Review: Gardens of Renaissance Europe and the Islamic Empires: Encounters and Confluences, edited by Mohammad Gharipour

Abstract

Mohammad Gharipour, ed. Gardens of Renaissance Europe and the Islamic Empires: Encounters and Confluences University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017, 272 pp., 55 color and 67 b/w illus. $94.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780271077796 This edited volume from Mohammad Gharipour presents research on cross-cultural influences in garden design between Renaissance-era Europe and three Islamic empires: Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman. It begins with a prologue by D. Fairchild Ruggles that summarizes relevant work on Islamic garden traditions, including themes of poetry and metaphor, form and typology, agricultural production, environmental concerns, and gardens as agents for cultural production. The book concludes with an epilogue in which Anatole Tchikine asks whether the term “global Renaissance” allows for new perspectives on the study and comparative understanding of gardens produced by European and Islamic rulers. Between prologue and epilogue are eight essays. In comparison to Renaissance gardens of Italy, France, England, and Portugal, two of the essays explore Ottoman gardens, four look at Mughal gardens, one examines the Safavid gardens established by Shah Abbas in and around the city of Isfahan, and another considers varied gardens of Islamic geography. The book's first essay, “Embracing the Other: Venetian Garden Design, Early Modern Travelers, and the Islamic Landscape,” by Christopher Pastore, documents the travel of several Venetians who went east from the later fifteenth through the late seventeenth centuries. Pastore discusses their observations of multiple cultures and sites in Egypt, Syria, the Indian subcontinent, Ethiopia, the Arabian desert, Baghdad, the Ottoman and early Safavid Empires, and Al-Andalus. Venetians embraced novel garden ideas derived from these cultures and applied them to the designs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century estates in the Veneto, alongside their borrowings from the classical villa tradition. The essay includes references and plans showing how Venetian gardens were expanded and updated through the use of novel hydraulics and vegetation, and how they were influenced by illustrations of landscapes encountered by those traveling abroad. Pastore argues that Venetian gardens served as experimental nodes of transformation and change, and as …