This summer exhibition features Dutch and Flemish artists portraying Muslims, and Islamic artists, primarily from the Ottoman Empire, depicting Europeans, to show the interaction, formal and informal, between these cultures. Curated by Talitha Maria G. Schepers, 2022-24 Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellow, during a year of her fellowship. Exhibited material comes from the Harvard collections with some local loans, and comprises about 120 works, primarily paper art but also textiles, ceramics, paintings and furniture. The object labels give richly informative explanations. In the final exhibition section, labels written by graduate students and museum fellows highlight ongoing research at the Harvard Art Museums and university. Instead of a formal catalogue, digital resources accompany the exhibition, to be permanently kept on the museum’s website and periodically updated. Extensively amplifying the exhibition, these resources feature essays by graduate students, fellows and staff on Egyptian obelisks in Istanbul, Islamic presence in German prints, pigments, tulips in the Netherlands, Pieter Coecke van Aelst’s journey to Istanbul, the evolution of costume books, the conservation of the Ottoman robe, and other topics. In this way, the Islamic and European interconnections are greatly expanded and this temporary display takes on a permanent life.

Most viewers will be familiar with at least some of this material, but there are also many surprises. Displayed are seven textile pieces, some of which have never been shown before: a cushion cover, a silk satin robe with gold and silver threads, two Lotto carpets, a prayer carpet and two velvet panels. The cushion cover and carpets are installed to evoke their functions, upon benches, in prayer, or coverings for Dutch tables. Ottoman customs are further presented in a pair of bridal bath shoes, constructed of wood, shell, leather and glass, and a woman wearing similar shoes is illustrated in an Italian Renaissance drawing. A small Madonna and Child with Saint Catherine of Alexandria and three female saints by Adriaen Isenbrant (c. 1520) includes a drapery backdrop, with a pattern similar to the Ottoman velvet panel hanging nearby. A carpet casually draped over a ledge in Willem van Mieris’ portrait of a man holding a sword (1686) exudes elegance, wealth and status.

Two maps and two pairs of images are at the gallery entrance. One map shows Eurasia around 1560, with Habsburg, Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal territories, and the other, the Low Countries, the origin of most of the artists on display. The paired images are well-chosen encounters: a German source serving an Ottoman artist, and a Mughal source serving a Dutch artist. Haydar Reis (called Nigari; Turkish, 1494-1574) portrayed Emperor Charles V from an unknown portrait, approximated here by Barthel Beham’s engraving of 1531. Haydar Reis followed an unknown model in profile, feathered beret, lace-edged shirt and fur-trimmed cloak, and translated its volumetric and textured qualities into his bold, flat and patterned forms. He smoothed the elongated nose, neatened the beard, closed the mouth and suppressed the Habsburg chin. Rembrandt copied a Mughal watercolor of Emperor Aurangzeb after one similar to that exhibited. He painstakingly observed its patterned and pleated textiles, plumed hat and rigid beard in ink, wash and chalk, making a few corrections to follow his source more precisely. Haydar Reis and Rembrandt each copied attentively and respectfully the details of his model, yet filtered it through his own visual and technical language.

Numerous prints and publications by Netherlandish travelers supplied the European audience with imagery of the customs and costumes of the lands east of the Mediterranean. Represented artists who travelled east include Erhard Reuwich, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Melchior Lorck, Nicolas de Nicolay, Cornelis de Bruijn and Jean-Baptiste Vanmour. Reuwich accompanied Bernhard von Breydenbach on his trip to the Holy Land (1483), and his panoramic map of Venice is the earliest multi-block city view. In the sixteenth century, trade and travel intensified, particularly between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The prints and publications from these travels informed the Europeans about the customs, rituals and costumes of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires, and provided models for artists. In 1533, Coecke presumably traveled with Cornelis de Schepper, Habsburg ambassador to the Ottoman court.  Displayed upon the wall as a frieze, the monumental Customs and Fashions of the Turks takes the viewer along this route through Slavonia and Macedonia to Istanbul, where Sultan Süleyman awaits. Coecke filled these scenes with many activities, a funeral, three Muslim men at prayer, a circumcision feast, and finally, the sultan on horseback in his weekly procession to the mosque. Another Habsburg ambassador, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq went to Istanbul in 1554-1562, and famously sent tulip bulbs to Vienna, setting off a craze for the flowers when the bulbs became cultivated in Leiden. Lorck accompanied him, and portrayed Sultan Süleyman and other court officials (1559); his costume book (1586, published 1626) had less impact, probably because of its delayed publication, but it appears in Rembrandt’s inventory (1656). De Nicolay went with the French ambassador Gabriel d’Aramon to Istanbul in 1551, and published his accounts of the journey (1567 and 1576); for his 60 illustrations of costumed figures, he used his own drawings, but relied upon some figures in Coecke’s woodcut, specifically women going to the baths. Experiencing the Ottoman empire was not required to portray it, as Hans Weigel and Jost Amman shamelessly assembled  their costume book from the material of Coecke, De Nicolay and others (1577).  Eastern dignitaries visiting Europe were also portrayed, as Aegidius Sadeler II engraved portraits of the Safavid ambassadors to the Rudolfine court in Prague: Cuchein Ollibeg (1601), Sinal Khan Shamlu (1604) and Mechti Kuli Beg (1605).

Records of travel and observation continue in the eighteenth-century for the entertainment and education of the European market. In 300 engravings, the painter and writer Cornelius de Bruijn  documented his journey through Russia, Persia and the East Indies, rewarding the reader with images of the people, ruins and sites of his route (1711). Working for the French embassy in Istanbul, Jean-Baptiste Vanmour made 100 paintings that depict daily life in the Ottoman empire; the hand-colored engravings of these paintings with their meticulously detailed costumes, musical instruments and furnishings would be authoritative for over a century in Europe, especially France (1712).

The majority of the exhibited works are by Netherlandish artists observing easterners, a factor of the availability of the selected artworks and the short time in which the show came to fruition. Less examined here is the western impact upon Eastern and Asian cultures, as the Europeans were not the only ones who were curious about foreign dress.  The eighteenth-century Japanese woodblock print of a Dutch woman represents the Far East, and is carefully inscribed: “Oranda nyonin, Juffrouw van Hollad” [sic]. Likely based upon prints, the figure wears a combination of a man’s jacket, ruff collar, elaborate skirt and heeled clogs. This print, somewhat anomalous among the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal focus, extends the range of the show to Japan.

Several hybrid pieces illuminate the ways in which European imagery was appropriated and incorporated into Ottoman and Mughal albums. [DL3] Christian images, sourced from prints circulated by the Jesuits from 1580 on, were appreciated for their aesthetic qualities and were incorporated in Mughal albums assembled under Jahangir and Shah Jahan in the first half of the seventeenth century. The delicately rendered watercolor of the Virgin and Child with two angels by Jamal Muhammad (c. 1630-1650) has its ultimate source in the Salus populi romani icon in Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, as it was engraved by Hieronymus Wierix (c. 1590). The palm trees and stream are added from the Qu’ran’s account of Jesus’ birth, imparting an Islamic interpretation to the Byzantine image. Such albums combined European and Mughal images with elaborate borders, often incorporating Dutch botanical motifs. Meanwhile, a prized drawing of a horse after a print by Jan van der Straet was placed into an Ottoman album, suggesting the importance of these animals as status markers and diplomatic gifts.

Turbans and tulips are most recognizable and ubiquitous markers of exchange between the Netherlands and the Ottomans. For non-Christian figures in biblical and historical representations, European artists used turbans to signify identity, antiquity and location. To distance the event in time and place, Lucas van Leyden included turbaned bystanders in his engraved Adoration of the Magi (1513); one of these observers is based upon an Italian medal of Mehmed II (c. 1480), an indication that the medal circulated. Turbaned men drawn by Govert Flinck, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout and Arent de Gelder are probably models posing in costume as studies for paintings.  Finally, ten watercolors of tulips are reminders of that often overvalued commodity by Margaretha Adriaensdr de Heer (c. 1603-1659-1665) and three other artists.

This review has surveyed only a selection of the exhibited pieces in this wide-ranging, ambitious and rewarding show.

Amy Golahny
Boston College
Richmond Professor of Art History Emerita, Lycoming College