The Republic of Beauty, Melding West and East

Told often enough that the West and Islam are natural enemies, we start to believe it, and assume it has always been so. But the Metropolitan Museum of Art argues otherwise in "Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797," a show that, with classic Met largesse, recreates the spectacle of two different cultures meeting in one fantastic city, where commerce and love of beauty, those great levelers, unite them in a fruitful bond.

A mosque lamp from Egypt shows the influence of Venetian glass-making.

At its peak in the 15th and 16th centuries the Most Serene Republic of Venice was a giant, clamorous Costco-on-the-Rialto. All the necessities of life and most of the luxuries flowed into and through it from every direction, and in bulk, filling open-air stalls and salesrooms, piling up on piazzas.

Wood, metal, grain, furs and leathers from northern Europe were shipped from Venetian docks to Near Eastern and African cities, many formerly Christian and now Muslim controlled. In return came ultra-refined Islamic luxury goods: Turkish velvets, Egyptian glass, Transcaucasian carpets and Syrian brass work of a quality that matched and exceeded the finest of Europe. Although much of this retail kept moving westward into Italy and beyond, Venice skimmed off the cream to adorn its churches and merchant palaces. And so thoroughly did the city absorb the cultural essences of these imports that it gained a reputation for being the most un-European town in Europe: a floating, glinting pipe dream of a metropolis with a style and a story entirely its own.

Visually the Met show, organized by Stefano Carboni, a curator in the department of Islamic art, presents Venice exactly this way. At the same time it acknowledges the tough entrepreneurial history running under the dazzle and glow.

The most famous early transaction between Venice and the Islamic world was not an exchange but a theft. In A.D. 828 two Venetian traders stole the body of St. Mark, the evangelist, from its tomb in Alexandria and brought it home with them.

The pretext was piety: to remove a revered Christian relic from Muslim hands. The rewards, however, were practical. With a single act of derring-do, Venice advertised its mercantile reach, reaffirmed its religious loyalties and gained a pilgrimage-worthy trophy saint to boot.

The accumulated chips would come in handy with the Vatican. In future centuries, when Europe was repeatedly forbidden by papal decree to do business with Muslim powers, Venice went right ahead, and got away with it, staying in touch with the larger world on which it depended for economic survival (it had no natural resources) and in which it took delight. That world is sketched out in the show's opening gallery.

A 15th-century navigational chart of the eastern Mediterranean defines its coordinates. A Venetian merchant's handwritten diary supplies some on-the-ground data. (In Egypt, for example, the merchant saw pyramids, giraffes and the interiors of elegant Muslim homes.) Two paintings, one large and one small, bring his experiences to life.

We see Venice itself in a 15th-century illustrated manuscript of Marco Polo's "Travels." A bird's-eye view, it is a mirage of crenelated rooftops, watered-silk lagoons and jumbo swans, with Marco Polo, festive in pink, about to embark for Persia. This is a storybook picture by an English artist who most likely never laid eyes on the city.

The Syrian city of Damascus looks far less outlandish in an oil painting done a century later of Venetian ambassadors being received at an Islamic court. Minus the minarets and towering turbans, this could be a European scene. Islamic culture was by this point as fully integrated into Venetian consciousness as Arabic words were into the local Italian dialect.

In a sense this entire show is an essay on how that integration played out in art. Sometimes the dynamic is straightforward, a simple matter of placement. An exquisitely illustrated 17th-century manuscript made in Shiraz, in Persia, ends up in Venice. Fragments of a painted Venetian glass beaker lie in a Jewish cemetery in Syria. How? Why? Things traveled; that's all.

Frequently, though, cultures are overlaid. The gold-patterned cloak worn by the Virgin in a 14th-century altarpiece by Stefano Veneziano is modeled on sumptuous textiles then entering Venice from Persia. This reference to a luxury import would surely have tickled the painting's merchant-patron. That the cloth depicted was "foreign" made it exotic enough for heaven.

"Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797" continues through July 8 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.