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Abstract
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 micro-level 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.
An evocative ḳıtʿa (two-distich poem) by the Ottoman bureaucrat İzzet Ali Paşa (1692–1734) preserves a description of a tailored gift to the poet from his beloved: an album of images with wide-reaching ambitions. He writes,
In this intimate verse, the poet draws a mischievous parallel between idol worshippers (ṣūret-perest) and pictures (taṣvir) in his beloved’s gift. Particularly because the poet’s paramour constructed this bespoke collection to hint at his likeness, already populating his lover’s heart, the lines leave little doubt that the pictures in this album likely contained figural paintings or drawings. While the poem offers no description of the figures that the paintings might have held, İzzet Ali Paşa does describe the collection as a whole with a deliberate and salient term: “world-seizing/conquering” (ʿālem-gīr). This descriptor arguably invokes the idea of a varied set of contents that captured figures and artistic styles from around the globe—perhaps even imported paintings. This article will demonstrate how the album described here fit a growing movement among Ottoman collectors during the long eighteenth century that spanned countless surviving compilations, eventually even inhabiting individual paintings. Almost album-like in its conception, the composite painting that is reached by the end of this study encapsulates the world-seizing themes of its poetic incarnation in the pasha’s verse. The painting’s imported subjects of an Indian maiden and meditating dervish, originally drawn in Iran, receive an eclectic makeover in Istanbul, thus reclaiming the work in a new visual language distinct to the Ottoman market. In this work, traces of artists’ hands from numerous time periods and geographical spaces converge in a single painting, where their diverse styles offer a statement on transcultural encounter as powerful as their subject matter. Although we will return to this painting later, it is introduced here as one of the many visual affirmations of the cosmopolitan aesthetic suggested by this couplet. Over the course of the eighteenth century, commercial artists and collectors increasingly created albums that emphasized this syncretic globalizing outlook. Consumers showcased fresh sources for figural painting, informed by a widening array of imported goods that infused Ottoman literary imaginations of the period.
The term ʿālem-gīr echoes sobriquets used for the rulers of the Mughal Empire (1526–1857), like Jahangir (“World Seizer/Conqueror”; 1569–1627, r. 1605–27), who was well known to the Ottomans as he received no less than three embassies from Ahmed I (1590–1617, r. 1603–17) to his court.[2] Yet during this earlier period, it was primarily royal albums, like that of the similarly dubbed “world emperor” Ahmed I, that captured a more global vision of the arts. As Emine Fetvacı has noted for Ahmed I’s album, compiled in the 1610s, such titles were employed intentionally in the album’s preface, and likewise were reflected in its contents and overall organization.[3] Altogether the album illustrated “the significance of viewing the artistic landscape of the early modern world as connected.”[4] The sultan’s chosen compiler Vassal Kalendar curated a range of wider Persianate works, European prints, and Ottoman paintings that drew from the wealth of visual sources in diplomatic gifts, booty, and court atelier productions housed in the sultan’s collection. Although works by commercial artists made their way into this album, they contributed to a compilation consumed primarily by the scrutinizing gaze of a sultan, whose strategic patronage defined artistic programs of the era.[5] Yet, by the first half of the eighteenth century, as İzzet Ali Paşa’s poem relates, new patrons contributed to a highly syncretic and interconnected worldview through album-making, including the anonymous beloved of this young, upper-middling bureaucrat.[6] Although syncretism in the arts was not new to the Ottoman capital, the albums of this later period increasingly demonstrate how a burgeoning group of cosmopolitan collectors responded to the wider commercial sector to become major contributors to growing trends in painting.[7] While we do not know if İzzet Ali Paşa’s album survives to this day (or if it only served as a poetic conceit), the albums discussed below offer apt examples of the dynamic invoked by its description. These albums capture a heightening diversity in the figures portrayed, rivaled only by the “world-seizing” origins of the imported paintings that they reclaimed. These paintings contributed to a fresh aesthetic of novelty in the Ottoman market during the long eighteenth century in which Ottoman artists not only drew inspiration from these works but actively engaged in transforming older paintings and imports into dynamic sites of encounter.
Contextualizing the Later History of Single-Folio Paintings and Commercial Albums
Artists of the Ottoman palace crafted albums for the royal household beginning in the early part of the sixteenth century, thanks to encounters with earlier albums from the Timurid Empire (1370–1507) and Safavid dynasty (1501–1736).[8] Yet this premier form of collecting, preserving, and displaying works on paper did not stay sequestered in palace settings for long. Experiments during the last quarter of the sixteenth century suggest that the practice of album-making had spread beyond the palace walls to new audiences of wealthy collectors in the capital of Istanbul.[9] By the early seventeenth century, a thriving art market had grown to supply this tenacious taste for collecting. An array of artists and dealers offered diverse works for purchase and commission, including decorated papers, calligraphy, découpages, and single-folio paintings. Their works catered to a range of paying consumers that spanned Ottoman urbanites and foreign travelers, even making their way into royal collections.[10] Of these commercial offerings, the transformation of single-folio paintings vividly captures how the market responded to changing demands and modes of consumption.
During the early decades of commercial painting in Istanbul, from the late sixteenth to early seventeenth century, the demands of buyers across Ottoman and European demographics largely consisted of local productions featuring characters that could be found in the palace and streets of the Ottoman capital or imperial provinces: sultans, their court, laborers, members of various religious communities, and fashionable urbanites, with only the occasional generic figures from the wider Islamicate world included in this corpus.[11] Yet this dynamic began to change by the mid- to late seventeenth century, and escalated after the Ottoman court’s return to Istanbul from its half-century residence in Edirne in 1703. The return sparked flourishing forms of consumerism, which stoked a second blossoming of the art market, giving rise to dedicated and diverse forms of painting collection.[12] This study delves into that later period of the commercial painting market as it responded to the mercantile forces that imported sources of inspiration for artists and collectors alike to adapt to their broadening artistic sensibilities.
The pages of later commercial albums from Istanbul carefully forged “connected histories” between the micro-level of Istanbul and supra-regional level of the wider Persianate world and Europe, a situation that complicates the long-held narrative of Westernization in Ottoman painting of the eighteenth century.[13] Instead, as we shall see, the later period of commercial painting and album-making ushered in a heightened fervor for imported works from the Safavid and Mughal Empires just as much as (if not more so than) European arts to create a far more globalizing vision for this period of commercial painting and collecting. Therefore, much like historians of Ottoman architecture have reassessed the blanket moniker of Westernization in the past two decades, Ottoman painting warrants a similar fresh eye, particularly from the commercial perspective.[14]
Furthermore, the painting market becomes increasingly significant when considering its output in relation to the court by the eighteenth century. Commercial artists (that is, those primarily employed outside the palace workshop) constituted a vital force in painting production, particularly as the royal atelier shrank steadily from more than a hundred artists at its height during the mid-sixteenth century to numbers regularly between six and seven artists throughout the eighteenth century.[15] Even when discounting older works preserved within compilations constructed during this period, a large enough number of paintings remains to comfortably suspect that these commercial artists enjoyed considerable favor among collectors, in addition to the second-hand paintings and imported works sold by dealers.[16] “Imported” or “foreign” is used here to refer specifically to models of a non-Ottoman origin (often single-figure character designs) arriving from areas spanning Europe to the eastern bounds of the Islamicate empires.
In addition to these wider offerings, by the eighteenth century numerous albums and inheritance registers preserve the names of owners, which had spread to include literati, notables from military-bureaucratic backgrounds, merchants, and their families.[17] Here, we will explore how the desires of this widening group of buyers in the capital, buoyed by the court’s return, stoked new trends of art consumption that would distinguish the later painting market from its earlier incarnations. As we shall see, the collecting craze for imported paintings gave artists new cause to craft their own adaptations of foreign designs. Far from acting as mere copiers, commercial artists added their new sources to a fluid and dynamic corpus of imagery that flourished under the expanding patronage that they enjoyed.
Several questions must be posed regarding the commercial image corpus: what happened when fresh models were introduced to the image pool? How did buyers consume these works, or even adapt them for their own personal enjoyment? What iconographic circuits did an imported model travel to gain popularity in the Ottoman commercial market? Such questions loomed over this research on Ottoman commercial albums, including one trilogy of albums at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (hereafter, BnF), the bindings and Ottoman figures of which were introduced in an earlier study.[18] This trilogy makes a fitting point of departure for a larger conversation regarding the transformation of the Ottoman painting market in the eighteenth century. In pursuing the questions above, these albums and their contemporaries unveil an era of painting that celebrated stylistic novelty by borrowing from this increasingly eclectic assemblage of visual sources in a manner that manifested in both painting production and collection.
Moreover, the interpretations of imported paintings in later albums compel us to question the centrality of European exoticism in the eighteenth century, loaded with its colonialist connotations. These works instead turn our attention to another, more complex dynamic operating within the Islamicate world with its own unique set of distinctions, which have yet to receive substantial attention in Ottoman painting studies.[19] If we are to use or even reclaim the term “exoticism” for this context, it must be recalibrated to reflect the Ottoman connotations of “world-siezing” art during this period. In this incarnation of exoticism, a work’s appeal derived in large part from its non-local origins, which could be wielded or manipulated within a new context as a creative force to enrich the cultural production of a cosmopolitan setting. In the albums discussed here, paintings play directly on shifting concepts of ʿAcem (Iran) and Hindūstān (the Indian subcontinent) to bolster an eighteenth-century vision of Ottoman cosmopolitanism. As Nile Green rightly has noted, outside the context of Iran and India, on the spatial edges of the Persianate world—the Ottoman (1299–1922) and Qing (1644–1912) Empires, and beyond—we also must “recognize the roles of hegemony and competition that are easily downplayed in celebrations of ‘Persianate cosmopolitanism.’”[20] These seeming contradictions allowed for Ottomans both to embrace certain elements of painting imported from abroad, and at other times to distinguish themselves from their rivals in responses that reinforced notions of artistic dialogue, competition, or even subversion.[21] Sometimes these associations are invoked explicitly in displacement, such as the recasting of foreign figures as characters of a distant past, and at other times they are conjured tacitly through cultural identification, such as portrayals of foreign dress or deliberate stylistic juxtaposition. Although imported paintings were admired for their diverse origins, the eclectic assemblages produced in these later albums diverged from a European sense of exoticism, or even from earlier eroticized portrayals of foreigners found in Safavid single-folio painting.[22] This Ottoman vision of exoticism was not always overtly erotic, although undercurrents of desire may be detectable when contextualized with literature of the period.
Across the later commercial albums, a distinct flavor of exoticism fed directly upon wider modes of consumerism for imported material luxuries, which were celebrated for their origins in contemporaneous Ottoman poetry, as we shall see. Yet, even if consumers derived pleasure, delight, and desire from encountering a foreign work or figure, the appeal arguably came in the powerful ability to refashion and re-inscribe meaning onto an imported work to fit distinctly Ottoman worldviews.[23] To this end, the form of exoticization here closely ties to collecting as an act of consumption, wherein imported paintings acted as foreign commodities to identify, organize, and display, even if only for intimate groups.[24] In this form of “consumable globalism,” compilers and owners reframed paintings under an Ottoman gaze to usher in a new stage in the works’ biographies as wonders or foreign specimens worthy of admiration.[25] Their selections for these albums, alongside the wider themes that governed their organization, reflect encounters with the wider world (European, Persianate, or otherwise) informed by luxury goods imported into Istanbul and the literary narratives constructed around them.[26] Perhaps fittingly, the scope of this phenomenon in Ottoman painting closely reflected wider modes of production during the eighteenth century, best encapsulated by Shirine Hamadeh’s concept of “décloisonnement,” or the opening up of society that encouraged artists and consumers increasingly to embrace outside sources to create an aesthetic of novelty unique to this later context.[27] Although Hamadeh originally applied this term to architecture, her findings also fit snugly into the world of painting during the same period. To adapt her words to this medium, Ottomans “selectively adopted and creatively refashioned” paintings originating from both abroad and Istanbul to construct “stylistically uncommitted” collections.[28] It may be argued that both artists and consumers contributed to that process. Altogether, their efforts generated collections that celebrated novelty through their “world-seizing” attributes.
First, we will examine the imported works in the case-study collection, the BnF trilogy (Arabe 6075–6077), before turning to address how some non-local models were altered and adapted within the same albums. The following sections explore Ottoman interpretations of these imported paintings through progressive levels: first, we consider the wider commercial context for this globalizing outlook, before turning to the inscriptions appended to imported paintings that reclaimed their figures for an Ottoman viewer. We then look to artistic augmentations (or overpainting) and Ottomanized adaptations of imported works. The final part of this study addresses wider trends among the later painted albums to demonstrate the extent to which heightened exposure to imported works tantalized the capital’s collectors with a taste for the eclectic. Both the microcosm of the BnF trilogy and its contemporaries point to a larger phenomenon, inherently tied to the steadily increasing demand for novelty.
A Fresh Aesthetic in the Ottoman Painting Market?
Perhaps best known from Ottoman poetry and architectural descriptions, vocabulary for this aesthetic of freshness and novelty spanned terms such as nevpeydā (novel), nevzemīn (new mode), and nev-ṭarz (new style), among other formulations.[29] As discussed in Hamadeh’s study, these terms likely reflected an aesthetic of the new, which developed at the Safavid court in the seventeenth century; there, this aesthetic was known as tāzagī/tāzaguī (literally, “freshness” or “novelty” in Persian), which sometimes was problematically dubbed sabk-i hindī, or the “Indian” style.[30] This theme spread rapidly during the seventeenth century and became a defining factor in poetic and artistic expression by the eighteenth century, encouraged by cross-cultural interactions across the Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman Empires.[31] According to Paul Losensky, poets who engaged in this style forged a “dialectic between innovation and tradition.”[32] Earlier studies on Persian manuscripts have demonstrated that the same theme often played out in painting, as old subjects became a fertile ground for reinterpretation to new and surprising degrees.[33] Later Ottoman albums make a necessary expansion of this topic, while demonstrating the power of mercantile forces that circulated art across the Islamicate world and beyond. In fact, the contents of these albums challenge a common narrative of Ottoman painting from the late seventeenth to eighteenth century, which attributes its “decadent” development largely to an increasing fascination with Western European art, seldom considering the plentiful influx of works from Persianate sources.[34] Yet, beyond this dynamic, the adaptation and consumption of such paintings from the wider Persianate world during the eighteenth century invites an intertwined discussion of how old and new, and imported and local production, interacted within the collections of Ottoman consumers.
When we consider the commercial market holistically, a much more complicated narrative of development emerges wherein the past often mingled alongside the present in the facing folios of albums, or even within individual paintings. That diachronic aesthetic in painting and compilation during this period belongs to a larger history of artistic recommodification. In this regard, the shelf life of a painted model was extended as a new audience reinterpreted its role for a different geographic and temporal setting. This article opens that discussion to consider a surge in imported paintings among other luxury goods from the Indian subcontinent, possibly via Iran, Yemen, or another intermediary market. Ottoman–Mughal relations in art have long gone understudied, with just a few works treating the topic (and in a largely indirect manner).[35] Even in the most focused consideration of the topic, in Rachel Milstein’s work on the important border region of Baghdad, Milstein’s argument offers only formal similarities between illustrated Sufi genres from the Ottoman, Shirazi, and Deccan context, rather than concrete evidence of artistic exchange.[36] Another opportunity, however, lies in the imported works and their adaptations found in the albums of the Ottoman capital, where far more documentation allows scholars to trace the ways in which trade and diplomacy may have facilitated this development. Likewise, this story of the market remains largely untold.
Far more is known about the artistic relations between adjacent empires, for example, between Iran and the courts of the Deccan sultanates (1527–1686) or Mughal Empire, which have received considerable attention for the seventeenth century onwards.[37] Or further westward, Safavid–Ottoman relations enjoyed a long-acknowledged role in the formation of the Ottoman court atelier during the sixteenth century.[38] Much less is said, however, about the continuation of Iran’s impact on Ottoman painting (and the wider world of the arts) after the turn of the seventeenth century, even less so after the fall of the Safavid Empire in 1736. While the seeds of interest in Mughal art, specifically, emerged at the court as early as the start of the seventeenth century, the large-scale uptake of this art among commercial buyers was slower, largely emerging during the second half of the seventeenth century and gaining traction during the eighteenth century.[39] The dissemination of Mughal paintings alongside later Safavid works in Ottoman collections compels scholars to re-assess how the extended shelf lives of older painted models ultimately could feed new trends in the market, including a desire for the culturally eclectic aesthetics of novelty.
Consumer(s) and the Globalizing Outlook of the Wider Market
It is essential to clarify some complexities present in the first trilogy of albums under consideration, as several hands of Ottoman and possibly Iranian origin appear throughout the volumes. Here, however, we will consider primarily the inscriptions in the Ottoman hand that appears on the overwhelming majority of folios, the hand that not only wrote the literary character labels but also captioned the latest historical figures (also Ottoman in origin) dating to the end of the eighteenth century. Based on the datable paintings, historical captions, and contemporaneous material trappings of the album trilogy, these inscriptions are almost certainly from the hand of the Ottoman compiler or owner of the collection in the last decades of the eighteenth century, when the trilogy assumed its final form.[40] Without further documentation, unfortunately it is not possible to determine definitively which of those two roles the inscriber held. Regardless, this individual certainly constituted a consumer of the paintings. Moreover, the inscriptions that this individual left behind provide a valuable window into this person’s interpretation of these works: the identities projected onto these figures (both historical and literary) offer a mosaic of characters particular to the world of an Ottoman urbanite, complete with an increasingly globalizing outlook during this transformational era of Ottoman art collection and production.
While the name of the individual behind this collection remains unknown, other details point to a non-royal and urbanite background. The thin leather bindings and cover faces of marbled paper comprise far humbler materials than those used for any known album made for royalty, or even those in the most elite families of the Ottoman administration.[41] Moreover, the inscriptions analyzed here suggest an individual who easily wrote in an Ottoman secretarial hand, although variations in the orthography leave some question as to how elite this person’s education was.[42] Yet this person may not have been a Muslim, based on some telltale errors that conflated the identities of famous Sufi figures.[43] From these details, this consumer demonstrates superficial familiarity with Muslim dervish orders from the same cultural sphere, but does not evince the more intimate knowledge necessary to recall accurately the names of foundational figures. Additionally, the individual had the access and means to purchase an impressive variety of works offered on Istanbul’s market, indicating a wealthy station or family. It is not farfetched to hypothesize that this description easily fits a few key dhimmi (non-Muslim) demographics that rose to riches and power during the eighteenth century, most notably Phanariot Greeks and Armenians. By the time of this collection’s creation, Phanariot Christians, in particular, had carved out political power on the diplomatic stage as dragomans (interpreters), statesmen, architects, and merchants between the Ottoman Empire and Europe.[44] Armenians also became critical players in international trade and made extensive use of familial networks stretching from Europe to India. Elite Armenians of the high-ranking amira class gained further authority as the chief bankers and also rising architects to the Muslim aristocracy.[45]
Yet why should this background matter for the collection of commercial paintings? As their spheres of influence suggest, these dhimmi communities, alongside foreign merchants, were at the heart of networks carrying a dazzling array of imported goods to the Ottoman empire.[46] Goods arriving via the thriving trade networks of this period infused the material world of Ottoman consumers with an array of products, and answered a burgeoning penchant for Indian imports. Indian imports specifically must be noted, as they inundated many markets by this period, not only in the Ottoman world but also in those of many European neighbors. For instance, the situation in France became so dire that Louis XIV (1638–1715, r. 1643–1715) had to ban the import of Indian fabrics and all of their imitations in the late seventeenth century.[47] Ottomans, on the other hand, embraced the variety of imported goods and their many imitations in the form of textiles, ceramics, and finally the paintings under consideration here.[48] In fact, the Ottoman-Armenian chronicler İnciciyan (1758–1833) celebrates this dynamic in his description of the bazaars of Istanbul. Around the end of the eighteenth century, he writes, “The markets of Istanbul have a beautiful characteristic; there are stores well-arranged and in a row that sell the same things and every type of good, especially goods produced in India.”[49] He doubles down on this statement shortly after, by indicating that the two largest categories of foreign luxury goods were those “from Europe and especially India.”[50] Contemporaneous travelers echo İnciciyan’s enthusiasm for Indian goods. Charles Pertusier (1779–1836), a military attaché to the French Ambassador Antoine-François Andréossy (1761–1828), relates, “The richest shops are those of the dealers in silks, India-goods, arms, jewelry and drugs ... The goods in general remain night and day in open display under these office who find it to be sufficient to merely close the gates and leave a watchman.”[51]
Although the markets of Istanbul had long acted as a nexus of international goods, the changing dynamics of display and conspicuous consumption, from the marketplace to the individual level, markedly transformed by the eighteenth century.[52] As early as the first decade of the eighteenth century, Ottoman writers also alluded to heightened forms of consumption among urbanites in the romances that they versified. The Ottoman poet Neyli, for instance, offers a twist on a conversion tale by casting his protagonist as a Christian maiden, suffering from an unrequited love for a Muslim youth. In her vain attempts to obtain his love, “She opened the purse of deceits and tricks. She scattered silver and gold on the path of her beloved. The mouth of her purse was the noose of her trap so that it might capture the strutting pheasant.”[53] When her many trinkets of affection and money do not sway her beloved, she settles for a lesser love, a commercial painting with his likeness, commissioned from a talented portraitist, which she worships in place of the youth before her eventual death and conversion. While such a tale may seem exaggerated for the sake of literature, the role of conspicuous consumption in romantic relations by this period had historical analogs that played directly upon the rising attraction to imported commodities.
One rich anecdote comes from the Venetian romancer Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798), who garners the attentions of a wealthy Ottoman merchant named Yusuf Ali during his stay in Istanbul as a youth.[54] This Ottoman gentleman runs into Casanova at the shop of an Armenian merchant as the young foreigner browses its beautiful goods. Yusuf Ali praises his taste. The Venetian hesitates, however, writing, “I did not buy, because I thought they were too dear. I said so to Yusuf, but he remarked that they were on the contrary very cheap and purchased them all.”[55] The packaged goods that Yusuf Ali sends to Casanova afterwards closely correspond to the mix of beloved luxury goods described by İnciciyan and Pertusier. His gift comprised silver and gold filigrees from Damascus, portfolios, scarves, belts, handkerchiefs, and pipes, “the whole worth four or five hundred piasters.” Although Casanova only specifies the origins of the precious metals, it is highly likely that at least some of the textiles that he received had been imported from India or Iran to reach such exorbitant prices.[56] Particularly by the second half of the eighteenth century, travelers from the Islamicate world, including the Iranian Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (1752–1806), noted that the most expensive elements of Ottoman dress were “composed of the choicest manufactures of various nations,” and for textile accessories like these, “[f]rom India they are supplied with muslins, and from Persia with shawls and embroidered silks.”[57] Yusuf Ali sends Casanova yet another case of imported Mocha coffee (from Yemen), “Zabandi” tobacco, and a magnificent pipe of jasmine wood covered in gold filigree, the lot of which Casanova pawns in Corfu to fund his later exploits.[58] This anecdote marks just one sensorial feast of the imported goods that saturated the lives not only of royalty and their highest officials but also of well-to-do Ottomans (and European beneficiaries) with increasingly worldly sensibilities.[59]
The same globalizing outlook informed by this commercial sector appears to have infiltrated Ottoman artistic sensibilities, reflected as keenly in painting as in other media by the late eighteenth century. These material realities inspired many authors and painters to imagine the beauties of the worlds that created these sumptuous goods, perhaps best exemplified by the Ottoman poet Enderunlu Fazıl (1757–1810). In his Ḫūbānnāme (Book of Beautiful Boys) and Zenānnāme (Book of Women), the author elaborates on the amorous qualities of beloveds from around the globe. In the various sections of illustrated copies, a portrait of a stock figure dressed in the latest fashions of the person’s region accompanies the text, posed against a receding landscape befitting the figure’s origins—not entirely dissimilar from some backgrounds found in the BnF trilogy (fig. 1). Both works commonly are considered the quintessential examples of Westernization in Ottoman painting.[60] Yet it may be argued that, while their illustrations draw certain aspects from European portraiture (such as the landscape backgrounds and stylistic approaches), these works, in fact, facilitate a distinctly Ottoman, syncretic experience. In function, the visual programs of both texts echo the experience of single-folio character studies, which grant these manuscripts the appearance of an anthology of short poems, even facilitating non-sequential readings of the sections.[61] Moreover, earlier scholarship has noted how these texts build on a wider Persianate literary tradition of the shahrashub/şehrengīz, or “city thrillers,” which acquainted readers with urban landscapes by introducing them to beloveds who might be found on city streets.[62]
The organization of the text in these works likewise hints at mixed cultural hierarchies among the lands chosen for this world tour. Fazıl opens his text by situating his readers in the regions of the wider world. Although he praises the lands of Europe, and specifically the city of Istanbul as the fairest of them all, he does not begin his survey here. Instead, beauties from major exporters of luxury goods, such as India (Hindūstān) and Iran (ʿAcem), take the prime positions of opening the world tour in both works by Fazıl, perhaps anticipating the appetites of Ottoman viewers.[63] In his first description of the languid Indian boy, Fazıl even ends with a curious couplet that connects the beloved in the painting to the material luxuries enjoyed by Ottoman readers. He writes, “If the heart finds a beloved, he will bind it. Do the Indians travel thus? Does the fresh gift of Indian cloth deceive the learned heart?”[64] While readers may expect Fazıl to end on a note about “fresh” poetry as the link between learned hearts and their beloveds, he instead makes the surprising choice to crown Indian cloth as the fresh gift. The author’s bait-and-switch references the more likely Indian delights that his readers would encounter: cloth imports, the most prized Indian good, which frequently made the arduous journey from Surat (Gujarat), to Basra (Iraq), then to Istanbul, where these fabrics were sold at nearly twice the price of the bulk purchase rate at their point of origin.[65]
In many ways, imported Indian cloth makes an apt metaphor for an object of desire in a global market. This “fresh gift” gave Ottoman buyers (and gift recipients) a taste of the wider world through a commodity, hinting at further beauties to behold at its origin. Such textiles subsequently underwent transformations into finished products in Istanbul, made perfectly to fit the particular needs of Ottoman consumers.[66] Yet, could an imported painting provide a similar effect, or even offer a more satisfying way to fulfill the desires for foreign figures stoked by Fazıl’s verse?
Recasting Mughal Figures: Invoking New Narratives Through Inscription
An album in the Bibliothèque Nationale, known as Arabe 6075, begins unexpectedly for an Ottoman album. Far beyond the Ottoman realms, a scene plays out on a garden terrace, where a prince sits with a book in hand across from loyal attendants. Perhaps he is about to recite poetry or converse with his companions in this image of royal leisure (fig. 2). The activities portrayed are common enough for a royal scene. The composition emphasizes the prime role of the prince by his position of privilege, his bust framed by a golden column and the terrace fence, which overlooks a garden at sunset. The reader can appreciate this setting’s material trappings: the floral carpets, the cushions on which the figures sit, and the white marble structure behind them complete with niches and delicate fluted columns of gold.
These material details, including the clothing of these men, all point to a specific time and place. The painting marks one of a series of imported works in this trilogy that an anonymous owner generously attributed to the famed Persian painter Bihzad (d. 1535).[67] The execution, however, reveals that the scene more likely came from the hands of an artist of the mid-seventeenth to eighteenth century working in the lands of the Mughal Empire. Yet the detailed and exacting rendering of each face in profile immediately calls to mind the portraits made during Jahangir’s reign into that of Shah Jahan (1592–1666, r. 1628–58), or one of their many subsequent imitations.[68] Small labels near the figures’ heads identify three of the four men. A viewer may expect to find the names of Mughal royalty and notable courtiers, yet that is not the scene before us, according to the Ottoman consumer. Instead, the image becomes a vehicle for meditating on another distant setting through the addition of unexpected captions, which transform the painting’s original meaning to resituate its viewers in another historical landscape. The labels identify the individuals, from right to left, as Caliph Haru[n] al-Rashid (766–809, r. 786–809); his son Maʿmu[n] al-Rashid, better known as Caliph al-Maʿmun (786–833, r. 813–33); and his advisor al-Barmaki (767–803). All three were prominent figures in the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1517). For the eighteenth-century Ottoman audience in question, these characters were best known from oft-recited cycles of tales. Today, perhaps the best-known cycle from this canon is the One Thousand and One Nights, otherwise known as Alf Layla wa Layla.[69] Many interpretations of the cycle from this era were recited frequently by storytellers, heard in urban coffeehouses and other public spaces of leisure in the early modern period.[70]
It is important to note that these same characters also appear in numerous Ottoman tales (ḥikāyāt) based on early Islamic history, some of which were sold in multiple volumes ideal for storytellers and individual book lenders.[71] One such collection was the history by al-Ṭabarī (839–923), Tārīkh al-Rusul wa al-Mulūk (History of the Prophets and Kings), which by this period had acquired many tales beyond the author’s original composition, including the heroic cycles of Camasp, among others.[72] The Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi (1611–1681) offered his own related retellings of the story of Harun al-Rashid and his early sieges of Constantinople, one of which he conflated with an episode from the Baṭṭālnāme, or the epic of the warrior Seyyid Battal Gazi (d. 740).[73] European travelers well into the eighteenth century continued to recount how coffeehouses in Ottoman lands would host recitations of tales relating to early and pre-Islamic history, among them stories like the “Life of Bahluldan,” a buffoon at the court of Harun al-Rashid.[74] Therefore, this caliph and his court had a long afterlife in the popular culture of the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The owner of this painting presumably cast these figures from a Mughal cultural milieu in new roles from one of these famous tales or another fantastical story based on this historical era. By merely invoking the core signifiers of the wider literary cycle (the character names), the painting is reworked into a fresh retelling, translated for Ottoman eyes in a surprising new light.[75]
The imaginative choice to recast the story raises numerous questions about the reception of the Mughal Empire among Ottoman audiences. The act of renaming this imported painting rendered it an exoticized artifact by both delocalizing and relocalizing its subjects into a power-related transcultural setting far more relevant to an Ottoman urbanite viewer.[76] In this archaicizing act of displacement, the consumer of the album played upon the Mughal origins of the painting, entangling it with a more opulent anchor from literature, and thereby augmenting its luxurious associations.[77] Here, the owner’s inscriptions reframed a Mughal painting to invoke, or even recreate, a scene associated with a famed historical reign celebrated in literary tales. It is in some ways fitting that the album opens with a moment associated with a cycle of tales with a popularity as widespread as that of the origins of these albums’ paintings.[78] That individual, whose hand is seen across almost all of the paintings in the trilogy, ascribed a myriad of new meanings to most of the imported works and their adaptations across this collection.[79] This act of inscription became a transformative means of crafting a fantastical vision of the literary past in a tangibly global way.
In this act, the exoticized Mughal functions as a springboard into another type of narrative, which moves the figure past the realm of Indianness into a legendary/historical context. Another character from the earlier cadre takes on yet another identity in a different painting, indicating how malleable and diverse these recastings could be. On fol. 9a of Arabe 6075, a late sixteenth-century portrait features a young Safavid man dressed in a colorful turban and white hunting robe (fig. 3). He carries a bow over one arm while he prepares to eat a fig with the same hand. The owner of the album has labeled him as “Ḫalīfezāde Harūn al-Raşīd,” or none other than the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid, who had appeared earlier as a Mughal prince. This Safavid incarnation of Abbasid royalty has parallels in other paintings from eighteenth-century literary manuscripts depicting Harun’s son, al-Maʿmun. For instance, in manuscripts from this period of the Ḫamse or “quintet” of Nev’izade Atayi (b. 1583), al-Maʿmun appears sporting a Safavid taj (baton cap) in his turban.[80] The portrayals of Abbasid caliphs appear to transgress a static setting or a single historical moment in Ottoman literature and painting, much like fairy tales still told today. Like the stories themselves, the appeal of the characters rested in the viewer’s ability to imagine them as members of any of the great empires that one could conjure from memory.
That dynamic allowed foreign paintings to take on new identities that reflected the interests of their later historical viewers. While perhaps at first unexpected, the Safavid and Mughal portrayals of Harun al-Rashid make more sense when contextualized within Ottoman perceptions of these empires. In Ottoman poetry, the two rival empires often are portrayed as synonymous with wealth, power, courtly splendor, and opulence. Beginning in the early eighteenth century, poets like Nedim (1681–1730) would compare Istanbul’s public gardens at Saʿdabad to their Safavid counterparts; they marveled at the accomplishments seen in the monuments built through the artistic and architectural patronage of Shah Abbas (1571–1629, r. 1588–1629) and his successors, which continued to occupy the imaginations of Ottomans even after the Safavid dynasty fell.[81] Decades later, the poetry of Naşid (d. 1791) illustrates how that landscape of admiration expanded towards Central and South Asian cities; particularly in divans (poetry collections) like his from this period, buildings and peoples from these regions played a prominent role in the lyric imagination.[82] Likewise, the reputation of Mughal ostentation existed long before the new wave of imported goods swept the capital from India. For example, the court poet Baki (1526–1600) alluded to the black mole of his lyric beloved as the “florid Hindu ornament” (Hindū-yı benefşe zīneti).[83] Yet, to recall the earlier discussion of Fazıl’s verses, by the later eighteenth century the imagery of material and corporal luxuries garnered a much more prominent association with the exoticized peoples of the Mughal Empire. The consumer of the paintings in the BnF albums appears to have subscribed to these circulating popular sentiments that are preserved in verse of the period. This consumer not only re-envisioned stories of wonder befitting the splendor of these empires but also openly praised the beauty of their inhabitants.
Akbar Shah
Further exploration of the trilogy’s inscriptions reveals that their writer was not beyond celebrating foreign figures specifically for their exotic allure—and, in fact, this factor was highlighted in collaged compositions. On fol. 2b of the same album, the reader finds a Mughal portrait labeled as Akbar Shah (1760–1837, r. 1806–37), the penultimate Mughal emperor, again attributed to Bihzad in the late eighteenth century (fig. 4).[84] Although more likely the portrait of an unknown Mughal courtier, the act of inscription yet again recasts the figure to inhabit a more illustrious identity. At the folio’s center, Akbar Shah sits on a carpet in a meadow smoking a hookah. Above, through an illuminated poly-lobed opening, a distant bucolic scene emerges, featuring two buildings surrounded by lavender trees and foliage. This distant architecture is executed in an entirely different manner from the emperor’s figure, utilizing much thicker lines and translucent watercolor pigments.[85] The buildings in this scene, which are likely the work of another artist from a different cultural milieu, resemble buildings in the Ottoman Empire more than any Mughal structure. While the artist probably did not portray a specific building, he drew features found in structures across Ottoman territories, including later Orthodox spaces and other tower-like edifices found in Anatolia since the fifteenth century. In particular, the tall, open steeple, slanted roof, and high-arched windows appear often in churches, convents, and monasteries (fig. 5).[86]
The background of this bucolic scene does little to explain Akbar Shah’s origins, social traits, or even amorous characteristics, as a viewer might expect to find in a work like the Ḫūbānnāme. Instead, the distant scene more likely serves as a deliberate juxtaposition. Within a single image, the western regions of the Ottoman Empire and the palatial gardens of the Mughal Empire come together to create a collage emblematic of the potential exchanges made possible through global trade circuits, now available not only to royal collectors but also to wealthy urbanites operating in the commercial market. The artist resituates the cropped portrait of Akbar Shah in an Ottoman provincial scene. Much like the refurbished Ottoman paintings of the period, the resulting product inserts a landscape into an earlier work to subsume the previous subject into a new statement of interaction between old and new, but also local and imported aesthetics. The resulting composition explicitly frames Akbar Shah within the gaze of an Ottoman context, emphasizing his faraway origins while deftly showing how these pieces can interact to create a cosmopolitan product.
Calligraphic verses in nastaʿliḳ (the predominant style of Persian calligraphy) pasted at the top and bottom of the composition augment the dynamic of the page, openly declaring the effect of the image on the eye of the beholder. The romantic couplet accompanying this painting reads, “You’ve made me smitten with a lock of your hair. You’ve rendered me stricken with misfortune.”[87] As the verse indicates, the central focal point of the entire composition is the youth’s single lock of black hair, which escapes his neat turban. Although the Ottoman reception of this emperor’s demise has not surfaced in textual sources, the inscription underscores an Ottoman awareness of Mughal rulers. It further demonstrates how the Ottoman consumer used royal Mughal identities to craft new, imagined narratives of prestige around a generic painting for a local audience in Istanbul. At least in this album, Akbar Shah becomes a specimen of foreign beauty celebrated in the poetic couplet that accompanies his image. Within the context of this compilation, Mughal figures straddle a role between the historic and literary. In each case, the Mughal figure becomes an ekphrastic tool, fit to inspire subsequent romanticization through verse or prose narratives.
Perhaps fittingly, too, the folio featuring Akbar Shah follows a depiction of a chained lion, another imported wonder from the empire’s North African territories or Safavid Iran, typically gifted and displayed in Istanbul’s āslānḫāne (lion house).[88] This work, alongside subsequent folios featuring elephants carrying Indian riders and another lion, creates a veritable menagerie of animals typically displayed in public ceremonies as diplomatic gifts from overseas in the years leading up to and during the eighteenth century.[89] While it is unclear if this sequence of paintings was intended to be read together or as separate themes, each of the folios in the BnF trilogy appears to allude to a wider world on display. In one sense, the albums became containers of the imported wonders that entered the Ottoman capital. Such wonders included paintings and the commodities of exchange depicted within them, from the textiles adorning their attractive figures to the animals of political pageantry that arrived in Istanbul.
Portrait of Salim Khan
A separate portrait in volume three of the BnF trilogy (Arabe 6077) points to an alternative use for Mughal paintings in eighteenth-century Istanbul as a model and inspiration for Ottoman artists. The page frames a portrait of a youth labeled as “Şehzāde Selīm Ḫan” (or Prince Salim), later known as Emperor Jahangir (fig. 6). The work is signed or attributed, “raḳm-i Fakīr Mehmed” (drawn by poor Mehmed), which could refer to the individual who designed the portrait or the painter himself.[90] The painting bears compositional similarities to Mughal portraits in how it captures the main features of the genre.[91] The artist, who likely based his work off a circulating Mughal portrait, paid close attention to the Mughal court styles of the seventeenth century. He captures the distinct turban (pagri) wrapping and short white robe (jama). The elements of this work can be found in numerous royal portraits of Prince Salim and Dara Shikoh (1615–1659), the eldest son of Shah Jahan, in collections from London and Kolkata, all roughly dating to the mid-seventeenth century.[92] The painted execution of the Ottoman adaptation at hand, however, bears a passing resemblance to the style of Levni (d. 1732), although it likely was not the work of the famous court painter himself.
Most importantly, this portrayal of a royal Mughal portrait in Ottoman mode seems to be the first of its kind. Interestingly, it appears that the artist, Fakīr Mehmed, did not attempt to capture the same depth in modeling and shading seen in Mughal counterparts to this portrait. The folds of the prince’s shirtsleeves are stylized in a herringbone pattern. Additionally, his turban captures the overall shape of a Mughal wrap, but the artist again opts for a rendering that creates rhythmic patterns rather than a functional headpiece in reality. While the face does carry some awkward proportions in the nose and mouth, the stylized rendition does not entirely betray a lack of skill on the part of the artist. Instead, it appears that the artist attempted to translate the more naturalistic Mughal portrait into a mid-eighteenth-century Ottoman aesthetic. Viewer expectations also may help to explain the portrait’s more unusual details, such as the odd proportions of the facial features and the pale, blushing complexion of the prince’s skin. These details raise numerous questions as to whether the artist drew on a knowledge of Ottoman physiognomic tradition to better capture the qualities of Jahangir as a ruler, or render him as royal to an Ottoman audience in their own visual codes.[93] The inscription itself already performs part of that labor by using the recognizably Ottoman title formation of “Şehzāde Selīm Ḫan,” which reflects how Ottoman chroniclers would refer to their own princes.[94]
The visual dynamic echoes the earlier treatment of the famous Seated Scribe attributed to Gentile Bellini (ca. 1429–1507), or later to Costanzo di Moysis (or da Ferrara, active 1474–1524). In that case, an Ottoman artist copied a European portrait to create works like the Seated Scribe, thus illustrating how a foreign work acted as a specimen to generate hybrid modes of depiction.[95] In the example seen in the BnF trilogy, however, the adaptation seems to become more of a self-conscious translation of forms into an eclectic creation that combined aspects of Mughal portraiture with Ottoman techniques of the same genre.[96] While the example of the Seated Scribe can show how such a translation occurred on a royal level for more than two centuries prior, such an overt translation of a Mughal portrait in a commercial album indicates a widening exchange occurring at the market level across empires.
Safavid Youth to Mughal Princess: Changing Identities of a Model
The story of one imported model in this album illustrates a much longer chain of adaptation wherein an old favorite was made anew, acquiring multiple reincarnations (and identities) in its Ottoman reception. This painting on fol. 7b of Arabe 6076 adapts an earlier model by the Safavid Shaykh Muhammad from around 1587, which Riza Abbasi (ca. 1565–1635) also used around the start of the seventeenth century (figs. 7, 8).[97] The BnF painting features an androgynous Safavid youth on a bent knee.[98] Moving outward, all other elements in this painting bear a dissonant relationship with its subject. In earlier Ottoman adaptations of this work from the Ahmed I Album (Topkapı Palace Library, Istanbul), such a model often appears before spare and minimal outdoor backgrounds (fig. 9). Unlike these seventeenth-century versions, the BnF incarnation plays with notions of time and space in a fresh manner unique to the mid- to late eighteenth century. The artist of Arabe 6076 rendered the figure with considerable fidelity to the Persian model in facial details like the connected eyebrows and the treatment of the drapery, as if aiming to preserve the aesthetic of the original foreign figure. Yet the bold orange costume, so common during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, sticks out rather flatly against the delicately executed background of receding red mountains rendered in a Europeanizing mode.
While landscapes quite like this were not used during the period in which Riza Abbasi was active, this type of background does appear within the same set of late Ottoman albums. In this set, however, such a background accompanies figural paintings created entirely during the latter part of the eighteenth century in the Ottoman Empire that feature urbanite figures similar to those by Abdullah Buhari (active mid-18th century).[99] These figures don the latest fashions in Istanbul: tightly cut bodices on robes of light fabrics like karmasüt (a figured or flowered silk and cotton textile), popular as Indian imports and Ottoman imitations of the period. In many ways, these Ottoman character studies nod fittingly to a cosmopolitan consumer lifestyle against bucolic scenery.[100] With these cases in mind, the painting in question of the kneeling youth becomes a composite piece that marries old and new designs to contrasting effect. The work’s execution highlights the archaicizing elements of the model’s form and costume, while the receding background reclaims this figure as a part of eighteenth-century visual culture.
Similar elements of eighteenth-century tastes appear more overtly in instances of interpretive overpainting in these albums.[101] Yet in the case of the androgynous youth, the artists created a wholly new painting with an old model: they maintained a strong connection to the pastiche elements of overpainted counterparts by pairing a somewhat perspectival background with a flattened figure. Given the similarities, the appeal of the work likely stemmed from how it struck a visual dialogue with a familiar model from Safavid Iran. Much like the parallel responses or naẓīre found in poetry and architecture, artists of single-folio paintings found innovative ways to enliven older foreign works while highlighting their own skills of adaptation at the same time.[102] The resulting juxtaposition of styles became just as crucial to the final effect as the figural model at the center of the piece. Altogether, the work offers a skillful investigation into numerous foreign styles, stretching the technical or even aesthetic possibilities of Persianate and European sources.[103]
When turning to the facing painting that accompanies this composite image on the bifolio opening, a coordinated theme emerges between the two selections (fig. 10; see also fig. 7). In this case, our painting of a formerly male figure forms part of a larger bifolio dialogue about exotic beauties, one of which also hails from the Mughal Empire. In a twist, however, the aforementioned figure adapted from the image of a Persian youth is labeled as none other than Banu Shah, daughter (bint) of Akbar Shah Hindi (1542–1605, r. 1556–1605), presumably referring to his youngest daughter Aram Banu Begum (1584–1624), or another daughter of Akbar I.[104] Thus the owner assigns the figure a new cultural identity, perhaps unaware of its earlier interpretations. The orange garb with gold patterns appears to resonate with a much earlier model of a girl across the gutter from Banu Shah, based on a model from sixteenth-century Iran.[105] That opposite figure is labeled by the later owner as the sister of Afrasiyab, a ruler of Turan in the Shāhnāma (Book of Kings, completed ca. 1010), the epic by Firdawsi (ca. 940–ca. 1020).[106] By coordinating resonant poses and costume elements, the bifolio opening appears to invite the viewer to compare the two portraits, which the inscriptions dub a historical figure on the right and a literary beauty on the left.
At the same time, the explicit inclusion of a later landscape makes a stark distinction between the two works. By offering context in the form of an identifiable climate (artificial though it may be), the artist purposefully relocates the painting of “Akbar’s daughter” in a place grounded by a geographic landscape, much like the paintings of eighteenth-century Ottoman urbanites in the same album and also the painted geographies of Enderunlu Fazıl’s Ḫūbānnāme (see fig. 1). Like Fazıl’s boy from Hindūstān, this figure hails from a region distinct from that of its Ottoman-born counterparts, given the contrasting reddish shades chosen for the arid ground. As for the sixteenth-century painting labeled as Afrasiyab’s sister on the left, the suggestion of a landscape in ink and wash takes on a new effect in this bifolio opening. The context allows the painting to inhabit another literary, historic space separate from that of its neighbor. The painting labeled as Banu Shah may parallel the general composition of the earlier work, but it also seems to challenge its mythic predecessor by extending the visual dialogue in its allusions to wider genres of Ottoman single-figure painting.
Although the confines of this article do not permit a full tour of the adapted artwork in this trilogy, the aforementioned paintings are by no means alone. The majority of paintings in Arabe 6075 and 6076 contain imported Persianate works and their close Ottoman adaptations. Arabe 6077 offers a more balanced ratio between imported works and Ottoman-themed paintings from the mid- to late eighteenth century, with further juxtapositions between them worthy of analysis. More often than not, it is the trilogy’s imported models that also carry rather aspirational attributions in an Ottoman hand to renowned painters of Islamic history and myth, including Bihzad and Mani, despite the fact that most works date from later periods and even contain prominent signatures of other artists, which likely did not go unnoticed by consumers.[107] In fact, the sheer variety of figures attributed to Bihzad alone should signal that these attributions do not function as spurious signatures, as they appear on a highly diverse mix of Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman (adapted) paintings alike. Instead, we may consider these references to illustrious foreign painters as commendatory statements, or inscriptions made to enhance the merit of the work in the eyes of the viewer.[108] Such faux-attributions further distinguish these works as imported marvels via their association with such legendary painters, which reveals far more about the owner’s education level and the reception of the works as archaicized artistic specimens. Therefore, the paintings discussed here only mark a small sampling of a much larger phenomenon across the trilogy and its many contemporaries, a phenomenon that invites further study.
The Influx of Foreign Works on the Market and the Expanding Appeal of Novelty in Painting
The BnF trilogy is indicative of a wider trend of cultural eclecticism and cosmopolitanism in painting that steadily grew over the long eighteenth century in Istanbul. While the Ottomans certainly exercised their ability to create transcultural paintings prior to that time, the surviving examples from earlier centuries overwhelmingly came from the court workshop.[109] There, royal artists notably expressed interest in Chinese and Iranian works, but they did not incorporate Mughal works during the royal atelier’s height in the sixteenth century, and only rarely did so at the start of the seventeenth century.[110] Possibly in tandem with changing tastes, the dynamics found by this later period illustrate substantial sociopolitical changes in the local and international trade community. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries constituted a “mercantile era” in which economic ventures steadily increased and bolstered artistic circulation across media.[111] The renewal in commercial painting and album-making in Istanbul coincided with this intensifying transregional market for commercial paintings in the Islamicate world, which began to increase markedly in the century leading up to the compilation of the BnF albums.
Numerous individual cases attest to how merchants, diplomats, and painters participated in the circulation of Mughal and Safavid paintings across Ottoman lands and Europe. For instance, the paintings that accompany Storia do Mogor by Niccolao Manucci (1638–1717), completed during the late seventeenth century, survive as a compilation of mixed Mughal works contemporary to several of the earlier paintings in the BnF trilogy.[112] The Venetian compiler and author served at the Mughal court on a mission for the English East India Company.[113] In his memoir, Manucci relates that he traveled over land routes via Anatolia into India and sent his writing and compiled paintings back to Venice with Jesuit monks.[114] Although he died before returning home, his account provides illuminating examples of travel routes that easily could carry Mughal paintings westward into Ottoman lands.
Another contemporaneous album in Vienna, compiled by an anonymous European in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth century, makes that connection far more explicit as it places figures from Ottoman costume albums and a Mughal portrait in direct conversation with one another on a single page (fig. 11). The owner may once have traveled to both empires or could have purchased these works as imported art objects. The particular meeting of this group of commercial works also signals how European consumers engaged in foreign markets and saw connections between them during this era, if only from the perspective of their own experiences. Furthermore, numerous costume albums indicate that European collectors developed a taste for Ottoman adaptations of models from the Mughal Empire and wider Central Asia.[115] Before the Ottoman ban on the export of rare books halted their production for a half century, costume albums developed an increasing array of foreign figures that spanned several regions of the Islamicate world during the second half of the seventeenth century (fig. 12).[116]
By the late eighteenth century, the aforementioned traveler Mirza Abu Taleb Khan also mentioned that some English officials preferred taking the route to India via Istanbul, and noted how several of these officials made good use of their travels to amass “a large collection of Persian and Hindoostany pictures, and other rarities of the East.”[117] Shortly after the period covered in the BnF trilogy, the album of Sir William Ouseley (1767–1842), compiled in 1811, preserves a painting of a scene from the Ramayana, an ancient Sanskrit epic, by Rajput artists, in addition to several commercial portraits by Safavid and early Qajar painters from Iranian bazaars (fig. 13).[118] Ouseley, too, carried his Iranian and Indian paintings across Ottoman territories before bringing them to their current home in England.[119] Like the BnF trilogy, these case studies feature primarily commercial artworks. Particularly in the case of the Ouseley album, which comprises works from artists in Shiraz, Kashan, Isfahan, and elsewhere, it is clear that travelers could find these sorts of portraits sold in many of the major cosmopolitan areas by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.[120] Therefore, the BnF albums do not merely represent the whims or quirks of a single consumer but a wider practice of commercial album compilation in urban areas of the early modern period.
At the same time, it is important to emphasize that these cross-cultural albums had local appeal and a consumer group beyond European adventurers and travelers. Within the Islamicate realms, albums often made their way westward as booty taken in war or diplomatic gifts throughout the early modern period.[121] Such was the case for imperial Mughal albums now in Iran like the Nasir al-Din Shah Album (ca. 1627–45), which belonged to the Qajar royal library before some dispersed folios found their present homes in Europe and North America.[122] Additionally, during the mid-eighteenth century, the court of Nadir Shah (1688–1747, r. 1736–47) incorporated the artistic loot from its Delhi campaign (1739) into albums featuring compositions celebrating the competitive and comparative spirit between the two empires.[123] The journey of such a variety of albums westward from the Mughal Empire makes it clear that the BnF trilogy does not represent a peculiarity but is part of a larger trend in the transregional circulation of artwork during the later period.[124] The Ottoman albums bring an alternative perspective to how imported paintings made similar journeys throughout the Persianate world to sustain an Ottoman consumer group that practiced compilation within and outside the palace.
Let us not forget that artists, too, may have had a role to play in disseminating imported paintings and stoking a fervor for fresh styles from abroad. The aforementioned Ottoman painter Abdullah Buhari, a renowned artist whose work is featured prominently in the BnF trilogy, identifies himself in signatures as “of Bukhara” (the literal meaning of Buḫārī) in present-day Uzbekistan, indicating that either he or his immediate family members had connections to the region.[125] Tülay Artan’s recent work situates Abdullah Buhari among a wider group of migrant dervish artists from Central Asia who resided in the tekkes (lodges) in the Ottoman capital and may have contributed to commercial production alongside their Istanbulite counterparts.[126] In fact, the wider Hajj (pilgrimage) network in Istanbul included room and board specifically for “Hindi” or “Hindu” pilgrims from South and Central Asia, who also may have contributed to this flourishing art scene.[127] Although information on guest occupations remains spotty until the early twentieth century, what can be gathered on key lodges established during the mid-eighteenth century, like Sultantepe Özbekler Tekkesi in Istanbul, is that craftsmen and laborers from these regions dominated among the guests at these establishments.[128] Whether through the skills they employed or artworks they may have carried, the burgeoning presence of these transient and “trans-imperial subjects” left material traces across the commercial art of the capital, traces that extended into the next century and a half.[129] Even beyond dervish orders, bureaucrats from the Caucasus and wider Central Asian regions were known to have served in the Ottoman bureaucracy, where they were well placed to become patrons and collectors of imported art. Şirvani Ebubekir Efendi (d. 1722) is one prime example of a pilgrim from Shirvan (part of present-day Azerbaijan) who later rose through Ottoman administrative offices to eventually become the Financial Office of Anatolia (Şıkk-ı Sānī Defterdārlığı), amassing an impressive manuscript collection along the way with many works produced in Iran and beyond.[130]
As to what can be discerned about the Ottoman urbanites who bought imported paintings, terekes (inheritance registers) offer tantalizing hints about this consumer practice. Many albums with imported paintings survive, but beyond those compiled for rulers, only a few concrete pieces of documentation remain for their ownership. In these inheritance registers, numerous household luxury items, articles of clothing, and textiles owned by well-to-do urbanites bear the descriptors of ʿacemī (Persian) and hindī (Indian) during the eighteenth century.[131] In this context, the term ʿacemī functions as a narrower term for non-Arab, which often refers to Iran by this period, although not exclusively.[132] On occasion, an illustrated book or portrait is described with the terms ʿacemkārī or Fārsī—the first referring to the execution, the latter to the language.[133] Numerous albums and anthologies of diverse sorts crop up in inheritance registers, but unfortunately records containing these types of works seldom carry a descriptor revealing the place of origin for individual paintings.[134] In these highly condensed lists, illustrated books often only receive a shorthand title and, at best, single-word descriptors that highlight unique (read: valuable) features. The varied contents of albums already complicated their categorization and made them challenging to describe effectively within the confines of an inventory. Therefore, although it is difficult to determine the extent of the practice in legal records, the many cases like the BnF albums show that the consumption of imported Persianate paintings did occur, and not infrequently.
Here, travelers’ accounts, when approached with care, can help fill in some gaps left by the Ottoman records for the sale of foreign paintings on the Ottoman market. For instance, Antoine Galland (1646–1715), as an attaché of the French embassy in Istanbul during the late seventeenth century, encountered multiple booksellers who offered him illuminated Persian portraits, but these works proved too pricey for his diplomatic patron.[135] That detail alone provides a telling clue to the substantial means of urbanite art collectors who could sustain this market. In the account of the late eighteenth-century traveler James Dallaway (1763–1834), the chaplain and physician to the British embassy in Istanbul tips off his fellow “oriental scholars” that booksellers offer “each his assortment of Turkish, Arabic, and Persian mss of which they do not always know the value, but demand a considerable price.”[136] He goes onto state that “mss beautiful and rare, as since the civil commotions in Persia, the most elegant books, taken in plunder, have been sent to Constantinople for sale, to avoid detection.”[137] The material evidence from albums like those considered here confirms the circulation and sale of Iranian paintings in Istanbul after the fall of the Safavids, while attesting richly to their consumption. Dallaway’s words also bring up questions regarding whether Ottoman consumers, like the owner of the BnF albums, considered their endeavor an early-modern act of “cultural preservation,” given the tumultuous situation in Iran.[138] Thus far, known sources remain silent on this matter.
It is possible that urbanite albums offered a means of feeding Ottoman fascinations with imported paintings, and that their presence on the market motivated Ottoman commercial artists to create their own local versions of foreign works, like those discussed previously. The many Ottoman adaptations of Mughal and Safavid portraits may indicate the emergence of a “knock-off” market, much like the one that offered Ottoman versions of imported Indian fabrics by this period.[139] Whether an early modern form of a “knock-off” or merely foreign inspired, these developments marked an increased commercial exchange with Iranian, Central Asian, and South Asian polities that had grown by the trilogy’s creation. Many parallels emerge in other media during the same time, as commercial artists found new sources of inspiration from imported Indian chintzes and Chinese porcelains. For instance, elements from both of these sources were mingled skillfully in Kütahya ceramics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[140] The popularity of these ceramics among local consumers and the eclectic nature of their designs may have been an apt commercial response to the collection of authentic Chinese and European porcelains favored by royalty by this period, as discussed by earlier scholars.[141]
Such a popular interest in Mughal products, in particular, did not merely echo trends at the court, but occurred alongside the intermittent resurgences in court relations with the Mughal Empire during the mid-seventeenth to eighteenth century. Although earlier Ottoman sultans had made strategic diplomatic advances into the Indian Ocean as a form of “soft empire” during the sixteenth century, state efforts waned by the end of that century, overshadowed by successful merchants’ entrepreneurial pursuits.[142] Despite the slowing efforts of the Ottoman Empire, the chronicler Mustafa Naʿima (1655–1716) relates that several Mughal embassies came to the Ottoman court from the 1630s to 1650s. According to Naʿima, the most successful of these Mughal ambassadors, Seyyid Hacı Mehmed, arrived in 1652 bearing lavish gifts from Shah Jahan, including an aigrette featuring a diamond even larger than the one worn by the Ottoman sultan.[143] Later chroniclers such as Şemʿdanizade (d. 1779) also refer to gifts that accompanied the letters relayed between Sultan Mahmud Han (1696–1754, r. 1730–54) and the ruler of Hind in 1746 and 1750.[144] The logical question is: Did these abundant gifts encompass paintings or albums as well?
A number of albums currently at Topkapı Palace contain at least a few Mughal and Deccan works dating to the mid-seventeenth to eighteenth century that comprise likely suspects for diplomatic gifts or foreign purchases during this period. The albums include H.2134, H.2135, H.2137, H.2146, and H.2143, although it is important to note that these contain several works absorbed from the estates of commercial collectors (fig. 14). In one striking case, the album H.2137—bearing the tuğra (imperial seal or signature) of Selim III (1761–1808, r. 1789–1807)—includes at least ten paintings from Mughal, Rajput, or Deccan artists in addition to numerous Safavid works.[145] Yet several distinctions in use arise when examining the Mughal works and Mughal-inspired Safavid paintings that made their way into the Topkapı Palace Library. Although these Topkapı albums preserve and showcase these imported case studies, more often than not, they do not engage with them in quite the same transformative way as the BnF trilogy. While mounted and framed often with exquisitely illuminated papers, figural works from the Indian subcontinent seldom appear on composite pages with calligraphy or other illustrative works, like the Akbar Shah portrait in the BnF trilogy. In fact, oftentimes these paintings inhabit entire bifolio openings in palace albums, rarely alongside a Safavid or Ottoman work (fig. 15).[146] Nor do these albums in the palace library appear to feature Ottoman adaptations of Mughal models, although some court artists like Levni had no issue vividly illustrating Safavid figures in the Ottoman aesthetic.[147] Somehow it appears that Ottoman adaptations of Mughal paintings did not hold the same appeal for the royal library. The Mughal works in palace albums appear unfettered of illustrative distractions, refocusing the viewer’s attention on admiring these pieces specifically as “foreign” works or ʿacemkārī, as one album containing paintings of Safavid, Ottoman (Europeanizing-mode), and Hindustani origins is labeled (fig. 16).[148] Although owning imported paintings articulated a degree of prestige in both cases, the consumer of the BnF albums felt the need to remold them with text in order to grant them new identities to fit the owner’s interests and expression of identity. To this end, the presence of imported works in the BnF albums goes beyond mere admiration to create focused studies of what a foreign figure could embody in a literary sense.
Even outside Mughal paintings in courtly and commercial albums, however, another possible factor may have aided in the Ottoman adaptation of a Mughal portrait depicting Prince Salim Khan, which illustrates the importance of considering networks of exchange functioning in multiple directions. Intermediary sources—particularly prints—may have facilitated the transfer of such an image. Given how often European merchants passed through Istanbul, it is not out of the realm of possibility that one may have carried a print based on a Mughal portrait. For instance, a Dutch publication of the “Landbeschrijving” by François Valentijn (1666–1727), printed in 1724 and 1726, has one surprisingly faithful adaptation of a royal portrait featuring Dara Shikoh and his son.[149] Atlas Historique (1732–39) by Henri Abraham Chatelain (1684–1743) also includes a number of prints based on royal Mughal portraits (fig. 17). Additionally, Ottoman inheritance registers reveal that numerous Dutch merchants living in Pera brought prints to the Ottoman capital, which subsequently were resold upon their deaths during the eighteenth century.[150] Therefore, it is not unreasonable to suspect that a circulating print may have sparked the creation of the Ottomanized Mughal portrait in Arabe 6077 (see fig. 6).
This source material is significant to note as, quite often in discussions of Westernization in painting during this period, the intermedial steps by which such transformations occurred are notably absent.[151] The use of prints often is implied in this process, but rarely is assessed in depth. The relationship between print culture and manuscript painting, however, already has gained traction in the study of Ottoman Armenian manuscripts, beginning in the seventeenth century.[152] Particularly by the eighteenth century, it becomes all the more pertinent to address this potential source for Ottoman commercial artists, who may have encountered works from artists of other faiths operating in the same city, or prints brought by itinerant agents.[153] Interestingly, in the case studied here, the possible use of prints did not encourage Westernization per se, but rather facilitated adaptations from the works of neighbors to the east.
Experimental Aesthetics: Freshening Up the Old, or Reclaiming a Painting?
The convergence of works—foreign and local, copied, and adapted—in a single album in many ways embodies the eclectic concept of novelty described at the start of this study. By the eighteenth century, single-folio artists anticipated the album format as the container for their works and also challenged it as a mode of expression with their own visual pastiches: interpretive overpainting manifested in a single-folio study. In perhaps the most overt form of transculturation in painting, the overpainted works found in later Ottoman albums capture the extent to which artists strove to contrast foreign and local elements in a visual pastiche that included elements from Europe to India, covering the reaches of their aesthetic imaginations. Although these artists experimented with Ottoman models in this endeavor (as in the BnF albums), foreign works offered a distinct opportunity to articulate responses to bygone artists and distant contemporaries abroad.[154]
One of the many examples occurs in H.2135, an album owned by the prolific collector Mehmed Efendi (d. 1805), son of the şeyhülislam (the highest jurist in the Ottoman administration) and fellow collector, Veliüddin Efendi (d. 1768).[155] Here, a work that began as a Safavid pen-and-ink drawing from the seventeenth century takes on a new life in Ottoman hands (fig. 18). A maiden reaches out her hand to a praying dervish. Her robe corresponds to Safavid fashions from the period of the drawing’s execution. Her long veil, however, is of a type donned by both Iranian and Indian women, making her identity more ambiguous to discern. After all, the woman’s costume also immediately calls to mind Safavid interpretations of Indian women from the Suz u Gawdaz (Burning and Melting) at The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (fig. 19).[156] While this period of intensifying exchange between the Safavid and Mughal Empires led to many artistic fusions as well as some shared clothing styles, the later Ottoman artists who encountered this work made the choice to further distinguish this woman’s origins.[157] In addition to filling in her garments with opaque pastel watercolors in lavender and sky blue, the artist(s) added a dark tan wash to her skin, immediately racializing the female figure in the eyes of the viewer in stark contrast to her uncolored dervish companion. The landscape, also inserted by the later Ottoman artists, applies European techniques of visualization, faithfully capturing a receding line of hills. The foreground, however, offers an otherworldly terrain: verdant trees on a glowing ground of pale pink, green, and yellow. The dervish figure physically recedes from this lush painted world, onto the paper beneath the scene. This material allusion to a spiritual withdrawal from the world of images likely did not go unnoticed by a learned viewer such as Mehmed Efendi, who himself was a disciple of a dervish order imported from Central Asia.[158] The supernatural greenery with an exoticized, female inquirer perhaps even heightened the effect to inspire a sense of wonder at this fantastical locale, likely making the dervish’s task of withdrawal even more challenging.
Furthermore, the visual pairing seemingly invokes an earlier dichotomy of cultural stereotypes conceived by Muslim intellectuals in medieval India and Iran. As Annemarie Schimmel has noted, this dichotomy contrasted the “purity” and “whiteness” of the “Turk” against the dark “infidelity” of the “Hindu.”[159] We only need to turn to examples from the Ḫūbānnāme and Zenānnāme, raised at the start of this discussion, to gauge how such physiognomic assessments of skin color continued to permeate Ottoman literature and feature prominently in physical descriptions of peoples from the realms in question.[160] Here, however, in an apparent response to earlier and contemporaneous textual traditions, Ottoman artists created a visual riff on the known themes, re-envisioned for a new era. Thus, a mix of diverse artists’ efforts visually interacted to create a celebration of eclecticism on the page, which in turn opened new levels of interpretation for the viewer to consider.
Forging an unexpected parallel with Mughal painting, the multiple visual registers at play in this painting and its close contemporaries craft a self-reflective meditation that amplifies the composition’s ability to transport viewers to a preternatural locale.[161] It is tempting to consider whether one of the Mughal paintings that found their way into Ottoman hands by the late eighteenth century inspired this eclectic mix of features. For instance, a Mughal painting of an ascetic in H.2137 freely combines elements from Persian painting, such as rock faces and Chinese clouds, with receding vistas akin to those seen in Netherlandish art to create an immersive amalgam of spatial systems (fig. 20).[162] Yet Ottoman painters went a step further to utilize the powerful absence of paint, thereby showcasing not only an engagement with foreign modes but a visual conquest of imported works. During the eighteenth century, numerous imaginative examples of Ottoman overpainting tended to favor preserving foreign drawings in this manner, as if the painters acknowledged the work’s distant origins in their efforts to enact new narratives and settings upon it (fig. 21). The process also marked an integration of foreign artwork into an Ottoman sociohistorical context in a manner that highlighted and manipulated difference to interpretive effect in a visualized form of eclectic exoticism. No less than the myriad of imagery that populated the poetry of this period, Ottoman paintings had found their own brand of eclecticism manifested on the page and in the wider albums that these paintings inhabit.
Concluding Thoughts
Much like the album gifted to İzzet Ali Paşa, compilations of this period alluded to themes that already inhabited Ottoman imaginations. While some Ottomans renamed their imported paintings to envision exotic characters from literary tales or recent history, others selected altered works that spoke to dialogic themes from lyric poetry. Much like the other luxuries readily displayed in the markets or presented to beloveds as gifts, the offerings on the commercial painting market were shaped by the cosmopolitan sensibilities of their individual patrons. Each collection of paintings responded to growing desires across media for aesthetic novelty, defined by a globally oriented eclecticism. Ottoman artists and collectors embraced a new wave of works from Iran, Central Asia, and India to construct their visions of novelty, mirroring the wider commercial fervor for commodities from these regions. Compilers and artists did not depend on a single stylistic tradition to achieve this aesthetic, but looked to an array of sources that they reframed within a uniquely Ottoman worldview. As artists increasingly were tapping into European modes of painting by this time, they applied these skills to models from the wider Persianate world alongside those produced locally in Istanbul. Rather than obscure these diverse origins, Ottomans celebrated the assemblage of traditions as a visual dialogue between old and new, foreign and local. These themes played out from the micro-level of individual paintings to the macro-level of the album format, which fittingly flourished during this time. Through curated samplings of sources ranging from the wider Persianate landscape to the edges of Europe, Ottomans harnessed the offerings of a world-class market to transform their rivals’ visual vocabulary into statements of their own syncretic sensibilities and boundless originality.
Although many imported paintings arrived in Istanbul as finished works, Ottomans instead regarded them as sources of considerable plasticity and potential. From creating an Ottomanized version of a Mughal portrait to resituating older models upon newer landscapes alluding to faraway lands, these works celebrate how Ottoman artists and collectors reclaimed imported works to contribute to truly “world-seizing” albums in scope and style. In particular, the method of interpretive overpainting best embodied these concepts. The process allowed artists to preserve the origins of a work while refashioning it for a new audience in an ode to eclecticism, wherein the hands of multiple artists coexisted on the page. Ottoman painters tapped into the sensibilities of their cosmopolitan patrons to find a mode that matched the talented poets of the era in visualized expressions of artistic response that embodied how the old could be made new—and the foreign made familiar—with a fresh coat of paint.
Gwendolyn Collaço, PhD (Harvard University), 2020, is the Assistant Curator for Art of the Middle East at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her research focuses on commercial painting in the Ottoman Empire, early-modern collecting practices, and cross-cultural exchange. Collaço has held fellowships with the American Research Institute in Turkey and the German Orient Institut–Istanbul, among others. She is preparing a monograph entitled, The Image as Commodity: The Commercial Market for Single-Folio Paintings in Ottoman Istanbul, 17th–18th Century. E-mail: [email protected]
Notes
I wish to offer my deep thanks to Holly Shaffer, the guest editor of this volume, for inviting me to participate. All of the contributors were fortunate to have her gracious and illuminating advice at each stage in the process. I also thank my fellow contributor Ünver Rüstem for his comments at a pivotal moment in the editing process, as well as my anonymous peer reviewers for helping me strengthen this study into the version before you. Furthermore, I extend my gratitude to András Riedlmayer for his ever-keen suggestions and corrections to my translations. At the latter stages of this journey, I was particularly appreciative to have Melanie Klein’s careful edits to polish the prose of this text into its final form.
Muṭayyeb itmeğe ṣūret-perest ʿışḳını yārüm / Baña bir tuḥfe-i zībā-yı ʿālem-gīr göndermiş / Bilüp naḳş-ı ḫayāliyle leb-ā-leb oldığın göñlüm / Anı telmīḥ içün mecmūʿa-i taṣvir göndermiş
A. İrfan Aypay, ed., Lâle devri şairi İzzet Ali Paşa: Hayatı, eserleri, edebı̂ kişiliği. Divan: Tenkitli metin; Nigâr-Nâme: Tenkitli metin (Izzet Ali Pasha, poet of the Tulip era: His life, works, literary personality. Divan: Critical text; Nigâr-Nâme: Critical text) (Istanbul, 1998), 267. Note that the term mecmūʿa, while typically translated as “anthology,” also has been used to refer to albums in Ottoman Turkish since at least the seventeenth century. In fact, among illustrated books listed in Ottoman inheritance registers, the term more commonly associated with albums in scholarship, muraḳḳaʿ, is seldom used, but mecmūʿa more often is employed. Examples also survive of commercial compilers referring to their own finished work in this manner. In the album of Mahmud Gaznevi, who finished his compilation of découpages and paintings in 1685, he calls the codex a mecmūʿa: Lūtfunla bu mecmūʿanın ey Rabb-i Ḥafīẓ evrāḳını miḳrāż-ı ḳażādan ṣaḳlā! (By your grace, O God the Protector, preserve the pages of this album from the fumbles of scissors!). Mahmud presents his album to Sultan Mehmed IV (1642–1693), and, using the same terms as in this ḳıtʿa, he calls it “my gift” (tuḥfum). Gaznevi Album, Istanbul University Library, T.5461, esp. fol. 59b. Uğur Derman, “Benzeri olmayan bir sanat albümü: Gazneli Mahmud mecmuası” (A peerless art album: The album of Gazenli Mahmud), Türkiyemiz 14 (1974): 21; Yıldız Demiriz, “Tuhfe-i Gaznevi: Gazneli Mahmud mecmuası” (Gift of Ghaznavi: The album of Mahmud of Ghazna), P: Sanat, kültür, antika 13 (1999): 48. For a discussion of the terminology in inheritance registers, see Gwendolyn Collaço, “Image as Commodity: The Commercial Market for Single-Folio Paintings in Ottoman Istanbul, 17th–18th c.” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2020), 249. For a published sampling of inheritance registers that include the term mecmū‘a, see İsmail E. Erünsal, Osmanlılarda sahaflık ve sahaflar (Book trade and book dealers among the Ottomans) (Istanbul: Timaş Yayınları, 2013), 453–59.
In the second line, the poet appears to be playing upon the mystic term naḳş-ı hayāl (design of the imagination). This may refer to earlier attested occurrences of this topic in poetry, such as the work of the same title, Naḳş-ı Hayāl, by Azeri Ibrahim Çelebi (d. 1585), written in 1579. See Muammer Temizer, “İbrahim Azeri Çelebi ve Nakş-ı Hayâl Mesnevi” (Ibrahim Azeri Çelebi and the Masnavi Nakş-ı Hayâl) (MA thesis, Istanbul University, 1948–49). For more on Azeri Ibrahim Çelebi, see Gelibolulu Musòtòafā ʻĀlī, Tuhfetü’l-uşşâk (Gift of lovers), ed İ. Hakkı Aksoyak (İstanbul: Millî Eğitim Basımevi, 2003), 99.
Emine Fetvacı, The Album of the World Emperor: Cross-Cultural Collecting and the Art of Album-Making in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 3. For more on this album, see Emine Fetvacı, “The Album of Ahmed I,” Ars Orientalis 42 (2012): 127–38; Emine Fetvacı, “Love in the Album of Ahmed I,” Journal of Turkish Studies/Türklük bilgisi araştırmalar 34.2 (2010): 37–51; and Serpil Bağcı, “Presenting Vaṣṣāl Kalender’s Works: The Prefaces of Three Ottoman Albums,” Muqarnas 30 (2013): 255–313. Upon Jahangir’s accession, the Ottomans promptly sent an embassy to India, which arrived in 1608 to a rather cold reception; the state sent a second in 1615. Naimur Rahman Farooqi, Mughal-Ottoman Relations: A Study of Political and Diplomatic Relations Between Mughal India and the Ottoman Empire, 1556–1748 (Delhi, India: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1989), 23–25.
Fetvacı, Album of the World Emperor, 3.
Fetvacı, Album of the World Emperor, 3.
Fetvacı, Album of the World Emperor, 3; Emine Fetvacı, “The Gaze in the Album of Ahmed I,” Muqarnas 32 (2015): 135–54.
İzzet Ali Paşa represents the upper portion of this growing demographic of art collectors. Born to a father already active in the financial administration, İzzet Ali Paşa followed this path and took up a post as secretary of finance (defterdār mektupçusu) before becoming the minister of finance (şıḳḳ-ı evvel defterdārı), a post that he continued to hold even after the Patrona Halil Rebellion in 1730. He eventually became a representative of the grand vizier and the district governor of Anatolia. The young official died shortly after becoming minister of war (serʿasker) in Revan at around forty years of age in 1734. Mehmed Süreyya, Sicill-i Osmani (Ottoman judicial registers), vol. 3, ed. Sayit Ali Kahraman (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1996), 845.
In fact, during the early decades following Istanbul’s establishment as the Ottoman capital, the vision of cosmopolitanism created by Mehmed II (1432–1481) resulted from a deliberate refashioning of dynastic self-image reflected in the city and court. Gülru Necipoğlu, “Visual Cosmopolitanism and Creative Translation: Artistic Conversations with Renaissance Italy in Mehmed II’s Constantinople,” Muqarnas 29 (2012): 1–81, esp. 1–2.
Gülru Necipoğlu, “Persianate Images between Europe and China: The ‘Frankish Manner’ in the Diez and Topkapı Albums, ca. 1350–1450,” in The Diez Albums: Contexts and Contents, ed. Julia Gonella et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 541. The topic also will be covered in Necipoğlu’s forthcoming work, “The Composition and Compilation of Two Saray Albums.” For more on the Persian tradition, refer to the seminal study by David J. Roxburgh, The Persian Album, 1400–1600: From Dispersal to Collection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 315–20.
The first album that definitively can be called a commercial album is Çsöbör Balazs Szigetvári Album, ca. 1570, Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, MS 209 Blankenburg. The album was made for a Hungarian individual named Laurenz Gosztonyi. In construction, it incorporates dyed and decorated silhouette papers common to Istanbul’s market, but draws its figural models largely from courtly histories and high-end albums made for either high officials or the royal family. Based on its inscriptions, however, the work functions more as an album amicorum, or friendship album, than the more dominant album types found on the market later. For more on this album’s significance in the history of commercial painting, see Collaço, “Image as Commodity,” 92–103. See also studies on the German House and the alba amicorum produced by its inhabitants, including Robyn Dora Radway, Paper Portraits of Empire: Habsburg Albums from the German House in Constantinople, 1567–93 (forthcoming).
This historiography is discussed thoroughly in Collaço, “Image as Commodity,” 22–52, a recent work that built upon the foundational introductory essays that propelled the study of Ottoman commercial painting: Metin And, “17. yüzyıl Türk çarşı ressamları” (Seventeenth-century Turkish bazaar artists), Tarih ve toplum 16 (April 1985): 40–50; Nurhan Atasoy, “The Birth of Costume Books and the Fenerci Mehmed Album,” in Osmanlı kıyafetleri, Fenerci Mehmed album/Ottoman Costume Book: A Facsimile Edition, ed. Midhat Sertoğlu (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1986), 22–30; Tülün Değirmenci, “An Illustrated Mecmua: The Commoner’s Voice and the Iconography of the Court in Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Painting,” Ars Orientalis 41 (December 2011): 186–218; Tülün Değirmenci, “Osmanlı tasvir sanatında görselin ‘okunması’: İmgenin ardındaki hikayeler (şehir oğlanları ve İstanbul’un meşhur kadınları)” (“Reading” the image in Ottoman figural art: Stories behind the image [city boys and famous women of Istanbul]), Osmanlı araştırmaları/The Journal of Ottoman Studies 45 (2015): 25–55. For a recent publication of Metin And’s collected articles, see Metin And, Ottoman Figurative Arts, vol. 2, Bazaar Painters, ed. Tülün Değirmenci (İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2018).
Commercial paintings of figures from the Ottoman palace and city streets sometimes include Europeans and, more rarely, a Safavid ambassador. Aside from these, a few generic stock portraits of a Safavid male and female are found, frequently recopied across costume albums. None of these, however, appears to be based on a Safavid painting, to my knowledge. As the rest constitute a small number of youths and dervishes, I will list them here: the Safavid ambassador appears in Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Cod. 206, fol. 30a; and the British Library, London, Or.2709, fol. 19b, Bāġbān-i ʿAcem. These figures appear mainly in costume albums of the early seventeenth century: The British Museum, London, 1928-3-23-046, fol. 75b, Tatar; fol. 105b, Uzbek Dervish; fol. 103b, a figure labeled in Ottoman as a “Persian Dervish,” but wearing a costume also found among Ottoman Kalenderi dervishes. Peter Mundy Album, The British Museum, London, 1974-6-17-013, fol. 50a, Persian youth; fol. 50b, Persian woman with pomegranate. Four unlabeled Safavid and Central Asian figures, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, Od-6-4, vol. 1, fols. 44a–48a, fol. 4a. Biblioteca Marciana, Venice, Foggie Diverse, It_04_4912_05578, fol. 51a, Indian pilgrim (dervish). Royal Ottoman albums of the seventeenth century also include a few commercial paintings that have been labeled provisionally as European- and “Mughal-inspired figures.” See Fetvacı, Album of the World Emperor, 3. The eighteenth-century commercial albums that I discuss include verifiable imported works from India, Iran, and Central Asia, alongside closely rendered adaptations of their designs. The frequency of their appearance also becomes far more widespread across later Ottoman albums; see the data set in Collaço, “Image as Commodity,” 434 (Appendix C.2).
Collaço, “Image as Commodity,” 290–322. For the survey study of Ottoman painting of this period, which emphasizes the increasing presence of European elements, see Günsel Renda, Batılılaşma döneminde Türk resim sanatı 1700–1850 (The art of Turkish painting in the age of Westernization, 1700–1850) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1977).
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31.3, special issue, “The Eurasian Context of the Early Modern History of Mainland South East Asia, 1400–1800” (1997): 735–62, esp. 745.
For examples of significant studies in this vein, see Shirine Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008); and Ünver Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
Thirty-six painters were on the imperial registers for the year 1606, and that number stays in the twenties for most of the century before drastically dropping to eight artists in 1688. The number of painters on record stays relatively stable, hovering between the low count of six or seven, throughout the eighteenth century. Bahattin Yaman, Osmanlı saray sanatkârları: 18. yüzyılda ehl-i hiref (Craftsmen of the Ottoman palace: The ehl-i hiref in the eighteenth century) (İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2008), 51; Bahattin Yaman, “Sarayın sanatkârları: 18. yüzyılda ehl-i hıref teşkilatı” (Artisans of the palace: The organization of the palace artisans [ehl-i hiref] in the eighteenth century), in XV. Türk Tarih Kongresi. Ankara 11–15 Eylül 2006. Kongreye Sunulan Bildiriler. IV. Cilt, IV Kısım (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2010), 1941. For comparisons to the earlier period of the Nakkāşhāne (royal atelier) and an overview of its organization during the sixteenth century, see Esin Atıl, The Age of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1987), 29–36, 291–97; and Filiz Çağman, “Mimar Sinan döneminde sarayın ehl-i hiref teşkilâtı” (The organization of the palace artisans [ehl-i hiref] during the age of the architect Sinan), in Mimar Sinan dönemi Türk mimarlığı ve sanatı, ed. Zeki Sönmez (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Yayınları, 1988), 73–77. For published documentation of the ehl-i hiref registers, see Rıfkı Melûl Meriç, Türk nakış san‘atı tarihi araştırmaları (Studies on the history of Turkish decorative arts) (Ankara: Feyz Ve Demokrat Ankara Matbaası, 1953). Parallels also are found in Ottoman architecture of this period, with the increasing presence of entrepreneurial dhimmi (non-Muslim) artisans, especially Greek and Armenian kalfas (master builders). Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 83–86.
My dissertation offers an overview of the eighteenth-century market for paintings, which includes a discussion of all of these sectors. See chapter 4 of Collaço, “Image as Commodity,” 233–89. Closely related to this market is that of stationers and, especially, second-hand books, from which paintings could be culled and reconstituted into compilations. For more on the development of the book market, see Erünsal, Osmanlılarda sahaflık ve sahaflar.
For a fuller discussion of the implications for this widening array of owners, see Collaço, “Image as Commodity,” 237–50, 283–89. For a published selection of terekes (inheritance registers) featuring owners of albums and anthologies, see Erünsal, Osmanlılarda sahaflık ve sahaflar, 453–59. The best known of the painting collectors of this period were şeyhülislam (the highest jurist in the Ottoman administration) Veliüddin Efendi (d. 1768) and his son, Mehmed Efendi (d. 1805). For more on them, see Zeynep Çelik Atbaş, “Evrak-ı perişandan evrak-ı şahaneye: Osmanlı koleksiyoneri Mehmed Emîn Efendi’nin kitap ve murakkaları” (From disorderly sheets to royal papers: The books and albums of the Ottoman collector Mehmed Emin Efendi), in Osmanlı kitap koleksiyonerleri, ed. Tülay Artan ve Hatice Aynur (Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, forthcoming); Zeynep Çelik Atbaş, “Osmanlı aydını Mehmed Emin Efendi ve murakkaları” (The Ottoman intellectual Mehmed Emin Efendi and his albums), in 14th International Congress of Turkish Art, Paris 19–21 September (Paris: ICTA, 2011), 117–26; Zeynep Çelik Atbaş, “Osmanlı aydını Mehmed Emin Efendi için hazırlanmış bir murakka (TSM Library, H. 2155)” (An album prepared for the Ottoman intellectual Mehmed Emin Efendi [TSM Library, H. 2155]), in Filiz çağman’a armağan, ed. Ayşe Erdoğdu et al. (Istanbul: Lale Yayıncılık, 2018), 113–30; and Zeynep Çelik Atbaş, “Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi’ndeki H. 2155 numeralı murakka” (Album number H. 2155 in the Topkapı Palace Museum Library) (MA thesis, Mimar Sinan Üniversitesi, 2003), 11–16.
Gwendolyn Collaço, “Albums of Conspicuous Consumption: A Composite Mirror of an 18th-Century Collector’s World,” Journal18, no. 6, “Albums” (Fall 2018), https://www.journal18.org/issue6/albums-of-conspicuous-consumption-a-composite-mirror-of-an-18th-century-collectors-world/ (last accessed February 16, 2021).
Outside the Westernization argument, studies that extensively explore Persianate exchanges in Ottoman painting of the eighteenth century onwards are few and far between. For one example, see Ülkü Ülküsal Bates, et al., Re-orientations: Islamic Art and the West in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New York City: Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery at Hunter College, 2008). The relationship between Mughal India and Iran from the Safavid reign onward is far better represented in both art-historical and historical studies, which I discuss below.
Nile Green, “Introduction: The Frontiers of the Persianate World (ca. 800–1900),” in The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, ed. Nile Green (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 1–72, esp. 2, 9.
Mana Kia draws on the definition for aporia given by Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) to describe the seeming contradictions in constructions of the Persianate. Although Kia applies this term primarily to language and adab (etiquette), here I find it necessary to expand that scope of inquiry to the arts. Interestingly, unlike Nile Green in his edited volume, Kia focuses solely on the Indian subcontinent, Iran, and Central Asia (clearly not extending into Qing territories). It is odd that the Ottoman Empire, as an empire that used Persian as the language of official court histories until the mid-sixteenth century (and even after in literary contexts), is not discussed in any detail in her study. Yet her general observations are nonetheless a useful heuristic. Mana Kia, Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 11.
Amy Landau, “Visibly Foreign, Visibly Female: The Eroticization of Zan-i Farangī in Seventeenth-Century Iranian Painting,” in Eros and Sexuality in Islamic Art, ed. Francesca Leoni and Mika Natif (Farnham Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2013), 99–129, esp. 100–101. See also, in the same volume, Sussan Babaie, “Frontiers of Visual Taboo: Painted Indecencies in Isfahan,” 131–56.
Interestingly, the focus on pleasure in Shirine Hamadeh’s notion of “décloisonnement” has parallels with Benjamin Schmidt’s conception of exoticism as a product of pleasures and delight, manifested in commodified objects. Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 5–7. Schmidt’s discussion of commodities also closely relates to points articulated in Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, “The Global Lives of Things: Material Culture in the First Global Age,” in The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, ed. Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (London: Routledge, 2016), 1–28, esp. 19.
Marina Bianchi, “Collecting as a Paradigm of Consumption,” Journal of Cultural Economics 21.4 (1997): 275–89; Marina Bianchi, “Consuming Novelty: Strategies for Producing Novelty in Consumption,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28.1 (1998): 3–18; Marina Bianchi, “Taste for Novelty and Noble Tastes: The Role of Human Agency in Consumption,” in The Active Consumer: Novelty and Surprise in Consumer Choice, ed. Marina Bianchi (New York: Routledge, 1998), 64–86.
I am borrowing the term “consumable globalism” from Schmidt’s discussion of exotic geography, which focuses on the image of the world as a commodity, which could include textual accounts, maps, visual representations, and decorative objects—all of which encouraged a reader to skim the world’s offerings. Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism, 18. For more on “biographies of things,” see Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in a Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–59, which should be read with Igor Kopytoff’s foundational discussion of the “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process” in the same volume, 64–91.
The notion of imported commodities affecting literary portrayals of foreign lands is not unique to the Ottoman Empire. In fact, the topic is better studied from the perspective of orientalist literature produced in Europe during the same period, wherein shifting literary representations responded to goods imported from the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Qing Empires. Although manifested in a manner distinct to the Ottoman literary context, it is worth noting that Ottoman writers may have drawn on similar material sources for imagery of Persianate societies abroad. Further overlaps are found in the use of products from India as signifiers of the region’s enticing prospects. See Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 18, 21, 274, 297–301.
Hamadeh, City’s Pleasures, 219–20.
Shirine Hamadeh, “Ottoman Aesthetics of Novelty in the 18th Century,” in 14th International Congress of Turkish Art Proceedings/Actes du 14e congrès international des arts turcs (Paris: ColleÌge de France, 2013), 373–80, esp. 377.
Hamadeh, “Ottoman Aesthetics of Novelty,” 375 and throughout; Hamadeh, City’s Pleasures, 219–20; Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 68, 82, 98. See also Can Erimtan, “The Case of Saadabad: Westernization of Revivalism?,” in Art turc: Actes: 10eÌme CongreÌs international d’art turc, GeneÌve, 17–23 Septembre 1995/Turkish Art: Proceedings: 10th International Congress of Turkish Art, Geneva, 17–23 September 1995 (GeneÌve: Fondation Max Van Berchem, 1999), 287–90; and Can Erimtan, “The Perception of Saadabad: The ‘Tulip Age’ and Ottoman–Safavid Rivalry,” in Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dana Sajdi (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 41–62.
Hamadeh, City’s Pleasures, 219–20; Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, “A Stranger in the City: The Poetics of Sabk-i Hindi,” Annual of Urdu Studies 19 (2004): 3. Wheeler Thackston notes, “There is nothing particularly Indian about the ‘Indian-style.’ [...] The more accurate description is ‘High-Period’ style.” Wheeler Thackston, “Persian Literature,” in The Magnificent Mughals, ed. Zeenut Ziad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 94. See also J.T.P. de Bruijn, “Sabk-i Hindī,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, http://dx.doi.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/10.1163/9789004206106_eifo_SIM_6377 (last accessed August 21, 2017).
Paul Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1998), 3–9, 40–51. Sabk-i hindī sometimes also was called “new manner” (tarz-i tāza), in reference to a style initially brought about in Isfahan. For more information on Persian poetry in the Mughal context, see Sunil Sharma, Mughal Arcadia: Persian Poetry in an Indian Court (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); and Sunil Sharma, “Novelty, Tradition and Mughal Politics in Nau‘i’s Suz u Gudaz,” in The Necklace of the Pleiades: Studies in Persian Literature Presented to Heshmat Moayyad on his 80th Birthday (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007), 251–65. See also Selim Kuru, “Poetics of Influence: Diverse Origins and Diverging Paths of Persianate Cosmopolises,” keynote lecture, Comparative Persianate Aesthetics Symposium, Boston University, September 28, 2017.
Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī, 195, 203. For examples and an explanation of tāzagī in Safavid Iran as a literary framework for imitation in the arts, see Michael Chagnon, “The Illustrated Manuscript Tradition in Iran, 1040s/1630s–1070s/1660s: Patronage, Production, and Poetics in the Age of the ‘Fresh Style’” (PhD diss., New York University, 2015), esp. 84–86, 94.
Massumeh Farhad, “Searching for the New: Later Safavid Painting and the ‘Suz u Gawdaz’ (‘Burning and Melting’) by Nau’i Khabushani,” The Journal of the Walters Art Museum 59 (2001): 115–30. For more on Iranian artists who looked to European sources for inspiration, see Amy Landau, “Man, Mode, and Myth: Muhammad Zaman ibn Haji Yusuf,” in Pearls on a String: Artists, Patrons, and Poets at the Great Islamic Courts, ed. Amy Landau (Baltimore, MD: Walters Art Museum, in association with University of Washington Press, 2015), 167–203; Landau, “Visibly Foreign, Visibly Female”; Amy Landau, “From Poet to Painter: Allegory and Metaphor in a Seventeenth-Century Persian Painting by Muhammad Zaman, Master of Farangi-Sazi,” Muqarnas 28 (2011): 101–31; and Amy Landau, “Reconfiguring the Northern European Print to Depict Sacred History at the Persian Court,” in Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia, ed. Thomas D.C. Kaufmann and Michael North (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), 66–82.
With regard to architecture, this issue is best described in Shirine Hamadeh, “Westernization, Decadence and the Turkish Baroque: Modern Constructions of the Eighteenth Century,” Muqarnas 24 (2007): 194. This phenomenon also is seen in examples of titles like the aforementioned Renda, Batılılaşma. Some studies discuss how the Ottoman artist Levni (d. 1732) used earlier Safavid paintings as models for his portraits, but after his career, little is written regarding Persianate artistic exchanges from the mid- to late eighteenth century. See Güner İnal, “Tek figürlerden oluşan Osmanlı resim albümleri” (Ottoman painting albums comprised of single-figure studies), Arkeoloji-Sanat tarihi dergisi 3 (1984): 83–96.
Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Salih Özbaran, Ottoman Expansion Toward the Indian Ocean in the 16th Century (İstanbul: İstanbul Bilgi University Press, 2009). Emine Fetvacı also has examined the Shāhinshāhnāma of 1601, now in the Khoda Bakhsh Library in Pagna (Persian ms. 256), which relates the Hotin campaign of Mehmed III (1566–1603, r. 1595–1603). She argues that the manuscript must have been given as a gift to the Mughal court, as it contains the seal of the Mughal princess. Fetvacı, Album of the World Emperor, 153 n. 7; see also Melis Taner, Caught in a Whirlwind: A Cultural History of Ottoman Baghdad as Reflected in Its Illustrated Manuscripts (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 165–68, 180. For a study of Mughal elements in Ottoman architecture, see Turgut Saner, 19. yüzyıl İstanbul mimarlığında “Oryantalizm” (“Orientalism” in the architecture of nineteenth-century Istanbul) (Elmadağ, İstanbul: Pera Turizm ve Ticaret, 1998), esp. 100–105; and Hamadeh, City’s Pleasures, 85, 167, 179, 200, 236.
Rachel Milstein, “From South India to the Ottoman Empire—Passages in 16th c. Miniature Painting,” in 9. Milletlerarası Türk Sanatları Kongresi: Bildiriler, 23–27 Eylül 1991, Atatürk Kültür Merkezi-İstanbul/9th International Congress of Turkish Art, Contributions: 23–27 September 1991, Atatürk Cultural Center-Istanbul (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 1995), 497–506.
Keelan Overton, ed., Iran and the Deccan: Persianate Art, Culture, and Talent in Circulation, 1400–1700 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020); John Seyller, “Farrukh Beg in the Deccan,” Artibus Asiae 55.3–4 (1995): 319–42; Farhad, “Searching for the New,” 136, fig. 15.
For more on the Safavid artists and Persian manuscripts that made their way to the Ottoman court in the sixteenth century, see Zeren Tanındı, “Manuscript Production in the Ottoman Palace Workshop,” Manuscripts of the Middle East 5 (1990–91): 68; Meriç, Türk nakış san‘atı; Filiz Çağman, “Kanuni dönemi Osmanlı saray sanatçıları Örgütü. Ehl-i hiref” (The organization of Ottoman palace artists in the age of [Suleyman] the Law Giver. Ehl-i hiref), Türkiyemiz 18, no. 54 (Subat 1988): 11–17; Atıl, Age of Süleyman, 30; and Zeren Tanındı, “Additions to Illustrated Manuscripts in Ottoman Workshops,” Muqarnas 17 (2000): 147–61.
For a discussion of possible early inspiration from Mughal art, see Fetvacı, Album of the World Emperor, 3.
In fact, the writer of the inscriptions may not have been the first owner of this trilogy, although this individual certainly took an active role in asserting ownership over its paintings after they came into the person’s possession. The physical albums seem also to include pages from multiple compilations, one large portion of which may have once existed in an Ottoman concertina format, rather than the standard codices that we see today. I thank Jake Benson for these thoughts on the bindings and papers of this trilogy.
For a direct example of a high-end album, compare the cover of Mehmed Efendi’s album (H.2155) in the Topkapı Palace Library, Istanbul, which features rich seraser textiles (a silk fabric using gold and silver threads, a type of taqueté or weft-faced weave) on the cover faces framed by thick bands of leather. Collaço, “Albums of Conspicuous Consumption”; Atbaş, “Mehmed Emin Efendi ve murakkaları,” 117–26.
For examples of the orthographic peculiarities, see the inscriptions on fol. 1a of Arabe 6075 for the spelling of Abbasid names (transliterated later in the article), which are missing final letters as if spelled based on aural memory rather than scholarly study of historical texts.
For example, on fol. 9a of Arabe 6077, a dervish is labeled as “Hacı Bayram-ı Veli Bektaşi,” which is a conflation of two figures from completely different Sufi orders and time periods: Haci Bektaş (1209–1271), founder of the Bektashi order; and Haci Bayram Veli (d. 1430), who founded the Bayrami order. I thank Cemal Kafadar for bringing up this crucial point in our conversations and encouraging me to pursue the possibility of a non-Muslim collector.
Panayotis Alexandrou Papachristou, “The Three Faces of the Phanariots: An Inquiry into the Role and Motivations of the Greek Nobility under Ottoman Rule, 1683–1821” (MA thesis, Simon Fraser University, 1992); Christine Philliou, “Communities on the Verge: Unraveling the Phanariot Ascendancy in Ottoman Governance,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51.1 (2009): 151–81; Christine Philliou, “Families of Empires and Nations: Phanariot Hanedans from the Ottoman Empire to the World Around It (1669–1856),” in Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond: Experiences Since the Middle Ages, ed. Christopher H. Johnson et al. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 177–200; Traian Stoianovich, “The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant,” in Between East and West: The Balkan and Mediterranean Worlds, vol. 2, Economies and Societies: Traders, Towns, and Households (New Rochelle: A.D. Caratzas., 1992), 1–77, esp. 32–35.
Hagop Barsoumian, “The Dual Role of the Armenian Amira Class Within the Ottoman Government and the Armenian Millet (1750–1850),” in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, vol. 1, The Central Lands, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (London: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1982), 171–84; Ohannes Kılıçdağı, “The Armenian Community of Constantinople in the Late Ottoman Empire,” in Armenian Constantinople, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian and Simon Payaslian (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2010), 229–42. For the Armenian community of New Julfa in Isfahan, see Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). For more on Armenian and Greek architects, see Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, 46–49, 83–94.
For more on the major merchant groups of this period and their material worlds, see Nancy Um, Shipped but not Sold: Material Culture and the Social Protocols of Trade During Yemen’s Age of Coffee (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017).
Faith E. Beasley, Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal: François Bernier, Marguerite de la Sablière, and Enlightening Conversations in Seventeenth-Century France (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2019), 241–42.
Amanda Phillips, Everyday Luxuries: Art and Objects in Ottoman Constantinople, 1600–1800 (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin–Preussischer Kulturbesitz; Dortmund: Verlag Kettler, 2016), 127; Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “The Empire of Fabrics: The Range of Fabrics in the Gift Traffic of the Ottomans,” in Inventories of Textiles—Textiles in Inventories: Interdisciplinary Studies on Late Medieval and Early Modern Sources and Material Culture, ed. Barbara Karl and Thomas Ertl (Wien: Vienna University Press, forthcoming). See also the example that I discuss below about the relationship between Indian chintz and the designs on Kütahya ceramics from Yolande Crowe, “A Kütahya Bowl with a Lid in the Walters Art Museum,” The Journal of the Walters Art Museum 64/65 (2006): 199–206.
P.Ğ. İnciciyan, XVIII. Asirda Istanbul (Istanbul in the eighteenth century), ed. Hrand D. Andreasyan (Istanbul: Istanbul Matbaasi, 1956), 26.
İnciciyan, XVIII. Asirda Istanbul, 28.
Charles Pertusier, Picturesque Promenades In and Near Constantinople, and on the Waters of the Bosphorus (London: Sir R. Phillips, 1820), 81.
Ariel Salzmann, “The Age of Tulips: Confluence and Conflict in Early Modern Consumer Culture (1550–1730),” in Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550–1922, ed. Donald Quataert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 94–97. See also Elif Akçetin and Suraiya Faroqhi, “Introduction,” in Living the Good Life: Consumption in the Qing and Ottoman Empires of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Elif Akçetin and Suraiya Faroqhi (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 1–38.
Kīse-i mekr ü ḥīleyi açdı / Reh-i cānāna sīm ü zer ṣaçdı / Dehen-i kīse oldı ḥalḳa-yı dām / Ṣayd ola tā ki ol tezerv-ḫırām
Sadık Erdem, ed., Neylī ve dīvān’ı (Neylī and his collected poems) (Ankara: Atatürk Kültür Merkezi Başbakanlığı, 2005), 363, lines 20–21; Elias John Wilkinson Gibb, A History of Ottoman Poetry, vol. 4 (London: Luzac and Co, 1905), 86–88.
According to Casanova, Yusuf Ali presumably made romantic advances on the young traveler during a meal at his home, which made him very uncomfortable. When Yusuf’s attraction was not reciprocated, the Ottoman gentleman offered his daughter’s hand in marriage to the young Venetian instead. Giacomo Casanova, The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova, vol. 2 (London, 1894), 34–35, 39–40.
Casanova, Memoirs, 57–58.
In fact, many of the goods in this gift and the following package to Casanova were known to have passed through Yemen via European, Asian, and local merchants. Although many were known commodities, some of these goods also had a key role to play in ceremonies performed by commercial merchants, such as rites of entry. Um, Shipped but not Sold, 1, 31, 47–51.
Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, trans. Charles Stewart, ed. Daniel O’Quinn (London: Broadview Editions, 2009), 281.
Casanova, Memoirs, 58.
For the highest echelons of society, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) notes a similar global aesthetic as she describes the imported materials adorning the late grand vizier’s villa in Istanbul. She notes that the windows feature “the finest crystalline glass brought from England” and that several chambers include wall panels of “Japan china.” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M--y W---y M---e [Lady Mary Wortley Montagu] (London: John Taylor, 1790), 148.
Günsel Renda, “Redefining the European. The Image of the European in Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Painting,” in Europa und die Türkei im 18. Jahrhundert/Europe and Turkey in the 18th Century, ed. Barbara Schmidt Haberkamp (Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2011), 325–42; Renda, Batılılaşma, 46–51. For an overview of illustrated copies of these texts, see Serpil Bağcı, et al., Ottoman Painting (Ankara: Ministry of Culture and Tourism–The Bank Association of Turkey, 2010), 279–82.
Later collectors also noticed how the single-folio compositions also often comprised whole sections, which some individuals readily excised from these manuscripts to sell or admire as separate works.
This comparison between şehrengīz and Enderunlu Fazıl’s work has been discussed previously in Tülay Artan and İrvin Cemil Schick, “Ottomanizing Pornotopia: Changing Visual Codes in Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Erotic Miniatures,” in Eros and Sexuality in Islamic Art, ed. Francesca Leoni and Mika Natif (Farnham Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2013), 157–207; and Sunil Sharma, “The Ottoman Turkish Zenanname (ʻBook of Womenʼ),” British Library, Asian and African Studies Blog, November 17, 2016, https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2016/11/the-ottoman-turkish-zenanname-book-of-women.html (last accessed February 18, 2021). For more on şehrengīz, see Deniz Çalış-Kural, Şehrengiz, Urban Rituals and Deviant Sufi Mysticism in Ottoman Istanbul (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014); Sunil Sharma, “The City of Beauties in Indo-Persian Poetic Landscape,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24.2 (2004): 73–81; Agâh Sırrı Levend, Türk edebiyatında şehr-engizler ve şehr-engizlerde İstanbul (City-thrillers and Istanbul in city-thrillers in Turkish literature) (Istanbul: İstanbul Fethi Derneği, 1958); and Gibb, History of Ottoman Poetry, 227–28.
The choice of India and Iran is not alphabetically driven, nor do these regions occupy the farthest ends of the world from an Ottoman perspective. Therefore, they must hold another appeal for the audience, for which I offer one potential reason in the discussion. For a printed edition, see Enderunlu Fazıl, Der vasf-ı Hubanname; Der vasf-ı Zenanname-yi Fazıl; Rakkasname-yi Fazılın (Concerning the description of the Book of Young Men; Fazıl’s Book of Ladies; Fazıl’s Book of Male Dancers) (Istanbul, 1839), 7–9, 57–59.
Būlsa dil baġlayacaḳ bir dilber / hindīler böyle seyāhat-mi eder / Alṭādır mı dil-i dānişmendī / Tuḥfe-i tāze-i ḳumāş-i hindī.
Hubanname, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, M.91.93, fol. 6a. See also Fazıl, Der vasf-ı Hubanname, 7.
Even foreign manufacturers who traveled to Istanbul, like Jean-Claude Flachat (d. 1775), duly recorded the superiority of Indian textiles to local productions. Flachat summarizes his conversations with a travel companion, an Armenian (likely a trader) who journeyed to Iran during the rule of Nadir Shah (1688–1747, r. 1736–47). His Armenian companion teaches him that the highest quality of spun cotton comes from Gujarat via the route described above. The Armenian also notes that this cotton is higher in quality than that of Smyrna (Izmir), Acre, Romania, and elsewhere. Jean-Claude Flachat, Observations sur le commerce et sur les arts d’une partie de l’Europe, de l‘Asie, de l‘Afrique, et même des Indes orientales. Tome Second (Lyon: Buisson, 1766), 435–36. For a more in-depth history of the textile trade of this period, see Amanda Phillips, Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles Between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021).
Indian textiles most often were employed in making such items as Ottoman turbans, headdresses, and ladies’ veils. Some finished textiles, such as cotton and fine wool shawls, were also in demand. Allan B. Cunningham, “The Journal of Christoph Aubin: A Report on the Levant Trade in 1812,” Archivum Ottomanicum 7 (1983): 5–127; Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Textiles and Silver: The Indian Ocean in a Global Frame,” in Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean: An Ocean of Cloth, ed. Pedro Machado et al. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 35; Phillips, Sea Change.
The attribution to Bihzad reveals a great deal about the eighteenth-century owner’s level of culture and education, suggesting that he may not have fully understood the stylistic differences between Safavid and Mughal works, or preferred to associate the work with a well-known artist as an appraisal of its quality in the owner’s eyes. For a fuller discussion of the complexities relating to authorship in earlier Persianate painting and attribution, especially concerning the figure of Bihzad, see David J. Roxburgh, “Kamal al-Din Bihzad and Authorship in Persianate Painting,” Muqarnas 17 (2000): 119–46.
Elaine Wright, “Mughal Portraiture and Drawing, in Muraqqa,” in Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, ed. Elaine Wright (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2008), 164–77. For hierarchical readings of the larger scenic composition, see Ebba Koch, “The Hierarchical Principles of Shah-Jahani Painting,” in Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays, ed. Ebba Koch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 130–61.
Metin And, “Storytelling as Performance,” in Medieval and Early Modern Performance in the Eastern Mediterranean, ed. Arzu Öztürkmen and Evelyn Birge Vitz (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 7. The first Ottoman translation of Alf Layla wa Layla, Binbir Gece, was prepared by Abdī in the fifteenth century; many more translations and adaptations followed. Harun al-Rashid often is depicted as the Keloğlan (baldheaded), a lazy, clever, skillful, and witty ruler in Ottoman reception in folktales. The best-known tales today from the One Thousand and One Nights are documented from the Turkish oral tradition and manuscripts, including “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp.” The stories of this cycle also were available to rent in bookshops (sahaflar) in Istanbul. See Hande A. Birkalan-Gedik, “The Thousand and One Nights in Turkish: Translations, Adaptations, and Issues,” in The Arabian Nights in Transnational Perspective, ed. Ulrich Marzolph (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 201–20, esp. 204, 207. For more on the earliest Ottoman translations, see Şinasi Tekin, “Binbir Gece’nin ilk Türkçe tercümeleri ve bu hikayelerdeki gazeller üzerine” (On the first Turkish translations of One Thousand and One Nights and the ghazals [lyric poems] in these stories), Türk dili araştırmaları (1993): 23; and Şinasi Tekin, “Elf Leyle ve Leyle’nin 17. yüzyıl yazması nasıl yayımlanmalı? Bu metin ne kadar müstehcen?” (How should seventeenth-century manuscripts of One Thousand and One Nights be published? Just how obscene is this text?), Tarih ve toplum 208 (April 2001): 77–80.
Recitations of “Arabian Nights” are mentioned by Alexander Russell (ca. 1715–1768), who traveled to the Ottoman province of Aleppo as a physician to an English factory. See the numerous references in his diary, Alexander Russell, The Natural History of Aleppo. Containing a Description of the City, and the Principal Natural Productions in Its Neighbourhood. Together with an Account of the Climate, Inhabitants, and Diseases (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1794), 148–49.
A lending collection in late eighteenth-century Damascus, owned by Ahòmed al-Rabbātò, supports this physical characterization for manuscripts of tales. Based on the surviving manuscripts, Boris Liebrenz describes al-Rabbātò’s books of tales as being of similar appearance: “With few exceptions this type of literature is characterized by books of a rather uniform outer appearance: They are of small size; they have the simplest cardboard or quarter-leather binding; although the script is often professional, clear, and readable, there can be no claim to calligraphic beauty; the texts are bound into many volumes of usually between 30 to 60 leafs, which leads to extremely inflated numbers of volumes for one single text that could—more economically arranged—fit into one or a few volumes. This might have served both the professional needs of the public narrators in the coffeehouses as well as those of the book-lenders who could thereby lend out many parts of a text at the same time.” Boris Liebrenz, “The Library of Aḥmad al-Rabbāṭ. Books and Their Audience in 12th to 13th/18th to 19th Century Syria,” in Marginal Perspectives on Early Modern Ottoman Culture. Missionaries, Travelers, Booksellers, ed. Ralf Elger and Ute Pietruschka (Halle [Saale]: Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Regionalstudien, 2013), 26. See also Meredith Moss Quinn, “Books and Their Readers in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2016), 145.
As Yorgos Dede relates, Harun al-Rashid’s legend connects with those of the early sieges of Constantinople and Seyyid Battal, both of which developed after the conquest of 1453 and appear in the anonymous Ottoman chronicles that incorporate the History of Constantinople (1491). Yorgos Dedes, Battalname: Giriş, İngilizce tercüme, Türkçe metin, yorum ve tıpkıbasım (Battalname [Book of Battal]: Introduction, English translation, Turkish text, commentary and facsimile) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Üniversitesi Yakindoğu Dilleri ve Medeniyetleri Bölümü, 1996), 23–24, no. 68. See also Stephane Yerasimos, La fondations de Constantinople et de Sainte-Sophie dans les traditions turques: Légendes d’empire (Paris: Librairie d’Ameìrique et d’Orient, 1990), 180–81; Irene Melikoff, “Sur le Jāmaspnāme,” Journal Asiatique 242 (1954): 453; and Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, “Battalnāme,” TDV İslam ansiklopedisi, vol. 5 (Istanbul: TDV, 1992), 207–8. Quinn further notes that “Many versions of al-Tòabarī, including the original composition, treat people who are the heroes of other hòikāye stories, such as King Solomon (of the Süleymān-nāme), Alexander the Great (of the İskender-nāme), and Ebu Müslim. See, for example, the tables of contents in Laleli 2018 and İzmir 463, both accessed in the Süleymaniye Library.” Quinn, “Books and Their Readers,” 145.
Although Harun al-Rashid is referenced many times in his text, Evliya Çelebi’s retellings include two tales relating to this caliph’s sieges of Constantinople. The first is titled “The eighth siege of the city of Constantinople,” and the second is “Üsküdar’s mosques, schools, inns, and bathhouses, and other remains of structures.” The latter contains an account of a siege that the city misattributed to Harun al-Rashid (the likely perpetrator was Maslama, d. 738, in 717–18), which is combined with an episode of the Baṭṭālnāme. See Evliya Çelebi, Evliyâ Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi (Evliyâ Çelebi’s Book of Travel), vol. 1, ed. Robert Dankoff, Seyit Ali Kahraman, and Yücel Dağlı (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1998), 33–37, 220–21. See also Dedes, Battalname, 24.
Carsten Niebuhr, Travels Through Arabia and Other Countries in the East, vol. 2, trans. Robert Heron (Edinburgh: R. Morrison and Sons, 1792), 267.
Numerous parallels arise with A.K. Ramanujan’s insights on retellings of other literary cycles, like the Ramayana, which pull on a common pool of signifiers (plot points, characters, names, geography, incidents, and relationships). As he writes, “Each author, if one may hazard a metaphor, dips into it and brings out their own unique crystallization, a new text with a unique texture and fresh context ... In this sense, no text is original, yet no telling is a mere retelling—and the story has no closure although it may be enclosed by a text.” A.K. Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation,” in The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 131–60, esp. 157–58.
These forms of re-inscribing onto non-local objects have been noted as a mode of exoticization in Paris during the same period. For example, French collectors renamed North American wampums as “collier de porcelaine,” which re-inscribed these objects with a greater economic and diplomatic meaning for their owners. Here, it appears that the re-inscribed names bring painted Mughal figures into the literary imaginary of the Ottoman urban sphere, which likely had a greater relevance for the owner than the original identities of these figures. For Parisian examples of re-inscription and renaming, see Noémie Étienne, “Transaction and Translation: The Trade in Non-European Artefacts in Paris and Versailles,” in Acquiring Cultures: Histories of World Art on Western Markets, ed. Bénédicte Savoy, Charlotte Guichard, and Christine Howald (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 23–35.
India had a reputation for artistry and abundance in Persianate literature since at least the sixteenth century. For example, the Safavid prince Sam Mirza Safavi (1517–1566), who was well known to the Ottomans, composed a ḳıtʿa in the mid-sixteenth century stating, “I must proceed to India, as there the affairs of the artists prosper. / Generosity and munificence have departed from the people of the world and gone to the Dark Land [of India].” Sam Mirza Safavi, Tazkira-i Tuḥfa-i Sāmī (Biographical dictionary of the gift of Sam) (Tehran: Maṭbaʿa-i Armagān-i Anjām, 1936), 246. This text is translated by Esra Akin in Musòtòafaì Alī’s Epic Deeds of Artists: A Critical Edition of the Earliest Ottoman Text About the Calligraphers and Painters of the Islamic World (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 207, no. 258. This situation recalls the role of China in earlier Islamic literature, in which the land was synonymous with beauty and worldly attachment, a category that includes the production and collection of fine art. The most notable depictions appear in the story of the Chinese Princess (or Robber of Consciousness) in Book One of Masnevi (1273) by Rumi (1207–1273), and Alexander’s judgment of Chinese and Greek painters in Iskandarnāma (ca. 1194–1202) by Nizami (ca. 1141–1209), among many others. For a summary of Rumi’s tale featuring the Chinese Princess, and the later Ottoman version by Sheikh Ghalib (1757–1799), see Victoria Rowe Holbrook, The Unreadable Shores of Love: Turkish Modernity and Mystic Romance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 42–44. For Alexander’s judgment, see David J. Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image: The Writing of Art History in Sixteenth-Century Iran (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 178; and Priscilla Soucek, “Nizami on Painters and Painting,” in Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. Richard Ettinghausen (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1972), 12. With regard to art collection, further instances appear in the story of the Chest of Witnessing, where the King of China brings out this object to show rare portraits of the prophets to the Arab Ibn Habbar. See David Roxburgh, “Concepts of the Portrait in the Islamic Lands, ca. 1300–1600,” in Dialogues in Art History, from Mesopotamian to Modern: Readings for a New Century, ed. Elizabeth Cropper, Studies in the History of Art, vol. 74 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; New Haven: Distributed by Yale University Press, 2009), 22. As this topic covers its own broad bibliography beyond the confines of an endnote, refer to the brief overview in Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Chinese-Iranian Relations x. China in Medieval Persian Literature,” Encyclopaedia Iranica 5.5 (1991): 454–55; an updated version is available online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/chinese-iranian-x (last accessed February 19, 2021).
Ulrich Marzolph, “Arabian Nights,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Third Edition, ed. Kate Fleet et al., http://dx.doi.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_0021 (last accessed August 25, 2017).
Holly Shaffer’s essay in this volume also engages with similar acts of the “re-casting” of characters found in printed works based on Indian and British painted portraits.
In a painting from the Sobḥet ül-ebkār (The Conversation of the Virgins), the caliph al-Maʿmun and his soldiers are greeted by a man with a tray of fruit. See Walters Art Museum, W.666, fol. 97b. Similar Safavid turbans appear on other historical characters. For example, see the painting of a messenger from Seljuk Sultan Melikşāh (1055–1092, r. 1072–92) being received by the Byzantine king on fol. 69b.
Hamadeh, City’s Pleasures, 229.
In numerous beyts (couplets), Naşid discusses Hindus, Tatars, Qajars, Persians in general, Russians, and Europeans. In terms of geographic range, he mentions and elaborates on Iran, Shiraz, Reyy, Isfahan, Kashan, the Holy Cities, Cathay, China in general, and Kandahar. Naşid’s poetry also indicates how many of the literary/historical characters discussed in this chapter became subjects of shorter poems during this period, including the Bermakids and Harun al-Rashid. For an inventory of subjects and also a facsimile/transliteration of his divan, see Lütfi Alıcı, “Dīvān-i Nāşīd: İnceleme—tenkitli metin” (Collected poems of Nāşīd: Analysis—critical text) (PhD diss., T.C. İnönü Üniversitesi, 1998), 102–10.
Sabahettin Küçük, ed., Bâkî dîvânî: Tenkitli basım (Collected poems of Bâkî: Critical edition) (Ankara: AKDTYK Türk Dil Kurumu Yayınları, 1994), 36. For the line’s earlier referent, see Annemarie Schimmel, “Turk and Hindu: A Poetical Image and its Application to Historical Fact,” in Islam and Cultural Change in the Middle Ages, ed. Speros Vryonis Jr. (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1975), 109.
As the penultimate ruler of the Mughal Empire, Akbar Shah took the throne in 1806 after the second reign of his predecessor, Alam Shah II (1728–1806, r. 1760–July 1788 and October 1788–1806). Akbar Shah’s rule followed an especially low point for the Mughal royal family. The renegade eunuch Ghulam Qadir captured Delhi for two and a half months in 1788. During this time, Ghulam Qadir’s forces blinded Alam Shah while also humiliating the royal women and children. In 1788, Alam Shah II was restored to the throne by a Maratha warlord from the Sindhia family; he ruled until 1806. Before his father was reinstated, Akbar Shah, a witness to these events, briefly acted as emperor for thirteen days. Following these events, in 1803, control over Delhi and its emperor had passed to the British East India Company, meaning that Akbar Shah inherited little power by the time he ascended to the throne. Perhaps the notoriety of this historical moment made the name Akbar Shah recognizable to an Ottoman audience attuned to international politics. For a short history of Akbar Shah, see Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 444. See also Kalikinkar K. Datta, Shah Alam II and the East India Company (Calcutta: World Press Private Ltd, 1965), 101–16. Chronologically, Akbar Shah is also the latest labeled figure in BnF albums 6075, 6076, and 6077. According to coins minted in his honor, the young emperor began using this title in 1788 during his temporary first reign. See R.B. Whitehead, “Some Notable Coins of the Mughal Emperors of India, Part II,” The Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Royal Numismatic Society, Fifth Series 6 (1926): 361–416.
While such distant architectural landscapes are common in Mughal painting, outside this example, I have not seen another painting that uses structures so closely tied to Ottoman buildings. The execution of the purple foliage and architecture also resembles eighteenth-century Ottoman additions to older paintings and albums. For an example of this trend, see British Library, London, Or.2709, fols. 10a and 29a, which are overpainted and interpolated paintings, respectively, in an album originally compiled circa 1600. For more on overpainting in Ottoman albums, see Collaço, “Image as Commodity,” 308–10.
The earliest examples of such features appear in manuscripts produced for Bayezid II (1447–1512, r. 1481–1512) and in structures like the Mevlana convent in Konya, dated to the fifteenth century. I thank my anonymous reviewer for the generous reference to the Konya example. Among the later instances of similar structures, the tall steeple and pointed roof have analogues in Blagovestenska Church in Szentendre, Hungary. This Greek Orthodox structure, established by Serbs in the mid-1700s, features similar tall windows on the steeple tower and arched windows topped with roundel windows. Aside from travel guides, this church has not received substantial study in English, although some of its features (and several of its counterparts) are discussed in Vukoszávlyev Zorán, “Serbian Orthodox Churches of Hungary,” Bulletin: Faculty of Architectural Engineering Budapest University of Technology and Economics, 2000, 39–43.
Be-zolfat marā mubtalā karde-i / Marā mubtalā-yi balā karde-i. See Francis Steingass’s exact definition of mubtalā-yi i balā as “Overtaken by or involved in calamity or misfortune.” Francis Joseph Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian–English Dictionary, Including the Arabic Words and Phrases to Be Met With in Persian Literature (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1892), 1150.
Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “Dogs, Elephants, Lions and a Rhino on Diplomatic Mission: Animals as Gifts to the Ottoman Court,” in Animals and People in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi (Istanbul: Eren, 2010), 282–83.
“Apparently all elephants offered to the Ottoman court were of Indian origin, including an animal sent to the Ottoman ruler in 1738 by Nadir Shah, along with a complete set of equipment.” Reindl-Kiel, “Animals as Gifts,” 279–80.
In Safavid painting, Riza-yi ʿAbbasi (ca. 1565–1635) and Shafi’-i Abbasi (active mid-17th century) were known to use raḳm-i (“written or drawn by”) in their signatures, but the use of the term in Ottoman painting is not as well documented and systematically studied. The term does appear, however, on other Ottoman paintings, for example, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, M.85.237.47. For Safavid examples, see J.M. Rogers, Islamic Art and Design, 1500–1700 (London: British Museum Publications, 1983), 70, 84. In her forthcoming article, Tülay Artan has suggested that the use of this term marked the user as someone who communicates by means of letters. Yet as raḳm also refers to marks or figures drawn, use of the term also may indicate the individual behind the image itself, either in design or execution. Sir James Redhouse, A Turkish and English Lexicon (Istanbul and Beirut: A.H. Boyajian, 1890), 983.
Wright, “Mughal Portraiture and Drawing,” 164–77. For a comparative perspective on the symbolic aspects and formal conventions of Mughal portraiture as it relates to genealogy, see Gülru Necipoğlu, “The Serial Portraits of Ottoman Sultans in Comparative Perspective,” in The Sultan’s Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman (Istanbul: İşbank, 2000), 22–61.
For examples of Dara Shikoh’s portraits, see Bichitr (active 17th century), Prince Salim (later Jahangir), Mughal India, ca. 1630, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, IM.28-1925; Murad (attr.), Dara Shikoh, Mughal India, 1631–32, British Library, London, Add. Or.3129, fol. 59b; and Dara Shikoh with a sword, Mughal India, 17th century, Indian Museum, Kolkata, R-221-S-129-5679.
For more on this Ottoman physiognomy and its use in royal portraiture, see Emin Lelić, “Ottoman Physiognomy (‘Ilm-I Firâset): A Window into the Soul of an Empire” (PhD diss., The University of Chicago, 2017); Sultan’s Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman (Istanbul: İşbank, 2000); and Loqmān ibn Hòosayn al-‘Āshûrî, Kıyafetü’l-insaniyye fi şemaili’l-Osmaniyye/Human Physiognomy of the Features of the Ottomans, ed. Tevfik Temelkuran and Engin Işıksal (İstanbul: Tarihi Araştırmalar Vakfı, İstanbul Araştırma Merkezi, 1999).
Many thanks to Ünver Rüstem for initially bringing this salient point about the inscription to my attention in our discussions.
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, P150e8, compared to Seated Artist, ca. 1600, Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, F1932.28. For the Ottoman attribution, see Necipoğlu, “Visual Cosmopolitanism,” 39–43. For older attributions, see Alan Chong, “Seated Scribe, 1479–81,” in Bellini and the East, ed. Caroline Campbell and Alan Chong (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2005), 122. See also, in the same catalogue, Emine Fetvacı, “Seated Artist, about 1600,” 123.
This type of eclectic transformation has been noted far earlier by the authors listed in note 95 (particularly by Necipoğlu), and also in Anna Contadini’s descriptions of the “Seated Scribe.” Necipoğlu, “Visual Cosmopolitanism,” 39–43; Anna Contadini, “Threads of Ornament in the Style World of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” in Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local, ed. Gülru Necipoğlu and Alina Payne (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 304.
For more on Riza-yi ʿAbbasi, see Sheila Canby, The Rebellious Reformer: The Drawings and Paintings of Riza-yi Abbasi of Isfahan (London: Azimuth Editions, 1996).
Based on my discussions with specialists of both Persian and Ottoman painting, considerable ambiguity surrounds this model’s gender. Although Sheila Canby titled Shaykh Muhammad’s version as “Young Man in a Gold Hat,” subsequent adaptations of this model in Safavid and Ottoman painting become murkier to identify without labels, as in this case. Even for earlier adaptations of this model, it is not clear how Ottoman viewers interpreted the details of Safavid figures and dress from decades to a century prior. Additionally, scholarship on the construction of gender in premodern Iran cautions us from using such binary identifications. After all, into the early Qajar era (1789–1925) in Iran, beauty was not distinguished by gender. According to Afsaneh Najmabadi, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that a highly gender-differentiated portrayal of beauty emerged. For earlier interpretations of this model, see Sheila R. Canby, Princes, Poets and Paladins: Islamic and Indian Paintings from the Collection of Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan (London: British Museum Press, 1998), 65–66, cat. no. 40; and Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 4, 11–25. I would also like to thank Michael Chagnon for discussing the earlier Shaykh Muhammad model and sharing the Canby reference with me.
Collaço, “Albums of Conspicuous Consumption.”
Collaço, “Albums of Conspicuous Consumption.”
For earlier and contemporaneous Ottoman examples, see Tanındı, “Additions to Illustrated Manuscripts”; İnal, “Tek figürlerden,” esp. 93–94 and res. 21–24; and Collaço, “Albums of Conspicuous Consumption.”
For a discussion of the naẓīre in architecture, see Gülru Necipoğlu, “Challenging the Past: Sinan and the Competitive Discourse of Early Modern Islamic Architecture,” Muqarnas 10 (1993): 176–77. For poetry, see Walter Feldman, “Imitatio in Ottoman Poetry: Three Ghazals of the Mid-Seventeenth Century,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 21.2 (1997): 42; and Walter Andrews, “Starting Over Again: Some Suggestions for Rethinking Ottoman Divan Poetry in the Context of Translation and Transmission,” in Translations: (Re)Shaping of Literature and Culture, ed. Saliha Paker (Istanbul: Boğaziçi University Press, 2002), 15–37. Naẓīre poetry also has been discussed in relation to earlier albums of the seventeenth century. See Fetvacı, “The Gaze,” 145.
This dynamic has striking parallels in Mughal painting at Jahangir’s court, as noted by Molly Aitken. See her discussion of how depictions of Layla and Majnun draw from European and Persian sources, particularly those depictions by Manohar (active 1582–1624), who juxtaposes an “exotic” Christian figure with a familiar Islamic character. Molly Emma Aitken, The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 155–210, esp. 170.
The full inscription reads, Bānū Şāh bint Akbar Şāḥ Hindī.
Upon close examination, the execution of the figure on the left also shows traces of overpainting wherein blocks of color frequently stray beyond the inked outline of the figure and even into the blue borders surrounding the figural study, unlike comparisons from Safavid courts.
Comparisons are found in Mehmed Efendi’s album to a figure with the same headdress and seated pose, H.2155, fol. 29a. See also a portrait of a “princess” at the Harvard Art Museums; M.S. Simpson, Arab and Persian Painting in the Fogg Art Museum (Boston, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1980), 69.
The mythic painter Mani is based loosely on a Parthian prophet from third-century Sasanian Iran, who founded the religion of Manichaeism. Historically, his teachings were said to have been illuminated and beautifully illustrated, but nothing survives to affirm that such works were painted definitively by his hand. Mani’s artistic reputation was expanded greatly in later Islamic legends, which describe him as a false prophet and a miracle worker with paint. For the related text by Dust Muhammad on Mani’s Artangi Tablet, which draws upon stories from Gulistan (completed 1258) by Saʿdi (1210–1292) and Nizami’s Khamsa (ca. 1163–1202), see Dust Muhammad, “Preface to the Bahram Mirza Album,” trans. Wheeler M. Thackston, in Thackston, Album Prefaces and Other Documents on the History of Calligraphers and Painters (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2001), 12. For a discussion of this work, see Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image, 174–219. See also Eleanor Sims, with Boris I. Marshak and Ernst J. Grube, Peerless Images: Persian Painting and Its Sources (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 20–22; and Iain Gardner, Founder of Manichaeism. Rethinking the Life of Mani: The Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 30 May–2 June 2016 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
For a fuller discussion of Ottoman signatures and attributions in later paintings, see Collaço, “Image as Commodity,” 300–304.
For a close study of cosmopolitanism at the court of Mehmed II, see Necipoğlu, “Visual Cosmopolitanism.”
For information on Chinese works in earlier Topkapı albums, see Necipoğlu, “Persianate Images.” Only one courtly manuscript based on Indian literature (in Ottoman translation via Persian) from this period is extant: the Ottoman Kalila wa Dimnah or Humayunname (British Library, London, Or.7354). Ernst J. Grube, “Some Observations Concerning the Ottoman Illustrated Manuscripts of the Kalilah wa Dimnah: Ali Çelebi’s Humayun-name,” in 9. Milletlerarası Türk sanatları kongresi: Bildiriler: 23–27 Eylül 1991, Atatürk Kültür Merkezi–İstanbul/9th International Congress of Turkish Art: Contributions: 23–27 September 1991, Atatürk Cultural Center–Istanbul, vol. 2 (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 1995), 195–205.
For more on this concept, see Sussan Babaie, “Introduction,” in The Mercantile Effect: Art and Exchange in the Islamicate World during the 17th and 18th Centuries, ed. Sussan Babaie and Melanie Gibson (London: Gingko Library, 2017), 9–12 and accompanying essays. Also, while the paintings in later Ottoman albums range in origin from European states to India, Ottomans collected other objects from a much wider variety of places during this period, such as importing porcelain from as far as China.
For a facsimile of the Manuzzi Album, see Niccolo Manucci, Piero Falchetta, and Mario Bussagli, Storia del Mogol, 2 vols. (Milano: F.M. Ricci, 1986). The Witsen Album is another comparable compilation from Hyderabad in 1686 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-T-00-3186). For an overview of this album, see Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer, “Het Witsenalbum: Zeventiende-eeuwse Indiase Portretten Op Bestelling” (The Witsen Album: Seventeenth-century Indian portraits made-on-demand), Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 44.3 (1996): 167–254.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011), 138–60.
For Manucci’s journey through the Ottoman Empire, specifically Smyrna, Bursa, Tokat, and Erzurum, see the first seven chapters of his memoir: Niccolo Manucci, Storia do Mogor; or, Mogul India, 1658–1708, trans. William Irvine (London: Murray, 1907), 1–20.
See the systematic study of the transformation of the figural design corpus, which maps relationships found between the contents of known seventeenth-century costume albums through network graphing, in Collaço, “Image as Commodity,” 160–231.
In 1715–16, an imperial decree addressed to booksellers prohibited the sale of fine books (kütüb-i nefise) to foreign merchants and their export from the Ottoman provinces on the pretext of their increasing rarity (ḳıllet). A widescale comparative study of acquisition dates is needed to determine the extent of the effects of this ban and the extent to which it was followed. From my own sampling of a single genre, I have yet to find an Ottoman costume album dating from the period immediately following this ban. Ottoman costume albums re-emerge in the last quarter of the eighteenth century with transformed production techniques that included the use of underdrawing, translucent pigments, and a re-emphasized Ottoman focus. For more on the Ottoman ban on the export of rare books, see Mehmed Raşid, Tarih-i Raşid (History of Raşid), vol. 4 (Istanbul: Matbaa-yi Âmire, 1865–66), 238. See also Frédéric Hitzel, “Manuscrits, livres et culture livresque à Istanbul,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, nos. 87–88 (September 1999): 19–38. For more on the developments in the figural corpus of costume albums and the eighteenth-century hiatus, see Collaço, “Image as Commodity,” 160–231.
Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, Travels, 143–44.
For this scene, see the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Ouseley 297, fols. 1r–2r.
Sir William Ouseley’s travel account narrates his route back from India, which takes him through Shiraz, Isfahan, and Tabriz before reaching Constantinople and Smyrna. William Ouseley, Travels in Various Countries of the East, vols. 2, 3 (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1823). Ouseley served as English ambassador to the Iranian court during these travels.
The origins of the paintings are inscribed on the backs by Ouseley himself on fols. 4a, 6a–11a.
This was the case for a number of Ottoman manuscripts that entered the palace library during the sixteenth century. See Tanındı’s example of Toqmaq Khan (active mid- to late 16th century) during his diplomatic mission to Istanbul. Khan’s gifts included the Shahnama of Firdawsi and some illustrated albums. Also, Ottoman military ventures into Iran, like the temporary capture of Tabriz in 1514, show how books entered the Ottoman court as booty, bringing in the works of new authors like ‘Ali Shir Nava’i (1441–1501). Following this, we begin to see Nava’i’s work illustrated in the Ottoman naḳḳāşḫāne. Tanındı, “Additions to Illustrated Manuscripts,” esp. 148–49.
Elaine Julia Wright, “An Introduction to the Albums of Jahangir and Shah Jahan,” in Elaine Julia Wright, Muraqqa‘: Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International; Hanover: Distributed by University Press of New England, 2008), 44.
Such albums may be found in the Institute of Oriental Studies, St. Petersburg (E14 St. Petersburg Album), and National Public Library, St. Petersburg (Dorn-489). Both are discussed in Anastassiia Botchkareva, “Representational Realism in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Changing Visual Cultures in Mughal India and Safavid Iran 1580–1750” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014), 227–32.
Botchkareva’s dissertation is one of the recent art historical studies of this Persianate dynamic between India and Iran, prompted by the “demands of the new, more diverse group of patrons outside the court. These individuals probably now competed with each other.” See Botchkareva, “Representational Realism”; and Farhad, “Searching for the New,” 126.
For background on Abdullah Buhari’s works, see Banu Mahir, Çağlarboyu Anadolu’da kadın (Women in Anatolia through the ages), cat. nos. 23, 136, 137, 138, 215, 269; Banu Mahir, “Abdullah Buhari’nin minyatürlerinde 18. yüzyıl Osmanlı kadın modası” (Eighteenth-century Ottoman women’s fashion in the miniatures of Abdullah Buhari), P Sanat, kültür, antika 12 (1999): 70–81; Serpil Bağcı, Ottoman Painting (Ankara: Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2010), 273–75; Renda, Batılılaşma, 41–43; Walter B. Denny, Turkish Treasures from the Collection of Edwin Binney 3rd (Portland, OR: Portland Art Museum, 1979), cat. no. 67; and Yıldız Demiriz, “18. yüzyılda çiçek ressamlığı” (Floral paintings in the eighteenth century), in 18. yüzyılda kültür ortamı, 20–21 Mart 1997. Sempozyum bildirileri (Istanbul: Sanat Tarihi Derneği, 1998), 80–83. For a sampling of his paintings in the BnF trilogy, see Collaço, “Albums of Conspicuous Consumption.”
Tülay Artan, “Women in Distress: The Changing Fortunes of Nev’izade Atayi and Üskübi Mehmed Efendi from the Early-Seventeenth to the Early-Eighteenth Century Istanbul,” Muqarnas 38 (forthcoming 2022). I offer my deep thanks to the author for allowing me to read a draft of this article.
As Rishad Choudhury points out, many of the lodgers may not have been only Indian but also Central Asian. Rishad Choudhury, “The Hajj and the Hindi: The Ascent of the Indian Sufi Lodge in the Ottoman Empire,” Modern Asian Studies 50.6 (2016): 1888–1931.
Lâle Can, “Connecting People: A Central Asian Sufi Network in Turn-of-the-Century Istanbul,” Modern Asian Studies 46.2 (2012): 387. For further background on this tekke, see Grace Martin Smith, “The Özbek Tekkes of Istanbul,” Der Islam 57.1 (1980): 130–39.
I am borrowing the term “trans-imperial subjects” from E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects Between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).
Şirvani Ebubekir Efendi is discussed in greater depth in Artan, “Women in Distress.” See also the preliminary work of Cécile Bonmariage, “Ottoman MSS Owners in the 12th/18th c.—Materials on the Library of Abu Bakr b. Rustam al-Shirwānī / al-Šhirwānī / Ebûbekir bin Rüstem-i Şirvânî,” https://dial.uclouvain.be/pr/boreal/object/boreal:180386 (last accessed February 26, 2021). For his luxury manuscripts in the Topkapı Palace Library collection, see Lale Uluç, Turkman Governors, Shiraz Artisans and Ottoman Collectors (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası, 2006), 480–81. For his manuscripts at the BnF, see Richard Francis, “Lecteurs ottomans de manuscrits du XVIe au XVIIe s.,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, nos. 87–88 (September 1999): 79–83.
One example with an impressive collection of foreign objects is “The Estate Inventory of Türk Ali Pasha, d. 1700,” reproduced in Birol Çetin, “İstanbul Askeri kassamına âit hicri: 1112–1113 (M. 1700–1701) tarihli tereke defterleri” (Inheritance registers dated 1112–1113 hijri [1700–1701] relating to the Askeri class) (MA thesis, Istanbul University, 1992), 1–31. For a translation into English, see Phillips, Everyday Luxuries, 149–61.
That eighteenth-century album (Topkapı Palace Library, Istanbul, H.2143) is labeled as ʿacemkārī, but contains works from India, Iran, and the Ottoman Empire, with some works from the latter group incorporating European modes of portraiture. Until roughly the mid-sixteenth century, terms like ʿacemī and rūmī (of the lands of Rum) were used to mark cultural competition and affinity, although, as Tijana Krstić argues, increasing tensions emerged among their usage by the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Tijana Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 5. An example of the earlier classical use is found in the naḳḳāşḫāne registers, wherein artists were divided into ʿacemī and rūmī factions. For more on the history of the concept of “Rūm” and its conceptualization in relation to ʿAcem, see Cemal Kafadar, “Introduction: A Rome of One’s Own: Reflections on Cultural Geography and Identity in the Lands of Rum,” Muqarnas 24 (2007): 15.
Examples of these terms include references to a very expensive “ʿacemkārī taṣvīr, 1,130 akçe,” Musahib-i Hazret-i Şehriyārī Ahmed Ağa, d. 1183. KA.309, fol. 70b; “Kitāb-ı Fārsī, muṣavver, 240 akçe,” Dergah-ı Āli İbrahim Beg, d. 1145. KA.67, fol. 1b; “Kıṣaṣ-ı Enbiya, Fārsī, muṣavver, 420 akçe,” Valide Hanı tüccarından Abdülkadir Ağa, d. 1183. KA.347, fol. 79b; and “Mihr ü Müşteri, Fārsī, muṣavver, 3000 akçe,” Şıkk-ı Evvel Defterdarı Mehmed Efendi, d. 1105. Istanbul (T.S.) 310, fol. 49b.
For examples of albums and anthologies in inheritance registers, see İstanbul kadi sicilleri (Ottoman judicial registers), vol. 15 (Istanbul: İSAM Yayınları, 2008–), 192–93; and İstanbul kadi sicilleri, vol. 36, 103. In general, I have encountered more than one hundred records for illustrated manuscripts, which include albums and anthologies, amongst the inheritance registers of commercial buyers for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A large percentage of these have been published in Erünsal, Osmanlılarda sahaflık ve sahaflar, 453–59.
“Un libraire turc, nommé Mahamoud Bacha, me fit voir plusieurs figures faites en Perse, enrichies à la marge de divers grotesques plaisans d’or, merveilleusement bien appliqués. M. l’Ambassadeur ne les prit pas, parce qu’il les vouloit vendre a un trop grand prix.” Antoine Galland, Journal d’Antoine Galland pendant son Séjour a Constantinople, 1672–1673, vol. 1 (Paris: Librarie de la Société Asiatique, 1881), 31. See also page 33 in the same volume for Galland’s account of a Shāhnāma in the “Persian style.”
James Dallaway, Constantinople Ancient and Modern: With Excursions to the Shores and Islands of the Archipelago and to the Troad (London: T. Bensley, 1797), 75.
Dallaway, Constantinople, 75.
I employ quotations in my usage of the term “cultural preservation,” as in today’s context the term is loaded with contemporary political connotations and comprises an entire field of study unto itself. Here, I am referring to a much earlier incarnation that relies on a connoisseurial appreciation for the past in relation to a work’s rarity in the market. For the earlier period covering the mid- to late sixteenth century, Lâle Uluç has suggested similar dynamics for how the Ottoman–Safavid conflict led to cultural development through the collection of Persian manuscripts among Ottoman elites. Lâle Uluç, “Ottoman Book Collectors and Illustrated Sixteenth Century Shiraz Manuscripts,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, nos. 87–88 (September 1999): 107.
Phillips, Everyday Luxuries, 127. Archival sources attest to this practice in other media, like textiles. In one case, non-Muslims from Chios attempted to open a weaving mill in Istanbul to sell fabrics equaling the quality of Venetian imports at just twenty percent of the price. Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Ali Emiri-SAMD III, Dosya 227, Gömlek 21881, cited in Reindl-Kiel, “The Empire of Fabrics”; also discussed in Collaço, “Albums of Conspicuous Consumption.”
Crowe, “A Kütahya Bowl,” 199–206. For examples and more on the development of Kütahya ceramics, see Garo Kürkman, Magic of Clay and Fire: A History of Kütahya Pottery and Potters (Istanbul: Suna and Inan Kıraç Foundation, 2006); Hülya Bilgi et al., Kütahya Tiles and Ceramics: Suna and İnan Kiraç Foundation Collection, Catalogue (Istanbul: Pera Müzesi, 2006); and Sevinç Gök et al., Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Kütahya Tiles and Ceramics 2 (Istanbul: Pera Müzesi, 2016).
Indeed, Kütahya ceramics were considered status/identity markers for the local elite of Cyprus and modern-day Greece, much like Chinese and European ceramics were to Ottoman princesses. See J. Mann and A. Saidel, “Kütahya Ware Coffee Cups in Rural Cyprus and Greece: Peasant Ware It Is Not,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 23.2 (2019): 343–60; Tülay Artan, “Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Princesses as Collectors: Chinese and European Porcelains in the Topkapı Palace Museum,” Ars Orientalis 39 (2010): 113–47; and Julian Raby and Ünsal Yücel, “Chinese Porcelain at the Ottoman Court,” in Chinese Ceramics in the Topkapı Palace: A Complete Catalogue, vol. 1, ed. Regina Krahl (London: Sotheby’s, 1986), 27–54.
Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration, 184–95. See also the account below by Mustafa Âli, who bemoaned the “rich merchants ... whose associates travel to India and beyond, returning with various precious rarities with which they constantly enlarge their capital.” Andreas Tietze, ed. and trans., Mustafa Âli’s Counsel for Sultans of 1581, vol. 2 (Vienna: Verlag Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1982), 37–39.
Naʿīmā, Naīmā tarihi (History of Naʿīmā), vol. 5, ed. Zuhuri Danışman (Istanbul: Kardeş Matbaası, 1969), 2370–71.
Şemdanizade, Fındıklılı Süleyman Efendi tarihi, mür’i’t-tevarikh (The history of Fındıklılı Süleyman Efendi, the shower of histories), vols. 1, 2, ed. M. Münir Aktepe (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Matbaası, 1980), 2:11, 1:151.
In particular, see Topkapı Palace Library, H.2137, which was compiled in the mid-seventeenth century under Shah ‘Abbas II (ca. 1632–1666, r. 1642–66), but entered the Ottoman collection at some point during the following century and a half, as it bears the tuğra of Selim III stamped at the heart of the shamsa (rosette or medallion) of fol. 1a. This album includes Safavid, Mughal, Deccani, and European compositions. See Botchkareva, “Representational Realism,” 37–38, 219–25, 306–12. Album H.2137 also features an earlier preface to the Muhammad Wali Khan album; see Thackston, Album Prefaces, 38. This preface is discussed in Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image, 224–25.
For a terrace setting comparable to that found in H.2143, which aids in identifying the origins of the work on the right in figure 15, see “The interior of a HARAM in DEHLI [sic]” (title inscribed on mount), Dipaka Raga, showing lovers on a couch at night, attended by two women, with lamps lit, Mughal India, 17th–18th century, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS. Ouseley Add. 170, fol. 3a. Digital Bodleian, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/inquire/p/25102ab4-d318-4378-afe3-e21116ac497b (last accessed March 1, 2021). The scene on the left in figure 15 closely resembles a composition from a ragamala (a series of paintings depicting a range of musical modes). See the “Madhuradhari Ragini” woman running into a building from a garden with peacocks and other birds in the Manley Ragamala, Amber, Rajasthan, ca. 1610, British Museum, London, 1973,0917,0.6. The treatment of clouds and vegetation, as well as the rendering of architectural elements on this album page, also bears similarities to the Manley Ragamala. While perhaps not by the same artist, this manuscript likely came from the same region or school, where its creators were well aware of the compositional elements used by the workshop of the Manley Ragamala.
Aside from figure 9 here, refer to fol. 5r of H.2164, which features near identical executions of the Safavid youth’s turban, face, and escaping curls.
In H.2143, fol. 1a, the Ottoman inscription on the left pastedown reads, muṣavver mecmūʿa-i ʿacemkārī (illustrated album of foreign works). Despite the fact that, by this period, the term ʿacemī often means “Iranian” in the context of the arts, this album’s contents indicate a wider usage of the word, as the album holds works of Iranian, Hindustani, and Ottoman origin. For earlier discussions of the term, see Gülru Necipoğlu, “Early Modern Floral: The Agency of Ornament in Ottoman and Safavid Visual Cultures,” in Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local, ed. Gülru Necipoğlu and Alina Payne (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 132–55. See also Şemseddin Sami Efendi, Kamus-i Türki (Turkish lexicon) (Istanbul: İkdam Matbaʿası, 1901), 297; and Sir James Redhouse, Yeni Osmanlıca-İngilizce sözlük (New Ottoman-English dictionary) (Istanbul: Redhouse Yayinevi, 1986), 7.
François Valentyn, Oud en nieuw Oost-Indiën, vervattende een naaukeurige en uitvoerige verhandelinge van Nederlands mogentheyd in die gewesten (Old and new East Indies, containing an accurate and detailed treatise on Dutch powers in those regions) (Amsterdam: J. van Braam en G. onder de Linden, 1724/1726), 255.
Marloes Cornelissen, “The Trials and Tribulations of a Dutch Merchant in Istanbul: Auctions at the Dutch Embassy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Capital,” in Osmanlı Istanbulu III: III. uluslararası Osmanlı İstanbulu sempozyumu bildirileri. 25–26 Mayıs 2015, İstanbul 29 Mayıs Üniversitesi, ed. Feridun M. Emecen, Ali Akyıldız, and Emrah Safa Gürkan (İstanbul: Büyükşehir Belediyesi, 2015), 745, 737.
The absence of intermediate steps is not the case for scholarship on earlier periods of Ottoman painting. Esin Atıl has suggested that sixteenth-century prints from the Netherlands and Italy in Topkapı albums (H.2135, H.2148, and H.2153) exposed Ottoman artists to aspects of European perspective like receding planes. These works may have acted as inspiration for the early seventeenth-century artist Nakşi, who also offers an earlier incarnation of exoticism in Ottoman paintings prior to this period. Esin Atıl, “Ahmet Nakşi: An Eclectic Painter of the Early 17th Century,” in The Fifth International Congress of Turkish Art, ed. G. Féher (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1978), 109. For instances of the use of prints as models for Safavid paintings, see Landau, “Visibly Foreign, Visibly Female,” 73–83; and Babaie, “Frontiers of Visual Taboo,” 131–57. For a thorough discussion of the reception of prints in the Mughal court workshop and their adaptation, see Yael Rice, “Lines of Perception: European Prints and the Mughal Kitābkhāna,” in Prints in Translation, 1450–1750: Image, Materiality, Space, ed. Suzanne Karr Schmidt and Edward H. Wouk (London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2017), 202–22.
Many thanks to Christina Maranci for graciously letting me consult her proof of her essay, “A Question of Style? Armenian Manuscript Illumination in Seventeenth-Century Constantinople,” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook (forthcoming), 1–17. See also Ünver Rüstem’s contribution to this volume, “Mapping Cosmopolitanism: An Eighteenth-Century Printed Ottoman Atlas and the Turn to Baroque.” For an earlier comparison on how portraiture in the “Frankish manner” was pioneered at the Ottoman court, see Necipoğlu, “Persianate Images”; and Emine Fetvacı on the “Bellini Album” from Ahmed I’s period: Fetvacı, Album of the World Emperor, 131–52.
The face of the woman seduced by a Safavid on fol. 15a is another case from this album that may have adapted a print.
Collaço, “Albums of Conspicuous Consumption.”
Atbaş, “Mehmed Emin Efendi ve murakkaları,” 120–21.
For more on this manuscript, see Farhad, “Searching for the New.”
For example, the A-line silhouette, common in Mughal dress, was adapted into Safavid sartorial trends by the late seventeenth century. This silhouette supplanted the languid lines emphasized by flowing robes found in numerous single-folio paintings produced earlier in the seventeenth century. For an example, see the painting of a “Prince and Princess” by ʿAli Quli Jabbadar in J. Housego, “Honour is according to Habit. Persian Dress in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Apollo 93.109 (1971): 209, fig. 7. For other examples of Mughal-inspired elements in Safavid dress, see numerous paintings, such as an early oil portrait of a woman wearing a Mughal brocade turban, in a work that came up for auction in 2018. Lot 100: “Portrait of a Lady,” Safavid Iran, mid-17th century, Sotheby’s, Art of the Islamic and Indian Worlds Including Oriental Rugs and Carpets. Tight-fitting trousers under transparent gathered skirts in the Mughal style also appear in Safavid paintings. See Norah M. Titley, Persian Miniature Painting and Its Influence on the Art of Turkey and India: The British Library Collections (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 120, pl. 20. Father Raphaël du Mans (1613–1696), a Capuchin priest and principal interpreter at the Safavid court, resided in Isfahan during the mid- to late seventeenth century, where he documented the goods exported from India to Iran for both local consumption and further trade. Among the merchandise were fabrics fit for clothing production, such as silks, cottons, and muslins (among other fabrics), and ready-made handkerchiefs, listed separately from other textile furnishings like carpets and blankets. Raphaël du Mans, L’estat présent de la Perse en 1660, ed. C. Schefer (Paris: Leroux, 1890), 365–66. For more on the migration of artists and poets between Iran and South Asia, see Farhad, “Searching for the New,” 116–17; Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī, 141; Seyller, “Farrukh Beg in the Deccan”; and Overton, Iran and the Deccan.
In another dervish connection to Central and South Asia, both Mehmed Efendi and his father were disciples of Murad Buhari (d. 1720), the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi shaykh who was born in Samarkand and later initiated into the Naqshbandi order in India. He went on to reside in Hijaz, Damascus, Istanbul, and Bursa. See Artan, “Women in Distress.” The practice of seclusion or withdrawal, inherent to Sufism, was still a popular topic during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly with the Halveti order that took its name from the ḫalvet, or practice of seclusion. See John J. Curry, The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire: The Rise of the Halveti Order, 1350–1650 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), in particular 256–57, on the seventeenth-century text by Fu‘adi (d. 1636). Ottomans also may have turned to earlier discussions of this topic. For instance, ʿAttar (ca. 1140–ca. 1220), known for his poem, the “Conference of the Birds,” also wrote the Muṣībatnāme (Book of Sorrows), which relates the journey of the seeker through forty stations of seclusion. See Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 66.
Schimmel, “Turk and Hindu,” 107–27.
For examples of how these themes continue in the Zenānnāme, the “Description of Women of the East Indies” indicates that the ladies’ faces and eyes are black (yūzü gözü ḳara ʿavretlerdir). As for their appeal, Fazıl says, “Although they have warmth from afar [literally, on the outside], on the inside, however, they are cold” (Gerçi ẓāhirde ḥarāretleri vār / Līk bāṭında bürūdetleri vār). In contrast, the complexion of the women of Istanbul (Islambol) is described in terms that draw on the purity theme: “They are composed of cotton and rosebuds” (penbeden ġoncadan olmuş tertīb). Fazıl, Der vasf-ı Hubanname, 58, 76.
Kavita Singh, Real Birds in Imagined Gardens: Mughal Painting Between Persia and Europe (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2017), esp. 3–5.
For more on H.2137, its sultanic seal of Selim III, and its Mughal paintings, see note 145. Mika Natif discusses how Mughal vistas almost appear detached from the composition to create an immersive nesting structure for the viewer. Mika Natif, Mughal Occidentalism: Artistic Encounters Between Europe and Asia at the Courts of India, 1580–1630 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 197. Also refer to Navina Najat Haidar’s discussion regarding how artists incorporated models from other polities, but maintained the scales of each source, which lent an uncanny otherworldliness to each composition, particularly when combined with the palette and setting. For example, consider “A Parrot Perched on a Mango Tree, a Ram Tethered Below,” discussed in Navina Najat Haidar, “The Art of the Deccan Courts,” in Sultans of Deccan India, 1500–1700: Opulence and Fantasy, ed. Navina Najat Haidar and Marika Sardar (New Haven: Yale University Press, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015), 21–23. See also Ebba Koch, “Netherlandish Naturalism in Imperial Mughal Painting,” Apollo 152.465 (2000): 29–37.
Ars Orientalis Volume 51
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