“Bellini and the East”
at the National Gallery, London.
April 12, 2006-June 25, 2006
The thirty-five year period from 1453 to 1489, beginning with the Turkish conquest of Constantinople and culminating in a remarkable portrait of Mehmet II painted by Gentile Bellini, proved to be pivotal for two empires, the Ottoman and the Venetian. It also occasioned a turning point in the relations between Venetian and Islamic art, and particularly in the life of Gentile, son of Jacopo and brother to Giovanni Bellini.
“Bellini and the East,” an exhibition mounted this past year by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the National Gallery in London, assembled a group of paintings, drawings, and artefacts affording a rare view of the arts, crafts, commerce, and diplomacy in the eastern Mediterranean in the last half of the fifteenth century. As this exhibition demonstrates, to see the period in terms of a clash of civilizations, or even of religions, is to misread what was going on. It was more a process of assimilation and accommodation than a conflict. The Ottomans were not fanatics. We speak of the “Ottoman Turks,” but their imperial ruling class was never purely Turkish even at its higher levels, but rather a multi-ethnic meritocracy. In terms of religion, the policy was one of toleration. Many of the empire’s rulers, administrators, architects, admirals, and other important figures were Greeks, Armenians, Serbs, and Bosnians.
The sultans were well aware that the conquest of Constantinople made them