From the Islamic world to Renaissance Italy.

As Catherine Hess so ably points out in the exhibition catalogue The Arts of Fire: Islamic Influences on Glass and Ceramics of the Italian Renaissance, globalization is not a twenty-first-century concept. Indeed, since the eighth century networks of trade, military conquest, and religious pilgrimages have contributed to international travel by land and sea that has never been limited to the select few. The Islamic world, which was geographically enormous, was known to western Europeans not only through firsthand visits, but also through the sophisticated luxury goods, such as textiles, carpets, metalwork, ivories, ceramics, and glass, that moved with regularity between present-day Kabul in Afghanistan and Spain.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles until September 5, Hess addresses the cross-fertilization of artistic styles and craft techniques between East and West since the eighth century. Enlightened leaders in Islamic lands furthered advances in technology, science, literature, medicine, and art. Because Italy was situated at a strategic point along maritime trade routes, by the time Islamic culture was on the wane in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the arts in Italy were flourishing. This is particularly true for the decorative arts--specifically ceramics and glass.

The techniques for making glass and ceramics, both based on fire, were developed by craftsmen in Asia Minor and the Middle East. In Egypt and Syria, glassblowers refined techniques for decorating glass, particularly enameling and gilding. By the thirteenth century, these techniques had reached Venice, where Byzantine enamelers were settling. This enabled the great maritime city to become the center for luxury glassmaking in Europe. A clear and colorless glass, called cristallo in Italian for its resemblance to rock crystal, was a widely sought Venetian product. While Venetian craftsmen adopted forms and decorative motifs indigenous to the Middle East, they were not slavish imitators. Glass decorated with narrative scenes and with devices appropriated from the classical past were some of the ...