Renaissance Sultans

Another narrative is that Renaissance art and architecture was inspired by ruins from ancient Greece and Rome and by the rediscovery of classical art and literature. But that narrative is worth questioning, too.

Powerful Italians like the Medici weren’t the only Renaissance rulers. To the east, the Ottomans rose to a position of dominance soon after their conquest of Constantinople in 1453. As Sultan Mehmet II expanded his empire into Eastern Europe, he also funded architectural, artistic, and intellectual innovations to showcase his power. He hired Italian artists and architects to work in his court. These artists in turn drew inspiration from the art and architecture of the great Islamic cities.

The Italian Renaissance is inseparable from cultural and economic exchange with the Islamic world. Muslim scholars preserved Greek and Roman texts. Renaissance poets and writers like Petrarch were inspired by themes in Islamic poetry. Much of the architecture of the Italian Renaissance was modeled on the great cities to the east, such as Aleppo, Cairo, and Tabriz. Paintings from European artists highlight these connections.

The painting above depicts the Christian Saint Mark preaching in Alexandria. The painting shows him addressing a crowd of Muslim men (Islam was not founded until nearly 600 years after Saint Mark’s death). The historian Jerry Brotton argues that the mixture of Christian and Muslim motifs in the painting “shows how the European Renaissance began to define itself not in opposition to the east, but through an extensive and complex exchange of ideas and materials.” As Europe integrated with the expanding networks of Afro-Eurasian trade, the Italian Renaissance was as much defined by its exchange with Islamic culture as its rediscovery of Greco-Roman styles.