bellini and mehmet, from istanbul to london

Orhan Pamuk celebrates the National Gallery's new exhibition of Venetian painter Gentile Bellini's works from his sojourn in fifteenth-century İstanbul, in this essay for the Guardian (their love-affair continues....) Bellini is famous for his European-style portrait of Mehmet II (Mehmet Fatih, or Mehmed the Conqueror), shown on the right--Pamuk rightly underscores its iconic value; it's one of the most instantly-recognizable visual reference points of "Ottomanness" (and has been remixed in some entertaining and subversive ways by Turkish artists and designers in recent years--I'm trying to find a photo of İsmail Açar's furniture pieces with the image superimposed, which I saw at İstanbul Design Week last fall, but alas the internet is failing to provide.)

If you found the artistic questions at the heart of My Name is Red compelling, you'll enjoy this piece--Pamuk was an aspiring painter before he started writing novels, and his extensive knowledge about the history of Ottoman and Persian art, as well as his preoccupation with the question of Western cultural influence, are on display here:

After the founding of the modern Republic of Turkey in 1923, when the westernising drive was just getting under way, the nationalist poet Yahya Kemal - who lived in Paris for many years and was as well acquainted with French art and literature as he was oppressed by doubts about his own literary and cultural heritage - once remarked ruefully: "If only we had painting and prose, we'd be another nation!" In so saying, he may have been hoping to reclaim the beauties of a lost age as documented in painting and literature. Even when this was not, strictly speaking, the case - as when he stood before Bellini's "realistic" portrait of Mehmed the Conqueror - what troubled him was that the hand that drew the portrait lacked a nationalist motive. One can sense a profound displeasure in these words, a Muslim writer's dissatisfaction with his own culture's shortcomings. He is also succumbing to the common fantasy that it might be possible to adapt to the artistic products of an utterly different culture and civilisation with ease, and without changing one's soul.

There are many examples of this childish fantasy on display in Bellini and the East and its accompanying catalogue. One is the watercolour from a Topkapi Palace album that is attributed to an Ottoman artist named Sinan Beg, and is almost certainly inspired by Bellini's portrait. The catalogue gives it the title Mehmed II Smelling a Rose; because it is neither a Venetian Renaissance portrait nor the classic Persian-Ottoman miniature, it leaves the viewer feeling unsettled.

The hybrid miniature of Mehmet and his rose is on the right; and here's a link to the National Gallery's exhibition page, which showcases the stunning "seated scribe" painting (discussed in the Pamuk piece) that's thought to be a portrait of Cem Sultan. I'll have to try and find time for this while I'm in Oxford next month for the conference.