Ottoman Studies

Today the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul seems a haphazard aggregate of modest buildings no longer capable of conveying imperial power. Yet it is one of the most celebrated of all Islamic palaces. Gulru Necipoglu brings together largely unpublished sources, both written and visual, along with information derived from the architectural remains to uncover the processes through which the meaning of the palace was once produced. She relocates the Topkapi in its historical context, a context that included not only the circumstances of its patronage, but the complex interaction of cultural practices, ideologies, and social codes of recognition

During his tenure as Chief Royal Architect (1539-1588) in the "Golden Age" of the Ottoman Empire, Sinan designed hundreds of structures that helped create the renowned urban image of Istanbul, particularly mosques with seemingly weightless, light-filled centralized domes that have been compared with developments in Renaissance Italy. His distinctive architectural idiom left its imprint over a vast empire extending from the Danube to the Tigris, and he became the most celebrated of all Ottoman architects. In this lavishly illustrated, major new assessment of Sinan's oeuvre, Gülru Necipoglu challenges standard views of Sinan as a "Turkish Michelangelo" driven solely by an insatiable urge for artistic experimentation. Her innovative analysis shows that Sinan's rich variety of mosque designs sprang from a process of negotiation between the architect and his elite patrons, both men and women. Defined though they were by social and territorial hierarchies and associated notions of identity, memory, and decorum, Sinan's mosques simultaneously shaped these conceptions. The Age of Sinan draws on a wealth of primary sources to reveal the chief architect's monuments as bearers of previously unrecognized dimensions of meaning. A sophisticated study of the cultural and social history of Ottoman architecture, interpreting the oeuvre of a seminal figure in the early modern eastern Mediterranean world, it is must reading for scholars and students of art history and other fields with an interest in the Ottoman Empire.

Evolving from a patrician domus, the emperor's residence on the Palatine became the centre of the state administration. Elaborate ceremonial regulated access to the imperial family, creating a system of privilege which strengthened the centralised power. Constantine followed the same model in his new capital, under a Christian veneer. The divine attributes of the imperial office were refashioned, with the emperor as God's representative. The palace was an imitation of heaven. Following the loss of the empire in the West and the Near East, the Palace in Constantinople was preserved- subject to the transition from Late Antique to Mediaeval conditions - until the Fourth Crusade, attracting the attention of Visgothic, Lombard, Merovingian, Carolingian, Norman and Muslim rulers. Renaissance princes later drew inspiration for their residences directly from ancient ruins and Roman literature, but there was also contact with the Late Byzantine court. Finally, in the age of Absolutism the palace became again an instrument of power in vast centralised states, with renewed interest in Roman and Byzantine ceremonial. Spanning the broadest chronological and geographical limits of the Roman imperial tradition, from the Principate to the Ottoman empire, the papers in the volume treat various aspects of palace architecture, art and ceremonial.

This is a comprehensive survey of the last two centuries of Turkish architecture. The author treats his subject chronologically and in its historical perspective, with full discussion of the effects of conquests, religion and social organization.

The City's Pleasures is the first historical investigation of the tremendous changes that affected the fabric and architecture of Istanbul in the century that followed the decisive return of the Ottoman court to the capital in 1703. These were spectacular times that witnessed the most extraordinary urban expansion and building explosion in the history of the city. Showing how architecture and urban form became involved in the representation and construction of a changing social order, Shirine Hamadeh reassesses the dominance of the paradigm of Westernization in interpretations of this period and challenges the suggestion that change in the eighteenth century could only occur by turning toward a now superior West. Drawing on a genre of Ottoman poetry written in celebration of the built environment and on a vast array of related textual and visual sources, Hamadeh demonstrates that architectural change was the result of a dynamic synthesis between internal and external factors, and closely mirrored the process of décloisonnement of the city's social landscape. Examining novel forms, spaces, and decorative vocabularies; changing patterns of patronage; and new patterns of architectural perception; The City's Pleasures shows how these exposed and reinforced the internal dynamics that were played out between a society in flux and a state anxious to recreate an ideal system of social hierarchies. Profoundly hybrid in nature, the new architectural idiom reflected a growing permeability between elite and middle-class sensibilities, an unprecedented degree of receptivity to Western and Eastern foreign traditions, and a clear departure from the parameters of the classical canon. Innovation became the new operative doctrine. As the built environment was experienced, perceived, and appreciated by contemporary observers, it increasingly revealed itself as a perpetual source of sensory pleasures.

The Sultan’s Portrait ran in the Topkapi Palace from June to September 2000 in rooms specially restored for the purpose thanks to the largesse of Isbank. The 576-page catalogue of the exhibition is indispensable for historians of court portraits in general and the Ottoman dynasty in particular. It contains a magisterial article by, among others, Julian Raby on the early sultans’ portraits and medals. Gulru Necipoglu writes on “The serial portraits of Ottoman Sultans in comparative perspective” and on the portraits of Selim II. The contribution of Filiz Cagman, curator of the Topkapi Palace, is on Nakkash Osman, who produced a series of 12 stylised miniatures of sultans circa 1579, later copied by an artist working in the circle of Veronese. Gunsel Renda writes on the portraits painted on canvas in the last century of the empire. Hans Georg Majer, founder of the group of academics who have been working on the subject since 1993, contributes an article on the 17th-century portraits, from the reign of Mehmed IV to that of Mustafa II. As in some European dynasties, such as the early Austrian Habsburgs, establishing a common dynastic identity was more important than rendering individual likenesses of rulers. The exhibition and catalogue confirm – as do similar portraits of Timurid, Safavid and Mughal rulers – that despite widespread disapproval, there was no formal Islamic interdiction of figural painting. The Sultan’s Portrait also confirms the frequency of artistic as well as diplomatic and commercial contact between the Ottoman Empire and the states of Western Europe. Many other portraits of Ottoman sultans surely await discovery, in European attics and Islamic collections.

The dominant form of Ottoman pictorial art until the eighteenth century, miniatures have traditionally been studied as reflecting the socio-historical contexts, aesthetic concerns and artistic tastes of the era within which they were produced. Begum Ozden Fyrat proposes instead a radical re-reading of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century miniatures in the light of contemporary critical theory, highlighting the viewer's encounter with the image. Encounters with the Ottoman Miniature employs contemporary concepts such as the gaze, frame/framing, reading and re-reading, drawing on thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze to establish the vibrant cultural agency of miniature paintings. With analysis that illuminates both the social and political situations in which these miniatures were painted as well as emphasising the miniature's contemporary relevance, Firat presents an important new re-imagining of this art form.

The late Ottoman Empire witnessed widespread and dramatic reform, which was vividly reflected in its visual culture. However, while other political and social developments in this period have received much attention, the interaction between Ottoman and Western artists and artistic practices is less widely understood. Ottoman Painting explores fully this complex and fascinating relationship for the first time, using vivid examples and drawing many intriguing and original connections. Wendy Shaw demonstrates how during the 19th century -- the very era when rapidly proliferating modernist artistic  movements in the West were giving up traditional styles, techniques and functions of art -- artists in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey were harnessing these discarded traditions as a novel and modern means of communication. And far from being simply slow in embracing modernity, Ottoman art tells the story of a different kind of avant-garde, representing a cultural revolution. Ottoman Painting is an important corrective to a Western-dominated view of the art history of an era and a stimulating addition to our understanding of the cultural life of the late Ottoman Empire.

A symbolic locus embodying myriad meanings, the political center of the eastern Mediterranean, and one of the old world's largest urban centers, Constantinople was the site of large-scale urban and architectural interventions. Changing visions--the changing political, cultural, and religious orientations of those who lived there and those who ruled from there--inscribed themselves in its spaces, transforming it and lending it new meanings. Constantinopolis/Istanbul is about such a period of change and remaking: following its capture in 1453, the city was host to a grandly conceived urban project meant to rebuild and transform the capital of Eastern Rome as the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Çiğdem Kafescioğlu traces the construction and representation of Ottoman Istanbul, threading histories of politics, culture, and architecture into the fabric of the urban landscape. Attentive to the preservation and destruction of artifacts from the past, Constantinopolis/Istanbul shapes an understanding of emerging modes of spatiality and visuality in Ottoman Istanbul as central components of a complex and fascinating urban process, that of the creation of a capital city through the interpretation and appropriation of another.

Levni's pictorial narrative of the Surname-i Vehbi, poet Vehbi's account of a festival organized in 1720 to commemorate the circumcision of four sons of Sultan Ahmed III, is undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of Ottoman art and possibly the last great example of illustrated Islamic manuscript. Preserved in the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul, the work is illustrated with 137 paintings that recreate the personages, settings, and events of an extraordinarily lively and enchanting age known as the Tulip Period. Printed in color with gold and silver, Levni and the Surname is a sumptuous facsimile edition that reproduces each illustration in the format of the original manuscript: an Islamic codex which reads from back to front, or right to left. The book also introduces the historical and cultural setting of the age, analyzes the tradition of festivals and festival books within the Ottoman world, discusses the artist's methodology in representing the festival of 1720, and concludes with a listingof the historic groups and individuals participating in the event.

A new approach to late Ottoman visual culture and its place in the world With its idiosyncratic yet unmistakable adaptation of European Baroque models, the eighteenth-century architecture of Istanbul has frequently been dismissed by modern observers as inauthentic and derivative, a view reflecting broader unease with notions of Western influence on Islamic cultures. In Ottoman Baroque--the first English-language book on the topic--Ünver Rüstem provides a compelling reassessment of this building style and shows how between 1740 and 1800 the Ottomans consciously coopted European forms to craft a new, politically charged, and globally resonant image for their empire's capital. Rüstem reclaims the label "Ottoman Baroque" as a productive framework for exploring the connectedness of Istanbul's eighteenth-century buildings to other traditions of the period. Using a wealth of primary sources, he demonstrates that this architecture was in its own day lauded by Ottomans and foreigners alike for its fresh, cosmopolitan effect. Purposefully and creatively assimilated, the style's cross-cultural borrowings were combined with Byzantine references that asserted the Ottomans' entitlement to the Classical artistic heritage of Europe. Such aesthetic rebranding was part of a larger endeavor to reaffirm the empire's power at a time of intensified East-West contact, taking its boldest shape in a series of imperial mosques built across the city as landmarks of a state-sponsored idiom. Copiously illustrated and drawing on previously unpublished documents, Ottoman Baroque breaks new ground in our understanding of Islamic visual culture in the modern era and offers a persuasive counterpoint to Eurocentric accounts of global art history.

Winner of the 2010 Spiro Kostof Award (sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians) Empire building and modernity dominate the history of the nineteenth century. The French and Ottoman empires capitalized on modern infrastructure and city building to control diverse social, cultural, and political landscapes. Zeynep Celik examines the cities of Algeria and Tunisia under French colonial rule and those of the Ottoman Arab provinces. By shifting the emphasis from the "centers" of Paris and Istanbul to the "peripheries," she presents a more nuanced look at cross-cultural exchanges. The different political agendas of the French and Ottoman empires reveal the myriad meanings behind remarkably similar urban forms and buildings. This lavishly illustrated volume makes numerous archival plans, photographs, and postcards available for the first time, along with reproductions from periodicals and official yearbooks. Roads, railroads, ports, and waterways served many imperial agendas, ranging from military to commercial and even ideological. Interventions changed the urban fabrics in unprecedented ways: straight arteries were cut through cities, European-style quarters were appended to historic cores, and new industrial and mining towns, military posts, and administrative centers were built according to the latest trends. These major feats of engineering were carefully planned to construct a modern image while addressing practical concerns of growth and communication. Celik discusses public squares as privileged sites of imperial expression, as evidenced by the buildings that defined them and the iconographically charged monuments that adorned them. She examines the architecture of public buildings. Theaters, schools, and hospitals and the offices that housed the imperial administrative apparatus (city halls, government palaces, post offices, police stations, and military structures) were new secular monuments, designed according to European models but in a range of architectural expressions. Public ceremonies, set against modern urban spaces, played key roles in conveying political messages. Celik maps out their orchestrated occupation of streets and squares. She concludes with questions on how the various attitudes of both empires engaged cultural differences, race, and civilizing missions.

Zeynep #65533;elik examines the changing face of Istanbul during the period when European cultural and economic influence intensified, integrating architectural analysis with discussion of broader issues of urban design and historical change.

Bu kitapta yer alan makaleler ... 7-9 Mayıs 1987 tarihleri arasında İstanbul Mimar Sinan Üniversitesi'nce düzenlenen Mimar Sinan Dönemi Türk Mimarlığı ve Sanatı Sempozyumu'nda bildiri olarak sunulmuşlardır

The first study of album-making in the Ottoman empire during the seventeenth century, demonstrating the period's experimentation, eclecticism, and global outlook The Album of the World Emperor examines an extraordinary piece of art: an album of paintings, drawings, calligraphy, and European prints compiled for the Ottoman sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603-17) by his courtier Kalender Paşa (d. 1616). In this detailed study of one of the most important works of seventeenth-century Ottoman art, Emine Fetvacı uses the album to explore questions of style, iconography, foreign inspiration, and the very meaning of the visual arts in the Islamic world. The album's thirty-two folios feature artworks that range from intricate paper cutouts to the earliest examples of Islamic genre painting, and contents as eclectic as Persian and Persian-influenced calligraphy, studies of men and women of different ethnicities and backgrounds, depictions of popular entertainment and urban life, and European prints depicting Christ on the cross that in turn served as models for apocalyptic Ottoman paintings. Through the album, Fetvacı sheds light on imperial ideals as well as relationships between court life and popular culture, and shows that the boundaries between Ottoman art and the art of Iran and Western Europe were much more porous than has been assumed. Rather than perpetuating the established Ottoman idiom of the sixteenth century, the album shows that this was a time of openness to new models, outside sources, and fresh forms of expression. Beautifully illustrated and featuring all the folios of the original seventy-page album, The Album of the World Emperor revives a neglected yet significant artwork to demonstrate the distinctive aesthetic innovations of the Ottoman court.

This volume represents the first scholarly work in English devoted to the experience of Italian architects and builders in Turkey, as well as in many of the lands once belonging to the Ottoman Empire. Covering a complex cultural and political geography spanning from the Danubian principalities (today's Romania) to Anatolia and the Aegean region, the book is the result of individual research experiences that were brought together and debated in an international conference in Istanbul in March 2013, organized in collaboration with the Italian Institute of Culture and Bogazici University.0Grounded on a flexible notion of identitarian boundaries, the book explores a rich transcultural field of encounters and interactions, analyzed and evaluated by scholars from six different countries on the basis of hitherto uncovered archival materials. Forms, ideas, individual mobility of actors and materials, networks of patronage, material and political constraints, and religious and cultural difference all play a significant role in shaping the landscapes, buildings and architectural projects presented and discussed here. From late 18th and early 19th century experiences of interaction between neo-classical backgrounds and westernizing Ottoman forms to the Italian proposals for a Turkish republican iconic landmark like the Ataturk mausoleum in Ankara; from the design of the first Ottoman university building to Ottoman varieties of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, and to the infrastructures and urban developments of the 1950s in Turkey, the book is both a richly illustrated and documented overview of relevant cases, and a critical introduction to one of the most enticing areas of encounter in the global history of 19th and 20th century architecture and design.

For over fifty years, Metin And championed Turkish theatre, traditional performing arts, festivities and the art of Ottoman miniature in dozens of articles and ten titles in Turkish and other languages. The list ends with Ottoman Figurative Arts I: Miniature, which attests to And’s fascination with the subject.
A fundamental “art of the book” as well as a courtly art form, miniature favoured a highly realistic depiction of daily life, human beings, the urban fabric and buildings – an aspect promoted widely in And’s work. Miniature’s main function was illustrating manuscripts. As Ottoman Figurative Arts I: Miniature ably demonstrates, the target audience was either the sultan, or high-ranking statesmen. Manuscripts so illustrated were prohibitively costly works of art, safeguarded in the Treasury, and any illustrated manuscript captured in battle would have delighted the victorious commander and sultan equally.
An indispensable reference book, the lavishly illustrated Ottoman Figurative Arts I: Miniature covers the stages in the development of the art in the Ottoman Empire, an overview of the studios, techniques and methods of this courtly art, and includes a splendid Album of portraits, lives of the sultans, the palace, festivals, literary works, religious topics, landscapes and townscapes, scientific and encyclopaedic subjects, the world of birds, animals and fantastic creatures as well as women and men.

In this volume, Elisabeth Fraser shows that artists and the works they created in the Mediterranean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were informed by mutual dependence and reciprocity between European nations and the Ottoman Empire. Her rich exploration of this vibrant cross-cultural exchange challenges the dominant interpretation of European relations with the East during the period, revealing a shared world of fluid and long-sustained interactions. Voyagers to and from the Ottoman Empire documented their journeys in prints, paintings, and lavishly illustrated travelogues; many of these helped define Europe's self-identified role as heir to Ottoman civilizations and bolstered its presence in the Islamic Mediterranean and beyond. Fraser finds that these works illuminate not only how travelers' experiences abroad were more nuanced than the expansionist ideology with which they became associated, but also how these narratives depicted the vitality of Ottoman culture and served as extensions of Ottoman diplomacy. Ottomans were aware of and responded to European representations, using them to defend Ottoman culture and sovereignty. In embracing the art of both cultures and setting these works in a broader context, Fraser challenges the dominant historiographical tradition that sees Ottoman artists adopting European modes of art in a one-sided process of "Europeanization." Theoretically informed and rigorously researched, this cross-cultural approach to European and Ottoman art sheds much-needed critical light on the widely disseminated travel images of the era-important cultural artifacts in their own right-and provides a fresh and inviting understanding of the relationships among cultures in the Mediterranean during an era of increasing European expansionism.

While European eclecticism is examined as a critical and experimental moment in western art history, little research has been conducted to provide an intellectual depth of field to the historicist pursuits of late Ottoman architects as they maneuvered through the nineteenth century's vast inventory of available styles and embarked on a revivalist/Orientalist program they identified as the 'Ottoman Renaissance.' Ahmet A. Ersoy's book examines the complex historicist discourse underlying this belated 'renaissance' through a close reading of a text conceived as the movement's canonizing manifesto: the Usul-i Mi'mari-i 'Osmani [The Fundamentals of Ottoman Architecture] (Istanbul, 1873). In its translocal, cross-disciplinary scope, Ersoy's work explores the creative ways in which the Ottoman authors straddled the art-historical mainstream and their new, self-orientalizing aesthetics of locality. The study reveals how Orientalism was embraced by its very objects, the self-styled 'Orientals' of the modern world, as a marker of authenticity, and a strategically located aesthetic tool to project universally recognizable images of cultural difference. Rejecting the lesser, subsidiary status ascribed to non-western Orientalisms, Ersoy's work contributes to recent, post-Saidian directions in the study of cultural representation that resituate the field of Orientalism beyond its polaristic core, recognizing its cross-cultural potential as a polyvalent discourse.

Osmanlı resim sanatı, İslam dünyasında gelişmiş, çeşitlenmiş kitap resminin temel ilkelerini izler.Öte yandan, bu ilkeler Osmanlı beğenisine uyarlanmış, İmparatorluğun geniş coğrafyasının ve komşularının resim tarzlarından beslenerek, Osmanlı sarayının kendine özgü çoğulculuğuyla koşut bir biçimde özgün bir resim dili yaratılmıştır. Kurumlaşmış bir örgütün üyesi olarak saraya bağlı sanatçıların hazırladıkları el yazması kitaplar içinde hayat bulan resimler-minyatürler, özellikle 16. yüzyılın ortalarında gerek üslup, gerekse konu bakımından diğer İslam ülkelerinin resim sanatından tamamen ayrılmıştır.Genellikle şahit oldukları, yaşadıkları olay ve olguları canlandıran osmanlı ressamları, yapıtlarına gözlemci bir tavırla yaklaşmışlardır. Bu yaklaşım Osmanlı tasvirine bir belge niteliği kazandırır.Bu kitapta, ustadan çırağa aktarılanlarla belirgin bir beğeninin sürekliliğini yansıtan Osmanlı resim sanatının, bir yandan da yüzyıllar boyunca hep yeni dinamiklerle dönüşüp çeşitlenmesinin serüveni, yaratıldığı tarihi ve coğrafi kesitin koşulları içinde irdelenmektedir.

Nurbanu (1525-1583) is one of the most prominent yet least studied royal women of the Ottoman dynasty. Her political and administrative career began when she was chosen as the favorite concubine of the crown prince Selim. Nurbanu's authority increased when her son Murad was singled out as crown prince. By 1574, when her son, Murad III became Sultan, Nurbanu officially took on the title of Valide Sultan, or Queen Mother, holding the highest office of the imperial harem until her death in 1583. This book concentrates on the Atik Valide mosque complex, which constitutes the architectural embodiment of Nurbanu's prestige, power and piety. The arrangement of the chapters is designed to enable readers to reconsider Ottoman imperial patronage practices of the late sixteenth century using the architectural enterprise of a remarkable woman as the common thread. Chapter 1 provides a general history of the wqaf institution to inform on its origins and evolution. Chapter 2 looks closely at the political dealings of Nurbanu, both in the domestic and the international sphere, building upon research concerning Ottoman royal women and power dynamics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chapter 3 presents a textual analysis of the written records pertaining to Nurbanu's imperial mosque complex. Chapter 4 examines the distinctive physical qualities and functional features of the Atik Valide within its urban context. The book concludes by assessing to what extent Nurbanu was involved in the representation of her power and piety through the undertaking of her eponymous monument. Providing a complete study of the life and times of this Ottoman empress, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Ottoman studies, gender studies, history of art and architecture, Islamic studies, history of religion and Middle Eastern studies.

The Balyan family were a dynasty of architects, builders and property owners who acted as the official architects to the Ottoman Sultans throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Originally Armenian, the family is responsible for some of the most famous Ottoman buildings in existence, many of which are regarded as masterpieces of their period - including the Dolmabahçe Palace (built between 1843 and 1856), parts of the Topkap? Palace, the Ç?ra'an Palace and the Ortaköy Mosque. Forging a unique style based around European contemporary architecture but with distinctive Ottoman flourishes, the family is an integral part of Ottoman history. As Alyson Wharton's beautifully illustrated book reveals, the Balyan's own history, of falling in and out of favour with increasingly autocratic Sultans, serves as a record of courtly power in the Ottoman era and is uniquely intertwined with the history of Istanbul itself.