Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture, 1100-1500. .

Deborah Howard. Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture, 1100-1500.

London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. xv + 283 pp. index. illus. gloss. bibl. $60. ISBN: 0-300-08504-4.

Yale University Press has been making an art of publishing books on the art and architecture of Venice. A quick glance at their website brings up at least fifteen books on the city. Several, such as Patricia Fortini Brown's Venice and Antiquity, take a broad view of the city's cultural milieu. Deborah Howard's Venice and the East falls within this latter group in its wide-ranging approach. The author proposes to uncover and examine the reflections of the Islamic world in Venice between 1100 and 1500, particularly as they appear in architecture and architectural decoration. At first this may sound similar to many art historical publications that establish artistic influence by comparing visual motifs. Howard's concerns, however, go beyond the standard tracking of similarities of form to a consideration of the many possible methods of transmitting ideas about distant places, such as incorporating images into architectural decoration or utilizing civic spaces in foreign ways. Her frank discussions of the complex ity and indefiniteness of these processes turn her book into nothing less than a study of the phenomenon of cultural transmission. Throughout the volume, for example, she acknowledges differences between levels of awareness of Islamic elements, distinguishing between the experiences of visitors to eastern sites and the perceptions of those who learned about the Islamic world second hand, from imported objects, drawings, or verbal descriptions. She is careful to present alternative explanations for similarities in architectural structures and motifs, but never loses sight of the concept that influence may be powerful even when difficult to prove.

After an introduction that considers Venice's self-identity as related to both Europe and the eastern cities with which she traded, Howard devotes two chapters to the active trading that Venice conducted with the east. She discusses the direct and indirect ways in which the experiences of traders and other travelers were communicated, received, and utilized. She points our that the education of traveling merchants, as well as their religious beliefs, influenced their responses to the east and its architecture. She outlines and evaluates the various means by which information could have been transmitted back to Venice: not only through scattered drawings, diagrams, and portable objects, but, more elusively and perhaps more importantly, through travelers' writings (which are frequently drawn upon throughout the book), oral narratives, and memories.

The remaining chapters, which constitute two thirds of the text, examine specific sites in Venice where Islamic influence can be seen. Examples are not limited to specific architectural forms, but include many types of references that are understood to "emulate" other cities and monuments rather than imitating them. A chapter on San Marco, for example, "focuses on references to Egypt, and to Alexandria in particular, in the mosaic decorations" (65) as well as including a section on Islamic architectural forms found in the building. Another chapter looks at Venice as a mercantile center and finds "characteristics of the emporia of the Islamic world" (111) in both its plan and its buildings. The section on Venetian palaces, in addition to a traditional tracking of specific architectural motifs such as ogee arches and mibrab windows, moves beyond the normal scope of art history to consider how such borrowings were perceived by a Venetian audience as signifiers of eastern experiences and social place. The unusual design and decoration of the Palazzo Ducale are shown to allude to the architecture of the Mamluks, as part of imagery meant to establish Venice as "the heart of a vast global trading arena" (188). A final chapter explores Venice as part of the pilgrimage route, which placed her in a constant comparative relationship to the Holy Land. The Venetian built environment is seen as emulating sacred locations, rather than directly copying them, until the city became a "flickering mirage" of Jerusalem.

Howard's book covers a wealth of information about Venetian and Islamic cities and architecture, including structures that no longer exist or have been substantially changed. This alone would make it a valuable study, as would the exquisite photographs or the derailed bibliography. But what sets this volume apart is the web it weaves of the fluid exchange of ideas, through art, across physical, cultural, and religious barriers.