Frist Art Museum
May 31–September 1, 2025
The Frist Art Museum presents Venice and the Ottoman Empire, an exhibition that explores the artistic and cultural exchange between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire over four centuries. Organized by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and The Museum Box, the exhibition will be on view in the Frist’s Ingram Gallery from May 31 through September 1, 2025.
This ambitious cross-cultural exhibition examines the complex links between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire from 1400 to 1800 in artistic, culinary, diplomatic, economic, political, and technological spheres. “The relationship between Venice and the Ottomans represents a fascinating and multifaceted chapter in the history of Mediterranean geopolitics, one marked by a blend of cooperation and conflict, handshake- and arms-length approaches, diplomacy and back-stabbing, understanding and misunderstanding,” writes exhibition curator Stefano Carboni in the exhibition catalogue.
Featuring a richly diverse selection of more than 150 works of art in a broad range of media, including ceramics, glass, metalwork, paintings, prints, and textiles, the exhibition draws from the vast collections of seven of Venice’s renowned museums. The creative contributions of well-known Venetian artists such as Gentile Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, and Cesare Vecellio are showcased alongside works created by the best anonymous craftspeople both in Venice and the Ottoman Empire. The Venetian loans are joined by a trove of recently salvaged objects from a major 16th-century Adriatic shipwreck of a large Venetian merchant vessel that have never been exhibited outside Croatia. A gallery dedicated to Mariano Fortuny’s Venetian- and Ottoman-inspired fashions and decorative arts created in the early 20th century brings the exhibition to a spectacular conclusion.
“Venice stood at the crossroads of a vast trade network connecting Africa, Asia, and Europe,” writes Frist Art Museum Curator at Large Trinita Kennedy. “To maintain its status as an international emporium, with markets full of ceramics, metalwork, spices, textiles, and other goods, Venice acquired overseas territories to its east and cultivated close ties with the Ottomans, whose empire became the wealthiest and most powerful in the Eastern Mediterranean after their conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and widespread expansion in the 16th century.”
Organized thematically, the exhibition begins with an overview of diplomacy and trade during the period illustrated through portraits of powerful Venetian and Ottoman leaders including doges, sultans, and ambassadors. On display are nautical maps as well as a printed manual that illustrates how merchants who spoke different languages conducted business using hand gestures. Despite diplomatic efforts, relations were not always harmonious. Between 1400 and 1800, the two powers fought seven major wars, with the Venetians gradually losing almost all their overseas territories to the Ottomans.
The exhibition, however, emphasizes that during periods of peace, the two powers forged a close relationship and shared aesthetic tastes. “Venetians and Ottomans admired and sought one another’s luxury goods and gave them to each other as gifts,” writes Kennedy. “Ottoman sultans liked Murano glass and portraits of themselves by Venetian artists, while Venetian women wore Ottoman clogs and perfumed their homes with incense burners imported from Ottoman regions.”
The next two sections are dedicated to decorative arts and textiles, which figured prominently in commercial exchanges and the interior design of Venetian homes. Extravagant Ottoman velvets and brocaded silks were synonymous with status and survive in Venetian museums today. The Ottomans were just as enthusiastic about Venetian textiles. “Both cultures favored red and gold and bold designs with carnation, pomegranate, and tulip motifs,” writes Kennedy. “Their textiles are so similar that sometimes it can be difficult to discern whether a textile was made in Venice or Bursa, the Ottomans’ principal textile center.”
A section dedicated to the spice trade traces how Venetian merchants sailed to Ottoman-controlled ports in Africa and Asia to purchase goods and then sold them in markets back home to merchants from elsewhere in Western Europe. In addition to spices such as cardamom, nutmeg, pepper, and saffron, Venetians depended on trade with Ottomans for coffee, figs, pistachios, raisins, salted sturgeon, sugar, vinegar, and, most importantly, wheat. Through a video featuring two Nashville chefs, a take-home recipe card, a display of spices, and scent devices with fragrant aromas, guests will learn about Venetians’ and Ottomans’ shared culinary culture.
Ship building, sailing, and a storied shipwreck are the focus of the next two sections. One of the highlights of the exhibition is a large group of objects recovered from a shipwreck that illustrates the opportunities and perils of seafaring in this age. They come from the Gagliana Grossa, a fully loaded Venetian ship that sank in 1583 in the waters off the Dalmatian coast of modern-day Croatia while traveling to Constantinople. The ship’s diverse cargo offers evidence of the types of goods Venetians traded in the Eastern Mediterranean. “The Venetian Senate sent a Greek diver to salvage diamonds, emeralds, pearls, and some luxury textiles onboard, but the rest of the goods remained on the seabed until the site was rediscovered in the 1960s,” explains Kennedy. “Excavations are ongoing, and this exhibition presents some of the most recently found objects.”
Works in the penultimate section center the revered Venetian naval commander and doge Francesco Morosini (1619–1694), who played a major role in Venice’s interactions with the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century and amassed a large collection of art taken from his campaigns as well as acquired from the Venetian art market. The exhibition concludes with an enchanting gallery devoted to the exquisite creations of Mariano Fortuny (1871–1949)—the Spanish artist, designer, and inventor who lived and worked for most of his life in a Gothic palace in Venice creating sumptuous textiles with new printing techniques that recalled the bygone era of Venice and the Ottoman Empire.
Image Credits
1. Vittore Carpaccio. Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan, 1501–5. Tempera and oil on panel; 26 1/2 x 20 1/8 in. Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia—Museo Correr, Cl. I n. 0043
2. School of Paolo Veronese, Venice. Portrait of Mehmed I, second half of the 17th century. Oil on canvas; 26 x 19 1/4 in. Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia—Museo Correr, Cl. I n. 0856
3. Ottoman Turkish artisanship. Bath clogs, 17th century. Wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl, studded leather; 2 3/4 x 9 1/8 in. Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia—Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo, Cl. XXIV n. 0119
Exhibition Catalogue
The accompanying catalogue, Venice and the Ottoman Empire: A Tale of Art, Culture, and Exchange, offers freshly reviewed and new perspectives on the intricate artistic relationship that existed between Venice and the Ottoman Empire. Published by Rizzoli Electa and edited by exhibition curator Stefano Carboni, the fully illustrated hardcover volume features newly researched essays by esteemed international scholars, including the Frist Art Museum’s Curator at Large Trinita Kennedy, on topics such as trade routes, the involvement of international communities in Venice, diplomatic interactions, and military power dynamics.
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