Cross-Cultural Spaces in an Anonymously Painted Portrait of the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II (original) (raw)
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2021
This dissertation could not have happened without the guidance and support of my advisor, Professor Emine Fetvacı, to whom I owe the greatest thanks. Emine's encyclopedic knowledge of the history of Islamic art, as well as her compassion and genuine care for her students has truly made my experience as a graduate student the best that it could be. Professor Jodi Cranston also deserves great thanks for encouraging me to push the boundaries of theoretical discourse, both in my dissertation writing and during in-class discussions. Jodi has asked me some truly challenging questions along the way, but always responded to my attempts to answer them with kindness. I am grateful to my committee members, who entertained my ideas of crossdisciplinary connections with grace and curiosity: Professors Jonathan Ribner, Alice Tseng, and Sunil Sharma. Professor Sharma deserves extra thanks for his extreme patience in teaching me the basics of Persian grammar. Thanks is also due to other faculty in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, including Cynthia Becker, who offered coaching and support as I prepared for candidacy exams, Ross Barrett, Sibel Bozdoğan, Deborah Kahn, who trusted me to be her research assistant, Fred Kleiner, who believed in my teaching ability, and Michael Zell, who let me cry in his office on at least one occasion. The Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS) and Koç Holding provided funding and support for research conducted in Istanbul during the 2019-2020 year. I wish to thank Günsel Renda and her students at Koç University for their hospitality. Professor Renda's generosity, feedback, and suggestions were invaluable to my dissertation project. Thanks vi to Vasia Mole at Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) for consistently offering assistance and cheer on cold December mornings. ITS also provided funding for my language studies at the Intensive Ottoman and Turkish Summer School of the Ottoman Studies Foundation in 2018. For their language courses at Cunda, I thank Selim Kuru, Yorgos Dedes, Maryam Niazadeh, Evangelia Balta, and Gülşah Taşkın. Special thanks to Berk Emek and the acil servis staff at Ayvalık Devlet Hastanesi for making sure I made it through the summer safely. To Himmet and Abdullah Hocas, thank you for helping me through the excruciatingly slow process of transcription and translation. I thank Niko Kontovas and Roberta Micallef likewise for their patience in teaching me modern Turkish.
Three Italian Portraits of the Ottoman Sultan
This dissertation surveys the evolution of the image of Mehmed II (r.1444-46, r. 1451-1481) through three contemporary Italian portraits of the sultan. These paintings are; the portrait in the National Gallery in London, the Double Portrait (sold by Sotheby’s in 2015), and the portrait in the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. After examining the emergence and the development of the image of Mehmed II through his medal portraits, this study focuses on the aforementioned portraits of the sultan, which were painted in the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries by Italian painters. Even though, there are many publications on the portrait in the National Gallery, the other two paintings were not studied in detail. This research analyzes the iconography of the paintings and compares the portraits to interpret their meaning in a broader context. It aims to understand how the iconography of portraits of Mehmed II evolved between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries within the Western cultural and political context. Keywords: Sultan Mehmed II, Gentile Bellini, Renaissance portraiture, Medal portrait, Iconography
“‘World-Seizing’ Albums: Imported Paintings from ʿAcem and Hindūstān on an Eclectic Ottoman Market.”
Ars Orientalis, 2021
Imported Paintings from ʿAcem and Hindūstān in an Eclectic Ottoman Market During the long eighteenth century, a rising consumer class of Ottoman urbanites fed their global sensibilities with a host of goods from Istanbul's thriving market. Among these offerings, expansions in mercantile trade and diplomacy brought a widening range of imported artworks into the commercial painting sector. These works included not only European specimens but also paintings from India, Iran, and Central Asia, preserved in commercial albums that have yet to receive attention comparable to that enjoyed by their royal counterparts. The influx of imported paintings provided artists, compilers, and owners opportunities for interpreting these works in a new historical context. Their methods of engagement ranged from the textual inscription of new identities onto foreign figures and the artistic augmentation of the compositions (overpainting), to full-scale adaptations of these imported models into local aesthetics. This article begins with a case-study collection at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France before contextualizing these works within wider trends across the contemporaneous album corpus. In all cases, eclectic tastes dominated from the microlevel of the painting to the macro-level of the album, which together strove to make the foreign familiar and the old new in a visual expression of the stylistic novelty permeating Ottoman media of the period.
Manazir Journal
In 1566, after Sultan Suleiman’s death, Shah Tahmasp (r. 1524-1576) sent condolences and congratulations to Sultan Selim II (r. 1566-1574) along with several gifts, including a magnificent Quran and an exquisite illustrated Shahnama copy, noteworthy in Iranian art history. However, the letter accompanying these gifts has often been overlooked, perceived as containing mere courtesies. This letter marked a significant exchange between Safavid kings and Ottoman sultans, with participation from secretaries across Iran. Its authors aimed to portray an idealized king and their notable characteristics, demonstrating that the actions of these rulers (Sultan Suleiman, Sultan Selim, and particularly Shah Tahmasp) aligned with this ideal. Art-related activities were among these characteristics. The authors detailed the Safavid king’s palace, garden, and the artistic gifts to highlight their connection with the king’s ideal image. This article explores the letter as a literary and artistic medi...
Ottoman Art and the West in the Sixteenth Century
2019
A historiographical essay on Ottoman Art from the 15th to the 16th century. Specifically, an analysis of Bellini's Portrait of Mehmed II and the influences it carried through Suleiman I's reign.
As a discursive practice, Orientalism has been far-reaching over the passing centuries. Worldwide, it effectively informed the mindsets of many artists, writers, and political activists, endowing particular entailments to the conception of “the East”. In this respect, Edward Said’s seminal book Orientalism can be regarded as the first systematic attempt to unravel the inner workings of this complex but equally pivotal process. However, Said’s analysis only provides a limited understanding of Orientalism since it primarily focuses on the various Orientalist constructions in arts, philosophy, and literature throughout Europe. Hence, Said somewhat overlooks the embodiments of Orientalism in the other regions of the world. This flaw of the book was even attested by Said himself in his later writings as he admitted that Orientalism was solely a study of the West and it has not developed a cross-cultural examination. If the semantic field of Orientalism, however, encompasses any discursive construction of the East including those which do not attribute pre-conceived characteristics to it, then it is neither something peculiar to the West nor necessarily biased in nature. On this account, one can think of Osman Hamdi Bey, an Orientalist par excellence whose oeuvre was originated in the late Ottoman empire. So far, several scholars have engaged with the life and artworks of Osman Hamdi Bey. Ussama Makdisi coins the term “Ottoman Orientalism” to elucidate how the Ottoman elites had perceived and represented the Arab peripheries of the empire during the nineteenth century. But, more importantly, in this context, Makdisi argued that Osman Hamdi Bey was an ardent promoter of Ottoman Orientalism based on his activities in the Arab provinces of the empire to collect artifacts. On the other hand, Zeynep Çelik invoked Osman Hamdi Bey’s ability to “speak back to Orientalist discourse” whereas Wendy Shaw perceived his art as a “subversion of Orientalist vision”. The present study picks up on the insights of these scholars. It will analyze the content and semiotics of Osman Hamdi Bey’s paintings to unearth the tenets of his peculiar Orientalism. To do so, naturally, these paintings will be put in a critical comparison with those of European Orientalist artist. Throughout this inquiry, I will argue that although Osman Hamdi Bey can be considered as an Orientalist in style, his paintings accommodates unorthodox aspects which significantly diverge from and, even, challenge the mainstream representations of European Orientalism. This contrast can be displayed in numerous ways. However, as my litmus test, I will exclusively focus on how Osman Hamdi Bey’s perception of gender roles in the Orient was different than those of his European peers.
In the Margins of Art History: Ottoman Armenian Artists and Art Historiography
This paper aims to introduce an art historical dimension to the discourse on Armenian and Turkish historiographies. It advocates critical treatment of the collective work of Ottoman Armenian artists, which, it argues, can generate far-reaching repercussions for both historiographies and beyond. Eurocentric canonical art histories generally dismiss the oeuvre of non-western artists working in western modes of production – such as oil on canvas painting – as mimetic and derivative of a western art tradition. The inheritors of the fragmented art historical space of the Ottoman Empire, replicating this model, have constructed their own canons where a dominant ‘national gaze’ substitutes that of the ‘western’. These linear and teleological nationalist or nation-centric narratives – including the ‘Turkish’ and ‘Armenian’ – mirror one another as they sieve complex pasts through the homogenizing prism of the national group or state to invent categories of ‘national art’ that allow no room for nuance. In this historiographic environment, Ottoman Armenian artists’ (and often subjects’) Armenian identities disrupt a nationalist Turkish imagination obsessed with wholesale appropriation and ‘Turkification’ of large tracts of the Ottoman art historical landscape, whereas any interaction with an Ottoman cultural context complicates myopic post-genocide Armenian views that render all aspects of the Ottoman experience as negative. Hence, the voice of the Ottoman Armenian artist is silenced through either deliberate, systematic exclusion, or selective effacement and assimilation of complex identities into simplistic narratives forged at the expense of contextualization and empirical base. This paper argues that a critical consideration of this substantial neglected visual art production undermines these artificial and inadequate art histories and interrupts their reductive narratives; furthermore, such honest treatment can act as a bridge between exclusive and hostile historiographies that inhabit parallel universes, and make powerful interventions into the discourse, transcending ossified narratives and prompting the study of Ottoman art into new territory.