"Venetians and Turks: A mutual curiosity
By Souren Melikian International Herald Tribune
LONDON Politicians in charge of international relations should ponder the show "Bellini and the East" on view at the National Gallery until June 25, and the book that defines its message. East and West did meet in the past. In doing so their encounters oscillated between devastating wars and hilarious mutual misperception.
The case considered here, the Venetian-Turkish love-hate relationship, while over 500 years old, has a curiously topical ring. The last two decades of the 15th century were not a time of felicitous harmony.
Western Europe was smarting from the cataclysm of 1453. Constantinople - the "City of Constantine," the Greek emperor who had declared in A.D. 313 the observance of Christian rites licit in the Roman empire - had been overrun by a new power whose irresistible thrust had not been anticipated in the West.
Few could have guessed that an obscure dynasty that we call Ottoman, from the Turkish Osmanli, would grow into a giant. It had arisen in Central Anatolia, soon incorporating a patchwork of ethnic and cultural communities: Greek in much of Western Anatolia, Arab on the south eastern shores of the Mediterranean, Armenian in the north-eastern quarter, Kurdish (in other words, West Iranian) in the southeastern quarter, and others.
Strongly assertive, the Ottomans did not really have a clear sense of their own identity. The rulers, and armies, were Turkish, the literate elite largely Persian speaking. The Ottomans were true globalists before the word was invented - they wanted to dominate the globe.
The 1453 conquest of Constantinople was a huge step in that direction. Symbolic occurrences had a deeper resonance than the two consecutive days of slaughter and looting about which Venice only heard from the thousands of Greek refugees who flocked to Italy. The Church of the Holy Apostles founded by Constantine, rebuilt by Justinian in the 6th century, was razed and in its place a new building arose, the "Fetih Mosque" (Conqueror's Mosque).
The Venetians who were on the front line, if only because they exercised a colonial domination over parts of Greece (the southern Peloponnese, then called Morea; Lemnos and some islands) could not forget the destruction, even if they wanted to. The vanished church had served as the prototype for their most famous monument, the 11th-century church of San Marco.
The Turkish advance continued. Forced to conclude peace in 1479, Venice gave up the Albanian city of Shköder (Scutari in Italian), important tracts of Greek land, including Morea and Lemnos. To no avail. The peace lasted as long as the conqueror, Mehmet II, was alive, that is until 1481. Skirmishes broke out, and then war once more. In 1499, the Ottomans occupied Lepanto. By 1500 they held two ports that gave them strategic control of the Corinthian Gulf.
The Venetians developed a psychotic curiosity about the "other side." At first, knowledge was scanty. When information is lacking, as any politician worth his salt will tell you, you make it up.
The figure of the conqueror excited imaginations. Around 1470, a portrait of "The Grand Turk" circulated, engraved by an unknown artist. It is hilarious. The features of the Turkish Sultan represented in profile are based on those of the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaiologos in an interpretation that is not exactly flattering. The high-beaked nose plunges precipitously and the sultan's angry expression is not unlike that of the hissing chimera perched on his hat.
What fit of whimsy drove an unknown visitor to present the image to the conqueror is not known. The two surviving impressions are both preserved in the Topkapi Saray Museum in Istanbul. Apparently, Mehmet II relished this testimony to Western ignorance of his appearance.
However, he may have thought that a joke should be allowed to go just so far. One of the conditions of the peace signed with Venice in 1479 stipulated that "a good painter" be dispatched from Venice to paint his likeness. The Doges did the decent thing. They sent their most famous portraitist, Gentile Bellini. His likeness of Mehmet II signed, dated 1480, shows a thin-lipped man staring with an impenetrable expression. How the portrait found its way to the West (it belongs to the National Gallery in London) is as mysterious as the eastward peregrinations of his cartoonish likenesses engraved some 10 years earlier.
As if the Venetians were hypnotized by the man who had beaten them, the well-heeled elite craved images of the Sultan even after his death. Bellini designed bronze medals representing Mehmet II in profile, in Ancient Roman style.
Framing the portrait in low relief, an inscription in Roman capitals spells out in Latin the words "of the Great Sultan, Emperor." An intriguing detail escaped the scrutiny of Susan Spinale in her superb essay on the subject. These titles actually translate the official protocol of the Sultan with its mix of Arabic and Persian words "al-Sultan al-Moazzam, Shahinshah." Bellini, it seems, had done serious research work before embarking on his labor.
Other medal designers went further in their expressions of adulation. "Great and Admired Sultan, Mehmet Bey," proclaims the Latin inscription on a medal possibly designed by a follower of Pisanello. Around 1478, Costanzo di Moysis even celebrated the conquest that had filled Europe with terror. On the reverse of a medal cast with one of the finest portraits of the Sultan, a Latin sentence intones: "This man, the thunderbolt of war, has laid low peoples and cities. Constantius [Costanzo] made it."
The East displayed symmetrical curiosity and admiration. Mehmet II asked for a sculptor to be sent from Italy, a request, alas, that left no identifiable traces.
The most intriguing result of Eastern curiosity is an enigmatic image in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. In the show, it is considered to be the work of Bellini. An Oriental seen sideways, seated crosslegged, writes on a tablet. The shading in the corner of the eyes, the handling of the curling meshes coming down over the ear, and above all the subtle psychological study of the expression of mute concentration, lips pressed, eyes wide open, leave no doubt about the Western training of the artist. Yet, the format and the paper are those of Iranian book painting cultivated at the Ottoman court. Apparently some gifted Westerner worked in the Iranian technique. Bellini? Perhaps not.
More than 60 years later, possibly as a result of a royal present, the painting reached Tabriz, then the Iranian capital, and was mounted in an album put together for the younger brother of the Shah under the direction of the great calligrapher Dust Mohammad. A band of Persian calligraphy was supplied, stating that it is "the work of Ibn Muazzin who is a famous European master." Ibn Muazzin, or "The son of the man who chants the call to prayer [muezzin]" is a curious name for a European. It has to be the nickname by which the artist came to be called by the Turks, who presumably passed it on to the Iranians. Could this be Costanzo de Moysis, the bronze medal designer, as the Italian historian Maria Andaloro plausibly suggested long ago? No drawing by him is known, but the thought is tempting.
Even more intriguing is the painting that the portrait inspired the most famous Iranian painter, Behzad, to create. The posture is the same, but instead of writing, the artist represented draws a portrait. Eastern stylization has eliminated the shading, the trompe l'œil folds of the sleeves and the garment. The authors of the book do not cite Behzad as the author. Yet, his signature is in his own Arabic formulation, "Behzad gave it its form" (sawwarahu Behzad) and, more conclusively, in his own hand, as I showed three years ago in a collective book on Behzad.
Both portraits eventually went back to Constantinople with the album of Bahram Mirza. In the 20th century, they somehow vanished from Turkey to travel to the United States via France - Behzad's portrait is preserved in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, which is not allowed to make loans.
Such are the missteps of East and West in the unpredictable minuet of their loveless encounters.
LONDON Politicians in charge of international relations should ponder the show "Bellini and the East" on view at the National Gallery until June 25, and the book that defines its message. East and West did meet in the past. In doing so their encounters oscillated between devastating wars and hilarious mutual misperception.
The case considered here, the Venetian-Turkish love-hate relationship, while over 500 years old, has a curiously topical ring. The last two decades of the 15th century were not a time of felicitous harmony."
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