Leah R.Clark, Courtly Mediators: Transcultural Objects between Renaissance Italy and the Islamic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. xix + 336 pp. £100.00. ISBN 978‐1‐009‐27621‐4 (hb).

Courtly Mediators makes an important contribution to scholarship on relations between the material cultures of Italian and Islamic courts in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, bringing to light new documentary evidence from Italian archives, and addressing methodological questions raised by global, material and sensorial turns in the field. In contrast to a long-standing historiographic focus on cities such as Venice and Florence, Clark positions the Aragonese court of Naples as ‘one of the main conduits’ of exchange between Italian, Mamluk and Ottoman courts in the period (14), focusing in particular on links between Naples and Ferrara, where Eleonora d’Aragona became duchess in 1473. In the introduction, Clark presents the Renaissance studiolo as an ‘entrepôt’ of transcultural exchange through a close reading of Antonello da Messina’s painting, Saint Jerome in His Study (ca. 1475). The analysis initiates a discussion of many methods and themes that play a crucial role throughout the book, such as the non-linear itineraries of ‘composite objects’ and objets croisés, as well as the reconceptualization of artefacts as ‘sensorial assemblages’ irreducible to the historiographically privileged senses of vision and touch. Chapters 1 and 2 further develop the historical and methodological foundations of the study, while the remaining three chapters and conclusion engage in case studies involving Naples and Ferrara. Chapter 1 sets courtly gift-giving practices against the background of events such as the Ottoman-Neapolitan War of 1480–1481, as well as diplomatic conventions such as what Clark calls ‘the ekphrastic tour’. Cautioning against binary East–West frameworks, as well as idealized accounts of cross-cultural harmony, Clark shows how ‘gifts can render visible political alliances or dependencies but just as equally can be signs of betrayal, treachery or shifting alliances’ (44). The second chapter addresses the relationship between language, mobility and ornament, focusing in particular on the ‘confusion and uncertainty’ of period terms such as damaschino (‘damascene’, i.e. ‘of Damascus’), which could refer to styles, materials, motifs or standards of quality, as well as places of production or purchase (76–8). For Clark, these and other ‘descriptions of objects from “somewhere else” point to mobility itself as a category of value’, and ‘ought to be regarded less as a problem than as an indicator of how closely artistic contact and exchange flourished across the Mediterranean, resulting in objets croisés that defy easy classification’ (70, 76). Chapter 3 follows the circulation of porcelain from China through Mamluk and Ottoman courts to Naples and Ferrara. The analysis hinges on 170 porcelain artefacts listed in a 1493 inventory of the collection of Eleonora d’Aragona. Though no longer identifiable today, Clark works between documents and comparative examples to argue that these objects reached Ferrara from Naples, and explores their shifting meanings and functions from a variety of perspectives, such as their documented metal mounts, frames and handles, which mediated ‘between the subject and object, between the global and the local, and sometimes between the past and present’ (124). Chapter 4 turns to the collections of Eleonora’s son, Alfonso d’Este, and the camerini that he built between Ferrara’s castle and ducal palace, rethinking the well-known paintings that decorated these spaces ‘as the frame or parergon’ for the material culture used and displayed within them. The porcelain vessels in Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, for example, come to stand in ‘direct paragone with the real objects on display’ (175), thus interacting not only with Alfonso’s own ‘dabbling in the potter’s art’ (179) but also with wider dynamics of ‘material mimesis’, such as ‘chalcedony glass that mimics chalcedony stone or lusterware that imitates metalware’ (184). Chapter 5 examines the medicinal and aromatic uses of vessels such as incense burners, buckets and albarelli by connecting them with the court apothecaries of Ferrara and Naples, which Clark compares to the Ottoman palace pharmacy (221–2), developing a previous comparison between Alfonso’s porcelain room and the çīnī anbāri at Topkapı Palace (169–70). Central to this chapter are the albarelli associated with the courts of Naples and Ferrara: vessels that were shaped practically and ‘ergonomically’ by mobility, and served both formally and functionally as ‘signs of news and knowledge’ from distant lands (196, 199, 236–42). The conclusion then reconsiders the comparatively static, grounded medium of ceramic floor tiles, which King Alfonso V d’Aragona began to transfer from Valencia to Naples in the 1440s. Clark shows how the transfer and translation of such tiles extended not only to Neapolitan patrons such as Diomede Carafa and Giovanni Pontano but also as far as the Hungarian court, where Beatrice d’Aragona had resettled as Queen in 1476, resituating this ‘Renaissance revival of a local antiquity’ within ‘larger global visual cultures’ (268). Many promising avenues of inquiry opened up by Courtly Mediators are rooted in Clark’s archival research. A good example is a previously unpublished letter sent to Duke Ercole d’Este on 9 August 1491, which describes ‘a shop run by three “Turks” in the area of Santa Sofia in Venice, who work in “gold and new things”’ (76). As Clark rightly points out, this document has important implications for the much-debated question of whether metalworkers from the Islamic world were active in Venice – a question that has long hinged on the lack of such documentation.1 In this as in many other cases, Clark demonstrates the potential of archival research to reshape methodological debates in the field. Simultaneously, Clark’s own methodological framework enables these documents to delineate broader, overlooked patterns of exchange: in particular, the nexus of Naples and Ferrara, which has played a relatively minor role in previous work on the latter city’s relationship with the Islamic world.2 By establishing this connection, Clark’s work will be of great benefit to future research on a wide range of topics, such as the cultural ramifications of the conquest of Otranto, the multi-layered complexity of transcultural exchanges between Italian and Hungarian courts, and the careers of individual artists like Costanzo da Ferrara, who moved between Ferrara, Naples and Istanbul in the 1470s and 1480s.