This exhibition invites us on a journey to the Mediterranean Sea between 1400 and 1800. During this period, Venice—an astonishing city built on hundreds of small islands off the coast of Northeast Italy—stood at the crossroads of a vast trade network connecting Africa, Asia, and Europe. To maintain its status as an international emporium, with markets full of ceramics, metalwork, spices, textiles, and other goods, Venice acquired overseas territory to its east and cultivated close ties with the Ottomans, whose empire became the wealthiest and most powerful in the eastern Mediterranean after their conquest of Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1453 and widespread expansion in the sixteenth century.
The complicated relationship between the Venetians and Ottomans is characterized by cooperation and conflict, handshake and arms-length approaches, diplomacy and backstabbing, understanding and misunderstanding. The Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire alternated between being valued trading partners and fierce adversaries at war.
Transporting us between the two realms, this exhibition follows the paths of individuals who commissioned, gifted, shipped, or traded the objects on view. Drawn primarily from the extraordinary collections of Venice’s renowned civic museums, the exhibition includes books, ceramics, coins, paintings, textiles, weapons, and even treasures salvaged from a shipwreck that reflect a myriad of interactions between Venice and the Ottoman Empire. The works of art attest to the shared history of these two Mediterranean superpowers.
Diplomacy and Trade
Although all major European powers maintained diplomatic ties to the Ottoman Empire at one time or another, none did so to the extent of the Venetian Republic. Commerce was the basis of the relationship—Venice made a strong investment in diplomacy to safeguard its merchants doing business in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Representing Venice in Constantinople were ambassadors and a figure known as a bailo. While ambassadors were sent for brief visits to the Ottoman capital to sign treaties and other agreements, the bailo maintained an embassy in Constantinople, typically lived there for two to three years, and was specifically tasked with promoting Venetian-Ottoman trade. At his residence, the bailo routinely had splendid feasts that included dramatic performances. Diplomatic translators called dragomen facilitated communication. While the Ottoman Empire did not maintain permanent representatives abroad, the dispatch of envoys to Venice, frequent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was important to its diplomatic efforts.
Gift giving formed an integral part of diplomatic relations. The Venetians and Ottomans greeted each other’s representatives with luxurious presents such as carpets, clocks, glass, gourmet food, metalwork, musical instruments, perfumes, and silk robes, which advertised the industrial and artisanal skills of the giver’s home country.
Luxury Textiles Between Venice and Constantinople
Textiles played a leading role in commerce between Venice and the Ottoman Empire. The most spectacular were brocaded silks and velvets—rich fabrics woven with raised patterns using gold and silver thread. Silk was synonymous with status, and the elite used it for clothing, furnishings, and rituals.
Venice had become internationally renowned for its silk production by the fifteenth century. Foreign rulers sent representatives to the city to shop for expensive silk fabrics for their wardrobes and palaces. The Venetian state bought large quantities of silk from local merchants to use in festive ceremonies, to outfit the doge and senators, and to gift to foreign courts. Venice typically presented lengths of costly silks to ambassadors at the end of their missions and was particularly generous with Ottoman representatives. The Venetians must have known how well received their gifts would be—Ottoman sultans famously favored kaftans made from their silks.
To compete with the Venetian silks arriving on their shores and to satisfy their own tremendous appetite for textiles, the Ottomans established a major production center in Bursa (in present-day Türkiye). Thriving by the 1460s, the city also served as a marketplace for raw silk coming from mulberry groves around the Caspian Sea in Iran. Venetian and other Italian merchants traveled to Bursa to buy both fabrics and raw silk.
Venetians and Ottomans shared tastes in textile colors and patterns. Both favored red and gold and bold designs with motifs such as carnations, pomegranates, and tulips. Their textiles are so similar that it can sometimes be difficult to discern whether one was made in Venice or Bursa.
A Wealthy Venetian Household
With large noble and merchant classes, Venice had many splendid homes lining its canals. Inside, the homes were colorful and bright. The walls were covered with gilded leather and patterned fabrics, and mirrors hung in nearly every room; glass roundels known as rui filled large windows, and polychrome terrazzo covered floors.
In these richly ornamented interiors, Islamic decorative artworks were displayed and used. Carpets, İznikware, and round-bottomed metal bowls gave their Venetian owners pleasure, as did the incense and bronze pomanders they imported from far-flung places to perfume their homes. Owning Ottoman objects in Venice could be an expression of cosmopolitanism as well as a sign of belonging to a society that owed its existence to trade.
The Fourth Ottoman-Venetian War (1570–73) was followed by the longest pause in military fighting between the two powers, lasting seventy-two years. Peace allowed trade; during this period, the Fondaco dei Turchi was established for Muslim traders active in Venice. Many Ottoman works of art reached the city, and the popularity of these imports led Venetian craftspeople to imitate their style and patterns in objects such as book bindings, ceramics, and parade shields. In this way, the artistic languages of the Ottomans and Venetians became further intertwined.
Spices, Dining, and Diplomacy
The spice trade became one of the cornerstones of the Venetian economy in the Middle Ages. Venetian merchants sailed to eastern port cities such as Alexandria, Beirut, and Constantinople to buy spices and other foodstuffs, along with incense and perfume, and then sold them in markets back home to merchants from elsewhere in Europe. Venetian and Ottoman dominance in the spice trade motivated Portuguese sailors to circumnavigate Africa to reach Asia in 1498.
Tables set with colorful glazed ceramics, engraved metalwork, gilded and enameled glassware, and silk textiles in both Venice and the Ottoman Empire showed parallels between their fine dining cultures. Their cuisines shared some similarities too. They both used spices sparingly, carefully selecting them to harmonize with the main ingredients. Another common trait was an appreciation of vegetables as more than merely garnishes to meat. Risotto, a staple of Italian cuisine, was most likely inspired by Ottoman pilaf. Ottoman rice pudding and sherbet desserts became popular in Venice. The former, known as riso turchesco (Turkish rice), is made with rice, butter, cinnamon, milk, rosewater, and sugar.
Foreign ambassadors recorded the lavish feasts they enjoyed at the Ottoman court, where bountiful food from all corners of the vast empire was prepared by skilled chefs. Venetian diplomats often presented sultans with gifts of parmesan cheese.
The Gagliana Grossa: A Sixteenth-Century Venetian Shipwreck
While sailing from Venice to Constantinople in the fall of 1583, a fully loaded Venetian merchant ship called the Gagliana Grossa sank in a rocky inlet off the Dalmatian coast (in present-day Croatia). Most crew members survived. Afterward the Venetian Senate sent a Greek diver to the site to recover diamonds, emeralds, pearls, and some textiles onboard but left everything else behind.
Nearly four hundred years later, fishermen and divers rediscovered the ship, and, after some looting occurred, underwater archaeologists started working at the site. Since the 1960s, archaeologists have recovered over twenty thousand objects. On view in this gallery are some of the most recent finds: bottles and goblets, brass chandelier parts, glass beads, mirrors, and round glass windowpanes. They exemplify the ship’s diverse range of cargo—raw materials, semi-finished products, and finished works intended for the Ottoman market and court. The Gagliana Grossa is one of the most significant shipwrecks ever excavated in the Mediterranean, and work at the site is ongoing.
Research conducted in the State Archives of Venice enriches our knowledge of the Gagliana Grossa. Built in Venice and launched in 1569, the wooden ship was one of the largest of its kind. When it sank fourteen years later, Odoardo da Gagliano (ca. 1557–ca. 1629), a Venetian merchant resident in Constantinople, owned it. For what turned out to be its final voyage, the ship left Venice late in the season (there was a sailing moratorium every year from November 20 to January 20). Bad weather may have caused it to sink.
Merchants and Sailors
The Republic of Venice was first and foremost a maritime power. For centuries it invested heavily in both a navy and a merchant marine—commercial ships operated by the state. The Arsenale, a giant shipyard on the east side of the city, mass-produced vessels of two principal kinds: long ships called galleys, with oars and sails, and round ships, which were smaller and propelled solely by the wind. Galleys, as exemplified by the Gagliana Grossa, had an enormous capacity for goods; they were also easily converted into war ships. For safety in pirate-infested waters, Venetian ships often sailed in convoys organized by the state. They traveled together on established routes through the Mediterranean, exchanged merchandise in select ports, and returned to Venice a few months later. Scheduled at regular intervals, these convoys ensured a steady stream of goods arriving in Venice.
Starting in the mid-fifteenth century, the Ottoman Empire became a sea power competing with Venice for naval and commercial superiority in the Mediterranean. For shipbuilding, the imperial arsenal in Constantinople became the Ottomans’ equivalent to the Venetian Arsenale. Skillful admirals such as Kemal Reis (ca. 1451–1511) and Hayreddin Barbarossa (died 1546) led the Ottomans to victory in many naval battles against the Venetians.
From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the Mediterranean enjoyed a mapmaking boom, fueled in part by ever-changing political boundaries. Seafaring was facilitated by carefully drawn nautical maps and astronomical instruments such as astrolabes that utilized Arab technology.
Francesco Morosini, Venetian Commander and Doge
Francesco Morosini (1619–1694) is the most celebrated Venetian involved in the Republic’s wars with the Ottoman Empire. Active in the second half of the seventeenth century, he achieved military success in the Eastern Mediterranean at a time when Venetian maritime power sought to prevent the advancement of the Ottomans over land and sea into Western Europe.
Morosini proved to be such an outstanding military leader that he was named Venice’s captain general of the sea four times. He commanded the armata sottile, Venice’s agile oar-powered galley fleet. While the Ottoman navy was similarly armed and had more ships, it proved to be less prepared and technologically savvy. While still at sea in 1688, Morosini was elected doge. He returned to Venice in 1690 but took up arms again in 1693 at the age of seventy-four. He died aboard his ship a year later.
Many Venetian works of art honor Morosini as a hero; some were intended for the Doge’s Palace, while others were made for his home. Like many other Venetians, he amassed a large collection of art, weapons, and trophies, using it to demonstrate the value of his service to the Republic. As spoils of war, he kept the Ottoman objects on view in this gallery. The city of Venice acquired much of Morosini’s collection from his heirs, and it is now displayed at the Museo Correr.
Mariano Fortuny’s Ottoman-Venetian Revival
Artist, designer, and inventor Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo (1871–1949) was born in Granada, Spain, but his life and career are inextricably linked with Venice, where he resided from the age of eighteen until his death. In 1898 he purchased an enormous Venetian Gothic palace and transformed it into an exhibition space, laboratory, library, painting studio, and textile workshop, as well as his home. There he experimented with a variety of art forms, including electric lighting and stage design, fashion, and printing. He outfitted the palace with antique furniture, armor, carpets, and textiles, combining them with his own magical paintings, printed fabrics, and silk chandeliers. Given to the city of Venice by his wife and collaborator Henriette Nigrin (1877–1969) after his death, the building is now a museum known as Museo Fortuny.
Fortuny assembled albums with photographs of Renaissance paintings by Venetian artists such as Vittore Carpaccio, whose portrait of Doge Lorenzo Loredan hangs at the start of this exhibition. Fortuny used the images to study patterned textiles of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Fortuny’s enduring interest in historical textiles led him to invent a new process to recreate designs from the past. Through close observation of Venetian and Ottoman velvets—both examples in his collection and depictions in Renaissance paintings—he was able to simulate the light effects and texture variations of these brocaded fabrics using printing techniques. He also frequently incorporated Venetian and Ottoman motifs such as pomegranates and tulips in his textiles. Fortuny’s sumptuous creations recall the bygone era of Venice and the Ottoman Empire.
