Exhibitions illustrating the interaction of cultures often display one-way relationships - the influence of Japanese prints, say, on French 19th-century painting. Not so the exhibition Bellini and the East (at the National Gallery until 25 June), which documents a rich multi-directional traffic. The central work among those on show is the National Gallery's Gentile Bellini portrait of Mehmed II (shown here). Its influence in the East can be seen in Turkish watercolours derived from it, and others based on a portrait medal of Mehmed by Costanzo di Moysis. Style alone does not tell where things come from. There is a round-bottomed brass box, inlaid with silver (perhaps made to hold sweets) signed by Mahmud al-Kurdi: it is no longer believed that he worked in Venice. But there is a salver decorated in the Levantine manner which was almost certainly made in the West. The reliquary Cardinal Bessarion presented to the Scuola della Carità - Venetian metalwork combined with paintings in a Byzantine style - is in the exhibition, and so is the painting Gentile made for the door to the tabernacle which housed it, showing the reliquary itself and the cardinal and two brothers of the scuola praying before it.

LRB 25 May 2006 | PDF Download