Renaissance artists pictured biblical Jews as Ottoman Turks by convention

Evidence

Toward the end of the fifteenth century turbans and other orientalizing features became entirely commonplace in Christian biblical art, as can be verified by a visit to any major collection of Renaissance works. In the cinquecento, the prestige and influence of Venetian artists helped to make the Ottomanized depiction of biblical Jews even more common. (The experience of Venetian traders with the rising Ottoman power included a stint by Gentile Bellini as an official painter at the court of the Ottoman ruler.) Consequently artists, who were more familiar than before with Ottoman costume, produced intricate ethnographic canvases for customers eager to own work with an exotic motive. The Louvre’s anonymous canvas Reception of the Ambassadors (c. 1488–96) shows a crowded parade of visiting notables (mostly oriental) before the sultan, who is seated on a raised settee. The work is believed to have had a great influence on a number of artists, including Albrecht Dürer, who may have been instrumental in spreading the orientalist fashion to German-speaking Europe. He followed the example of the Venetian orientalist artists and indiscriminately applied his repertoire of turbaned characters to images of the contemporary Orient as well as of the biblical narrative. The invention of the printing press then facilitated the spread of his etchings throughout Germany and the rest of Europe. In this way, in the High Renaissance imagining the biblical Israelite as a “Turk” became a matter of course throughout Western Christendom. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 179

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how visual convention — not theology, contact, or scholarship — could come to define how a whole people was imagined. Dürer’s etchings + the printing press as the vector of a biblical stereotype offers a parallel to how modern image tropes propagate.
• XREF: Connects to Gombrich’s ‘Art and Illusion’ on schemata and convention, and to Edward Said’s Orientalism on how Europe constructed the Orient through representation.
• QUESTION: When exactly did artists stop depicting biblical figures in contemporary European (or Roman) dress and switch to Ottoman conventions? Was it purely a matter of ethnographic availability?