ABSTRACT
The late fifteenth century witnessed a notable rise of Venetian works of art negotiating cultural encounters between Eastern and Western worlds. Various paintings, graphics and sculptures with subjects ranging from rarer themes of classical mythology and literature to the more popular stories of the Golden Legend and the Bible, particularly the Adoration of the Magi, were more than ever creating new narratives and visual forms of the Muslim East. This increase of Eastern images in the artistic centres of Venice and the adjacent Veneto had been set in motion on the return of the Venetian artist Gentile Bellini from his journey to the Ottoman capital of Constantinople as a painter-diplomat in 1481. Gentile Bellini’s voyage to the court of Mehmed II plays an important role in the transmission of visions and images of the Muslim East, as the analysis of the drawing Young Greek Woman will show. Moreover, it will reveal the mobile qualities of the drawing itself and its active part in the shaping of Western fantasies of the Muslim East.
