East met West in Renaissance Venice, especially in the work of Gentile Bellini. One of the city’s most prestigious artists, he was sent to Istanbul in 1479 to work for the Ottoman sultan, Mehmed II. All of Bellini’s surviving work done in Istanbul will be presented in the exhibition. The artist depicted Byzantine and eastern Mediterranean subjects such as Cardinal Bessarion and Caterina Cornaro, queen of Cyprus. While exploring Western fascination with the East—and vice versa—Gentile Bellini and the East provides a new context for examining the art of Renaissance Venice.

Gentile Bellini and The East has been organized by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the National Gallery, London, and is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Also on view at the National Gallery, London, April 12 to June 25, 2006.

Venice as we know it is inconceivable without the “East” – the myriad of cultures which bordered on the eastern Mediterranean Sea and provided gateways to Asia and Africa beyond. This exhibition focuses on just one episode in this millennium-long exchange: Gentile Bellini’s response to the east in the late fifteenth century. In his lifetime, Gentile was Venice’s most prestigious painter and in 1479 he was sent by the Venetian Senate to work for Sultan Mehmed II in Constantinople. But Gentile also responded to other aspects of the east, including the Byzantine Greek Empire as well as Venice’s other trading partners in North Africa and the Levant.

The second half of the fifteenth century, the time frame of this exhibition, witnessed a decisive power shift in the Mediterranean basin. 1453 saw the fall of Constantinople (later to be known as Istanbul), capital of the once mighty Byzantine Empire, to the Ottoman army led by Mehmed the Conqueror. Successive Ottoman military campaigns threatened Europe, particularly the Italian states and their domains, and by 1500 much of the Balkan peninsula and many of the former Greek islands were in Turkish hands. Their only serious military and territorial challenger was Venice.

Neither war nor religious fervor could destroy Venice’s long-established relationship with the Eastern Mediterranean. Her prosperity and her identity derived from her role as mediator between Western Europe and the much richer civilizations of the Near East, and her ability to exchange and assimilate goods and ideas from across the Mediterranean. Mark, her patron saint, was from the Egyptian city of Alexandria, and her cultural and spiritual centre – the basilica of San Marco – was built in his honor (and as his mausoleum) in the Greek Byzantine style. During the fifteenth century Venice’s rich cultural and economic dialogue with other Mediterranean civilizations still shaped many characteristic aspects of her life and artistic production: including architecture, painting, glass, metalwork and textiles. Such exchanges were reciprocal. Household objects were made in Damascus specifically for the Venetian export market, while silk damasks from Venice (the name reveals their Syrian origins) were traded all over the Mediterranean.

The continuing impact of the Greek Byzantine world upon Venetian art and culture after 1453 is another theme of this exhibition. Many Greeks had fled to Venice or her colonies, formerly Byzantine possessions. The most important of these were the islands of Crete and Cyprus, whose last independent ruler was the Venetian Caterina Cornaro. Venice’s Greek character was so pronounced that it seemed ‘almost another Byzantium’ to Cardinal Bessarion, the most famous of these exiles. Some Greeks considered Bessarion a traitor for his avocation of union between the Eastern and Western churches. But none of these critics could match Bessarion’s devoted advocacy of the Greek cause in the West: whether by agitating for Crusades against the Turks, or imbedding Byzantine culture and holy relics within Italian society. Perhaps the most precious of these donations was the Reliquary he donated to the Venetian Scuola della Carità. We examine the continuing relationship between Venice and Byzantium in the late fifteenth century through the circumstances of this gift, and Gentile Bellini’s painted evocation of it, made to decorate the tabernacle in which the reliquary was stored.

The third section of our exhibition reconsiders Gentile Bellini’s visit to Constantinople. In 1479 he was sent by the Venetian Senate to the Ottoman capital as part of the peace settlement between Venice and the Turks. His role was not just as a visiting painter in an exotic locale, but also as a cultural ambassador for Venice. This was important to Mehmed II as he was particularly interested in the art and culture of Italy, and seems to have attempted on several occasions to have himself portrayed by Italian artists. Our exhibition attempts to reconstruct Gentile’s work in Turkey and connect it with related objects by the artist.

Our understanding of Gentile Bellini as an artist has been greatly obscured by the loss of his most important paintings - the monumental canvases in the Doge’s Palace, Venice, destroyed by fire in 1577. Only a few of his other works remain, namely the large narrative paintings The Procession in Piazza San Marco and the Preaching of Saint Mark in Alexandria, produced in his final years. Little remains of Gentile’s art from the 1470s and 1480s, except for the works made in Constantinople – and these have proved controversial in attribution. Moreover, many workshop paintings and drawings have been assigned to Gentile Bellini. This has had the unfortunate consequence of confirming his reputation as an awkward artist, especially in comparison with his beloved brother Giovanni. Their talents were quite different, and we hope through this exhibition will reveal Gentile’s outstanding visual curiosity, especially in recording personalities.