CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- This summer, the Harvard Art Museums present the story of the rich cross-cultural artistic connections that took place over 300 years between the Dutch, the Flemish, and the Islamic world. The exhibition Imagine Me and You: Dutch and Flemish Encounters with the Islamic World, 1450–1750 challenges the persistent notion that war—in particular, religious war between Christians and Muslims—dominated their interactions. In reality, the Habsburg, Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires were all multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-lingual, and multi-faith societies. Prompted by the rich diversity of these empires, Imagine Me and You explores the myriad cultural, diplomatic, and mercantile interactions that took place either in person or through the exchange of objects, art, and ideas.

Imagine Me and You was curated by Talitha Maria G. Schepers, the 2022–24 Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellow in the Division of European and American Art at the Harvard Art Museums. She worked closely with a range of museum colleagues in curatorial, conservation, programming, and other departments to develop and implement the exhibition.

“My main hope is that visitors will explore the exhibition, either in person or through the accompanying digital tool, and encounter something new and meaningful about the cultures represented, or something that inspires them to see their own culture through fresh eyes,” said Schepers. “I encourage visitors to consider how cross-cultural interactions have shaped and enriched who we are as a global community not just in recent times, but for centuries.”

Imagine Me and You unveils the vibrancy of multi-cultural exchange between the Low Countries (roughly modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands), then part of the Habsburg empire (1282–1918), and the Islamic world, in particular the Ottoman (1285–1923), Safavid (1501–1736), and Mughal (1526–1858) Empires that concurrently controlled much of Central and Southeast Europe, North Africa, and South, West, and Central Asia. European artists experienced multiple and diverse encounters with the Islamic world through travel, trade, war, and diplomacy. These interactions varied in level of contact: aside from in-person interactions, Netherlandish artists could also encounter the Islamic world visually, through works on paper that circulated across Eurasia and reached the Low Countries.

The approximately 120 objects in the exhibition include drawings, prints, paintings, textiles, and more. In addition to sumptuous textiles and striking wool carpets from Türkiye (Turkey) and intricate album paintings from the Ottoman and Mughal periods, there is a range of drawings and prints from Netherlandish, Flemish, Dutch and other artists, including Margaretha Adriaensdr. de Heer, Haydar Reis, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Melchior Lorck, Nicolas de Nicolay, Lucas van Leyden, Jacob Marrel, Rembrandt, and many more.

More than 75 of the works are drawn from the permanent collections of the Harvard Art Museums. Loans have been generously provided by the Maida and George Abrams Collection, the Tobey Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the following Harvard University collections: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Houghton Library, and Fine Arts Library.

By bringing together works from these different collections, the exhibition provides a new way of understanding the museums’ permanent holdings within a global context. It explores how Netherlandish representations of the Islamic world were meant to be understood at the time. Artists from the Low Countries increasingly refined their techniques to create ever-more lifelike representations, but lifelikeness should not be mistaken for reality. The majority of works on display are not accurate representations of events, but imagined renderings created by highly skilled artists, many of whom never visited the Ottoman, Safavid, or Mughal Empires.

The exhibition consists of eleven sections across three gallery spaces that guide the visitor thematically and chronologically through the narrative of cross-cultural encounters. Highlights include:

• A dynamic display of nine delicate drawings by various Dutch artists of tulips, along with texts that discuss the period known as Dutch Tulipomania, when tulips—traded through diplomatic relations with the Ottoman court—became a highly sought-after luxury commodity in the Netherlands in 1634 and bulbs fetched exorbitant prices in a speculative market that crashed three years later.

• A monumental woodcut by Netherlandish artist Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Customs and Fashions of the Turks (1553), which, through seven scenes, depicts a journey from Eastern Europe to Istanbul, to meet Sultan Süleyman. Measuring nearly 16 feet long, the highly detailed frieze of processions of men walking and on horseback constitutes the earliest visual rendering in the Low Countries of a journey to the Ottoman Empire, one that Coecke personally took in 1533.

• An exquisite 18th- to 19th-century Ottoman long silk satin robe, or kaftan, from Türkiye (Turkey), decorated with gold and silver metallic threads in a swaying vine motif, likely worn by a woman. This work, on display for the first time since it was acquired in 1999, was recently studied by Adrienne Gendron, 2022–24 Objects Conservation Fellow in the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. Her research into how the metallic threads were fabricated before being woven into the robe is shared in the gallery.

• A display case containing 13 historical pigment samples sheds light on some of the materials these artists used, including ultramarine, rose madder, and cinnabar. The case is also being utilized as an in-situ experiment by Celia S. Chari, 2022–25 Beal Family Postgraduate Fellow in Conservation Science in the Straus Center, who is looking into the light-induced color changes of realgar-type pigments, which are made of arsenic and sulfur. Recent technical research on an Ottoman watercolor portrait of Francis I, King of France, by Haydar Reis, has opened up a question: did the artist deliberately use pararealgar—a rare, mineral-based yellow pigment—for the golden portions of the painting, or were they originally painted with realgar, a red pigment which is known to chemically transform into pararealgar when exposed to visible light? Paint outs that contain realgar-type pigments will be exposed to gallery lights throughout the duration of the exhibition to further this investigation.

The accompanying digital resource, available through the museums’ website and via QR codes in the galleries, dives deeper into the exhibition’s core themes of encounter and imagination. A variety of contributions, ranging from short texts focused on a single object to longer technical studies, reflects a multitude of voices from across the Harvard Art Museums and Harvard University. The essays provide more in-depth information about Coecke’s woodcut frieze Customs and Fashions of the Turks, the Dutch craze for tulips and watercolor drawings of tulips, depictions of Islamic textiles and Ottoman attire in Netherlandish and French artworks, the hybrid objects in the exhibition that fuse elements from different cultures and styles, the technical studies of the Ottoman kaftan and Haydar Reis’s portrait of Francis I, and much more. The online platform allows for a broader investigation beyond the works displayed in the galleries and extends the life of the exhibition.