The overtures of a Muslim ally: diplomatic gifts from Persia to Italy (1453-1630)
Creators: name: Rokhgar, Negar Sarah
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2020

description: By the mid-fifteenth century, the extensive territorial spread of Ottomans brought the Islamic world in close contact with Christian Europe. The majority of cross-cultural studies have focused on the multilayered interactions between the Ottomans and Europeans. My dissertation shifts attention to an anti-Ottoman league, first proposed by Calixtus III in 1456, and joined by Persia as a Muslim ally of Europe against the common enemy, the Ottoman Turks. The plea for an anti-Ottoman union with European powers by the Persian king in the late fifteenth century set the stage for continued alliances pursued through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the Safavid Shahs of Persia. These enduring connections between European Christian and Persian Muslim rulers resulted in complex reciprocal diplomatic exchanges fostered through the establishment of diplomatic embassies and the exchange of gifts. This dissertation is the first art historical investigation of the visual culture that was produced through early modern Persian-Italian diplomatic relations.This study investigates the range of meanings of these diplomatic gifts by looking at them as agents in a broader politics of imperial self-fashioning. It distinguishes between two forms of visual and cultural exchange. The first encompasses a wide range of materials that functioned as the objects of diplomatic exchange. These included richly decorated luxury goods, such as inlaid bowls, carpets, silk brocades, and ornamental weaponry. The second includes painted representations, which were commissioned following important diplomatic missions and the formation of new alliances and treaties. Whereas gifts facilitated diplomatic negotiations, painted representations reveal much about the perception of cultural difference in early modern courts. By considering the gifts’ artistic style through comparisons with similar objects still extant or represented in Persian illuminated manuscripts, this study situates the objects in their Persian context and elucidate the inherent messages behind their selection. Conversely, by looking at the paintings by European artists commissioned to illustrate these Persian embassies in Italy or address Persian-Italian negotiations through visual references, it approaches the same diplomatic interactions through the lens of Italian authorities and assesses the message they received or intended to broadcast to their audience. In looking at painted representations, this dissertation evaluates an underlying politics of how visual images may have served various agendas. In addition to expressing deep forms of knowledge about territorial and religious histories, they visually established hierarchies of cultural and political status within the growing alliance. For example, Shah Abbas’s gift of a silk brocade with an embroidered image of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child can be seen both as an appropriate gift for his Christian allies and as a display of Persian artistic and cultural prowess.By turning attention specifically to the objects and representations associated with the Persian-Italian alliances, this dissertation adds new dimensions to the understanding of how objects functioned as modes of communication that were integral to solidifying new forms of international relationships. It concludes with the statement that the development of global commerce in the early modern world was an outgrowth of the earlier political alliances that were founded on previous forms of gift-exchange.