically defeat a museum,' said Mark Stevens in New York. Piling decorations, ritual objects, and paintings together in the same galleries often results in a contextless hodgepodge that resembles 'œa rich man's attic picked over by scholars.' But the Met's 'œsumptuous collection' successfully summons the cosmopolitan intellectual milieu that for so long made Venice unique. Venice was a Christian city-state, but often more friendly to the Muslim Turks than to the pope. A republic in an age of monarchies, it favored trade over war. For these seafaring sophisticates, surrounded by internecine Christian violence in Europe, Islam represented not repression but luxury. Lorenzo Lotto placed Oriental carpets in his paintings, for instance, and not merely because he liked their designs. To him, they conjured up a world of 'œdesire, yearning, and excitement.'
Yet this seemingly encyclopedic exhibition actually leaves out a lot, said Lance Esplund in The New York Sun. Primarily, there aren't enough paintings, and many works have been included not for aesthetic reasons but merely because they illustrate Islamic costume, textiles, or carpets. 'œAs with many of the objects on view, the artwork feels secondary to the point it makes.' Among the few strong paintings here, don't miss Gentile Bellini's enchanting Portrait of Sultan Mehmet II (1480). An anecdote about these two brings home how much both Western and Islamic cultures have changed. The painter supposedly presented the sultan an image of John the Baptist's head on a platter. Disparaging the work's lack of realism, Mehmet ordered a slave to be decapitated: 'œThis,' he admonished, 'œis how a freshly severed head should look!'
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