Gardens of Renaissance Europe and the Islamic Empires: Encounters and Confluences
Tom Verde
Mohammad Gharipour, ed.
2017, Penn State UP, 978-0-27107-779-6 $94.95 hb.
While establishing diplomatic relations and trading goods during the Renaissance, the Ottoman East and European West discovered they also shared a passion for gardens and garden design. European narratives of travel to the major Islamic empires of the day—Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Persia and Mughal India—include descriptions, drawings and sketches of cities and their gardens. These added “to the reciprocal flow of ideas and concepts in terms of architectural and garden design,” including the “exchanges of gardeners” and “horticultural or irrigation techniques.” Vivid descriptions of Ottoman gardens, for example, led to the French court’s replacement of Italian gardeners with Ottoman specialists after 1495. The “gardens of Mughal emperors served as models” for the Lisbon gardens of Portuguese envoys to Goa and became “symbols of wealth and status.” In the cultural rivalry between Rome and Istanbul, “villa gardens constituted a stage for outdoing each other.” This collection of scholarly, yet readable, well-illustrated essays closely examines how Islamic and European garden traditions interacted and influenced one another.
You may also be interested in...
The Alhambra at the Crossroads of History—Our Book Review
The Alhambra at the Crossroads of History shows how the 13th-century Andalusi palace complex in Granada, modern Spain, generates often conflicting meanings at the same time—meanings actively constructed and sometimes misread. Edhem Eldem, an Istanbul-based history professor, traces its role in shaping social and cultural identities across imperial Europe, Arab North Africa and Ottoman Türkiye from the 18th to the early 20th centuries.
The Vanishing Sea by Artist Dinara Mirtalipova—Our Book Review
How often do we take nature for granted, assuming it will never vanish? In US-based folk illustrator Dinara Mirtalipova’s new children’s book, a sea is the main character: the one that provides livelihood and prosperity, until humans’ poor choices cause its demise.