Infidel chic

TOP: Anonymous (Chinese). Large porcelain dish from Ming dynasty, Yongle period (1403–1424). BOTTOM: Attributed to Gentile Bellini, A Turkish Artist (1479–80).

Art historian Paul Hills
The Art Institute of Chicago, Thursday 21.
Silk Road Chicago—the fusion of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Art Institute and cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble—could fall into the trap of bringing people together through art while forgetting the art itself. To head off that possibility, the Art Institute has invited speakers to discuss the Silk Road’s influence on European art. British art historian Paul Hills is first up with a lecture Thursday 21.

“What’s so fascinating [in 15th-century Venetian art] is that there was a kind of love/hate relationship that Venetians had with Islamic lands,” Hills says from London. While the Venetians loved Islamic silks and textiles, they also knew that those goods came from lands ruled by “the infidels.” But the Venetians noticed that Islamic rulers “had a high standard of living, and they wanted their luxuries.” Out of that tension, Venetian artists and rulers painted and incorporated Islamic materials and styles into some of Western art’s most iconic artworks.

In his Venetian Colour (Yale University Press, $60), Hills describes the marble brought to Venice and used in St. Mark’s Cathedral following the sack of Constantinople in 1208, after the Fourth Crusade. It was brought back and used as costly paneling for St. Mark’s interior walls and, not incidentally, showed off the reach of the Venetian empire. It might not be the best picture of harmonious ethnic relations, but it’s some of the most divine art in existence.The story of the marble gets better when Hills says that it wasn’t even the high quality that attracted the Venetians, but rather the marble’s weight. “What was being brought back from the East was very light; it was spices, mainly,” Hills says. “But ships needed ballast, and [the Venetians] had an eye for marbles.” So the Venetians “scooped them up” following the Crusade.

Hills will focus on other Islamic influences in his lecture. The “ambiguity” in the way Islamic fashions are represented provides him with fertile ground to discuss East/West relations of the 15th century. “In Venetian paintings of the New Testament, they use [what was then] modern-day Islamic art,” he says. “To us, it seems odd.” But, as he points out, the artists were trying to represent the clothing style and design of the lands they thought of as the cradle of Christianity. Hills will discuss Vittore Carpaccio’s work, including one painting that “has a high priest who’s supposed to be Jewish, but who’s dressed in Islamic textiles.”

While Hills sees the value in the Silk Road’s unifying ethos, he points out that the artists themselves had little to say about East/West relations. How much contact a society has with foreign countries is largely determined by its businesspeople, after all. “I think states which are dominated by merchants, as Venice certainly was, understand that peace is preferable to war,” he says, “because war is bad for business.”—Marc Geelhoed

Paul Hills lectures Thursday 21 at the Art Institute.