An Ottoman Album of Drawings with European Engravings (TSMK, H. 2135) (original) (raw)

This paper revises an album (muraqqa) (Topkapı Palace Museum Library, H.2135) which was compiled at the end of the 18th century for a bibliophile Ottoman bureaucrat named Mehmed Emin Efendi who was the youngest son of shaykh-ül islâm Veliyyüd-dîn Efendi. The dimensions of the album’s binding are 37 x 26 cm. Its front and back had been covered by an European seraser fabric dating to the mid 18th century. The album has twenty seven folios which are at the same dimensions of the binding and all of these folios had been arranged by the compilation of various flat-coloured and marbled papers using the vassale method. Further the illumination works in Safavid and Ottoman styles in this album had also been aligned with the same method. At these folios there are sixty five drawings, three of them are European engravings, one belonging to Hans Brosamer who was a German painter, draughtsman, engraver and woodcut designer. He worked in Fulda from c. 1520 to the mid-1540s, as is known from a series of dated paintings and copper engravings. The rest of drawings are qalem-i siyahî works, most of which are tinted. These works had been drawn in Timurid Herat and Safavid Meshed, Horasan (Herat), Isfahan styles during the late 15th and 16th-17th centuries. This album also contains Ottoman drawings dating to the 17th and 18th centuries. This paper will deal with the content of the album H.2135 trying to clarify the connection between European engravings and Islamic drawings according to the interactions of cultures, their subject matter, medium and provenance.