Rosamond E. Mack. Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300-1600.

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. x + 258 pp. illus. bibl. index. gloss. $65. ISBN: 0-520-22131-1.

Rosamond E. Mack is an art historian who has traveled widely in Islamic countries, focusing her attention on their art and ornament, the subject of the book under review. In addition, Bazaar to Piazza is concerned with the exchange and influence of the decorative arts between Italy, above all Venice, and the Near East. Its ten chapters are preceded by an introduction in which the premise of this study is set out: the importance of travel in the eastern Mediterranean; the influence of eastern prototypes and the way this influence varied according to what the West admired at a particular historical moment; the elite status held by oriental works of art; the importance of East-West trade, travel, and industrial competition among the Mediterranean countries. This book is furnished with a full scholarly apparatus of notes, glossary, bibliography, and an index, although the glossary lacks certain essential terms. As well as the ease of use thus provided, the reader has the pleasure of handling a volume which is well-designed, with many beautiful, captioned color plates, in addition to those in black and white, all of them placed near the relevant text.

Travel, and the trade and diplomacy which often accompany it, merits a single chapter. Again Venice captures the reader's attention, as the Loredan embassy of 1338 to the East is discussed followed by a consideration of the various fondachi (an institution whose purpose was to afford accommodation to foreign merchants, often in a special palace, while controlling their mercantile activities). In this chapter the author introduces the subject of the diplomatic gift arriving from the East citing a celadon dish presented to Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-92) by the ruler of Egypt. Another even more spectacular object arrived in Italy from the East during the fifteenth century--the large Ptolemaic cameo known as the Tazza Farnese. It was in the collection of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Pope Paul II (1417-71), and before Paul II it was drawn, as noted by Mack, by a Timruid court artist of the Persian court. However, the author does not seem to know that it was also owned by King Alfonso II of Naples (1385-1458), a newly discovered fact that places Alfonso in the succession of Renaissance collectors and connoisseurs who took great pride in owning one of the most coveted of ancient glyptic art objects.

With the following chapter Mack introduces the subject of eastern textiles and their crucial influence on those of Italy. A recent study, La seta in Italia dal Medioevo al Seicento, dal bacco al drappo, ed. L. Mola, R. C. Mueller, and C. Zanier (Venice, 2000) is an important addition to the bibliography. Lucca was the foremost center in Europe for luxury figurative silk textiles and much of the silk and many of the designs arrived in Lucca from the East. Then, starting in the mid-fourteenth century, Italian textiles traveled to the East. The preservation of many of the eastern textiles in Italy is due to the fact that church vestments were made from them, and the vestments were subsequently used as grave wrappings. Knowledge of the eastern designs is also documented by religious paintings (for example, Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi) and portraits (Bronzino, Eleonora di Toledo).

Pseudo-Arabic script (not pseudo-Kufic, a common misnomer) links the chapter on patterned silk and chapter 4 ("Carpets") by way of the discussion of eastern ornament. Pseudo-Arabic script was employed as ornament--in the case of the West, often as the decoration of the borders of the garments of the elite (the Madonna, saints, and others), following a pattern established through the use of authentic script by eastern artists. Likewise, the author recognized the script decorating eastern metalwork as yet another prototype of western pseudo-Arabic script.

In the important chapter on carpets Mack states that the early carpets, from the fifteenth century, were produced in various locations in western Anatolia. It seems that the Italians initially preferred figurative carpets often representing animals. These carpets disappear from paintings in the 1470s to be replaced by those with geometric designs. The term, "Lotto carpet" (well-defined in The Eastern Carpet in the Western World by Donald King and David Sylvester [London, 1938]) named after the sixteenth-century Italian artist, Lorenzo Lotto, who used them extensively in his paintings, is briefly considered. A great many of the carpets painted by Sebastiano del Piombo, who made use of the "Lotto carpet," and Lotto show pseudo-Arabic script, and they all serve a decorative purpose. One of the largest oriental carpets extant (1088 cm. x 409 cm.) is that in the reserves of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. On the evidence of sixteenth-century inventories (those of 1557 and 1571) this Mamluk carpet entered the collection of the Medici grand dukes between those two dates and is perfectly preserved due to the fact that it was reserved for state occasions. The decorative purpose of many of these carpets is also made evident by their lavish use on the exterior of public buildings such as the Doge's Palace in Venice. Carpets along with ceramics were frequently sent to Italy as gifts on state occasions and thus acquired a particular status as an elite court object.

The discussion on ceramics which follows makes evident the importance of Italian pharmacies as a locus for the influence of eastern ceramics on those of the West. Documentary evidence dating to the beginning of the fifteenth century from Sta. Maria Nuova in Florence specifies that its over 500 pharmacy jars were to be in the damascene style. Collectors such as Lorenzo the Magnificent preferred eastern ceramics--especially porcelains. This evolved in the later sixteenth century under Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici in an attempt, unsuccessful but demonstrating great beauty, to establish the famed, but short-lived, Medici porcelain factory. In Ferrara, in 1514 Duke Alfonso I d'Este engaged a Venetian potter to imitate oriental porcelain without any evidence that this project came to fruition. In this same year Duke Alfonso paid for The Feast of the Gods now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, which includes representations of several large blue-and-white oriental bowls, demonstrating the use of eastern porcelain as an elite object, part of the growing demand for elite objects by the discerning Italian consumer.

Bookbinding and lacquer were two Islamic arts much admired in Italy, as was "inlaid brass." Giorgio Vasari attributed late-Renaissance improvements in Italian metalwork to the products of Islamic craftsmen. Enthusiastically admired by the Medici, the grand dukes displayed in the octagonal Tribuna of the Uffizi examples of "inlaid brass" such as the beautiful covered box, incised and inlaid with silver and today in the Bargello in Florence. It is mentioned in the first inventory of the Tribuna (1589). In the penultimate chapter Rosamond Mack draws on her knowledge of trips made to Damascus and other eastern cities by Venetian artists who were commissioned to document the peoples, architecture, and ornament of the East.

Much of the exchange emphasized here has been from the East in the direction of the West. On the other hand, Islamic connoisseurs made use of consortia of Venetian craftsmen. Western ceremony, such as that employed by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, was likewise copied. Textiles continued to be Italy's chief export to the East, where Islamic designs were woven in Italian silks. This being true, it is strange that there is only one Islamic ceremonial garment made to order in Italy still extant (the voided velvet kaftan of Suleyman I in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul). Islamic and Italian art objects can often resemble each other so closely that the only way to distinguish them is through a careful examination of their respective techniques.

Rosamond Mack should be congratulated on her study of the arts of the eastern and western Mediterranean and the way they influenced each other. She adds new information and insights to our understanding of this subject, concentrating on the decorative arts in a novel way. Bazaar to Piazza is a book which beautifully presents the carpets, silks, and ceramics of the East. While the individual decorative arts are well set out, the author might have attempted a better synthesis and more complete integration of these arts into the cultural context of the age. This, however, is a minor criticism of an important addition to the literature on the cross-fertilization of Islamic and Italian art during the period of the Renaissance.

MARTHA A. MCCRORY

Fashion Institute of Technology

New York, Emeritus