Translating Desire: Safavid and Ottoman Daggers in the Venetian Imaginary

This article studies the circulation and reception of a group of metal daggers, inscribed with self-referential Persian poems, that travelled throughout Persian, Ottoman, and Italian territories in the sixteenth century. Whereas past scholarship on the circulation of Islamic metalwork has often located the cross-cultural appeal of these objects in their aesthetic or economic value, we show how the technique and epigraphy of these daggers interacted with literary traditions in the Italian and Islamic worlds. In particular, we link a dagger at the Metropolitan Museum in New York to the work of two distant writers: the little-known Persian poet, Maulana Nutqi Shirazi, and the infamous Italian satirist and pornographer, Pietro Aretino. The connections mediated by such daggers reveal both cross-cultural affinities and misunderstandings, indicating how gendered violence and non-binary erotic fantasies were translated and transformed across cultures through the mobility of artifacts.