Looking Eastward, Italian Orientalist painters
Regional, Culture, 3/20/1998

Under the patronage of Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and Italian President Oscar Scalfaro, al-Assad Library in Damascus is hosting an art exhibition "Looking Eastward" organized by the Syrian minister of culture in collaboration with the Italian embassy in Damascus. The exhibition, which opened yesterday, includes rare collections of panels which portray the Arab and Islamic world during the 19th century.

The canvas' themes are derived from impressions of Italian artists who visited these Arab and Islamic states during that era. The idea of a survey of works by masters of Italian Orientalism was born in 1990 on the occasion of the exhibition of etchings by Giorgio Morandi at the Museum of Modern Art in Istanbul, sponsored by the then-director of the Instituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Michele Cordaro.

The exhibition, with a selection of slightly more than fifty works, was presented from December 18, 1996 - January 31, 1997, due to the efforts of the Instituto Italianodi Cultura in Istanbul at the Dolmabahce Palace, the official residence of the Ottoman government from 1909-1922, which boasts among its rich furnishings large paintings on Orientalist subjects by some of the Italian artists featured in the exhibition.

Throughout the centuries, Italian culture has always had periods marked by special interest in the world of the East, especially the Islamic Arab world (demonstrated once again in recent studies of medieval literature, not to mention those on early Renaissance thought), and Italy, surrounded by the sea, has continued to watch its navigators venture into exotic lands.

Beginning around the end of the 18th century, it was chiefly British and French travelers who set out explicitly and systematically to explore the East. The Middle East used to be considered the Orient, the name conventionally applied to the Islamic countries between Africa and Asia, and the term Orientalism in the field of art described a penchant for the iconography connected with those countries.

These iconographic repertoires were defined in large part by explorer -travelers who set their courses on the established pattern of the Grand Tour, proceeding from the north or the west towards the south and south-east. The Grand Tour was often conducted out of a passion for archaeology rather than out of curiosity about the customs of others.

Italian Orientalist artists, in the wake of that of other European countries, extended their area of exploration from Morocco to as far as Iran and made a name for themselves for particular achievements, specializing for example, in vast panoramic views, in the recording of characteristic sites, and capturing people engaged in their daily life. Special types of work also corresponded to the traditions of the schools that produced the individual artists.

One of the first and one of the very finest Italian Orientalists was Ippolito Caffi, a Venetian by birth, and there are traces of the great Venetian tradition in his interpretation of the Moslem and Arab world. There are others like Bossoli, with a background in stage design, who laid out his views in scenographic fashion. Italy is rich in different schools and traditions, and each made its own contribution, even within specific genres.

The question of the Orientalist painting, and orientalist description generally, in Istanbul deserves some attention on its own. Artists, explorers and wanderers in distant lands are one thing; another thing are artists who settle, some for long periods, in the Muslim capitals and become familiar with the environment and culture of the single locals.

In Istanbul and in Turkey generally, Italian artists -- and they were numerous -- crossed paths with masters from other cultural areas; and even with local painters, who were in many cases quite familiar with the environment of Paris and who ended up describing their own environment and customs in the spirit and style of someone who comes from Europe. In other words, Istanbul itself generated models symbolic of its own physiognomy: It offered itself as a fable and an enchantment.

Meanwhile, at the court of the Sultan, Italian artists were giving their best in creativity and inventiveness. It is significant that the sojourn of the Italian painter who stayed longest in Turkey, Fausto Zonaro, lasted for almost the same length of time as the stay of the great Italian architect Raimondo D'Aronco: about twenty years in the same time span.

In Istanbul, Zonaro was able to give full breadth and play to the mannered picturesque he started out from, and it was here in Istanbul that D'Aronco celebrated the ideal union of cultures in the name of the most elegant and spiritual form of modernism.

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