The Muslim Umayyads had also invaded and successfully conquered swathes of Spain from 711 AD – the Alhambra in Granada continues to be the country’s most visited tourist destination today – as well as Sicily and Malta from the 9th to 11th Centuries. European culture had, in theory, long been in contact with Islam, Islamic art and architecture. With the Christian religious movements of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation jostling for authority around this same period, it’s no surprise that translations of the Koran were sought out by European theologians to be used in their debates, something that is the centre of a current European research project.

A post-colonial view

While Andalusian tiles, Turkish ceramics and Persian rugs were coveted luxury goods – and inspired facsimile craftsmanship across Europe in places like Venice – what the exhibition tries to unpick is how, in Orientalist art, many of these items were effectively props; signifiers to help denote the exoticism of the figures or buildings in the image that lay before the viewer. The term Orientalism blossomed into public scholarship when Palestinian-American academic Edward Said published his work of that name in 1978, arguing that western discourse and behaviour had systematically ‘othered’ the eastern world. In it he says: “Arabs, for example, are thought of as camel-riding, terroristic, hook-nosed, venal lechers whose undeserved wealth is an affront to real civilisation. Always there lurks the assumption that although the western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being.”