Venice, Durer and the Oriental Mode. Hans Huth Memorial Studies.

At the end of the fifteenth century a large number of paintings were produced in Venice that depict exotic animals and turbaned figures set against the backdrop of Oriental architecture. It was Europe’s earliest attempt to portray Muslims in a Muslim habitat, but it was more than a vague and ill-informed evocation of the East. Realistic in many of their details, these Orientalist pictures reflects the Serenissima's political and mercantile links with two fifteenth-century Islamic Empires of the Eastern Mediterranean - Ottoman Turkey, with its capital in Istanbul, and the rival Mamluks, ruling over Syria and Egypt. Both Mamluk and Ottoman motifs can be distinguished in these paintings and their different sources identified. This study is an attempt to clarify Venetian Quatrocento Orientalism, which affected Dürer and thus Northern Europe, and to define the sources and practitioners of its Oriental motifs. The Hans Huth Memorial Studies, published by his wife and friends, are dedicated to examining the interrelationship between the decorative arts of Europe and the Islamic world. [Jacket].