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.'
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