Bellini, now farther east

Bellini and the East, last seen at the Gardner, opens in London in a few days, and running with the 'East meets West' theme, the Guardian has published a review by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk (link via ArtsJournal.)  It's a bit of a curious article, though it does provide some perspective otherwise lacking and smartly spends time on the question of portraiture, which I never adequately addressed when I posted about the exhibition.  I don't want to dwell on this too much, but it seems to me that the author overplays his hand in drawing distinctions between the art and culture of the Renaissance and the Islamic Ottoman Empire.  Not that they weren't quite different, but Pamuk's discomfort with their points of contact causes him to devalue the products of those encounters.  The sense of a shell game in process is only magnified when, to illustrate his comparison between the art and mentality of the two cultures, he relies on Velázquez, whose work and worldview were quite distant from the 15th century Venetian ostensibly at the heart of the exhibition, for his exemplar of the West.  No small thing when one considers that how artists relate to the surface they work on and their concepts of space figure prominently in his argument.  It will be interesting to see the rest of the coverage in the British press and how it compares to what attention the exhibition received here.