The New Criterion

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, t ...

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