Islam in Europe

This illuminating exhibition catalogue interrogates the entanglement of the Islamic
world with European visual culture during the medieval period and Renaissance, from
the 9th century to the end of the 17th. It traces and reveals this interconnectedness
through works of art that reflect the intense environment of contact, influence and
exchange which developed over centuries between the two cultures. It also explores
the reception of the image of ‘Islam’ in Europe, as highlighted by an important painting
of the Supper at Emmaus, painted in the so-called ‘Oriental Mode’ by the Venetian
artist 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 and
the many ways it altered the trajectory of European visual culture. Opening with earlymedieval
objects produced by Muslim artisans and known to have been exported in large
numbers to medieval Europe, the catalogue explores the crosscurrents of visual culture
at the nexus of Islam and Christendom which were already well developed by the 10th
century. 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 in
medieval Spain.
A central group of objects traces the breathtaking force with which refined export
wares from Mamluk Egypt and Syria, Central Asia and Anatolia flooded the Italian market
during the 14th to 16th centuries, revolutionizing European aesthetics as well as the taste
for (and very definition of) luxury goods. This section of the catalogue includes objects
that chart the rise of European textiles, metalwork, ceramics and other arts specifically
emulating Islamic designs.
The catalogue concludes with a group of important early textiles spanning the 13th
to 17th centuries. It explores how and why European artists started to incorporate lavish
Ilkhanid silks into their imagery, and how Italian weavers began to imitate both these
early imports, and later also Ottoman velvets flooding the market in the 15th century, with
voracious appetite. One of the catalogue’s key foci is an important group of rare Anatolian
carpets woven between the 15th and 17th centuries and richly imitated both by European
painters including Titian and Holbein, and by local weavers vying for control of the
market in luxury furnishings.
The catalogue presents 60 works of art, which have taken a decade to bring together
and are presented in this way for the first time. Together the works elucidate the complete
integration of Islamic art and artisanal technology into European visual culture during
a period of extraordinary efflorescence. A brief introductory essay explores questions of
entanglement in the medieval world and proposes a new lens through which to examine
the artistic production of the period. The catalogue closes with a new essay by Michael
Franses analyzing the importance of the only firmly dateable ‘Lotto’ Arabesque carpet still
in existence, acquired by The David Collection, Copenhagen, in 2022.