Ottoman History Podcast - Picturing History at the Ottoman Court

Episode Date: January 27, 2016

with Emine Fetvacı hosted by Emily Neumeier and Nir Shafir Emine Fetvacı discusses her research for Picturing History at the Ottoman Court (Indiana University Press) with Emily Neumeier and Nir Shafir. Download the episode Podcast Feed | iTunes | Soundcloud In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman court became particularly invested in writing its own history. This initiative primarily took the form of official chronicles, and the court historian (şehnameci), a new position established in the 1550s, set to work producing manuscripts accompanied by lavish illustrations. However, the paintings in these texts should not be understood merely as passive descriptions of historical events. Rather, these images served as complex conveyors of meaning in their own right, designed by teams of artists to satisfy the aspirations of their patrons, which included not only the sultan but also other members of the court. In this episode, Emily Neumeier and Nir Shafir speak with Emine Fetvacı about these illustrated histories, the subject of her 2013 volume Picturing History at the Ottoman Court.  « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Emily Neumeier. And I'm Nir Shafir. And today we have with us Dr. Emine Fetvaja, Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. at Boston University. And today we'll be basing our talk on Emine's recent book, Picturing History at the Ottoman Court, which last year won the Fuat Kuprulu Book Prize from the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. We'll also be touching on a companion volume, Writing History at the Ottoman Court, which Emine edited with Erdem Cipa. So Emine, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me.

So today we'll be talking about paintings in illustrated manuscripts, and I think a lot of our listeners know these as miniature paintings. Could you give us a little bit of a background on these paintings? And actually, I think there's a bit of a controversy about calling them miniature paintings. So could you give us a little bit more background about what these are? Sure. It's not so much a controversy anymore.

Those of us in the field of sort of book arts, let's say, of the Islamic world tend to call these paintings paintings because that is what they are the term miniature was used much earlier in the scholarship and is considered these days to be a little bit condescending and not giving these paintings their due the respect that's due to them or something like that anyway it's just now become a habit to just for me anyway to call them as paintings the word illustration is also often used and I use it too and mostly these paintings are illustrating texts there are of course some that are separate

from texts but many of them do illustrate texts. When we use the term illustration, we might lose sight of the fact that they are not simply reflecting like a mirror everything that's in the text into the visual realm, but rather they're actually commentaries themselves. And many of these paintings are ways to highlight certain parts of the text and also sometimes even give sort of subversive readings to the text. So they really function as conveyors of messages, at times equivalent to, other times subservient to the texts that they illustrate. So who made these paintings?

illustrate. So who made these who made these paintings? The paintings that I have worked on for the book that you mentioned, the picturing history book, many of these were made at or around the Ottoman court. Sometimes we know the names of the illustrators because they're listed in documents that sort of talk about who was paid how much for what project. Very rarely or almost never are Ottoman history manuscripts signed, I think, by painters. I'm trying to think and I can't, I hope I'm not making a mistake. I'm not remembering any signatures. But anyway, there aren't many, even if there are any. So we have the names of these artists

because they're listed in wage registers and not because they're signing their works. And many of them are employed on an ad hoc basis for specific projects. So let's say someone at the court, more often than not a grand vizier or a high-ranking eunuch will decide to commission a book about something. Maybe it's easier to talk about concrete examples. So one example I talked about in the manuscript, the chief white eunuch,

Bab-i-Sa'd-e-As,azan-Ferah walks out of the audience of Mehmed III. This is late 16th century. Mehmed III is what? 1596? 1603? He walks out of the Sultan's audience and turns to an author who happens to be sort of waiting

that he wants him to write about the account of the recent wars in Iran. And so the author goes home and does his writing. And so this is the sort of commissioning of the book. Now, the eunuch just walked out of the sultan's audience. That's all we know. So it's very hard to know whether it's the sultan himself

or the eunuch who decided that the book should be made. But it's probably a combination of the two of them. A decision is reached inside the room and then once the eunuch walks out, he asks for it. So there's the initial sort of act of commissioning for that example. And then once the book, once the text is written, usually a group will be appointed at the palace and they will be assigned sort of salaries and everything and they will work on the project and then once it's finished often they will go back to whatever

their regular jobs may be so it seems like there are artists who are almost regularly employed as artists in the late 16th century because there are a lot of projects happening but we also know of cases where people sort of come in from the provinces work on a special project and then are sent back to where where they're working so how many people would it take to say make one book it's a good question it's hard to say i mean i'm trying to think of the documents that i have looked at so there are you'd certainly have an author often it's the author who supervises the production of the manuscript you'd have two or three scribes or calligraphers um and certainly you'd have one

maybe two people doing the illumination which is not the paintings but all the other sort of beautifying of the page and then you'd have a few two or three artists painters right so a whole studio a team yeah a whole studio yeah yeah so this was really a team project producing these kinds of books yes always a team project and we tend to think of paintings as, you know, single author works of art, but they're really, usually someone does an underdrawing, another person is responsible for laying in all the gold, and someone else is responsible for doing the trees, and someone specializes in buildings, and someone else does the people.

David Roxborough had once said in class many, many, many years ago now, that it's good to think of these paintings as kind of like works of performance art. Beethoven writes the script, someone conducts, and someone's playing the piano and others are playing the violin and it all sort of comes together. But depending on who's doing the conducting, the piece sounds a little bit different every time. Right. And in this case, the conductors, for the Ottomans anyway, for the history works, is usually the official court historian. And for a large part of the period that I wrote about,

that's a man by the name of Seyid Lokman. So it's his inflection that we get on many of these. So the role of the court historian, when does that role position really emerge as a prominent position in the Ottoman court? Christine Woodhead has written about the history of the Ottoman court historian, and she places the beginning with the appointment of Arifi

in the 1550s to compose the Suleymanname. And then there are two other sort of intermediary figures and then Lokman takes the position in the 1560s and he's there until the 1590s he's replaced then by Talik Izade who works mostly for Mehmet III and then we have the name of one other figure who is appointed but we don't actually have anything by him so it's a short-lived 50 some years of having an official court historian who's responsible for writing shayna maze which is actually a very specific kind of project they're not writing prose histories they're not writing um a straightforward chronicles,

but they are charged with writing from the beginning are Persian verse accounts of Ottoman history that are written in the same meter and the rhyme scheme as the Shahnameh, the 11th century Persian epic of kings, the Book of Kings. And they sort of fit the stories of the Ottomans into the molds of the Shahnameh so that the Ottoman rulers or generals appear as Shahnameh heroes. Many of the values of the Shahnameh are things that sort of come to life again in these Ottoman histories.

life again in these Ottoman histories. It's just interesting to me how the word shenameh becomes synonymous with history, but it's not, right? It's a very specific kind of history. There are other histories being written at the Ottoman court or in the Ottoman empire. So as we've discussed, book paintings are very important in the visual culture of the Ottoman court, and they can appear in all different kinds of texts, but in the specific context of these history writings, which really exploded, as you say, at the second half of the 16th century, what kind of themes would be visualized in the paintings that accompanied these texts? So many of the, I mean, these paintings are illustrations to begin with, right?

So they are accompanying texts which are talking about mostly military campaigns and celebrations or audiences. So they're always sort of official events or military events, one or the other. There are a few funerals, but these are also sort of official events, I guess. So these are generally the themes that we see. You might have images of the sultan sitting in the palace, sort of meeting with important people. So this would be an audience scene. Or you might have an image of a military commander

sitting in front of his tent, meeting with important people, discussing, sort of strategizing. Or you might see sort of the army in the act of, you know, walking towards battle. So maybe this would be a good time to talk about a specific example and by the way on the website and accompanying this podcast we'll have a few images for you to check out later so um let's start with this one um this is a good one to begin with because it actually sort of encapsulates some of the themes we've been

talking about the questions you've been asking me about production, etc. This is a painting from a manuscript in the British Library, the Shahnameh of Selim Khan. It was written by Lokman and probably around 1571. It's not dated. And it was not finished. This, to me, is one of the really interesting manuscripts because this is one of those instances

where we have a number of different drafts of the same manuscript. We have two drafts in the Topkapı which contain just text. And then we have this draft in the British Library which contains the beginnings of the text. And then there's the finished version again in the Topkapı. So three in the Topkapı, one in the British Library.

This one, this painting, is one of the more complicated compositions that I have looked at as well. It's actually two paintings juxtaposed on the same page the smaller one above has a kind of a stepped shape and it's actually representing a painting that is being or that was discussed in the context that's illustrated in the lower half of the page so who's sitting in the in the lower so in the lower half of the page. So who's sitting in the lower half of the page? So in the lower half of the page,

we have the people responsible for making the Shehnami Selim Khan. At the center, dressed in blue-gray, is probably, I mean, they're not identified, right? But probably. No labels. Yeah, no labels here. But probably, I I mean I'm

able to say all of this from the very detailed description of the event in the text that surrounds the painting so the text talks about how a prominent historian around the Ottoman court

was asked wanted to have events of the period written down in a shahnameh format. So he decides to give his notes to Lokman to write it up. So this lower half of the painting actually is a group portrait of those responsible for the making of the manuscript.

At the center, Cydidine Grey is a prominent historian of the manuscript. At the center, seated in gray, is a prominent historian of the 16th century, whose notes were used by Lokman, the author of the book we're looking at, to compose the text. Lokman is seated to the right. I think these people are discussed in the text, and of course we can guess at who's being represented they're not actually labeled here but there's some interesting text on the painting which I'm going to talk about in just a second so to the right dressed in dark green is probably Lokman himself who is the author of the text as I said seated across from them are three figures. One of them is holding a little book in his hands, which actually has text written on it. And that, I believe, is probably the scribe

of the manuscript, whose name was Sinan. And the text describes his pen as being sort of as sharp as the spear, which is what Sinan is. Seated next to him is a man, you'll notice if you look really closely, that's holding a painting. And that is a sketch of the painting that we see in the upper half of the page here. And that is probably Osman,

who is responsible for the paintings in the manuscript. He's listed as sort of the chief nakash, the chief illustrator who's responsible for these paintings, but he can't be the only, he's not the only one. It's teamwork, as we discussed earlier. And then seated in the lower left corner is probably the illuminator who was commissioned. So these are sort of, this, as I said, is a group portrait.

And then on the right in the back are two sort of servants who are bringing in another book for these guys to look at. According to the story of how this book was composed or how the final project was done, composed or how the final project was done, these three artists, artists and calligrapher were asked to present examples of their work to the Grand Vizier and others in the Sultan's retinue and they examined these first examples and then decided to go ahead with the production. So what we see above is the exemplary painting that was done in order to decide whether this should be the artist who will illustrate this manuscript or not.

So in the upper image, we see the audience of the Ottoman Divan, a group of sort of ministers here, seated in the kubelı, in the imperial council chamber. And if you look at, this is also like a triangular composition actually, at the very top underneath this tower here, we see the Sultan Selim II behind a grilled window. This is the window from behind which the Sultan would sort of listen to the Imperial

Council meetings. Except he's visible here, and in real life he wouldn't be visible. It's sort of like this big brother situation, right? You don't know if he's there or not, but you have to behave yourself as if he is. So in this case, Selim II is visible here. Directly underneath

him, dressed in white and a little bit taller than everyone and bigger than everyone else, is Sokolu Mehmet Pasha, his grand vizier, who is the mastermind behind the beginnings of this project, who is Lokman's patron too. And then seated to either side of Sokolu Mehmet Pasha, to his right, but our left are the other sort of viziers.

And to his left, our right are the two military judges of Anatolia and Rumelia. And then underneath them are people who have come to sort of give petitions to the divan, et cetera. So this representative painting is really about the political order of the Ottoman Empire, right? This is how decisions get made. You have the ruler in the background guaranteeing that justice is done, and then those who are representing him politically are the members of the imperial

council. And then if you think of the two paintings together as their juxtapose on the same page, those who are representing the sultan and his representatives, those who are representing them in image and word, are the author, the illustrator, the calligrapher, etc., of the manuscript. So these two paintings on this page are all about the process of making these manuscripts, but they're also about this larger idea of representing justice and representing the order of the Ottoman Empire. Which, of course, I assume is a major theme in these histories yeah so as you mentioned there there we don't have labels for these texts but we we can we can make pretty good we can read these paintings according to

different clues uh that are given um in terms of where someone's position what they're wearing and so you mentioned you just mentioned political order. In what way is this political order expressed through the visual? In what way is this hierarch, political hierarchies represented in the paintings? Well, this is again a great example to answer that question.

So if you look at the upper part of the image, we've got the upper half, right, the smaller painting inserted sort of in above, it's got a triangular or a pyramidal sort of composition of people. On top of that triangle or on top of the pyramid is the Sultan who's higher than everyone else and then directly underneath him is the Grand Vizier, who's supposed to be representing the Sultan. He's a stand-in, he's a lieutenant in the real sense of the term, right?

He takes the place of the Sultan. And then slightly lower than him, spreading out to either side, spreading the base, are the other members of the imperial council. So the visual composition helps us to understand how the relationships between the sultan and his grand vizier and the rest of his court were supposed to be.

These paintings don't actually tell us about how things really were. They tell us about how the people who made these paintings wanted things to be perceived, because of course they are representations. I like to think of them as more prescriptive rather than descriptive. They're prescribing the ideal relationships between

between these people as opposed to describing. They're not I mean they're documents but of course all of our archival documents are interpretive too so these paintings are just as just as factual and not at the same time as the written documents that we work with. In what way do we see shifts in the political order reflect in paintings? As we move into the last quarter or the last 10 years of the 16th century, we start to see different kinds of historical manuscripts being illustrated and therefore different people appearing on the pages of these manuscripts. and therefore different people appearing on the pages of these manuscripts. One good example, which we don't have an illustration of here,

it is in my book, it's a manuscript in the Topkapi Palace, the Surname, the Imperial Book of Celebration, is a long text all about the circumcision ceremony of Murad III's son, who eventually becomes the next ruler, Mehmed III. So there, it's not a war account. It's an event that takes place in the capital, and the prime movers and shakers there are the sultan, his family, and the chief black eunuch, the Sultan, his family, and the chief black eunuch, Mehmet A, who was responsible for commissioning the manuscript, but he also has a very active role in sponsoring the ceremony too. So there we have a different figure coming to the fore. So as the political order shifts in the palace as power goes from the Grand Vizier to other figures like the eunuchs who are basically servants of the household. We see the topics of the paintings shift as well. So does it in terms of shifts in political power in the second half of the 16th century,

as they get reflected in who's represented in the paintings, I assume this also is reflected in who's commissioning these history texts. Yes, absolutely. So when you look at Ottoman historical painting from afar, and if you just consider the titles of the books that are being considered, that are being made, titles like the Shayname of Selim Khan, the Suleymanname, the Shayname of Sultan Mehmed,

you would think that these must be books that are commissioned by the ruler and are only about the ruler. But even these sort of very classical examples of Ottoman history painting and Ottoman historical manuscripts are really about the court and the ruler as surrounded by the people around him. And many of them are commissioned by the grandees at court. And of course, as the power balances shift in the second half

for the last part of the 16th century, the patrons shift as well. But as I also explained earlier when we were talking about the example of Ghazan Farah stepping out of Mehmet III's audience and commissioning a book, the example of Ghazan Farah stepping out of Mehmet III's audience and commissioning a book, it's also sort of hard to know who's making that decision. So we need to think of this group as a group. Welcome back to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Nir Shafir. And I'm Emily Neumeier.

And we're here today speaking with Emine Fethadji. So you were speaking about how these paintings were kind of viewed by not just the sultan, but kind of the whole court, the whole world of the palace. I mean, how do we access that world of readers and viewers? What can we find out about it? Great, thanks for asking about this, because it's something I feel strongly about, actually.

So I think I was saying earlier how we assume these books to be only about the sultan and only commissioned by him, but they're commissioned by others at court, and they're about the entire court system. They're not just about the sultan. And they're not read by just the sultan either. I have learned from basically sort of reading the texts, of course, themselves, but also looking at documents in the Topkova Palace archives that list the books that were kept in the treasury, the palace treasury.

And next to these lists of books, which give the titles, are also names of people who have checked books out. And then their names are crossed off when they clearly bring the books back. And among those names is the Sultan's name. So clearly he's, yes, of course, he's a bit more special than everyone else, but he also has to bring the books back. So from these records, we know that books, some of the books at the top kapu are being kept in the treasury, but the treasury functions like a lending library, to all of those pages,

who are those young men who are being trained in the palace. So there are lists of books that are handed out to various students, you know, to the various Ajimi Olans, or pages, I guess we can call them in English, who are residing in one dormitory or another in the Topkapı. So we know that during their education at the palace, these young men are reading these books. So they're a very important part of the audience

because, of course, they're going to grow up and be the next generation of the ruling elite. And here, as part of their education, they're learning the ideal Ottoman system by looking at these manuscripts. So it's really a way these histories of the Ottoman court are in a way geared towards the future to sort of influence and shape the future of this court. So

Lending Library and then and there are you know a couple of thousand people living at the top kapos so the audience is much larger than just the person of the sultan right it's a miniature city of sorts exactly um and there are a few visual representations of um books and book reading um in the in the manuscripts themselves these usually tend to show the sultan and a group around him. One example that we have digitally available is a painting from the Harvard Art Museums. It is a folio from a manuscript of the Jawahir al-Garaib, which is a translation of the Bahrel Ajaib in English,

let me say, Gems of Marvels, a translation of the Sea of Wonders by the author Jennabi, and made in Istanbul around 1582. In this painting, that's the painting at Harvard right now, we see an image of Murat III seated in his privy chamber, in his library, with books on the shelves on either side of him. And notice how there are other individuals, of course, in the painting, in the scene, in the room with him, there are the servants of the privy chamber, the guys to his left, our right, with the red headgear, who are almost like attributes of the sultan. We always see them next to the sultan in these paintings. One of them is holding the sword, and the other one, I can't actually quite make out what he's holding but often it's someone who's got the water bottle and then we have other servants and some midgets in the lower or dwarves in the lower part of the painting so the sultan's close companions are also in the same room with

him when he's consulting his books now in painting, he's not actively looking at them, but the painting provides us with the context in which some of the books are kept. So some are in the treasury, some are in the privy chamber with the sultan. I also saw lists of books that were in the harem, so we know that the ladies are reading them too and looking at them. I've also seen notes.

This was really fascinating. In a volume of the biography of the Prophet Muhammad, the sixth volume illustrated biography, Siyer-i Nebi, commissioned by Murad III, one of those volumes is in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. And on one of its pages is a note inserted in the 18th century sometime so maybe of interest to you 1750s I think that I forget the names of the individuals but they're

all described in detail in my book one of the mothers of of one of the sheikhsades has written in the book basically hoping for you, if you read this note, oh, reader, please send, you know, say prayers. Pray for my son. Pray for me and pray for my son. So here we have a book created and finished around 1595, 150 years later in the hands of one of the women in the harem. She's holding on to it for long enough to be able to

write into it right right and and sort of she's reading it looking at it thinking about her son she's leaving a message and she's leaving a message for future readers exactly yeah so the i guess yeah thanks that's true so that in a way corroborates what I was saying a couple of minutes ago, which is really that these books are all about future readers. I mean, they're not all, but part of their goal is to give ideas and teach the future generations.

So there's very much the assumption that they're made for posterity. They're not made just for the here and now. So this is, I think you've given us a wonderful description of kind of all the different actions and readings and audiences of the court. And just kind of to give the listeners a broader view

of the world of kind of Ottoman illustrated manuscripts. I mean, what can we know about kind of illustration, the production of illustrations and illustrated manuscripts outside of the court i mean some people talk about this you know these market artists and things like that right um so thanks for asking that the world beyond the palace um i want to say a couple of things one even when we are looking at these books made for courtly patrons. The artists who are working on them are also working on manuscripts made for other slightly lower group,

a slightly lower group of patrons. So we know that sort of illustrated books are being made for and used by actually a slightly larger segment of the Ottoman population than just those in the palace. Certainly we're talking about very wealthy people who are able to afford these things, but a couple of concrete examples.

We actually know of things being produced even outside of Istanbul. So Mustafa Ali, the great historian of the late 16th century, when he's posted in Aleppo, he is able to commission an artist to illustrate a version of his Nusretname, his account of the Ottoman-Persian wars of like 1578 to 90. So he's able to get an artist in Aleppo to illustrate a book for him, which he then presents to the palace as an example of sort of what he's capable of. But so there's someone there in Aleppo who's capable of painting a historical Ottoman manuscript. And here we have a sort of a middle to high ranking official

who's able to commission the services of an artist in Aleppo. We also have the case of another Ottoman military figure, again in the sort of late 16th century, the author of the Shijatname, who is not only, he's as I said, military figure, but he's writing the text,

so he's a historian. It's an account of his own heroic deeds in the Ottoman-Persian wars. Wow. Self-promotion. Yes, very much. I mean, these books are the sort of the PR mechanisms of their day. You commission a book about how great you are,

and you present it to the palace, and then you're promoted. This touches on something I wanted to ask. In terms of these works can be prescriptive and even a source of community building or consensus, I'm also interested, I wanted to ask in terms of, how does these efforts of self-promotion, can they ever go wrong? Do they become a source of conflict

in any way that we can see now? They get co-opted. Let me go back to the story of the Shenami of Selim II, the painting with which we began, the story of its production. So that project begins under the guidance of Sokolu Mehmet Pasha, and it begins with the account of the Zigetvar campaign, which is the last campaign of Suleyman the Magnificent. This is when Suleyman dies, and Sokolu is so instrumental in ensuring a smooth transition from Suleyman to Selim II by making sure nobody knows about

Suleyman's death before Selim can come to meet the army, etc. So the Shename of Selim Khan was supposed to begin with the Zigitvar campaign, and we know this because of the draft in the British Library, which contains the account of the Zigitvar campaign. But the final version of the book, which was actually completed during the reign of Murad III, when Sokolu was quickly losing his power and then eventually died, was assassinated. Others at court were becoming more powerful. And the Zigat Bar campaign was edited out of the book

so that in the final version, it's not there. Wow. First, the companions of Selim II, who towards the end of his reign have even more power and they're resenting Sokolu, they start to sort of take this out. And then more so during the reign of Murad III, when the book is completed and Sokolu is Grand Vizier,

but really fallen out of favor, that show others in Murad III's Grand Vizier, but really fallen out of favor, that show others in Murat III's court in a favorable light are illustrated and, you know, written about and illustrated in the book, rather than events that only champion Sokolu. So the project changes because of changing power dynamics. So it's not quite an example of things sort of going wrong, the way you were asking me, but the story has changed so that it will not go wrong. Right, yeah. If people are seen to be stepping out of bounds. Exactly. Getting too big for his breaches.

Exactly. That's definitely one way we could describe it. Terima kasih telah menonton so we've talked about the context of commissioning and reading and accessing and borrowing these books in in the 16th century but i wanted i was wondering, as an art historian, what is it like for you in the 21st century accessing these manuscripts today? Where are they found? Are they digitized? How does this affect how you experience the manuscripts for your research? Well, some of it is very similar to the 16th century context. Many of the books that I wrote about are in the Topkapi Palace library, which...

So they haven't gone very far. No, they haven't gone very far and they're accessed by a select few and then people know about them through word of mouth. That's how it worked in the 16th century too. So you get permission to do your research and you go to the library. And I was very lucky.

As a graduate student, I spent a whole year every day, Monday through Friday, at the topkapı library looking at manuscripts and it was really a very you you feel very privileged of course not only are you in the palace but differently than the 16th century you're now looking at things that are 400 years old or maybe not so differently because the topkapı treasury also contained earlier masterpieces which clearly people were looking at in the 16th century and the 17th this is something i'm interested in now for another project right of course these paintings you know emerged from an earlier context of course exactly so you look at them sort of in

person many of them are digitized now also i have to say there's a difference between the very early 21st century and where we are now so when when I did my research, I didn't, I mean, not that I wanted it, but there wasn't really the option of looking at digital versions. As an art historian, I would much prefer to have the actual thing in front of me. Today, many of the manuscripts are digitized. So this past summer, actually, when I was at the Topkapı, some of the manuscripts that are in a bit more sort of fragile condition than others, they wanted me to first look at the images on the computer screens that they have there.

And then, of course, when you're looking at them with these high-resolution images, you can zoom in, you can look at details, etc. And in terms of gathering information, that's useful. But in terms of trying to understand how these books and albums functioned in the context in which they were made, the screen is not very useful because a 16th century viewer was not able to blow things up.

They're able to blow things up. They're able to just look at what's in front of them. You can bring the painting closer to your eye. But you can't play with it the way you do on a computer screen. Anyway, these new technologies, I guess, give us new tools tools but it's really important as art historians for us to think about these paintings as paintings that were meant to go in books and the way you experience a book you turn the pages you are able to sort of compare the the picture with the text or the other picture that's next to it

or on the other side you get a different sense of the rhythm of how a book works when you are reading it and turning the pages versus clicking on a screen and just looking at the paintings i know that you know a lot of the what okay miniatures have been essentially cut out of books uh and then sold to international art markets or you know people earlier in the 16th 17th century would cut them out and put them into albums and so in a sense i mean even back then people were kind of viewing them as kind of disembodied or kind of separate little images right not necessarily within a book um but if but then you're looking at an album as a as a complete work of art which has a logic and a rhythm and and sense to it or maybe sorry i'll put a different way so like

when we see them in museums or when we see them you know when they're cut out and sold as individual yes images i want to cry we see them kind of sold as individual pieces of art, right? And we just encounter them as kind of like this one image. Then how do we put them back into that book? How do we reconstruct their original context and viewing and so forth if we just have that separate image? Well, that's a good question. Perhaps that is something that can be done digitally,

but I just wanted to sort of remind us that we're not meant to encounter them one by one. There are some drawings, sure, that were made as sort of independent works of art that are meant to be by themselves, but mostly we're talking about the arts of the book. And so remembering that it's an object that contains more than just the one painting that you're interested in is important

but I don't really know I mean I don't know how do you reconstruct it once once once it's spread on the walls of museums around the world exhibitions bring them together there's the very famous example of the great Mongol Shah Nami. Almost all, I think, of its known paintings were brought together for the Legacy of Genghis Khan show at the Metropolitan, and certainly the catalogue of the exhibition brings them together. But it's still not the seeing them on the wall is behind glass is still not of course the same experience as being able to turn the pages here okay well i guess with those words we encourage all of our listeners to uh get permission to go to the top copper library and view these manuscripts in the book format in the

or maybe we can we can we can we can use this as a public forum for a call for more facsimiles because those are very useful very useful it's one way of disseminating absolutely yeah well thank you so thank you so much for joining us today and i'd like to remind our listeners that we will have a series of images that we discussed today and a few more available on the website. So please check that out at www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com. And there will also be a bibliography there for listeners who'd like to read a bit more and find more of Emine's work.

And please also go to our Facebook group where you can join a community of other interested listeners. So thank you for tuning in, and we'll see you next week. © transcript Emily Beynon