Download PDF | Elizabeth Rodini - Gentile Bellini's Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II-I.B. Tauris (2021).
233 Pages
Acknowledgments
This book is the result of a personal journey that has been nearly as circuitous as that of the painting it traces, Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II. Time spent researching, thinking, and writing in Chicago and London, Baltimore and Venice, New York, Istanbul, and Rome leaves me with a long and happy trail of acknowledgments and thanks.
The early stages of this project were supported by my teachers and colleagues at the University of Chicago and a grant from the Fulbright Foundation. Rebecca Zorach invited me to present a preliminary version of my thoughts on the portrait and James G. Harper supported its eventual publication. I am grateful to Ashgate for permission to publish a revised version of that work here as Chapters 2 and 3. At Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, I benefitted from the support and insights of many, including Marian Feldman, Unver Riistem, Ben Tilghman, Hérica Valladares, the History of Art Department, and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, in particular Donald Juedes and the staff of Special Collections.
The chance to participate in Re-Mapping the Renaissance: Exchange between Early Modern Europe and Islam, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, University of Maryland, reinvigorated this project and connected me with a diverse, informed community of scholars, including Kaya Sahin and Julia Schleck. Related presentations at the University of Michigan, the College Art Association, and at Johns Hopkins provided critical moments of insight and chances to explore new questions. More recently, Leah Clark and Katherine Wilson and participants in the Mobility of Objects across Boundaries, an Arts and Humanities Research Council workshop in Chester, England, provided useful feedback. My colleagues at the American Academy in Rome have made it possible for me to complete my manuscript and turn my thinking in new directions.
Support for my research came from many quarters, including Alan Crookham and the staff of the National Gallery Archive in London, the lively academic community at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City, and the New York Public Library, which gave me access to materials and a space to write. I am especially indebted to all of those who welcomed me to Istanbul and facilitated my studies there. Without M. Ozalp Birol, Giines Ozge, and Giinsel Renda, I would not have been able to finish this work. The 150 or so Turkish people who responded to my offbeat online survey and took the time to talk to me on the streets of Istanbul made me only long to return to that marvelous city as soon as possible.
Guidance and moral support were provided by many, and I hope this list conveys the extent of my debts while leaving no one behind. Thank you to Frederick Bohrer, Olga Borovaya, Gavin D. Brockett, Miray Cakiroglu, Giilru Cakmak, Ferenc Péter Csirkés, Tom Cummins, Walter Denny, Minevver Eminoglu, Ali Eminov, Ahmed Ersoy, Leah Eskin, Noémie Etienne, Ivan Gaskell, Zeynep Giimiis, Anne Harris, Ezgi Ince, Risham Majeed, Tim McCall, Olgu Merandy, Nancy Micklewright, Catherine Rudin, Alessandra Russo, Ozge Samanci, Olaya Sanfuentes, Lisa Schermerhorn, Zeynep Simavi, Marianna Shreve Simpson, Sarah-Neel Smith, and Amanda Wunder. Maya Kahane assisted me with research, and Natalie Rudin and Teresa Turacchio with images. I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers who helped me write a better book, and to my editor at I.B. Tauris, Rory Gormley, for his assistance.
Ihave a wise circle of interlocutors—readers, writers, listeners, and counselors— who encouraged, challenged, and inspired me as my work developed. Gary Vikan read my proposals and encouraged me to write in my own voice. Sanchita Balachandran, Rebecca Brown, Marya Flanagan, and Lia Markey were ever generous in their reviews, commentary, and support. Without Linda Seidel, I would not have had the courage to continue pushing this project ahead, into fields of research and frontiers of thought that were new to me.I am grateful to her for decades of mentorship, and for teaching me the power of patience, close looking, broad thinking, and a good story.
My parents, Robert and Eleanor Rodini, first took me to Venice—the search for Mark’s lion may well have launched this project. I thank them for setting me on such a fruitful path. The decades spent researching and writing this book essentially span the lifetime of my daughters, Sofie and Natalie. To my husband, Charlie, it surely feels like a lifetime and then some. My greatest debts are to the three of them, for standing by my side and allowing me to roam.
Pursuing a Portrait
Subject, Object, Method
Room A
In November 2003, I went to London to see a painting that I had been thinking about for over a decade (Plate 1). It is the work of the Venetian artist Gentile Bellini, produced in 1480 at the Ottoman court in Istanbul, and it depicts Sultan Mehmed II, long known to both Turks and Europeans as “the Conqueror”—a name given out of admiration on the one hand and fear on the other. This disjuncture embodies everything I have come to know about Gentile’s portrait, starting with its reputation. For despite the picture’s fame, I had to travel underground to see it, into the basement of the National Gallery to “Room A of The Lower Floor Collection.” Officially open for only two-and-a-half hours on Wednesday afternoons, this collection was also accessible by special request. I arrived on a Friday and sought out the Duty Manager’s Office, where I was told to come back the next morning for admission.
The geography of the museum should have alerted me that this was a secondrate space for what were considered second-rate paintings. The experience of climbing a grand staircase to reach a collection’s masterworks is familiar to museum-goers worldwide. One virtually never travels down to view a museum's most precious holdings unless perhaps there is a figurative treasure hunt involved, such as the exploration of an Egyptian “tomb” or a chance to see an archaeological find in situ.' Located on the Lower Floor of the National Gallery, Room A literalized a sort of class hierarchy that seemed thoroughly and appropriately British. Although the Main Floor galleries were numbered, this one was lettered. Location and lexicon warned me: this is not where you will find our Leonardos and Rembrandts, our Constables and Turners. You are straying off the beaten path if you venture here, into the uncertainties and doubts of art history, where we cannot guarantee the quality of visual experience that is the hallmark of the National Gallery. Indeed, Room A displayed paintings that museum professionals would call “problem works”: works with significant questions of attribution or even authenticity, works that had at some earlier date been cleaned or restored nearly to the point of defacement, and those that simply did not live up to the considerable standards of the Gallery’s world-class collection.
Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Mehmed II fits that bill, no matter how well known its subject or intriguing its imagery. This is evident as soon as we start to examine the picture closely. It seems at first glance a view in profile—the pose favored for portraits on ancient medals and coins, and preferred well into the mid-fifteenth century (Chapter 2, Figures 2.4 and 2.5)—although, on closer inspection, we can see that the Sultan is actually turned ever so slightly toward us, permitting us to glimpse the bridge of his nose and a bit of his right eye. Recognizing this, we begin to see the third dimension described in the work: furred robes animating the Sultan’s curved shoulders, the bulbous turban wound round his head, and an architectural frame given volume through shading on the inner arch and the adjacent marble ledge. The ledge separates us from Mehmed and is another familiar Renaissance portrait element, used to suggest space by seeming to distance the sitter physically from the viewer. On its base, to left and right, are inscriptions glorifying the subject and the painter—Mehmed is called “conqueror of the world” and Gentile his “golden soldier” The date of the completion of the painting anchors this timeless representation in a particular moment: 25 November 1480.’ A neatly draped tapestry, embroidered and studded with gems, rounds out the pictorial illusion, keeping us back while simultaneously inviting our touch.
The harder we look, the more contradictions emerge, insisting that something about this picture is not quite right. There is the contrast between the crisp details at the margins, of tapestry and carved stone, and the relative illegibility of the sitter himself, his face hazy and his form lost under a bundle of ill-defined robes. Then there is the marble arch that surrounds him. Its role is monumental, yet it seems flimsy, as though one good push could topple it over; it appears to curve up over the Sultan’s head, yet his body remains firmly situated behind it. The overall relationship of figure to architecture is also disconcerting, as if the picture of the Sultan were cut out and pasted behind the carved frame. It is hard to describe or define the space he occupies. Is he sitting before a black background affixed with six crowns? Or is blackness a sign of empty, open space? In that case, do the crowns—themselves enigmatic, possibly emblems of territorial domain, possibly marks of Mehmed’s position in the Ottoman dynasty*—float, like specters or some sort of proto-holographic illusion? How do we explain this lack of clarity from a skilled and much admired Renaissance painter?
One response has been to dismiss the picture as damaged and unfit for close examination. Its condition is poor. It has suffered from overcleaning, aggressive repainting, and other mishandlings. Scholars have a hard time agreeing on what Gentile Bellini painted and whether we can even consider the portrait to be by his hand. It has in past decades been unattributed to Gentile then reattributed to him. It has been considered a copy of Gentile’s original as well. Most recent opinion seems settled on its authenticity, although many experts concur that less than 10 percent of what we see can actually be given to Gentile. All of this uncertainty makes people who work with art—scholars, curators, conservators— uncomfortable. To assign a work to an artist and make arguments based on a problematic attribution is risky business if it is going to be reassigned to someone else tomorrow. Similarly, details of appearance, like the kind of visual disjunctures described here, can easily be discounted as irrelevant to the original work.
The problematic reputation of Gentile Bellini’s painting certainly disturbs the National Gallery, which in 2009 sent it on long-term loan across town to the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), where it now hangs, among carpets and metalwork, in a gallery dedicated to cross-cultural exchange in the fifteenth century. In this context, Gentile’s journey to the Ottoman court is the dominant concern; the painting’s presence has less to do with its essence as a work of art than the larger circumstances that it represents, less for what it is than what it stands for.* Here the paradoxes also multiply: the story of the portrait spans continents but its art historical narrative is restricted by uncertainties over its own past; it is in great demand but is shunned; it is highly relevant but frequently dismissed. The portrait’s short journey across London, its resettlement and reassessment at the V&A, are a sharp distillation of a larger, more compelling challenge: how best to tell the story of objects valued for their permanence but defined by change.
Between time and space
When I look at the beleaguered surface of this painting, the aspect that landed it in Room A, I see not a damaged picture but an artifact of survival, and I think of my research as an archaeological project as much as an art historical one. The painting displayed today in London is certainly not the painting that originally was; there is a metaphoric excavation to be undertaken here, allowing that which time has diminished to tell us something of what has been lost—something that, I would venture, was of considerable quality. We allow this with all sorts of objects: with ancient columns fallen from their plinths, medieval sculptures that have lost their polychromed surface, fragments of pots, and jewelry that can no longer be pieced together. But we demand more of paintings, not permitting the ghosts of images or the reworkings of well-intentioned but ill-informed restorers into our notion of what a painting “is.” With X-rays, ultraviolet imaging, and other modern means, however, we have an excellent sense of Gentile’s original composition that, it turns out, is essentially identical in form to what we see today, down to the inscriptions on the parapet. Arguments about the painting made on the basis of its original composition, on what is represented and how it is arranged, are strongly grounded in visual evidence of authenticity.
A critical loss in the case of the London portrait is its surface, and so the traces of brush and paint that make this a work, quite literally, of Gentile Bellini’s hand. In a world in which authorship is of central importance to the prestige of a picture and to its monetary value, this fact is a significant strike against it. But from the perspective of history writing, we can work around it—even with it, allowing the absence of pigment to redirect our attention and reframe our inquiry. Other paintings by Gentile survive in better condition, so we can begin by imagining that his picture of the Sultan originally exhibited similar qualities of precision and luminosity.° This is a chapter of its physical history that is not difficult to reinvent and suggests that the Sultan portrait, produced, after all, for a high-ranking and certainly demanding patron by one of the most admired Venetian artists of the day, was once of fine quality itself. Rather than the history of a second-rate picture, ours is the story of fine work that time has transformed.
Indeed, the stripped surface we see in London, flat where modulations of color have been lost and murky where Gentile’s sharp edge of observation has been worn away, tells a different tale, a harder one to trace but ultimately a more captivating one. This is a history not of painter making but of time transmuting, not of a picture hanging on a wall but of a canvas that has journeyed across time and space, from then to now and there to here. Its worn surface is an invitation to ask questions about what happened after the painting was completed. What events have intervened in this picture's life to make it lose its sheen and sharpness? Where has it hung, who has seen it, and how have they responded? What is the story of the picture beyond the relatively static moment of its production? What happens if we put it back in motion?
Recirculation is the principal project of these pages. By this I intend several things. Most literally, the chapters follow Gentile’s portrait of Mehmed as it traveled from its place of production in Istanbul westward, eventually arriving, although not permanently, in London. There are periods in which we can pinpoint its place of display and time-stamp its ports of call—on an easel overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice, for example, or in a crate at Victoria Station—each context framing a new set of meanings. For nearly 400 years of its history, however, its location remains a mystery, with only a few tantalizing hints as to where it may have been. In this context, recirculation is also conceptual, referring to the impressions Gentile’s picture made not only through its physical presence but also on the imagination.
My pursuit of these varying historical traces grows out of several interlocking areas of interest for art historians and other scholars who write about things: mobility on the one hand, and object biographies on the other. In many ways, Gentiles portrait of Sultan Mehmed exemplifies a history of cross-cultural encounters firmly situated in a “contact zone,’ a place of convergence that invites diverse modes of inquiries into how and why it was made and used. A long line of distinguished art historians has taken this cosmopolitan approach to the portrait, and their work—singling out that of Giilru Necipoglu and Julian Raby, to which I am particularly indebted—reveals the complex circumstances of its production. Yet that contact zone, the Ottoman court, represents only a brief chapter in the life story of the portrait. Gentile’s canvas has been on the move for half a millennium, its path running the length and breadth of Europe. To echo cultural critic James Clifford, the question that interests me is not so much “Where is it from?” but “Where is it between?”®
Quite literally, the “between” is the trajectory spanning the painting's production at the worldly court of the Ottomans and its current home on the walls of the V&A. More abstractly, “between” addresses the meanings it has held along the way, from Mehmed’s solicitation to Venice for the loan of a painter to the portrait’s enshrinement in art historical narratives as the first realistic representation of a Turk. Attention to the “between” encourages us to build out from more familiar understandings of the picture’s history and consider how those other circumstances have informed it. For we moderns, this means releasing the grip that museums have on how we think about old paintings—as stable, static, and subject to neatly crystallized explanations. A mobile object is one that defies such boundaries, be they geographical or interpretive.” Such an object is always in flux.
Thus a focus on mobility goes hand in hand with object biography, the idea that things, including art objects, exist in the world dynamically and in a continual process of evolution. Inspired by the pioneering work of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai and his notion of the social life of things, scholars have adopted this framework to explore and explain the shifting value of objects as they are, for example, transported, repaired and reworked, housed and displayed, copied, reinterpreted, damaged, denounced—even lost and forgotten.* Again we are pushed between the poles of knowledge, into a place where the certainties of traditional art historical method fall short. I use “life” and “afterlife” to distinguish two interrelated biographical threads: what actually happened to Gentile’s painting, and how it was imagined and remembered in absentia.’
I will return to the matter of the afterlife shortly, as it bears heavily on how I use historical evidence and organize my narrative. Yet before we stray too far from the topic of journeys and biographies, it is worth pausing on some terminology. The trajectory of Gentile’s picture and of these pages ranges across territories we know today as Turkey, Italy, and the United Kingdom, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, but in the period we are discussing none of these political boundaries or regional definitions existed. At the time of the picture’s production, in 1480, Gentile Bellini’s home, Venice, was the seat of a republic that controlled lands across the eastern Mediterranean, and Italy was not even a hint of a dream. Mehmed IT ruled the Ottoman Empire, which was rapidly expanding from its Anatolian heartland to encompass territories from the Balkans and the Caucuses to North Africa—far more expansive than the modern Turkish state.
No one would have recognized anything called the “Middle East.’ To the Venetians it was Levante, meaning rising (as of the sun), while to the Ottomans “east” lay across the horizon toward Persia and India. Likewise, the people we call “Europeans” were defined by regional origins (“Venetians”) or given the larger moniker “Franks.’!° “Turk” was used by Europeans to mean “Muslim” and was a generalized substitute for the derogatory “barbarian,” the converse of a civilized local. Such was also the case with the Ottomans, who tended to group people by religion rather than geography and called the Christian simply “infidel” (kafir)."
This terminology is problematic but also eye-opening. It signals, again, the instability of people and places too easily misunderstood as fixed, cueing us as well to the malleable identity of an object like Gentile’s portrait. It also reminds us that the way we talk about people and things contributes mightily to how we understand them. I employ in these pages a balance of terms that strives to be meaningful to modern readers while remaining sensitive to historical language, moderating usage as we move from the fifteenth century to the present: so I use Venetian in 1500, Italian in 1900; Ottoman in 1600, Turkish in 2000; and for clarity generally Constantinople before the Ottoman conquest of 1453 and Istanbul after, although the historic city name held on for centuries.'* Europe and Italy are useful labels even when anachronistic, and Turk helpfully indicates the people of a region without reference to politics until the rise of the modern Turkish state. I avoid the label Middle East except when a twenty-first-century clarification is needed, and when ancient history is at the fore I refer to Mesopotamia and Assyria. The most fraught moniker, “Oriental,” demands its own investigation, which I pursue in Chapter 5 in the larger context of nineteenthcentury Orientalism.
“Portrait” is another term that requires explication, although it is so thoroughly the topic of these pages that we will keep this opening discussion brief. The portrait will be our concern at every turn, from the language used to talk about it in the fifteenth century to debates enfolding it in the twentieth.’’ Yet its centrality to this story compels us to consider for a moment how we think about portraiture today. A portrait is typically defined as a likeness, a representation of a particular person that looks sufficiently like that person to serve as a tool of physical identification. It does not require much effort to discover that this is far too simple a definition: take cubist portraiture by Picasso, intentionally deceptive self-portraits by Cindy Sherman and Adrian Piper, or even the very basic notion that a camera can lie.
We will return to this problematic equation, portrait equals likeness, in many contexts and guises across 500 years and have a chance to set our own notions against historic ones. So too will we need to rethink the contemporary understanding of portraiture as a representation of an inward, personal state of being. Greatly admired portraitists, from Titian to Rembrandt to Van Gogh, are consistently praised for their ability to depict this unseen essence in paint. However, in Gentile Bellini’s day and in the context of courtly commissions like that of Mehmed II, portraiture was valued above all as a vehicle for outward expression, a means of presenting the public self to audiences near and far.
My title describes Gentile’s painting as “iconic, by which I mean to refer to its ongoing fame, across the centuries and particularly in modern-day Turkey— something we will attend to in the final chapter. In the context of likeness and related matters of representation, however, this term also invites attention. Orthodox Christianity (centered for centuries in Constantinople, Mehmed’s eventual capital) and art historians who study such matters define the icon as an image that transmits a sacred presence, typically of the Virgin Mary or Christ." Icons are generally paintings and can sometimes resemble portraits, although their status and use are completely different from the genre of imagery discussed in these pages. They not only depict people but are also treated as surrogates for them, worshipped by the faithful who believe they are a direct transmission, through association and copy, of their sacred subjects. An icon’s authenticity depends on the conviction that “the painter had recorded the actual living model, or that there was a direct link between the model and that painter's original picture through an interconnected set of copies.!°
A similar chain of representation will guide our pursuit of Gentile’s picture in the sixteenth century. Orthodox icons also invite us to pause, again, on the notion of likeness, as the “truth” of these images lies not in their physical resemblance to, say, the face of Christ but in a physical and ritual association with him. Mehmed, enthroned at the heart of Byzantium and a broadly educated, intensely inquisitive man, surely understood icons and their power, just as he was patronizing emerging forms of Italian portraiture.’ Did he imagine some possible overlap in their aura or potential? We need not equate our categorizations—icon versus portrait—with his; rather, confluences of form, function, and meaning point to the very complexities that concern us here.
As we follow the trail of Gentile’s portrait, we will find that the expectations for what portraits can be and should do are much more varied than what likeness and interiority can encompass. We will think about this portrait as a transaction between sitter and artist and as a medium of exchange. We will imagine it as the test of the painter’s skill and a spur to memory, as a source of information and of political posturing, and—recognizing and querying widespread assumptions about the status of representational imagery in Muslim cultures—as a dangerous thing, best discarded. We will compare the importance of its subject, the Sultan, to the status of the portrait itself, and tap into shifts in this balance that impact how it has been valued.
The London portrait is also a vehicle for thinking about relationships, between artist and subject and among those who came later, including scholars, collectors, institutions, and even nations. People will bob in and out of our story, but the anchor that holds the narrative in line is the portrait—sometimes its physical presence but more often ideas about it, what it represented to those people and how they have continued to reimagine it. My real subject is the stories that orbit this peripatetic image as it has traveled, over time and sometimes unrecognized, between Istanbul and London.
Stories and quests
Iam one of the storytellers. This may not seem the language of a historian, but it is accurate in several senses. The more academic of these stems from my own immersion as a student in the 1980s and 1990s in what is best characterized as “new historicism.” So dubbed by Stephen Greenblatt in what he describes as a spontaneous attempt at naming, new historicism is an approach to the past that is fundamentally cross-disciplinary, interconnected, and self-aware.'” It owes a particular debt to anthropology, from which it derives the notion of a “thick” context of meaning; and it draws on post-modern literary theory, including the conviction that any form of writing is a representation rather than a reflection of reality—this goes for the writing of the critic as well.’* The seminal work of Michel Foucault undergirds new historicism. In particular, Foucault insisted on the conditional nature of both historical evidence and history making, daringly likening his own texts to fiction.”
The landscape for historians inspired by this critical mode is challenging but, like a strenuous mountain hike, highly rewarding. History writing has long relied on empirical language to convey its basis in fact, language that the influential historiographer Hayden White associates with the nineteenth-century novel and such conventions as linear chronology, unified point of view, and a distant, omniscient narrator.”? White is skeptical of texts that hide the fact of history making under a veneer of neutrality in pursuit of an “explanatory effect,’ and he proposes alternative forms of writing history that might be “impressionistic, expressionistic, [or] surrealistic.’ A “poetic” history that admits of its own art and perspectives has, for White, the creative potential to break new ground and expand our understanding.”
The risks of such an approach may seem tremendous: if we replace neutrality with subjectivity and explanation with poetics, are we not implying that fiction can replace fact? Not at all. Even at the moment that history “happens,” its meaning is varied according to the many who intersect with it—varied, thus multidimensional and unfixed. To accept that there is no single take on any one event (or document or painting) is not to deny its essence, but to acknowledge its complexity. New historicists tackle this challenge by searching for their subject in the thicket of the life that has surrounded it, allowing the authoritative source to mingle with the anecdotal, the solidly steadfast with the small detail and the contradiction. Such histories do not claim to spotlight the truth but see their work as akin to a prism, refracting the past in a rich spectrum of meaning.
Because of its mobile, evolving history, Gentile’s portrait of Mehmed II virtually demands to have its story told in multiple. Beyond its literal trajectory, there is also the course of memory and invention, of what people think they know and remember of the image—of the life the picture takes on beyond the frame. We first meet it at the Ottoman court in Istanbul where it was produced, but will track it soon after to Venice (perhaps—this is a story of remembering and forgetting) and later to Britain in the context of nineteenth-century Orientalism and collection building. We find it again in Venice on the brink of World War I, in early struggles over Italian patrimony, and at the National Gallery, in a tangle over the practices of preservation and the legal definitions of portraiture. Its trail leads us across London and finally, in 1999, back to Istanbul, where it stirs up a dynamic brew of historic regret and national pride.
As an art historian, I am not only writing about this afterlife but extending it. In the pages that follow, I use the portrait as a tool for exploring a range of questions critical to the history of art that I hope will interest experts and amateurs alike: questions of meaning in circulation (Chapter 2), truth in representation (Chapter 3), copies and memory (Chapter 4), Self and Other (Chapter 5), authenticity (Chapter 6), patrimony (Chapter 7), “portraiture” (Chapter 8), and contemporary relevance (Chapter 9). Another goal is to explore possible approaches to an object forged in a cultural contact zone but circulating out in the world, thus addressing the current challenge to write a more global art history—a point I return to below. In the spirit of new historicism, my attention to one painting might be considered an extended historical anecdote, a small detail that reveals a world of thinking.”
This detail, Gentile’s portrait of Mehmed, presents significant challenges to history writing for reasons we have already begun to acknowledge. The painting itself is in a questionable state. Similarly, documents from the painter’s stay in Istanbul are sparse and difficult to verify, and gaps in its provenance (that is, when it was to be found where) are substantial. Yet evidence for the picture’s history, if generously defined and creatively examined, is wide-ranging and provocative. We must be willing to leave the actual canvas behind and attend instead to its residue in memory, in copies, tributes, reconstructions, and even rumors. In some cases, this context is all we have, and we must work from that frame inward, seeking a trace of the picture in the matters that surrounded it. Traditional histories might struggle with this distance from the subject and be silenced by the materials—documents and pigment—that have been lost. But by embracing even the more oblique stories, what is known about this portrait along with what has been believed, imagined, and invented, we can arrive at a fuller sense of both its life and its afterlife.”*
Thus we return to stories. A “story,” too, seems to imply a fiction or an untruth, but I use the term here to underscore the fact that I—like any historian, and with particular gratitude to those whom I emulate*’—am working between my own time and circumstances and those of my subject. History is made, not found, and it is helpful to use language that acknowledges that act of construction. I therefore write in my own voice when personal experience imposes significantly on the
narrative—primarily in the opening and closing chapters, but not exclusively. I occasionally use contemporary analogies to bridge past and present. And because I aim to make this history accessible, I frame my engagement with the many scholars, thinkers, and sources that support this text in ways I hope will be inviting rather than discouraging. For those who want to trace my intellectual path, there are the Notes and Bibliography to mark the way; others are welcome to proceed without them.
Globalism and relevance
Storytelling is an apt description of my work for another reason, and that is that my quest after Gentile’s portrait has become quite personal. Fifteen years after meeting it in Room A, Iam still thinking about it. It has crept so thoroughly into my imagination that, as I recount in the final chapter of this book, I arrived in Istanbul in 2018 with distorted expectations of the traces I would find of it there. My own fascination with the portrait begs that I take a hard, inward look at the theme underlying that chapter, namely the matter of relevance. It is not that this painting is particularly important in the history of art; its time on the Lower Level of the National Gallery makes that abundantly clear. So why have I come to care so much about Gentile’s picture and its history?
Old pictures—“Old Masters,” as they are often and unfortunately labeled—do not have much of a reputation for intrigue today. The ever-shifting novelty of contemporary art and a comprehensible disaffection for histories of “dead white guys” makes my subject seem outdated, distant from the things that matter. In fact the opposite is the case, precisely because Gentile’s portrait of Mehmed has existed and still exists not just as a canvas but as an idea, one in dialogue with a varied and increasingly global social context.
I have not to this point made much of the East-West theme that underlies these pages, from the diplomatic exchange at the heart of the story to the complicated relationships that define modern geopolitics—although this is likely the most obvious point of relevance to many readers. Some might see a fifteenth-century Venetian painting of an Ottoman sultan as an optimistic symbol of harmony; others might interpret its production as a lost moment of promise, a failure of historic rivals to compromise and come together, or as just another node in an ever-evolving network of cross-cultural interactions, at times tranquil but often not. The portrait is a touchstone for historians interested in matters of exchange and encounter;** yet new approaches to globalism invite new takes on it as well.
A twenty-first-century cosmopolitan art history resists the traditional map of the world that relies on fixed boundaries and nationalist frames to define our subjects—Turkish sultans, Italian painters, British collectors, and so forth.”’ This revised outlook, with its postcolonial foundations, prioritizes dynamism and change.”* It sees the world as fluid, a place where objects move and morph, defying geopolitical borders and classifications and demanding new lines of questioning.” In this view, notions of stylistic influence are too linear, borrowing too hierarchical, and translation often too contrived. Culture is inherently “between” and entangled. Inspired by scholars who have sought to disrupt the oppositional division between East and West, I too aim to write against this binary frame.” Venice and Istanbul may be understood as poles in the story of a journey, but more apt is the motif of circulation that is embodied by the London portrait itself, ongoing and never complete. The fact that the portrait returned briefly to Turkey in 1999 makes the circle a better figure for my project than either the line or the arrow.
Nor can any of us escape our own historical moment and our own frames of reference. One day, in February 2015, in the Rare Book Room of the Johns Hopkins University Library in Baltimore, I sat down to finish my study of Nineveh and Its Remains by Austen Henry Layard, the first known owner of Gentile’s portrait in the modern era. As we will see, Layard was among other things an explorer and the archaeologist who excavated the ancient Mesopotamian city of Nineveh in the 1840s, in what was then Ottoman territory. He was responsible for bringing many Assyrian antiquities back to London, including a giant winged bull now in the British Museum (Chapter 5, Figure 5.5). He was also an amateur ethnographer, peppering his treatise with observations about the people he encountered on his travels; Nineveh and Its Remains is as much a description of the land’s modern residents as of its ancient ruins.
As I read, my own sense of time and space was upended. The bull in London closely resembled the creature I had seen that very morning on the front page of the newspaper, being defaced by a militant of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) wielding a power tool.*! This act of destruction reverberated through my reading of Layard. His book describes how the ulema (Muslim scholars) “pronounced that [excavated Assyrian] figures were the idols of the infidels,’ and how the local people, “like obedient disciples, so completely destroyed them, that [the British archaeologist] was unable to obtain even a fragment” “May God curse all infidels and their works!” declares another tribal leader.*? Layard’s delight at receiving permits to export his Assyrian finds to England suddenly seemed less smug to me.I could see through his imperialist satisfaction to my own disconcerting sense of relief that, as a result of his efforts, some of those treasures were far away from the weapons of that morning’s terrorists, deep inside a London museum.”
I was trying to work as a historian, to put on my blinders and not read a 150-year-old text through the news of that morning and my emotions. But it was an impossible task.
I could not look at the images in Layard’s volume or read his words without conjuring up the violence unfolding, against objects but more importantly people, in territory once Assyrian, later Ottoman and Iraqi, and at that moment held by ISIS. It seemed as though history was rolling up on itself, tightening a knot around my research that made it more uncomfortable but also, I came to realize, more relevant. This coincidence of word and image, of events past and present, forced me to collapse the space of history and address head-on the meaning of objects in the present. I was able to see, in that confluence, the way that the winged bull—carved in Assyria, buried by time, excavated and shipped to London, published by Layard, and visited by millions at the British Museum, but also, in its close cousin, assaulted by the weapons of ISIS—was both a sign of the past and an indicator of the present, highly significant despite its distant history. Relevance is not forever, it comes and goes. In February 2015, an ancient Assyrian bull was briefly at the center of the world.
This detour through my reading of Layard’s text is apt for another reason beyond the matter of relevance: it takes me away from Gentile’s picture, yet the picture is still there, if at some remove, as an artwork that Layard owned and treasured. We will cycle toward and away from the material subject of this book, the portrait of Sultan Mehmed IJ, many times over the course of the coming chapters. These narrative byways are central to my larger theme and illustrate another point, namely that any single object, if thoroughly pursued, leads in myriad directions.
Our approach to Gentiles portrait of Mehmed may at times feel disrupted, for there will be many twists and turns along the way. But this disjuncture is in keeping with the nature of the picture itself, with its inherent contradictions and its ongoing, persistent intrigue. Our focus in the eight chapters that follow is not just the canvas in the frame, but the people, ideas, and events that have encompassed it. In the end, this book is about journeys—of the painting, and of our own roads to understanding it.
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