Infiltrating Artifacts: The Impact of Islamic Art in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Florence and Pisa

As cities with far-reaching diplomatic, mercantile and missionary networks, fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Florence and Pisa were characterized by the impact of numerous artifacts imported from distant lands. This paper focuses on two case studies: The first one sheds new light on representations of Oriental carpets in the miraculous image of the Annunciation in the Florentine church SS. Annunziata as well as in its multiple ‘copies’, while the second one reflects on the impact of Mamluk metalwork from Syria and Egypt on late medieval and early Renaissance Italian panel painting. Contributing to recent art historical debates on transcultural dynamics, image-object-interrelations, and intersections between visual and material culture, this paper interrogates two site-specific cases of entanglements between the local and the global in the premodern period.

The Damascene vessels, which Petrarch praises so eloquently in these lines, in comparison with the most sought after metalwork in antiquity, were artifacts from the Islamic world, particularly from Mamluk Syria and Egypt. Made of bronze or brass and inlaid with gold and silver, these highly sophisticated items indeed caught much attention. When the Florentine Simone Sigoli visited Damascus on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in  and , he did not tire of describing the markets in the city, where "also [are] made a great deal of brass basins and pitchers and really they appear of gold, and then on the said basins and pitchers are made figures and foliage and other fine work in silver, so that it is a very beautiful thing to see". In awe, Sigoli exclaimed: "Verily if you had money in the bone of your leg, without fail you would break it off to buy these things".  Wealthy merchants acquired them eagerly along with precious silks, glassware, ceramics, and carpets, and Mamluk metalwork circulated widely in and beyond the Mediterranean. This paper discusses the impact of artifacts imported from the Islamic world on the image production of fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Florence and Pisa. As trade articles, gifts, or loot, diverse objects arrived here from regions as distant as Al-Andalus, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. They stimulated local craftsmen; they were displayed on façades and in interiors; and they were represented in pictorial space. Yet, while Tuscany's far reaching diplomatic, mercantile, and missionary networks have been thoroughly studied by historians, in the discipline of art history these artifacts were mostly dismissed as exotica and craft items, pertaining to the rubric of "applied" rather than "high arts", and their crucial role in art production in late medieval and Renaissance Tuscany has been grossly underrated. What is more, Sicily and Venice still dominate the scholarly discourse regarding the impact of Islamic artifacts in pre-modern Italy.
In the following, this papers draws on the renewed interest in artistic interactions and exchange processes in the Mediterranean as well as in transcultural studies of artifacts and intersections of material and visual culture.  The first case study will shed new light on the earliest known representation of an Oriental carpet in an Annunciation scene and discuss the impact of imported artifacts in junction and tension with that of a miraculous image. The second case study will focus on the polymateriality of late medieval and early Renaissance panel painting and examine visual and material references to Mamluk metalwork in the medium of the gold-ground of early fifteenth-century Tuscan painting.

I. In pictorial space: Oriental carpets in Annunciation scenes
The Florentine church SS. Annunziata houses an image of the Annunciation which has been venerated as a semi-acheiropoieton since the fourteenth century.  According to a legend, the artist failed to represent the face of the Virgin, which was then miraculously painted by an angel. Still, whenever the curtains in front of the fresco were lifted, Mary's face was not the only visual element that drew the beholders' eyes, so did the imported Anatolian pile carpet at her feet (Fig. ). The rug shows a repetitive animal design in a grid-like structure; large white geometricized creatures are seen in profile against an orange, dark blue, and dark red ground. Although no exact model exists, animal patterns similar to this one are a common feature of fourteenthcentury pile carpets from Asia Minor (Fig. ). While Marco Spallanzani studied the importation of carpets to late medieval and Renaissance Florence and Siena, the depiction of Oriental rugs in fourteenth-to sixteenthcentury Italian painting had already been pointed out by Julius Lessing, Alois Riegl and Wilhelm von Bode.  Nevertheless, scholars have never reflected on the carpet in the fresco in SS. Annunziata from an art historical perspective,  even though this artifact is particularly noticeable when considering its strong impact on later Annunciation scenes.
Once an image cult had developed around the semi-acheiropieton, it was widely replicated, and so was the carpet. But while the placement of the rugs in these copies was at first more or less guided by the "original", the choice of their specific design was apparently free. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there is only one accurate copy of the carpet, which can be found in S. Lucia sul Prato in Florence.  All the other rugs represented in Annunciation scenes, based on the fresco in SS. Annunziata, differ in color, pattern, and length. Whereas the Annunciation in S. Spirito in Prato shows a rather small rug featuring geometrical ornamentation beneath Mary's feet (Fig. ),  a particularly long carpet with geometrical ornaments embellishes the Annunciation scene in the Florentine church of S. Maria Novella. Here, the carpet is spread out across the whole room, even going beyond it: its fringes extend across the threshold of the open door onto the grass (Fig. ).
The carpet in the Annunciation scene in SS. Annunziata could hence be replaced in the copies by another type, which might have been known to the painter or owned by the commissioning church or monastery. For example, a rug such as the one featuring stylized animals with feelers and tentacles, kept in Istanbul (Fig. ),  might have inspired the copies made by Gentile da Fabriano and his workshop which include carpets with longbeaked birds, many-legged animals and a robot-like creature with antennae on top of its head, staring hypnotically at the beholder (Fig. ).
Yet, the relationship between actual and painted carpets was not restricted to one inspiring the other. When positioned on the floor, rugs delimit an area, access to which can be highly regulatedone need only think of the red carpet treatment or of the denotations of carpets in ruler contexts.  In the fresco, the rug connecting Mary with the angel indicates the sacred territory on which and across which the miracle of the Annunciation occurs. But it is very likely that, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there would also have been actual carpets in front of the altars underneath the images, carpets that linked the beholder with the Annunciation scene. Rugs are frequently documented in late medieval and Renaissance church inventories, also for the tabernacle of the Annunciation in SS. Annunziata.  In a Christian context, their use was not only practical, but it was even ascribed symbolic meaning. William Durandus defines carpets in his Rationale divinorum officiorum first as "cloths that are spread out under foot, specifically for walking on with feet", and then specifies: "especially for the feet of bishops who must walk over worldly things with their feet".  As the passage shows, carpets were considered to be luxury items representing riches in general, and bishops were obliged to renounce these (symbols for) worldly goods by trampling on them ("pedibus calcare debent").
The Anatolian carpet in the Annunciation scene in SS. Annunziata in fact brings the world and the manifold interchanges between Florence and the world into the church, and so do the rugs in the numerous copies of the fresco. Yet, they could also provide room for marginal images, a zone for artistic imagination, their patterns could be transformed, adapted, or invented by the artists, and they could even negotiate the means of painting. In S. Maria di Cortenuova near Empoli, where the carpet is represented as a material, pliable object, leading down one step from the Virgin to Gabriel, the pattern was changed to fluttering birds, placed in squares as if they were in cages (Fig. ).  Moreover, in the Florentine church of S. Marco, the carpet shows birds which in their vivacity indicate the virtuosity of the painter's brush rather than a design that could actually have been knotted ( Fig.  and ).  From around , painters no longer confined their creative approach to carpets in representations of the Annunciation to a change of pattern. Now, rugs "wandered" in the scenes. In the Annunciation attributed to Giovanni di Pietro da Napoli and in another one by Fra Carnevale, dated around , the carpet is not shown beneath the Virgin's feet, but rather seems to have been used as a "landing surface" by the angel (Fig. ).  Furthermore, carpets appear in these images according to their specific functions in Renaissance Italy. In Andrea Previtali's Annunciation, a carpet links Mary and the angel spatially, but it does so while covering a table behind them instead of lying on the floor (Fig. ).  As highly expensive commodities, Oriental carpets were in fact only rarely laid out on the ground. More often, they were arranged on banks, tables, and benches; or they were hung over balconies.  The latter is expressed in Piero Pollaiulo's Annunciation in which the perspective dynamics of the strongly aligned lines entice the beholder's gaze into the background of the interior, where one encounters a window opening on the left (Fig. ). Diverted from all the polycolored marbles, it still takes some effort to detect the carpet: it hangs over the balustrade of the terrace outside the windownext to a peacock and a view of the city of Florence (Fig. ). Given the many and manifold representations of rugs in Annunciation scenes since the first representation in SS. Annunziata, from the late fourteenth century onwards, devotees almost expected to see a carpet in an Annunciation scene, particularly in Florence. Pollaiuolo played with these viewing expectations. By the fifteenth century, the Oriental carpet had in fact been "Florentinized" through painting. In Florence, it signified both: a local reference to the miraculous image incorporating a carpet in the Annunziata, and the Mediterranean networks of this city, rich through and proud of its trade. 

II. In gold: Mamluk metalwork as the Virgin's nimbus
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, direct and indirect contacts between Tuscany and the Islamic world were indeed multifarious. Merchants, pilgrims, missionaries, and diplomats travelled back and forth, and interactions increased in the early Quattrocento, following the conquest of Pisa in  and the acquisition of Porto Pisano and Livorno in , when Florence gained direct access to the sea and when it sent several official embassies to Cairo.  In a seminal study based on archival records, preserved artifacts, and representations in painting, Marco Spallanzani traced the importation of Islamic metalwork described as da or di Domascho to fourteenthto mid-sixteenth-century Florence.  Yet, Spallanzani also drew attention to a paradox, namely to the fact that, despite the high appreciation of metalwork from Mamluk Syria and Egypt, these objects were only rarely represented in Italian art. They appear in Giovanni da Milano's Stories of the Life of Mary Magdalen in the Cappella Rinuccini in S. Croce and in Domenico Ghirlandaio's Birth of the Virgin in S. Maria Novella, both of them in Florence, whereas in Carpaccio's Dream of St Ursula in Venice a Mamluk brass bucket is discernable on the left wall where it hangs from a cupboard. Anna Contadini pointed out that it clearly resembles a Syrian bucket that has been preserved in the Cathedral of Treviso.  The general imbalance between the presence of Mamluk metalwork on the Apennine peninsula on the one hand, and its scarce representation in the arts on the other, is even more noticeable when compared with the abundant representations of other imported goods such as carpets.  This paradox, however, can be solved by not only searching for representations of Mamluk metalwork produced by the painter's brush, but also by the painter's gold leaf.
Though Masaccio's Pisa Polyptych, painted in , is now dismantled and partly lost, its  antique and early Christian sarcophagi, an architectonical structure built up of columns with Corinthian and Ionian capitals. Yet, it is the haloes in this image that we will now focus our attention on.
When representing haloes, i.e. circles of divine light, in the medium of painting, artists faced a number of problems: regarding their shape and decoration, their materiality, visibility and invisibility, as well as their spatial disposition. As has been frequently noted, in the Pisa Altarpiece these issues are evidently at play in the representation of the Child's cross nimbus which is not only  rendered three-dimensionally and in perspectival foreshortening but even reflects the Christ Child's head and blond curls.  Masaccio's bold approach can be contextualized in an artistic setting which was characterized by the testing of ever more experimental solutions for haloes. For example, in Altichiero da Zevio's wall paintings in Padua (), St. George, kneeling and about to be beheaded, carefully balances his nimbus like a metal disk on the back of his head. Once conceived as a material object, the question of the halo's ornamentation arose, to which Paolo Uccello found a particularly stylish answer in his Madonna and Child (c. -), now in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin: the Virgin's and the Christ Child's haloes match their intricate hairdos in color and design (Fig. ).  As is well-known, artistic experiments with haloes were not confined to the Apennine peninsula. Robert Campin, for example, positioned the Madonna in front of a fire screen whose round shape, though made of yellow straw in wicker technique, evokes a nimbus. Yet, it is Francesco del Cossa who can be credited with the most audacious pictorial creation in this context. In the Dresden Annunciation (-) he not only equipped Gabriel with a halo but also with a holding device for it: a kind of helmet consisting of four brackets attached to a ring (Fig. ). In the painting, the nimbus is thought to share both the quality of weight and exposure to the effects of gravity with other worldly objects, and hence requires an instrument in order not to fall to the ground. As Roland Kanz pointed out, del Cossa's provocatively outspoken and accurately fitting construction clearly refers to late medieval theater props and prevented the angel from losing his halo "no matter how fast he flew or how heavy the turbulences on his way to Mary through the sky might have been".  Returning to Masaccio's Pisa Polyptych, the latter can be called an artistic arena for displaying diverse kinds of haloes. Whereas the Child's nimbus distinguishes itself from all other haloes in the central panel in terms of both its design with a cross and its foreshortened instead of flat appearance, in the predella scenes, haloes are represented in fulland in three-quarter-profile views, and in the martyrdom of St Peter the nimbus is even placed on the floor and serves as the base for the saint's crucifixion upside-down. The halo of the greatest size and most elaborate ornamentation, however, graces the Virgin.
The nimbus frames Mary's head and partly overlaps the throne behind her (Fig. ). Through its conspicuous decoration it is clearly discernable from the plain gold-ground in the background. Two small bands with repetitive round punches enclose a larger band featuring an Arabicizing inscription. The Arabic and pseudo-Arabic letters are positioned against a hatched and granulated background and are hence visible from near and afar.
In the fifteenth century, the phenomenon of Arabicizing script in Italian painting was not new. Still mostly overlooked as "decorative ornaments", Arabic, Arabicizing, and pseudo-epigraphic characters that resemble other Oriental scripts appear in a large number of late medieval Italian artworks.  With pseudo-script, artists explored the boundaries and sounded out the areas of tension between letters and lines in the margins and thresholds of their paintings, that is on hems, haloes, and frames. In many cases, these inscriptions were instigated by inscribed artifacts imported from various regions in and beyond the Mediterranean. For the haloes featuring pseudo-Arabic script in early Quattrocento painting, even a specific type of object has been proposed as a source of inspiration: Mamluk brass plates (Fig. ).  Still, Fred Leemhuis' ingenious suggestion has not had much effect on art historical scholarship.
Gold-backs and haloes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries have been well-studied, most prominently by Erling Skaug, Mojmír Frinta, Joseph Polzer, and Bastian Eclercy.  Fifteenth-century haloes, in contrast, stood more in the shadow.  It is as if scholars had taken Leon Battista Alberti's rejection of gold in panel painting more seriously than Quattrocento artists who still very consciously and creatively used the gilded parts of their paintings: not least to incorporate into them clearly visible references to artifacts imported from the Middle East; a practice which can be witnessed in works of art by Masaccio, Gentile da Fabriano, Fra Angelico, Giovanni di Francesco Toscani, and other painters.  Masaccio's Madonna was commissioned by the wealthy Pisan notary ser Giuliano di Colino di Pietro degli Scarsi (-) for his funerary chapel in S. Maria del Carmine in Pisa, the Tuscan port city with her own and long-reaching history of numerous artifacts imported or looted from the Islamic world: the famous bronze griffin on the roof of Pisa Cathedral, ascribed to Al-Andalus, Mallorca or Iran; the marble capital from Madinat-az-Zahra near Cordoba; or the bacini, glazed ceramic bowls from Tunisia,

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Al-Andalus, Fatimid Egypt and other regions around the Mediterranean Sea, which decorate the façades of so many Pisan churches.  Yet, in , when the altarpiece was installed, Pisa had already lost her independence and the control of her harbor to Florence. The first Florentine embassy to Mamluk Cairo, led by Felice Brancacci and Carlo Federighi, had left from Porto Pisano in , and Florentine galleys sailed in the Mediterranean.  The central predella scene from the Pisa Polyptych, now in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, features the Adoration of the Magi who bring the Christ Child precious gifts from "the East".  Right above this scene, the Virgin's nimbus in the central panel, donated by ser Giuliano di Colino di Pietro degli Scarsi, presents an "Eastern" artifact to the beholder: the evocation of a brass plate from Mamluk Syria or Egypt. Before Masaccio embellished the Madonna in the Pisa Polyptych with a nimbus inspired by Mamluk brasswork, he had already done so in the San Giovenale Altarpiece ().  In fact, in both cases, the Virgin's nimbus not only features Arabicizing lettering, which is clearly visible against a hatched background, but even the chinoiserie motif of the lotus blossom, a popular ornamental device in Mamluk metalwork of the time: it separates the pseudo-inscriptions on the haloes at regular intervals, in the case of the Pisa Altarpiece right above the Madonna's forehead.  The fact that a Florentine artist, when representing a halo in his altarpiece destined for a  church in Pisa, took inspiration from metalwork imported from the Mamluk Empire, which itself comprised motifs from other regions, such as, in this case, lotus blossoms introduced from China, testifies to the highly complex trans-urban, trans-regional, and transcultural networks, different levels of proximity and distance, short-distance and long-distance relationships, their entanglements, stratifications, and superimpositions, which were at play and negotiated in the arts. These overlaps, tensions, and concomitances of references to sites near and far are even more pronounced in the Annunciation scenes based on the fresco in SS. Annunziata in which the represented carpets establish a link to the miraculous image in Florence with its painted carpet on the one hand, and to actual Oriental carpets, their trade routes, marketplaces, and production centers in the Mediterranean, Asia Minor, and the Middle East on the other.

III. Concluding remarks: Mediterranean entanglements and intersections between visual and material culture
The Annunciation fresco in SS. Annunziata and Masaccio's Pisa Madonna have already been studied extensively by art historians regarding matters of "agency": the former in connection with practices of copying miraculous images and with its ex voto cult; the latter vis-à-vis the reception of antique architecture and sculpture in the early Quattrocento.  The comparison and juxtaposition of the two case studies, presented in this paper, enhanced these discourses by shedding new light on the Mediterranean dimensions of these artworks as instances of a cross-cultural and transmedial "agency of things".  The comparison of the two case studies has been revealing in regard to the diverse ways in which imported artifacts were incorporated into fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Tuscan painting: they infiltrated both pictorial spaces and the gilded parts of the images. Until now, the artistic reception of Islamic artifacts represented in Italian painting has been primarily studied in order to acquire new insights into these artifacts. Our knowledge about Oriental carpets before , for example, relies to a large extent on their representations in Italian painting because so few fourteenthcentury rugs have been preserved. The aim of this contribution, however, was to highlight the opportunities and challenges these objects posed to painters: their colors or metallic glaze, their materiality, shape, surface structure and ornamentation.
Both case studies elucidated the intersections between material and visual culture in Florence and Pisa from a Mediterranean perspective. In the Annunziata fresco and in its various copies, we witness the frictions between the dynamics of a miraculous image on the one hand, and the impact of carpets recently imported from the Islamic world on the art production of late medieval and early Renaissance Tuscany on the other. This analysis has shown that the appearance of Islamic artifacts in Italian painting cannot be grasped  as a mere "Orientalization" of pre-modern Italian pictorial spaces, when wealthy merchants and travelers could recognize luxury objects such as the ones they had acquired in the bazaars of Cairo and Damascus or as imported goods in Florence and Pisa in Italian paintings of the time, but that imported artifacts could also be "localized" and gain new meanings through their incorporation into paintings which had their own interrelations, particularly in the case of miraculous images. What is more, Masaccio's Pisa Madonna as one of a number of early fifteenth-century paintings with Arabicizing inscriptions in the haloes of the Virgin, Christ or saints elucidated that imported artifacts were not only introduced into the pictorial spaces of fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Tuscan painting, but also represented by means of applied gold. Analyzing the artistic reception of Islamic artifacts, their incorporation into the syntax of the images, and their negotiations through the materiality of these imageswhich comprise both painted and metal surfacescan thus enhance our understanding of fourteenthand early fifteenth-century Tuscan painting itself.
To conclude, let us take a second look at the lines by the Aretine poet, quoted at the beginning. Petrarch's statement is in fact remarkable on many levels: his description of the "genesis" of a type of artifact, a notion which is even more conspicuous if we think of the traditional associations of metalwork as "living matter";  and the implied geographical "origin stories", denoting the provenance of contemporary metalwork in comparison with the provenance of metalwork in antiquity, thereby also attesting that humanists were very aware of the Mediterranean exchange processes ancient Rome had already been involved in. The relationship between the Italian reception of antique works of art on the one hand, and of artifacts from the Islamic world on the other, and the interwovenness of references to artifacts geographically and/or temporally distant, is indeed a vibrant field of inquiry which, so far, has only marginally been touched upon in art historical scholarship.  Yet, it is the artworks themselves that bring up these questions: in the case of the Pisa Madonna, for example, we encounter Masaccio's receptivity of and artistic response to antique architecture, taken up by his contemporary Filippo Brunelleschi in these very years, in the design of the Virgin's throne; to the works of local sculptors such as Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, and Donatello, as can be seen in the monumentality of the represented figures;  and to artifacts recently imported from the Islamic world. Within the image, however, they are rendered very differently: the architectonic throne made of grey stone is seen in perspectival foreshortening in pictorial space, whereas the Mamluk plates are presented parallel to the picture plane, "merged" with the gold-ground.
In the sub-discipline of Italian art history, the study of artistic responses to antique art and architecture is highly developed. Artistic receptions of Islamic artifacts, in contrast, have only recently received more attention. Yet, precisely because artists such as Masaccio creatively negotiated both, even in the same artworks, it is necessary to study both together; to draw methodologically from studies regarding the reception of antiquity, which have dealt with matters of artistic transfer, practices of copying, imitating, and the creative transformation of pre-existent models,  in order to sound out the similarities, differences, and areas of tension between antique and Islamic artifacts when represented in painting, and their diverse temporal layers, and to experiment with and investigate new methodological approaches. According to Petrarch, Mamluk metalwork filled Italians with such awe that it even rivalled the role Corinthian metalwork had once had in antiquity. In fact, from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards, Italian craftsmen sought to imitate the imported goods as a market response when they created what scholars long termed "Italo-Saracenic metalwork" which was then exported, not least to the Islamic world, and when Giorgio Vasari elaborated on Damascene metalwork and Italian imitations of it.  Masaccio's Pisa Madonna precedes this moment. Elucidating the dynamic interrelations between the visual and material cultures in a Mediterranean setting, it brought the circulation of Mamluk metal plates from Syria and Egypt to Italy and their use as sumptuous tableware to a halt when they were represented vertically in the gold-grounds, though not as luxury platters but rather transformed into "reified" divine light.