“D and fables I fashion,” wrote 18th-century Italian poet and librettist Pietro Metastasio, “and even while I sketch elaborate fables and dreams upon paper ... I so enter into them that I weep and am offended at ills I invented” (1). Metastasio might have been describing the work of his contemporary Giambattista Tiepolo, whose art blended history, mythology, legend, and scripture in a grand man...

Lacunary perceptions, biased and partial, often anecdotal, and subject to an impression of anarchy, disorder and gigantism, commonly confer a comfortable illegitimacy on attempts to interpret a metropolis like Cairo. The impenetrable crowd, inevitably “clamorous,” ensures a cheap continuity for nostalgia about the mysteries of the Orient and about the romanticism of ruins. Immutable stereotypes...