Traces the blending of Islamic and European visual culture during the ninth to seventeenth centuries.

Islam in Europe surveys artistic production in the medieval Islamic world and examines the many ways it altered the trajectory of European visual culture. It reveals this interconnectedness through works of art that reflect the contact, influence, and exchange that developed during the medieval period and Renaissance. It also explores the reception of the image of Islam in Europe.
 
Opening with early medieval objects produced by Muslim artisans and known to have been exported in large numbers to medieval Europe, this catalog explores the crosscurrents of visual culture at the nexus of Islam and Christendom which were already well developed by the tenth century. A central group of objects traces the breathtaking force with which refined export wares from Mamluk Egypt, Syria, Central Asia, and Anatolia flooded the Italian market during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, revolutionizing European aesthetics and reshaping the taste for—and the very definition of—luxury goods. The catalog concludes with a group of important early textiles spanning the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries. 
 
Presenting sixty works of art together for the first time, this illuminating volume elucidates the complete integration of Islamic art and artisanal technology into European visual culture. A brief introductory essay explores questions of entanglement in the medieval world, and the final essay by Michael Franses analyzes the importance of the only firmly dateable Lotto arabesque carpet still in existence, acquired by the David Collection in Copenhagen in 2022.