Images in the Borderlands: The Mediterranean between Christian and Muslim Worlds in the Early Modern Period ed. by Ivana Čapeta Rakić, and Giuseppe Capriotti (review)

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• Images in the Borderlands: The Mediterranean between Christian and Muslim Worlds in the Early Modern Period ed. by Ivana Čapeta Rakić, and Giuseppe Capriotti
• Nat Cutter

Čapeta Rakić, Ivana, and Giuseppe Capriotti, eds, Images in the Borderlands: The Mediterranean between Christian and Muslim Worlds in the Early Modern Period ( Medieval and Early Modern Europe and the World, 1), Turnhout, Brepols, 2022; hardback; pp. 310; 21 b/w, 58 colour illustrations, 1 map; R.R.P. €100.00; ISBN 9782503595085.

To the well-trodden field of early modern Christian–Muslim relations in the Mediterranean, Ivana Čapeta Rakić and Giuseppe Capriotti provide an interesting and timely collection of essays structured around depictions in images and artworks, rather than the more conventional diplomacy, trade, warfare, and slavery. Considering the Mediterranean as a 'borderland'—a dynamic site where societies and cultures overlap and bleed into one another, rather than a hard border or limit—the collection's central strength is a genuinely interdisciplinary and multinational approach. Several rich illustrations (fifty-eight colour images), an impressive diversity of scholars (from Italy, Spain, Croatia, UK, USA, and Turkey, including tenured academics, graduate students, and independent researchers) and wide-ranging subject areas (outlined below) are represented.

The book is divided into three parts, preceded by Čapeta Rakić and Capriotti's 'Introduction', which summarises the critical issues surrounding borderlands and image-based history. The first part, 'Borderland', begins with Peter Burke's brief but wide-ranging account of the legacies of Islamic art and culture across Europe, provoking the highly detailed studies that follow. Chapters by Ivan Alduk, Ferenc Tóth, and Ana Echevarria explore images and imprints of borderland in the tiny, highly strategic Dalmatian village of Zadvarje/Duara, which changed hands repeatedly between Venetian and Ottoman empires and developed a hybrid culture; the towering fortresses of the Dardanelles and Bosporus as a symbol of encroaching French military power in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire; and elite military corps from Al-Andalus to Lepanto, provide an interlocking picture of both reception and reality in spaces of conflict. Echavarria's chapter, in particular, will be of broader interest for its rich and nuanced account of 'military conversion' (p. 77)—the widespread practice in Islamic–Christian borderlands of capturing or recruiting soldiers who then voluntarily or involuntarily changed their religion as they rose to high military office—and its cultural impacts, particularly for individual royal prestige and the iconography of warfare.

The second part, 'Lepanto', focuses closely on contemporary echoes of this strategically insignificant but culturally iconic 1571 battle in Ligurian and Piedmontese religious art (Laura Stagno), classically-flavoured portraits of Christian military and political leaders (Chiara Giulia Morandi), a book of [End Page 311] imaginary triumphal monuments from Antwerp (Juan Chiva and Víctor Mínguez) and a series of Ottoman naval manuscript drawings (Naz Defne Kut). Stagno's chapter deserves notice for its surprising exploration of Lepanto's repeated incorporation in rosary altarpieces dedicated to the Virgin Mary, envisioned as the battle's patron and ongoing protector against the Ottoman threat, incorporating the battle into the devotional life of communities far from 'the great epicentres of propaganda' in Madrid, Rome, and Venice. Kut's chapter presents a refreshingly original account of the historical events leading up to and immediately following Lepanto, integrating existing and newly translated Ottoman sources into the well-known story and illuminating longer-term legacies in Turkish historical memory.

The third part, 'Circulation', draws our focus out again, considering how early modern artists imagined both contemporary, historical, and fictional conflicts between Europe, Africa, and the Eastern Mediterranean: in portraits of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II (Angelo Maria Monaco), the funeral rites of Spanish emperor Philip II (Cristelle Baskins and Borja Franco Llopis), paintings commissioned by the Knights of Saint John in Malta (Maria Luisa Ricci), frescoes in Florence's Palazzo Pitti (Francesco Sorce), and Iberian public sculptures (Iván Rega Castro). Each of these chapters is exhaustively researched and elegantly written and taken together they provide outstandingly detailed interrogations of images, suitable for undergraduate teaching on European depictions of the Islamic Mediterranean and research. Monaco's chapter introduces the concept of 'rhetorical index' (a measure of the layers of meaning and reference stratified...