Ceramics and glass: transfer of skills across the Mediterranean
Adoration of the Magi, Andrea Mantegna, circa 1495–1505, (distemper on linen, 48.6 × 65.6 cm). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Islamic ceramics from Spain and Anatolia were imported into Venice from the thirteenth century onwards. Anatolian ceramics sought to master the production of Chinese porcelain and imitated its white and blue decorations, which explains why in the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth century, the distinction between authentic Chinese porcelain and Islamic imitations was not always made by Europeans. In Mantegna’s Adoration of the Magi, Melchior holds a ceramic cup, evoking a Ming cup from the fifteenth century. However, it is different both in shape and decoration, suggesting that the cup could have Middle Eastern origins instead. The fact that it is depicted in the hands of one of the Magi shows that it was a precious object associated with prestige and exotic origins.
Mosque lamp produced in Venice, 16th century, (glass, 28 cm in height). Topkapi Museum, Istanbul.
Glass objects, as well as raw materials to produce them, arrived in Venice from the Middle East in the thirteenth century, if not earlier. Throughout the following centuries, Islamic glass production was shaped by Europeans’ demand and taste for these products. In the fifteenth century, as the workshops of Murano accessed a first-row position in European glass industry, the trade in glass objects and raw products between Venice and the Middle East was inverted. Additionally, the Ottoman court deeply enjoyed Venetian glass objects. In 1569, it ordered a considerable amount of mosque lamps from Venice, which the lamp from the Topkapi Museum might be a surviving example of. Similarly to the way on which oriental prayer rugs were used to decorate Christian churches, this mosque lamp is an example of an object produced in Venice and used for religious purposes in Constantinople.
