A SULTAN’S TREASURES

Even decently educated Americans tend to have at least one great black hole in their cultural universe. We start life riddled with them, like pieces of galactic Swiss cheese. Then the old two-semester art history survey gives us a handle on Egypt and the ancient Near East, then stumbles smartly forward bearing the banner of our rational European heritage starting with the Greeks and ending happily with the French Impressionists.

Later we get some sense of Oriental art, because our museums venerate it, and Primitive art because our modern art owes so much to it, but when it comes to Islamic art, most Americans squeeze a puzzled smile behind glazed eyes and murmur, “Oh, yes--um--arabesques and all that.”

It is tough to say why this art remains so remote, but the fact that it does may cast some light on why our politicians have such miserable success dealing with their politicians. A cultural chasm yawns ominously between the two civilizations as between alien planets.

Since we do inhabit the same orb, this lack of empathy is obviously a bad thing, and anything that tends to make it better is welcome. Enter “The Age of Suleyman the Magnificent” at the National Gallery to May 17. It is a trove of textiles, ceramics, costumes, manuscripts, weapons, jewels and bibelots mainly from the fabled Topkapi museum, of which everyone has heard on account of it’s being the setting of a very good old thriller movie with Melina Mercouri.

One look, and lovers of more familiar art are liable to think, first, that they will leave these 200-odd decorative objects after a light-go round. After five or six turns through the gallery, you realize yourself nicely seduced by extraordinary refinement. Surprisingly, the arts style and expressive vectors seem at last somehow familiar.

Fantasy art.

Working backward from known experience, we recognize the throbbing cobalt blue and infinite space of that illuminated serlevha is an effect Joseph Cornell achieved in his better boxes. The lush, almost decadent elaboration of a jewel-encrusted gold canteen we have seen in fetish objects by Lucas Samaras. Delicate Persian miniature-style pictures ring a bell for those who have not seen them before, because in the West the style has been adapted--for childrens’ book illustration.

It is as if the West can only conceive this art as Arabian Nights fairy-tale fiction or as the symbol of stylish aplomb it became when we adapted its whiplash curves to Art Nouveau. The Ottoman Turks were once the European bogymen the Soviets are today. Maybe there is some kind of subconscious cultural revenge in making their art either puerile or foppish. A simple line drawing by the artist Velican seems etched by a figure-skater and makes Aubrey Beardsley look like a barbarian.

It is to the credit of this marvelous art that it evokes in us the realms of the unbelievable, like the creations of beings of another--possibly superior--order. Certainly getting it through our skulls that this is the fruit of a real and very great people is a good lesson in cultural appreciation.

The Ottoman Turkish sultan Suleyman I was born in 1494, two years after Columbus discovered America. He ruled until 1566, dying while leading his army against Hungary at age 72. His reign marked the crest of Ottoman power and produced--thanks largely to the sultans personal patronage--what was arguably the greatest period in Islamic art. Suleyman was the contemporary of England’s Henry VIII, France’s Francis I and the Hapsburg emperor Charles V. The size of his empire made them look like state governors. It boomed up through the Balkans, edged across Northern Africa, cascaded down the Red Sea through Egypt to Yemen fanning out through Syria and Mesopotamia. And Suleyman’s art matched the magnificence of his empire. And what is here does not even touch on his achievements as a patron of architecture.

It is the essence of Opulence.

Muslim doctrine forbids the depiction of living things because, it reasons, the artist with the arrogance to create likeness is taking over functions reserved to the deity. This did not stop them from hiring infidels to paint exquisite miniatures or stylizing motifs from nature in their patterns or making art designed to paralyze the viewer.

They did impossible things with color. Blues that are supposed to recede from the eye advance as if they were reds. Deep bloody scarlets brood and recede. In a silk brocade, pink turns hot and electric against a passive pale blue. Nobody ever used color with such sensual artifice. This stuff makes European culture look like it suffers from a fear of beauty. When your eyes bite into a peach-colored rug, the juice runs down your cheeks. These colors turn to heavy perfume, too luxurious and sweet for austere northerners. The vision is so lush it is hard for us to keep in mind that it is, in the end, a spiritual vision, but it is apparent in the way the art disembodies itself.

Anthropological observers think that art has its purposes. Armor is made not just to protect but to impress and frighten. Ottoman art is not so much frightening. It is as stunning as a “Star Trek” phaser. Attacked by a man in a suit that makes him the shape of a Blue Meanie wearing an onion-domed helmet, carrying his bow in a velvet case and advancing with a bejeweled knife of elegant design, might create a fatal flash of belief that there might be worse ways to go than being slain by this magical alien. Look at those appliqued boots. Not only are they gorgeous, they seem to have been fashioned with the novel idea that boots should fit the feet rather than on our authoritarian notion that the feet must conform to the shoe.

The art creates a sense of magic that is by no means fortuitous. Embroidered shirts made for Suleyman have designs that turn out to be intricate occult talismans.

Islamic culture is rightly remembered for its achievements in poetry and mathematics, a contradiction more apparent than real. Both have to do with precision. Both hold controlling interest in this art. Its lyrical side gives it delicate buoyancy and superb color harmonics. Its mathematical side creates an impressive clarity and sense of control that prevents even the most effulgent ceramic decoration from lapsing into excess.

In the end, everything from exquisitely inlaid domed wooden Koran boxes to a gold ceremonial throne is a little scary. The art revels in walking a tightrope of contradiction between refinement and excess, between artificiality and earthiness. It is like watching an aerialist walk his rope while juggling torches and razor-sharp scimitars.