Islamic Art and Culture in the Renaissance—The True Moor of Venice

welcome to these talks at the Metropolitan Museum on Sunday afternoon and some if not all of you may wonder what does the person who is responsible for Islamic art in this museum what is he doing talking about Italian Renaissance art and even dwelling on a painting like this well the answer is Italian Renaissance art represented Islam as it came to be crystallized in the minds of Christian Europeans for hundreds of years and through our exploration of the symbolism of some of these wonderful paintings done in Renaissance Venice in the late 15th and early 16th century we may actually discover together the identity of a central figure in one of the most mysterious paintings of the entire Renaissance the three philosophers by George Olney but first we go through the metropolitan museum's own treasures and this strange painting by another Venetian artist of the period carpaccio painted in 1510 already indicates the kind of extraordinarily subtle symbolic allegorical language that these painters used and inviting us to crack the riddle of what they show they invite us on an extraordinary journey of discovery here carpaccio invites us with the two saints in foreground to meditate on the Passion of Christ the dead Christ on a broken throne and you can see Jobe the Old Testament prophet on the right and on the left the Christian monk abbot st. Anthony they meditate on Christ and we can already see the I'm sorry the meditation takes us up to this symbol here which is the cave the cave in which Christ was buried and from which he was resurrected and on this side is the world of death and on this side as the inscription in Hebrew on job's seat here says I know that my Redeemer liveth so that on the right side you have a vision of paradise and eternal life the soul is represented by these deer these deer which are waylaid by the ferocious beasts of hell but here the ferocious beasts cannot capture the soul which is a deer that has been entering into the land of salvation you even have the contrast between the dead tree on the side of death and on the side of resurrection the living tree this kind of imagery actually is very prevalent in Islamic art of the 15th and 16th centuries - but knowing now that this is how we can learn to read these paintings as wonderful sign languages pictorial expression of religious symbolism now we can discover and crack the meaning of this extraordinary painting about to come up I'm talking about the more of Venice the true more of Venice this central turbaned Muslim looking character in the middle of a painting by Giorgione whom I believe we can now identify as the Spanish Muslim philosopher ebin nourished Averroes who died in 1198 and who was the single Muslim philosopher most read most pondered by Christian Europeans and most notably Venetians in even as late as the 16th century so here's our mysterious more of Venice he reappears in the painting this painting which has been called the three philosophers ever since it was seen by a Venetian chronicler in 1525 hanging in a palace of a Venetian nobleman Contarini then the painting traveled on and was sold in northern Europe and entered the collections of the Archduke of Austria you can actually see when he bought it in Brussels in 1649 of the painting is represented here and when it entered Austrian collections it was identified as the three wise men the Three Magi the Archduke himself thought he was buying a painting of three mathematicians three astrologists three astronomers so who are these three characters and the mystery has hung so thick upon this painting that in 1932 one of the Austrian curators veel de took an x-ray of the picture and revealed low and behold that the character on the right had rays coming up from the fold of his garment which seemed to suggest that these three figures had to include Moses because any Renaissance European looking at a bearded figure with raised looking like almost horns coming out from the top of his head must be Moses and if the figure on the right is Moses well then maybe these three philosophers or three Astana MERS astronomers represent the three religions and it's often has been suggested that what we have were Moses Mohammed and a young Christian only in 2004 however was the mystery of another Giorgione painting finally cracked by another Austrian specialist you're gonna hop and before we go into the mystery of the three philosophers I want to invite you to look at what you again hop figured out about this painting by George Olney which is in the Accademia in Venice called The Tempest painted in the very first years of the 16th century and very famous as one of the very first European depictions of a stormy sky and again all sorts of interpretations have been offered indeed ever since the middle of the 16th century the key to Giorgione's meaning was lost and Vasari the great Italian Renaissance chronicler of the artists even says that the trouble with Giorgione we greatly admired for his craftsmanship is his stories have no order we simply cannot figure out what he's trying to say story a cone on a piano or DNA they do not have order well you've given up looking at the 1525 chronicle of the paintings that hung in the contour any palace in Venice was able to say it was pointed out that aside from the three philosophers the other paintings in the cycle of Giorgione works represent the legend of Troy therefore this painting must have something to do with Troy why well for one thing Venetians were very proud of the idea that their ancestors were the mythical vanity were supposed to have been a people led by a Trojan Prince a refugee from burning Troy Prince Antenor and if the Venetian people therefore have Trojan ancestors than they are equal to the Romans whose ancestors are also Trojans led by Aeneas and Venetian Renaissance statesmen were proud to claim this Trojan ancestry and were extremely interested in everything that could depict the trojan cycle so what European hop was able so brilliantly to show is that the character on the left is Prince Paris shown in princely dress but with the staff of a shepherd Prince Paris has just seen the three goddesses who have offered him the choice of who is the most beautiful with the gift of the Golden Apple and we know that Paris chose Aphrodite and Aphrodite promised Paris that she would give him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world and here is Prince Paris setting off to find her unfortunately Prince Paris up on Mount Ida left behind his former lover the nymph a known a whom he had got with child and because he is abandoning her and he's going back to Troy and then off to seek his destiny and find Helen of Troy Helen of Sparta the wrath of the Gods falls on the walls of Troy a prefiguration of its destruction out of which will rise a new race of Trojans who will found the great empires of Italy this was extremely ingenious and let's see if this holds this approach can help us decipher what Giorgione was trying to say in his painting of the three philosophers now Vasari the chronicler already by the 1530s 1540s had trouble figuring out what George Oni was trying to say but he Vasari did admire George Oni as the artist who introduced into Venice the style of sfumato or smoky foggy misty effects invented or in any case associated with Leonardo da Vinci Giorgione is very much a Mozart type young figure who dies in his early thirties of the plague in 1510 leaves behind only a handful of masterpieces but they are the masterpieces which introduced a new Venetian style in contrast with the previous style we saw with carpaccio which is bright sunlit harsh no atmospheric effects everything is crystalline instead Giorgione brings into Venetian painting fog mist shadow and darkness so here the three philosophers let's try to take one interpretation which has been current since the 18th century and which is still found very often repeated that these are the three wise men the Three Magi after all weren't the Three Magi astronomers too didn't they look for a star in the sky to guide them to the Christ child we have as recently as the 1980s ants go Murray the well-known Austrian philosopher and historian of art has suggested that two of the wise men here on the right are waiting for the results of the astronomical calculations of the younger man now let's just see if that works out certainly we have three characters here and these three characters are an aged man a middle-aged man and a young man something we do very much associate with the convention of the three wise men however another theory advanced is that in the 16th and 17th century Italian books often printed these triads which suggest the three ages of man resemble the three wise men but are not the three wise men in this case in essence these three men are actually three famous astronomers who adorn the title page two Galileo's treatise printed in the early 17th century geologists a system de Mundi the dialogue of the system of the world and the three men here are on the right Copernicus looking young and beardless on the far left a very aged looking Aristotle and in the middle the Greek Oh Egyptian astronomer of the second century AD Ptolemy associated with the Ptolemaic system so it's been suggested maybe the young man in the painting of Giorgione is Copernicus who was actually studying in nearby Padova the University of Venice just when Giorgione was painting and certainly at the close of the 15th century the Venetian printing presses were showing these dialogues of great astronomers with again ptolemy here on the left and a recent German astronomer regiomontanus discussing and pondering as if an eternal dialogue with Ptolemy regarding the system of the world so Bruno Nardi and modern Italian scholar has suggested maybe the young man in the painting is the young Copernicus and maybe the old man the one in the in the painting is Aristotle and the turbaned man in the middle is this Egyptian Greek Oh Egyptian cosmologists Ptolemy well perhaps but when Ptolemy was actually represented in the in the Renaissance by the Venetians he was always shown as a king as here Ptolemy the astronomer is deliberately confused by the 15th century artists with Ptolemy king of Egypt as if the great astronomer and cosmography had been the king as well so that even though he's an ancient Egyptian 15th century Europeans tend to show Ptolemy dressed guard and crown as a contemporary European king and that doesn't look like one of either any one of the three characters of the Giorgione painting now let's take the theory of the three wise men and we have here one of the very oldest depictions of the Magi it's from Ravenna Byzantine style early 6th century AD and we already see at the beginning of the Middle Ages this stylization of those who had been Zoroastrian priests coming to worship the Christ child according to st. Matthew stylised then as three wise men not that the Bible says that there were three of them but because Matthew said that they brought gifts of gold frankincense and myrrh tradition stylized them into representatives of pagan humanity coming to worship Christ and necessarily three so that the wise man bearing gold offers tribute to Jesus as king of kings frankincense is offered by a second wise man in homage in tribute to the God incarnate in man and finally the third wise man offers myrrh in recognition of the bitterness that will be undergone in suffering by Jesus Christ the man so since they're already stylized into three wise men still in the sixth century AD mosaic from Ravenna identified with contemporary Persians they are dressed as what maji maji I really were supposed to be Zoroastrian Persian priests but they're also stylized to represent the three ages of man and this becomes the norm in all these representations you definitely see the elder whose name was traditionally rendered as Melchior the youngest Kaspar and the middle-aged with a brown beard or dark beard Balthasar and if we leap forward to a thousand years later another depiction of the three wise men this time by Gentilly da Fabriano in early 15th century italy we get this multiple effect whereby i first invite you to see that again the three wise men always look at the Christ child and none ever turns his edy away from the Christ child indeed that's another problem with the Giorgione painting where we see that two gentlemen look in the same direction but one turns away his head whereas in depictions of the Maji mage I what is important is that all three here completely identified by Catholic Europeans of the 15th century as Kings look towards the Christ child and the story of the Maji the Magi could even be made to carry political associations and our esteemed Iranian scholar colleague mr. su devar has actually identified these three characters as idealized portraits of the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund of Austria and Hungary the Byzantine Emperor Manuel ii and the young Duke of Burgundy heir to the Duchy of Burgundy John Duke of Nevaeh all John the fearless all three of whom were involved in a crusade against the Turks ultimately to free Constantinople from their siege and finally liberate Jerusalem so these stories show that contemporary history is seen as sake and 15th century Europeans are pulling sacred stories into significance for modern politics as well as if these three contemporary European rulers were also going to be the three wise men who would save Europe from the Turks as we come towards the end of the 15th century now we have Andrea Mantegna's depiction of the three wise men were the three kings most interesting to us because Andrea Mantegna was a brother-in-law to the Gentile a and giovanni bellini brothers in venice who were themselves the Masters of Giorgione so we're coming into the Nexus of painters closely associated and what we see here is that Montaigne depicts the Incarnation as a mystical event taking place not in a manger but in a cave by now Italian Renaissance artists and theologians are identifying the place where Christ is born with Plato's cave that is this dark lower world of matter into which the divine symbolized by the star becomes incarnate for our salvation and just as in the carpaccio painting Christ emerges from the dark cave that is this lower world to ascend in the resurrection so in the mystery of the Incarnation he descends into the cave the three wise men again all look very carefully at the Christ child but we see that a further story is told the oldest Melchior is an old European King but the second one Balthazar is clearly shaved head dark beard and turban doffed with respect in and is a Muslim and behind is the youngest Vegas Kaspar who from the 1480s on in European art begins to be depicted as an African this is a moment which corresponds very closely with the conversion to Catholicism of the Kingdom of the Congo by Portuguese missionaries the congo kingdom became the first great african ally of the catholic portuguese and from the 1480s on depictions of the three major i multiply to signify not only the three ages of man bearing three gifts that signify three natures in Christ but also the three continents of humanity Europe Asia ie Islam and Africa the new hope of Christianity this Montaigne painting in the Getty collection in California emphasizes again what we've just said the Magi by the end of the 15th century appear one as an old European King the second the middle-aged man as a Muslim rendering tribute to the Christ child while the third is the young African convert and all three gaze intently at the Christ child none must avert his gaze here we get a further variation on the Three Magi of great interest by a contemporary of carpaccio and George Oni in early 16th century Venice Giovanni man swathi and in this case what you will see is that the Three Magi certainly depict the three races of man as conceived at the time but all three now are shown as Muslims and indeed they are wearing the very specific turbans of the Egyptian Sultanate the Mamluk Sultanate with which Venice had such close trading connections the eldest Magus wears this complicated turban of a sultan with what an ambassador a European ambassador of the early 16th century said looked like snails horns as you can see here then you have the 2nd and the 3rd who is shown as an African and yet they are shown also as the sultan a provincial governor and a high officer of the egyptian sultanate and what this means is a reflection in paint of a prediction a prophecy that was circulating in the venetian lagoon in the beginning of the 16th century at a time when as the paintings don't really make us feel things were going very badly for Venice the Portuguese had gone around the Cape of Good Hope and seemed to be able to crack the Venetian trade monopoly with Egypt by tapping Indian spices at their source many European powers were leading against Venice to destroy her the League of Cambre and 1509 bringing together the Pope who excu decayed adventists the King of France the Habsburg Emperor in Austria all lead again van against Venice and as the French were saying at the time table table bushwa Venetian tremble tremble Venetian bourgeois with the idea that the Venetians were corrupt subtle traitors traitors to Christendom always willing to sell out fellow Christians in order to trade with Muslims and the Venetians were feeling particularly bad about this because the Turkish Muslims at the time were nibbling away Venetian territories in the eastern Mediterranean and it actually looked as other Turks we're going to win throughout the Mediterranean and then Pietro nany an agent monk rose in one of the pulpits event and preach to the people saying I have heard I have a prophecy yes the Sultan of Islam will be triumphant he will actually enter on horseback into the Vatican into st. Peter's Church and he will make his horse drink from the baptismal font in st. Peter's as from a watering trough yet at the very instant of his triumph he will be struck by grace the Sultan of Islam will become a Christian and as ruler of the world he will restore unto Venice all her possessions all her influence in the east he will even make a Venice responsible in perpetuity for the administration of Jerusalem and Palestine the conversion of the Sultan the recognition by the Lord of Islam of the divinity of Christ will bring about the glorious end of time and the eternal triumph of Venice a message that was very consoling for the Venetians of course in their troubled early years of the sixteenth century and that is what so many of these early 16th century Venetian paintings show with the idea that the three wise men who come to worship Christ in effect represent the hoped-for conversion of the great Sultan of Islam sometimes identified with the Sultan of Egypt sometimes with the Sultan of Turkey the two great powers of Islam that Venetians normally dealt with now when we come to Giorgione himself we actually do have a painting which represents the three wise men explicitly and what do we see well we have actually two trilogies and we can see that the two trilogies don't again necessarily correspond to the three wise men I'll take the detail to show it more clearly in the front you have the three wise men all again looking in the same direction at the Christ child the elder the middle-aged the youth all European in this case but behind them you have a shadow trilogy a second trilogy as it were a commentary upon the first and the three sort of sub wise men in the background represent to Muslims a Turkish Muslim and a Tartar Muslim from the Black Sea area who turn their head away from the Christ child unlike the three holy Magi here but the third and the youngest the African like a Congolese of the 1480s 1490s or first years of the sixteenth century following the finger-pointing of the Portuguese Christian Knight looks faithfully upon the Christ child so Giorgione suggests that there are many meanings that we can read into these triads Giorgione again explores the motif of the trilogy of worship with the adoration of the shepherds and here now you do fully recognize the idea that Christ seen here as the child in the star the star looks like a child is incarnate in the cave which is this lower world identified with Plato's cave and here Giorgione plays with the idea of the three ages of man in which you have the elder as Joseph the middle-aged man a shepherd and a younger Shepherd here again the three ages of man and all looking very intently upon the child they are not the three wise men but they remind us of them there are variation on the theme yet in still another exploration of the triad of the three ages of man we know that Giorgione painted this mysterious picture of three musicians or the music lesson which has absolutely never in Italian tradition of the 16th 17th 18th centuries ever been identified with the three wise men certainly you have the elder the middle-aged and the youth the only traditional identification we've ever had was a an attribution of the 17th century to another painter and it was called the young Marcus Aurelius with his teachers so the idea is you have the three ages of man you have an e vocation of the three wise men but they are not necessarily the three wise men at all so let's try to identify at least the two characters on the right the very the elderly man and the man in the middle and I think we can do it this way the Muslim now certainly in Venetian painting of the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries you see Muslims pretty much everywhere here on the K side in this painting and this detail of a painting by carpaccio called witnessing a miracle of a relic of the true cross and up here you have the two Muslim characters mingling in the crowd now certainly we think of 15th and 16th century descriptions of Venice by writers of the time who remarked about how many foreigners could be seen in Venice it's Shakespeare's famous remark they the trade and profit of the city consisteth of all nations but the fact of the matter is the Venetians had practically a monopoly of European trade with Egyptian Sultanate but they didn't allow many Muslims to come to Venice itself they were indeed very few ambassadors allowed to set foot on Venetian land which remained very strict about excluding most Muslims from the city so what these Muslims are actually doing in these Venetian scenes is precisely what carpaccio says they're doing they are there as the symbols of non-christian humanity to witness the miracle of the true cross to witness the triumph of Christianity the fact however that these are Venetian paintings means that for a Venetian audience which included many merchants who went sometimes every year to Alexandria or Beirut a Venetian audience demanded that Muslims look like Muslims so that as a result the Muslims in Venetian paintings of the Renaissance look more like Muslims than any other Muslims to be seen in European art before the 19th century and this is very clear in carpaccio's painting for the cycle of saint stephen representing young st. stephen in what looks like a stylized Jerusalem preaching unto the non-christians and carpaccio who's used many sketchbooks from pilgrims or merchants to the Holy Land or to Egypt has provided us with extremely faithful renditions of Ottoman Turks Egyptian Muslims like this one here this kind of orange turban a North African Muslim with a fold of turban under the chin we know that there was a great Venetian trade mission in Clemson and what is now Algeria you have the Albanian Muslim here and then here you have the Jew and the Orthodox Greek Christians they are on the far left all these represent non-catholic humanity living in their infidelity but about to hear the message of Christ but they can also persecute it as in this other painting by carpaccio which shows those Jews who chose to stone Stephen to death depicted as pretty much contemporary Muslims recognizable as Muslims with the turbans this other great cycle by carpaccio makes it even clearer that we're talking about the fulfillment of the prophecy the triumph of saint george who has saved the maiden who was offered in sacrifice by a pagan king and queen on the seashore of Asia Minor now Saint George is a Venetian Knight and the king and queen of Trebizond are shown as a Muslim Sultan and his queen and it's made very clear that as a result st. George baptizes them the Sultan has even laid down his turban which is held by his Paige here in a sign along with his ministers that Islam the Lord of Islam has recognized the triumph of Christ that is the triumph of Venice the detail here makes that about as explicit as you could possibly wish and that is why these Muslims have to look so real now the triumph of Venice over Islam is an ambiguous theme because everybody in Christian Europe knows that if there is one group of Christians who are narrowly dependent upon Muslim goodwill and enjoying excellent commercial relations with the Muslim powers it is the Venetians Venice would go bankrupt if it did not enjoy its monopoly of trade with Egypt and Egypt would go bankrupt if it were not able to sell the goods from India coming up the Red Sea to the Venetian merchants actually the trade ties between the Sultan of Egypt proclaiming himself the protector of Islam and the Doge of Venice who proclaims himself a champion of Christendom were so close that when the Portuguese entering the Indian Ocean in the early 16th century actually threatened both the Egyptians and the Venetians by taking away Indian trade from the Red Sea and Mediterranean route the Venetians secretly elide themselves with the Egyptians to try to launch a fleet into the Indian Ocean to chase out the Christian Portuguese and everybody in Europe knows this and because Venice lies under such a cloud the Venetians are going to proclaim their triumph through the symbolic story of st. mark st. mark is the way Venice triumphs over Islam not by fighting it directly but by as it were tricking it like good merchants the merchants of Venice tell us that Saint Mark the Apostle whose symbol is the lion the winged lion as depicted here by carpaccio that the Apostle st. mark after Christ's death came to preach and Italy and while he was at Aquileia on the shore of what would become the Venetian Lagoon Christ appeared before him and said these mystical words pax tibi ma che Evangelista males peace upon the mark oh my evangelist here in this Lagoon will you find your final resting place then st. mark after the vision went on traveled to Egypt preached in Alexandria and suffered martyrdom in Alexandria where he was buried so how do in Venice even though here carpaccio affirms that the Lion of st. mark as the protector of Venice emphasizes that the Venetians with their patron lion dominate both on sea and on land well according to Venetian legend as here shown in a mosaic of the early 12th century from st. Mark's Basilica in Venice and purporting to depict a miracle that occurred in the year AD 828 indeed st. mark was buried in Alexandria and Alexandrian Christians recognized mark as their patriarch and patron saint so here is the city of Alexandria but the Greek Christian monks and Coptic monks in Alexandria now under Muslim rule felt that the time had come to allow two Venetian merchants three boons and the rusty cous to carry away the body of Saint Mark so miraculously preserved for nearly eight hundred years to Venice where it would be safe from the Muslims even though the Muslim rulers of Egypt were perfectly happy to have pilgrims from the Christian world come to Alexandria and pay taxes and dues in order to worship in the shrine of Mark in Alexandria so the Muslim authorities were certainly reluctant to allow the Venetian merchants to take the body of Saint Mark away so what the Venetian merchants did three boons and rusty cous was carrying away the body of Saint Mark in a basket covered with pork chops that way the Egyptian customs inspectors at shipment when they were about to board their ship wanted to look in the basket saw the pork chops uh-oh take it away and this is actually what it says in one of the world's earliest comic strips here in the Latin American foreign tour hands ear he voci fare on tour all that is Latin except for the Arabic Khan's ear which means pork mark they carry off big conceal these cry out and below it says Carla boosts absconds involve around Fujin quarrelsome hidden under meats they go back and flee back ie to Venice so when Gentilly Bellini with his brother giovanni bellini finishing the painting in 1506 1507 depicted st. mark preaching in Alexandria they multiplied the symbols st. mark is shown in classical garb but the Egyptians to whom he preaches are shown as contemporary Muslims made as recognizably Muslim as possible for an early 16th century Venetian audience of course it's the Venetians who believed in st. mark and so you can see them all arranged in their senatorial garb behind st. mark now in the background is a very strange-looking building which actually suggests st. Mark's Basilica and Venice of course it does it's supposed to we're supposed to be in Africa at the same time you can see palm trees you can actually see a giraffe so you're in Africa the temple that would have been here in Alexandria when Saint Mark preached would have been the temple of the Egyptian deity Serapis that Renaissance Italians were very interested in Pico della Mirandola mercy Leo fechino all go into sort of deliriums of theological and philosophical exegesis in remarking how the ancient Egyptian cross of life looks like a prefiguration of Christian cross and the god Serapis actually held such a cross of life against his heart as a prefiguration of the apostolic message and the Venetians make it the idea of the transfer crystal clear when Gentilly Bellini shows the procession of the relic of the true cross in st. Mark's Square the same painter has made it absolutely clear that Venice with the Basilica it built to receive the body of mark is actually the New Apostolic See of mark Venice is the new Alexandria when the Pope dares excommunicate Venice as he did in 1509 the Venetians reply you have been founded by Peter we have been founded by just as good an apostle even a better he wrote a gospel by mark Venice is the new Alexandria because Venice has never come under Muslim domination we trade with the Muslims but we trick them that is the Venetian triumph so when Giovanni man sweetie paints the story of st. mark in the fifteen tens 1520's he multiplies depictions of the Basilica of Alexandria as a prefiguration of st. Mark's Basilica with various emblems showing that we are somehow in Muslim Egypt and the Roman governor of pal of Alexandria in the 1st century AD is shown as an Egyptian sultan and you have Venetian merchants wandering through the Egyptian crowd and those who put mark to death the pagans are shown again as contemporary Muslim Egyptians in this painting by Giovanni Mons weighty even as late as 1547 when Tintoretto paints another aspect of the story of st. mark we can see this transfer of symbolism here Tintoretto paints the moment when the pagans having killed mark intended to burn his body on a funeral pyre there at the end of the square but a storm broke out and the rain drenched the funeral pyre the pagans fled in terror and the good Christians of Alexandria were able to save st. mark and it's a prefiguration of the future transfer of the body of mark to Venice itself the two stories are sort of telescoped the elderly gentleman holding the Rope of the camel near the Rope of the camel is tomorrow Rangoon a the patron of Tintoretto Tintoretto actually painted himself right there in a self-portrait under the camels neck and if you go to Venice you will actually see that if you stand right in front of Saint Mark's Basilica and look at the little square in front of you in 1547 this is what you would have seen this is the san Sorvino church that stood there these are the procuracy a nuova and the idea is you yourselves are receiving mark into you you are here in Venice and mark comes to us mark comes into us and we become the new and worthier Alexandria the New Apostolic See we are the true city of the Apostle so now it doesn't become difficult at all to recognize what all these Muslims are doing in 16th century Venetian paintings as the 16th century wears on painters like Titian and as here in 1519 show the style becoming ever fleshy er and heavier and more realistic but you still get the same idea when the van noblemen of the Pizarro family and his brother in the church kneel and beg Peter for his intercession with the virgin almost represented like a dog adesso front of her wonderful palace with fleshy cherubim up in the clouds you will have a Muslim here on the far left he is the Sultan of Islam who vows his head beneath the papal banner upheld by a Christian Knight again a symbol of the hoped for conversion of the Sultan now these representations of Muslims in Venetian art Oh a great deal to Giorgione's own master Gentile a Bellini who in 1479 1480 was appointed by the venetian state to a company of aneasha embassy to the Sultan of Turkey to Istanbul this was to negotiate a peace treaty and the Venetians thought it would be a good idea to impress the Turks with a great artist who could show the Sultan just what a Venetian artist was capable of doing and genteel a Bellini obliged and while in Istanbul made many many sketches he painted the portrait of the sultan mohammed ii the conqueror who according to Vasari was so impressed by a genteel a villainous portrait of him that he said chicken kiss speedy talk we da throw there must be some spirit behind it which actually knowing Islamic philosophy he could actually have said because such things were said for Muslim artists genteel a Bellini left behind in Istanbul this wonderful sketch of a Turkish artist on the Left which didn't come back to the west until the 20th century and which spawned very interesting imitations in the Islamic world that we'll see in our conclusion but let's come back to Venice with Gentile a Bellini who thanks to his Turkish sketchbook is going to put little Turkish characters all over his Venetian scenes this is a detail of the procession of 1496 in st. Mark's Square and I invite you to look even closer you see these three little Turkish witnesses to the procession of the true cross and Alba HD Rafa German Renaissance artist visiting Venice and Gentile a Bellini studio in 1495 actually copied them and dear love and other Germans are going to introduce these Venetian sketches of Muslims into German art where they will serve to show that nasty pagans as contemporary Muslims persecuting the Christians as here the martyrdom of st. Sebastian so on the left you see another one of these Turkish sketches by Gentile a Bellini a kneeling Janissary or officer of the Imperial Guard in Turkey and reappearing here in dear hos martyrdom of Saint Sebastian even clearer is but unfortunately I couldn't get a color reproduction sorry I couldn't get a colored reproduction of this fresco by Pinter akio done in 1492 in the Vatican but where the Roman officer ordering the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian is actually an adaptation of Gentile a Bellinis Turkish officer so genteel a Bellinis sketchbook is used but I have to bring in another current to crack the mystery of what will be Giorgione's three philosophers this is the reception in Italy of Islamic philosophy by the accidents of history we know that one of the greatest heart's creative centers of Islamic philosophy then all the world was Spanish Cordova and one of the greatest Islamic philosophers ever lived didin 1198 was the cordovan philosopher even ruched translated into Hebrew by Spanish Jews and into Latin where he was given the name ever roie's European Christians were so impressed with avaroa zis philosophy that king frederick ii of sicily in the early 13th century invited a Briton Michael Scott who'd spent 20 years in Toledo in Spain learning Arabic and translating a ver o is to come to Palermo very Muslim looking town as you can see from the Church of San Giovanni Dalia America Thani on the right frederick ii invited Michael Scott come to Palermo to finish his translations of the philosophy of Averroes and ever OE these precious commentaries upon Aristotle to finish them in Latin form and then frederick ii as of 1220 sent these translations by michael scott to the great universities in italy and also in northern europe so after 12 2000 ways in latin form is taught in bologna is taught in paris is taught in Oxford and for most of Christian Europe the thought of Averroes in its Latin guys becomes the main idea of Islamic philosophy that is available to medieval Christian Europeans now the very earliest depiction we have of averroes even rushed you can actually see the latin on the upper left there other Royce is in this drawing by a scholar of the university of padova in the early 14th century and this already becomes a type whereby the Muslim philosopher on the left Averroes has to be made as recognizably Muslim as possible so in early 14th century Italian gives him a long beard long hair coming from under a turban but he's the Muslim but he is the commentator as Dante calls Averroes he gronckle mental fail he who wrote the great commentary and he will be shown almost systematically in conversation with an ancient Greek here the Neoplatonic philosopher pour furious dressed as a contemporary early 14th century Western Christian scholar and the idea is that these two men are engaged in a constant dialogue and Western Christendom accepts the idea that no commentator better understood the meaning of Aristotle than Averroes this does not mean that you adhere to avaricious philosophy what it does mean is that you sharpen your wits through the study of Averroes in order finally to affirm the triumph of the Christian spirit and if I had to compare the impact of avarice on Western European thought from the 13th century on I would then compare it to that of say Trotsky on 20th century political thought that is Trotsky in places like Western Europe North America or even in the Soviet Union dangerous subversive very intelligent and to prove the superiority of your brand of Marxism if you happen to be a spell honest or your capitalism if you happen to be a capitalist you have to be able to overcome Trotsky an argument because Trotsky is recognized as the most brilliant or one of the most brilliant of these Minds that you fear as carrying an ideological system that if you cannot refute it point by point intellectually you may be defeated by it brute force fine war fine but you also have to be able to retort with the mind and this is very much what the philosopher Alvaro EES systematically taught in European universities from the 13th to the 16th century becomes the symbol of the Islamic mind of the Islamic intelligence seductive and it makes you afraid and you turn to the church to provide counter arguments to show that you have absorbed the system of Averroes but you have overcome it in the light of higher Christian knowledge and avaroa stands as the central champion of everything you want to overcome this is why ever OS becomes so central in these representations admired and feared at the same time feared precisely because he is admired and admired because he is feared so when st. Thomas Aquinas in this painting that we now know is by Lee poem M me from the early 14th century when st. Thomas Aquinas is shown in triumph in a church in Pisa Saint Thomas Aquinas who in the later 13th century as a member of the Dominican Order wrote so many treatises against Averroes contra aveiro EES thus against the believers in averroes nevertheless st. Thomas cannot do without Averroes he argues with a ver always so that he is represented with Plato on the right and Aristotle on the left and the fathers and the Apostles above him sending rays of wisdom unto the book that he holds upon his lap below the secular and the priesthood look up at st. Thomas Aquinas doctor of the church with veneration except for one person and that is the Muslim philosopher Alvaro ease himself shown turning his head away from Thomas Aquinas and the truth he preaches turning his head away and ever oh he says great book of commentary is shown flat down upside down Alvaro ease is eternally vanquished by Thomas just as in medieval Christian churches you will often see the picked the the depiction a sculpture of the church triumphant as a young woman with a spear and a crown looking at a figure of Christ then on the other side of the doorway you will see another young woman with her eyes bandaged turning away from the Christ a crown slips from her head and she leans on a broken Reed she represents the synagogue as opposed to the church triumphant with the idea that every time a medieval Christian entered a church he watched the eternally repeated triumphs of the church over the synagogue when a Christian priest and from the late 13th early 14th century on every ambitious priest wanted to be anything more than a parish priest he wanted to accede to the higher orders of the church had to read Averroes he had to read ever always because st. Thomas Aquinas argued with Averroes and in order to understand st. Thomas Aquinas you had to absorb what st. Thomas Aquinas knew about Averroes so every Christian priest was therefore invited by st. Thomas Aquinas to participate in this intellectual debate where again the truth of the church would be established by overcoming ever ohi's in eternal argument and again I think we can draw a twentieth-century parallel where Orwell George Orwell was obviously thinking about Trotsky in 1984 when the mythical character of Emmanuel Goldstein the subversive intellectual is projected onto the screens of Big Brother's propaganda so that big brother can eternally vanquish Emmanuel Goldstein with the superior argument of Big Brother's ruling party and the idea is this is a combat which lasts as long as the world will last so Averroes like the devil will always be with us or like the very harsh medieval Christian view of Judaism it will last until Judgment Day and the millennium then it will be allowed to disappear but until then the church reaffirms its triumph it affirms its triumph over the synagogue depicted as an as a woman with bandaged eyes and it firms the triumph over Islam depicted as the great and terrible philosopher ever ohi's as thomas quotes from the psalms or proverbs rather very taut and midi tobot or goo torneo melodia maiya desta boom tour in p um my my throat shall meditate the truth and my lips shall detest the impious one that is ever always at a very center of the book that st. Thomas Aquinas holds against his chest in this painting in 14th century Florence by Andrea Bona Yuto in the Spanish Chapel of Santa Maria Novella again you see the triumph of st. Thomas Aquinas surrounded by the luminaries of the church and the Old Testament you can even recognize Moses here with his ray like horns and Saint Thomas now triumphs like the devil in Dante cell over a counter Trinity the Trinity of the evil the Trinity of the dand sibelius the heretic arias the heretic and the worst heretic of all the one in the center Judas in Dante system Alvaro E's in Thomas Aquinas system you can see ever oh he's here up close made very recognizable as the great Muslim philosopher and definitely here at the feet of st. Thomas Aquinas we're not talking about the three wise men it's a counter triad now in the 15th century we know that with the invention of printing Venice from 1469 on established itself as one of the greatest printing centers in the world one of the miracles of scholarship is that most of the Muslim philosophers known to medieval Europeans who had been translated into Latin between the late 12th and the early 14th centuries were first printed in Venice centuries before they were even printed in the Muslim world itself and the Venetians among the very first books which they printed for the curriculum of the Venetian University at Padova Padua printed of course the works of Aristotle regarded as the foundation of scientific learning but the text of Aristotle here would always be accompanied in smaller print by the commentaries of Alvaro ease as you can see written there aris thought that he studied a and then below Combe avaroa scored Avensis commentary with commentaries with the commentaries of arab Averroes of Cordova and while we know that the Jews in Spain suffered tremendous persecution in the 15th century Venice gave them a relative welcome Venice became a center of Jewish scholarship by the end of the 15th century and we know that eminent rabbis in Venice with their knowledge of the Hebrew Spanish Ebru versions of averroes actually served as editorial advisors for the venetian printing press for up to date proper editions of the works of Aristotle with the comments of Alvaro EES much of our oasis work in the original Arabic has actually been lost and we know a lot of it as preserved by Venice in Latin or even in Hebrew versions here again is one of the very first printed editions of Aristotle with the ever own commentary this was printed in for the University of Padua by the Venetians in 1483 and the owner of the this early printed edition wanted to make it look like a manuscript personalize it so he had the artist Gerardo of cremona sari Girolamo of cremona paint what looks like miniatures in a manuscript they are hand painted and what's interesting about this page of a ver of Aristotelian text and Avro and commentator is that jido nama that Cremona actually shows us in 1483 the intellectual curriculum that was required reading in a great european university what you have there at the top on this sort of balcony is what 15 century Italians called the two roba philosopher alma the crowd of philosophers the column in the middle stands for the separation of time on the right the ancients on the left those that 15th century Europeans considered the moderns so on the right you have the Greeks dressed the way Venetians thought they should have dressed that is like contemporary Byzantine Greeks with a kind of bowler hat and beards here right next to the column raising a finger pointing to the heavens is Aristotle Aristotle looks back at his own master Plato behind Plato and Aristotle stand the two Greek commentators that were familiar not only to Renaissance Italians but also to the Muslims the misty as' and Alexander of Aphrodisias and to the far right you have the caricature of those human beings who do not read or understand philosophy they may look like human beings but they are actually a which are caricatures of human beings turning their backs on wisdom and wearing the hood of a buffoon so this is a very important look they're turning the back away and to the left of the column you have the moderns that is closest to Aristotle because we may hate him but we recognize that he understood him best is alvaro ease the all-purpose Muslim philosopher right behind Averroes is the other Muslim philosopher who is very much read in Latin by the European Middle Ages so much so that st. Thomas Aquinas actually quotes them sometimes in rebuttal of some arguments of Averroes this is the early 11th century metaphysician mystic philosopher and physician known in latin form as Avicenna or the way the Italians would have pronounced it IV chenna that is a latin transcription of the arabic eben c not son of cena even cena central asian persian was very much read in medieval islamic spain and was part of a group of philosophers translated from the Arabic into Latin at the orders of the church in Thule though in the 12th century but because of an error of translation one of the church translators gerard loose kramenin sees in the 12th century miss translated his title in Arabic which was a shake at release the Supreme Sheikh supreme Sheikh as the Latin sameness Rex that is the elder king encouraging Western Europeans to think that Avicenna like Ptolemy had not only been a philosopher and a doctor but also a king therefore he will be shown with a crown over is turbine or the turbine is wrapped around a crown and because he was also a physician whose book of medicine was studied as the standard textbook in medicine in European universities until the 17th century the Canon of Medicine he is therefore shown not in the kind of jalabiya type tunic of an ordinary Muslim he is shown wearing the gown of an Italian doctor of medicine so he can distinguish these two Muslims were the two Muslims that Dante recognizes along with Saladin as the three wise Muslims who are allowed a place not in hell proper but in limbo and behind the two Muslims benefiting from the two muslims in his own interpretations of the ancient greeks is the champion of the catholic church st. thomas aquinas in his dominican habit on the far left so that the artist Girolamo doc Ramona has depicted the entire adventure of philosophy and human thought as perceived by Renaissance Europeans before the close of the 15th century and you see how much in the very center the pair created by avarice and Aristotle stand out as protagonists even a Saint Thomas Aquinas cannot do without them and therefore the messages neither can we in we can leaf through this wonderful book which is preserved in the Pierpont Morgan Library in every case the artist depicts an Italian doctor like Pietro da bono here in eternal symbolic disputation with a ver o is below who as it were up holds the whole philosophical sense system and who was made to appear here as if he were the symbol of human reason going as far as it can without being illuminated by divine grace so that Ingenio tradition the Mossad asked us through our genius we can and to the Stars wonderful depiction of Alvaro is the upholder of the system even though we oppose him but no one in medieval late medieval Europe opposed Averroes more bitterly than the Italian humanists then we can call the inventor of modern Western civilization that's a tall order what do we mean Petrarch Francesco Petrarca poet humanist who in 13 767 residing in Venice bitterly attacked the teaching of the Arab philosophers and doctors in European universities it was Petrarch in a pamphlet issued as a blast against the avaroa scholars of Venice said I detest the entire Arab race we are Christians our foundations must be the Greeks and the Romans I do not accept arabic thought philosophy medicine they must be expelled he wrote a whole pamphlet in 1367 here's Petrarch represented by andrea del castillo in the 15th century Petrarch wrote a pamphlet called of my ignorant but also that of many others in which he demanded the expulsion of the latinized arabic authors from the european curriculum and what we're going to see in the 15th and 16th centuries is going to be the struggle between the university authorities who are trying to maintain the study of the arabic authors and the humanists so-called in the Petrarchan spirit who are going to demand the final expulsion of averroes and all other arabs from the curriculum so despite patriarchs blasts in the 15th century it's university pad you are still great centers of Averell and learning so that Averroes again is seen as upholding this whole philosophical system and here Girolamo doc Ramona shows a wonderful dialogue the pairing of Averroes and aristotle in front of the mountain linking earth and heaven as in Dante system and here you can actually see that Aristotle shown as a contemporary Byzantine Greek sits in front of Plato's cave this lower world but Aristotle's finger points to the heavens there is a world beyond the metaphysics beyond this lower world and ever always may not see all the way up to where Aristotle is pointing towards what will be the Christian truth but nevertheless a ver o ease is so close to Aristotle that we cannot expect to understand Aristotle if we do not read ever oh he's and they are shown as a pair now look at this I would argue and this is the theory that I defended in Venice that what George Oni depicts here in the three philosophers of 1504 is alvaro is with Aristotle the pair in dialogue with Aristotle as the old man ancient times holding a tablet of astrological signs in reference to Aristotle's own works on the heavens and on metaphysics alvaro ease the middle-aged man is closest to them now is this simply surmise analogy we actually have more and more hints beginning to close in on us one is this constant depiction of the Muslim philosopher paired with the Greek philosopher in Italian art from the 14th century on Averroes and porphyry on the left on the right in a late 15th century metal plaque Aristotle looking like a Byzantine Greek teaching sitting before him stands someone who looks like a Muslim commentator actually it's a Greek commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias facing Aristotle but by now the idea that the commentator of Aristotle is a Muslim that the artist has actually represented Alexander of Aphrodisias as a Muslim looking philosopher they form very much of a conventional pair now this character is very interesting he's a sketch of a rather arrogant looking young Turkish merchant by Gentili Bellini when Gentilly Bellini Giorgione's master was in Istanbul in 1479 1480 now watch this did Giorgione borrow the idea of his standing figure that looks so Muslim from this drawing of an actual living Muslim drawn by his own master genteel a Bellini all right even if he did borrow that figure does it prove that the standing figure in the turban is a philosopher indeed ever ohi's himself well we had get further clues in 1492 another Italian artist pink tricky Oh master of Raphael painted in the Vatican apartments in Rome the philosophical disputation of st. Catherine of Alexandria confusing the pagan philosophers of Egypt before the throne of the pagan Emperor and you can see that pink Tory Keo in 1492 has borrowed the genteel a Bellini sketch so that this character indeed becomes a Muslim looking philosopher and who is the Muslim looking philosopher in 15th and 16th century European art almost invariably ever ohi's comparison is very obvious even to the detail of the finger hooked rather arrogantly proudly in the sash we know that pintura kyo pillaged the notebooks of genteel a Bellini or copies thereof peopling his his fresco with characters lifted right from the sketchbook like this Turkish Janissaries on the Left reappears in the fresco in fact printer Akio so taken up with this genteel a Bellini standing Turk that he used him for a great fresco in Siena which he finished in 1507 very close in time to the 1504 Giorgione painting which certainly depicts symbolically the triumph of catholicism over islam because it shows the pope pius ii who asked the Doge of Venice to organize a crusade by sea in order to recover Constantinople from the Turks who had just captured it in 1453 and living in Rome at the time where it was a very strange Turkish character and Baez edom awesome on a Turkish Prince brother to salt on mehmed ii who lost his bid for the throne and fled for refuge to the papal court accepted baptism became known from the pope who baptized him as Callixtus oto manos and made a living for the next 30 years dressing in his gorgeous ottoman robes and proclaiming to every european prince who would listen to him if you can set me back up on the throne of constantinople which i will take back from my brother then i as a christian guarantee to you that the whole ottoman empire becomes christian so this character sort of paraded and made his living that way in these pageants organized in european courts traveled up to austria and burgundy as the living embodiment of the prediction of the prophecy conversion and submission of Islam's cosmic Rhetor and here he is kneeling at the feet of the Pope before this expedition which actually never sailed in Ancona in 1465 and behind him you can see that Pinter akio uses this character to symbolize Islam itself standing behind the putative Sultan Islam but Islam about to be vanquished about to submit at last to the authority of Christ so I think here the meaning of the painting is that the character in the middle represents Alvaro ease indeed he is the Muslim philosopher using a drawing which has come to symbolize Islam itself but about to be vanquished ever ohi's I'm sorry Averroes is closest to Aristotle he looks at Aristotle but Averroes does not look in the same direction as Aristotle Aristotle in this dark wood is looking towards the future when the light of Christianity will dawn at the opening of the dark wood of the soul and the young man here meditating before the cave is also calculating the moment when the Sun will rise the whole painting I believe is an illustration of patriarchs pamphlet of 1367 of my ignorance and that of many others which was first printed in Venice and made quite a splash in 1501 calling for the expulsion of averroes from university studies in Venice and one sentence in particular is of great interest here we know that the Contarini family who owned this painting was extremely interested in philosophy we know it so well that we actually have a record of complaints of Saint Mark Cathedral library complaining that the Contarini family were holding on to books and hadn't returned them yet we actually have the titles of those books so it happens in the early 16th century too so he actually know that these people were very brainy intellectual types and the sentence I think that Contarini asked Giorgione to depict unless Giorgione knew it himself to begin with was the avarice search for the light of the Sun the way they search for the truth in the works of Aristotle and yet they turn their backs upon the light of the Sun now let's I think confirm it by figuring out who the third character is now we have these depictions of the famous opening canto of the Divine Comedy of Dante where you see some of the same dramaturgy the idea that the soul emerges from the dark wood and is before the cave which is the cave to this lower world but the mountain above the cave rises to the heavens Dante here turns to look towards his own spiritual mentor Virgil it has been suggested by several scholars that the young man of these trilogy if not young Copernicus which i think is very very doubtful he didn't become famous until another 30 years and then back in Poland the idea has been suggested that the young man may represent the Venetian humanist and ferocious opponent of avaroa studies air mola barbero who in the 1480s first translated directly from the greek instead of using a latin version from the era they the Aristotelian commentator the misty that ever oh is it used with the argument why do we have to go to the Arabs now that we can rely directly on our knowledge of the Greek and ere Millau Barbaro was sent as an ambassador to the papal court by Venice then the Venetian Senate was angry with him because he accepted an appointment by the Pope he died in his fortieth year in 1493 and it seems that the Venetian Republic that made amends and asked carpaccio was represented here to include him in the cycle of Saint Ursula as sort of a papal secretary but dressed as a Venetian senator here so is this the third character the young man well perhaps I think we can better make a better case however for this this is an engraving by martin schongauer the german fifteen century ization whose drawings whose engravings we know we're very popular in 15th century italy in fact you can go upstairs and see what the young Michelangelo did with another Shinagawa engraving and I think this engraving is where Giorgione gets the idea for his young man this inspired young Christian looking up to the hills looking up to the heavens is inspired I think by martin schongauer x' st. John at Patmos and there is what you can see upstairs another great Italian Renaissance genius the young Michelangelo inspired by directly another engraving by martin schongauer in Bello martino martin the beautiful as the Italian Renaissance artists called him another theme is carpaccio's inspiration of st. Augustine looking up to the heavens to receive inspiration which i think is what the young Giorgione character is doing rargh certainly approved of Augustin rather than st. Thomas Aquinas because st. Thomas Aquinas used Arab philosophers and Augustine did not because he lived well before their time and this character too seems to be an interesting source this is the illustration to the personal manuscript copy of the poet Virgil that was actually owned by Petrarch Illustrated for him by the great painter Simone a martini in the 14th century and which shows Virgil as an inspired prophet who foresees the birth of the Christ child in the fourth eclogue and therefore is Christianized in Italian Renaissance perceptions as a prophet of the Holy Roman Empire designed by God to unite the world in justice under Emperor Augustus in order to receive the message of Christ so that Virgil is annexed to the Christian story along with the whole cycle of Troy in any case I think we do see a definite connection here of the inspired seer prophet of that Christian triumph here very much the same position with the outstretched leg and we see that Giorgione has been using these traditional figures for his own symbolic purposes and this is why I would suggest therefore that our interpretation of the painting is the three ages of man favio Biondi the italian unist of the fifteenth century actually invented the concept that there were as ancient times there are modern times and between the ancient times of the Greeks and Romans and our modern times stand the Middle Ages that is actually a concept which favio Biondi suggested as an analogy to the three ages of man and here Aristotle stands for ancient times the young man on the Left may be air Millau a bottle or whoever this young inspired Christian is stands for young modern times and in the middle the Middle Ages represented by the Muslim philosopher the Muslim philosopher who as Petrarch says may be great in his understanding of Aristotle certainly Giorgione still considers him central to our intellectual tradition but he turns his back upon the light of the Sun even though like Aristotle he will never emerge from the dark wood of the soul yet Aristotle looks in the correct direction like the young man of our Christian times beyond the dark night of the forest and beyond the darkness of the material world of the cave in which Christ chose to be incarnated the youngest age of man can look upon the triumph of Christ just three years three only after Giorgione finished his three philosophers Raphael in the Vatican in 1507 painted the famous School of Athens in which we can already see the triumph of Petrarch that is the modern definition of Western civilization in Giorgione in 1504 the Arab philosopher of Cordova was still central by 1507 the great philosophers are all Greeks and Latins in the middle you have Plato who seems to be a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci and Aristotle and where is the Muslim in all this because of actually am a pamphlet in the british museum series monographs on great paintings of the Western world and the question raised in this monograph written in 1997 is one wonders what the exotic foreigner is doing among all these noble Greeks and Romans and the exotic foreigner is alvaro ease now shifted to the side an eavesdropper over the shoulder of pythagoras a greek philosopher and this has become the perception of islamic culture in the west Averroes was a european ever ohi's was a Spaniard ever Oasis legacy lingered far more among Christian and Jewish Europeans than in the Islamic world itself he is a participant in the great intellectual debate of 300 to 400 years of European history and yet no one reads ever oh is today except specialists that is pretty much what has been the fate of Islamic culture in the redefinition of European culture that is it is exotic it's not central to the Canon if you study it you're a specialist you're interesting you're exotic you bring a breath of fresh air but you're not central a European scholar until the end of the 15th century to master the teachings of the church had to master Thomas Aquinas to master Thomas Aquinas he had to master ever ohi's therefore ever ohi's and the Arabic culture of Averroes is central to the European Canon itself with the triumph of patriarchs ideas we get the School of Athens of 1507 where Islamic culture becomes a sideline so I think on this note we can say farewell to the noble Moor of Venice thank you very much you

Channel: The Met

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Keywords: Metropolitan, Museum, of, Art, metmuseum, mma_education, mma_lectures, Islamic_art, renaissance, art, Venice, Giorgione

Id: geyoQMi6c1g

Length: 94min 54sec (5694 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 12 2009