When West met East
The Arts flourished in the Ottoman Empire during the 16th century and their influence reached across space and time to Tudor and Victorian England
THE commission must have been challenging, even for a master of Titian’s calibre. Someone, possibly Philip II of Spain or Venetian sculptor Danese Cattaneo, had asked the Italian artist to paint a portrait of Hürrem (or Roxelana, as she was known in Europe), wife of the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman I. Titian had never set foot in Istanbul, but that wasn’t in itself an issue—he had painted, based only on a medal or a small effigy, several portraits of Suleiman, including one for the Duke of Mantua that the city’s ambassador, Benedetto Agnello, called ‘so similar …that it seems the very Turk alive’. Much trickier was the fact that few people knew what the secluded Hürrem really looked like. Nonetheless, Titian and his workshop, perhaps aided by their imaginations, managed to paint at least one portrait (which used to hang at Danese’s house, according to artist Giorgio Vasari) and possibly more: the woman in Turkish attire at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, US, could be Hürrem (some critics believe her to be a generic Queen of Persia), as could be the one at Florence’s Galleria degli Uffizi (traditionally identified as Cypriot queen Caterina Cornaro).
However fanciful, Titian’s artwork was testament not only to the fascination Europeans had with Suleiman and the concubine who had ‘bewitched’ him into a marriage against tradition, but also to the intense cultural exchange between Christian countries and the Ottomans. European artists had chronicled the ascent of the Mediterranean’s latest power at least since Suleiman’s great-grandfather, Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople, had requested Venice send him a painter for his court and Gentile Bellini had been duly dispatched (a portrait of Mehmet attributed to Bellini is in the V&A Museum).
Suleiman himself sported a four-tier ‘helmet’ made in Venice (conveniently one-upping the three-tier crown of his enemy Charles V). However, artworks travelled as frequently from the Ottoman Empire towards Europe, as Walter B. Denny and Sumru Belger Krody
note in The Sultan’s Garden: The Blossoming of Ottoman Art.
Turkish textiles, in particular, even made their way into Renaissance paintings, such as Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (now at the National Gallery): the German master featured Anatolian carpets so often that two designs have since been named after him. Although the Ottomans were engaged in continual war under Suleiman’s rule, extending their empire from Baghdad to Budapest, the Arts flourished, as ‘Art of the Ottomans: Faith, Beauty and Power’, a V&A course starting tomorrow, reveals. It helped that the Sultan —who, as did previous Ottoman rulers, cultivated a craft (he was a goldsmith)—was an active, generous patron, as were his wife, Hürrem, and daughter, Mihrimah. Indeed, the greatest Ottoman architect of the time, Sinan, built two Istanbul mosque complexes under the patronage of the two women, before constructing for Suleiman the Şehzade Mehmed Mosque (in memory of his son Mehmet) and the magnificent Süleymaniye, the slender minarets of which soar above multiple domes to poke the sky by the Golden Horn.
Manuscripts, ceramics, metalwork and textiles lived a moment of equal splendour, as Esin Atil notes in The Age of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. At the heart
of Ottoman visual and decorative arts was the imperial painting studio, the nakkaşhane, which, drawing from the artistic heritage of places as diverse as Persia, Europe and China, developed new artistic languages for the Empire. Here, head painter Shah Kulu (or Shahquli) gave impulse to the saz style that featured dragons and other mythical creatures among stylised leaves and floral palmettes. Another head painter, Kara Memi, developed naturalistic floral designs that soon permeated different art forms in and beyond the confines of the Ottoman Empire—not least, as Prof Denny and Ms Krody mention in their book, Tudor embroideries featuring Ottoman carnations—and seaman Haydar Reis (Nigari) pulled off the unlikely combination of a career in the Ottoman navy with one in portraiture, painting, among others, Suleiman and his son and successor Selim II.
Exchanges with England intensified under Elizabeth I, whom the Ottomans considered, according to historian Leslie Peirce’s Empress of the East, a shining example of muhaddere, virtuous woman. Elizabethan England didn’t necessarily return the favour, often remaining wary of the ‘heathen’ Ottomans, but it developed an appetite for Turkish ware —particularly rugs, which people usually hung on the walls like tapestries. It was not an interest that would remain confined to the 16th century, either. It boomed again during the reign of another virtuous Queen—victoria. Some 300 years after Memi designed his flowers, Ottoman motifs lay at the core of 19thcentury designs we think of as quintessentially British: the patterns of William Morris. ‘Art of the Ottomans: Faith, Beauty and Power’ runs February 22–March 28 at the V&A Museum, London SW7 (www. vam.ac.uk)