Traces the blending of Islamic and European visual culture during the ninth to seventeenth centuries. This illuminating exhibition catalogue interrogates the entanglement of the Islamic world with European visual culture during the medieval period and Renaissance, from the 9th century to the end of the 17th. It traces and reveals this interconnectedness through works of art that reflect the intense environment of contact, influence and exchange which developed over centuries between the two cultures. It also explores the reception of the image of 'Islam' in Europe, as highlighted by an important painting of the Supper at Emmaus, painted in the so-called 'Oriental Mode' by the Venetian artist Giovanni Mansueti (c. 1465?1527) in the last decade of the 15th century. Islam in Europe presents a survey of artistic production in the medieval Islamic world and the many ways it altered the trajectory of European visual culture. Opening with earlymedieval objects produced by Muslim artisans and known to have been exported in large numbers to medieval Europe, the catalogue explores the crosscurrents of visual culture at the nexus of Islam and Christendom which were already well developed by the 10th century. It continues with artworks produced under the aegis of the Umayyads (711?1031) and later Islamic dynasties which ruled large swathes of the Iberian Peninsula until 1492, and the influence of Islamic rule on the development of a distinctive visual culture in medieval Spain. AUTHOR: Diana Luber is the Islamic specialist at Sam Fogg, London. She is an art historian and writer who specializes in the arts of Islamic Spain, as well as the contact between the Islamic world and the West.
