ABSTRACT
The so-called Reception of the Venetian Ambassadors in Damascus in the Musée du Louvre (Plate 28) has been the subject of extensive study by generations of Islamicists, and now by students of East-West connections in the Mediterranean world during the Renaissance. Yet it still remains an enigmatic work, because it sits outside the categories we are familiar with for fifteenth and sixteenthcentury Venetian representations of the Levant. It neither represents a biblical subject set in the Near East, nor is it a portrait. Furthermore, we do not know its original location, although we can be sure that it was not made as part of a cycle of paintings for one of Venice’s scuole, or confraternities.
