Click here to buy tickets for this exhibition, or telephone +44 (0)870 8488484.
Click here to buy the Turks catalogue from the Royal Academy’s main website.
The successive empires created by the Turkic-speaking peoples stretched from China to the Mediterranean – a whirlwind series of conquests that led one chronicler to call the waves of mounted Turkish warriors ‘a storm on horseback’. The storm left behind splendid architectural monuments, as well as an incomparable artistic heritage, including the extraordinary array of paintings, manuscripts, calligraphy, textiles, carpets, ceramics, glass, woodwork and metalwork on display in the RA’s exhibition ‘Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600–1600’.
Yet Turkish art remains a fascinating conundrum. Given the obscure origins of the Turks and the number of nomadic peoples they comprised, their civilisation is hard to pin down, particularly since they absorbed the diverse cultures and religions they encountered on their wanderings. Over time, particularly from 1000 AD onwards, the Turks conquered the native Persian and Arab rulers and became patrons of the courtly arts, often assimilating ideas from China into their predominantly Islamic culture.
Though not always the makers of art, their role as agents in the shaping of dynamic artistic cultures was vital and remains poorly understood. The task of unravelling the knots of these interwoven cultural histories lies at the heart of the RA’s exhibition.
The exhibition charts the artistic traditions developed by Turkic ruling elites over a millennium and a terrain spanning the modern geography of western China, the Central Asian Republics, Iran, Iraq, Turkey and the Balkans. Drawing on Turkey’s wealth of art collections, most of the 370 objects on display are from Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace Museum and the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art. Many have never before been seen outside Turkey.
Organised chronologically as a series of vignettes or ‘snapshots’ of artistic achievement, the exhibition does not attempt to be comprehensive. Rather, it focuses on key Turkic dynasties and their interactions with other ethnic groups. The territories they dominated can be seen in the map above.
The show begins in the world of western China and Central Asia with frescoes, silk banners and reliquaries from the sixth to the eleventh centuries, found in the cave temples of Turfan and its surrounding sites. With their portrayals of the pantheon of Buddhist and other deities and demons, these objects reflect the multiplicity of religions – Buddhism, Christianity and Manichaeism – practised along the Silk Road. Their hybrid style and subject-matter point to a diverse region ruled alternately by Chinese and Turkic dynasties whose states were multilingual, poly-ethnic mixtures of settled and nomadic peoples. Many of the artefacts were made under the suzerainty of the Uighurs, a Turkic people from western China who were the dominant power in Central Asia for nearly a century (744–840 AD). After they were overthrown by another Turkic tribe they became a secretarial class, staffing administrations of later dynasties where their script was used to write the Turkic language. This earned them a reputation as ‘teachers of civilisation’.
The next section of the exhibition bears witness to the flowering of the arts under the patronage of the Great Seljuks (reigned 1040–1194). Led by the army chief Seljuk, who converted to Islam in 985, an army of Turkic tribes overthrew the ruling dynasties in Central Asia and Afghanistan. By 1055, the Seljuks had spread across Iran to Iraq, where in Baghdad Seljuk’s grandson Tughrul liberated the caliph, the supreme religious leader of the Islamic faith, from the control of another dynasty. Tughrul was heralded as the Sultan of Sunni Islam and inaugurated a period of rule where the Seljuk military elite supported Islam and became active patrons of art and architecture. At its peak, the dynasty of the Great Seljuks stretched from Arabia to the Indian border, taking in most Muslim territories in Asia, but it fell to the Mongols in 1194.
The Seljuks decorated their palaces with painted sculptures and textiles. A flourishing literary culture gave rise to exquisite books – works of science and literature – illustrated with figurative paintings. On display are several monuments of Turkic literature from the eleventh century, including a Turkish lexicon, epic tales, a book of advice for rulers and another for interpreting omens. In ceramics and metalwork, craftsmen developed new techniques and decorated their wares with diverse themes, from princely epics to signs of the zodiac and the
calendar. In Great Seljuk art, we can witness the rise of the human image as a subject of art. Scholars now believe this development was engendered by a climate of humanism characterised by a curiosity about mankind’s role in the universe and a desire to attain knowledge and develop an ethical system.
The artistic style forged under Seljuk patronage continued in Iraq and Turkey under an offshoot dynasty known as the ‘Rum Seljuks’ (reigned 1081–1307), because they occupied the territory of the eastern Roman Empire, referred to by Muslims as the Land of Rum. After the Rum Seljuks were defeated at the first Crusade in 1097, they moved their capital to Konya in Anatolia.
The Seljuk sultans of Rum erected splendid mosques and institutions of learning and trade throughout central and eastern Anatolia and commissioned objects to furnish religious buildings. Their rule saw a cultural renaissance that produced the mystical works of Sufi poets Rumi and Yunus Emre. Rumi wrote in Persian and Yunus Emre in Turkish, for both languages were used in the court, the madrasas and the Dervish lodges, part of the synthesis of cultural traditions that occurred under the Rum Seljuks.
The next gallery is devoted to a single artist, Muhammad Siyah Qalam (Muhammad of the Black Pen), whose enigmatic paintings are among the Topkapi Palace’s most prized possessions. On display is the vast majority of his work, never before exhibited outside Turkey – a powerful, mysterious and often humorous group of images. Different proposals have been made about the Black Pen’s identity, milieu (from the border of China to eastern Turkey) and dates (c.1300–1500). His bold, expressive pictures are unmatched in the Islamic world, showing scenes of nomadic life; dancing and music-making demons; and Sufi dervishes. These almost Goya-esque paintings stage dramatic and animated figures as dark silhouettes on blank paper.
The following two galleries introduce the art of the Timurid and Turkmen dynasties which held sway in Iran and Central Asia from around 1370 to 1500. They inherited a political and cultural world created by the Mongols, a Eurasian empire whose foundation was laid by Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century. The Turkic tribesman Timur, or Tamerlane, took Genghis Khan as his model and waged a brilliant and brutal military campaign from the 1380s to 1405 that brought Central Asia, Afghanistan and Iran under his control.
Timur established a pattern of patronage developed by his successors, the Timurids, and by two other rival dynasties: the Qaraqoyunlu (Black Sheep) and Aqqoyunlu (White Sheep), confederations of Turkic tribes in Anatolia and Azarbaijan. Collectively, their artistic legacy constitutes an intricate hybrid of courtly and nomadic cultures, all of which used the arts to legitimise their rule and impress their Persian and Turkic subjects.
Monumental architecture played a key role in Timurid and Turkmen cultural policy. Timur’s grandson, Ulugh Beg, built an observatory in Samarqand (c.1420) which represents one of the last monuments of Islamic science. Upon his death in 1449, the observatory was wrecked and its scientists fled in the face of opposition from religious authorities. One of the highlights of the exhibition is an architectural scroll from the Topkapi Palace Museum used by architects and builders to disseminate designs for vaults and wall decorations in a variety of building types. It represents the culmination of a century of architectural experimentation. In addition, objects in wood, jade, inlaid metal and ceramics are on display, which were made to glorify the Timurid and Turkmen courts of Samarqand, Herat and Tabriz. Many of these were made in response to exquisite objects imported from China, examples of which are also on show.
The last three galleries are devoted to the Ottoman dynasty. Tracing its descent from a tribe of Oghuz Turks from Central Asia, the house of Osman (late 1200s to 1924) rose to power in northwestern Anatolia, founding capitals in Bursa and Edirne, before they captured Constantinople in 1453 under Sultan Mehmed. Mehmed’s rule (reigned 1444–81) ushered in a period of intellectual and cultural variety that reflected Istanbul’s position at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. Various objects explore this confluence, a Janus-faced culture that is highlighted in portraits of Mehmed by the Venetian Gentile Bellini from 1480 and the Ottoman painter Sinan Bey . The Ottoman advance was continued by Mehmed’s successors, most notably Süleyman the Magnificent (reigned 1520–66), who led his army to the gates of Vienna, the campaign that marked the limit of Ottoman expansion into Europe. Süleyman adorned his empire with numerous superb buildings, most of them built by his great architect Sinan, who continued his work under Selim II and Murat III.
The works of art of Süleyman’s reign in particular are among the most exquisite in the history of art and are richly represented in this exhibition. These include the art of the illuminated book and calligraphy, which the Ottomans took to new heights. As well as developing scripts and imperial symbols (the Tughra) for official documents and religious texts they also invented a new genre of drawing called saz, characterised by full blossoms and serrated leaves. Such drawings bristle with the fluid and kinetic power of calligraphy.
Ceramics, particularly the fabled Iznik wares, also flourished. Again, many of these objects were inspired by the peerless collection of Chinese porcelain amassed by the Sultans and housed in the Topkapi, the best outside China. Süleyman’s patronage also extended to textiles and carpets, which were made for the court and architectural interiors. During the 1540s and ’50s, this gave rise to an entirely distinct Ottoman aesthetic, a sort of corporate brand, immediately identifiable with the dynasty. It combined various artistic traditions – East and West – into a unique style that was characterised by floral forms with an infinite capacity for expansion.
This exhibition gathers together a panoply of artistic subjects, techniques and media and considers the multiple roles of patrons and artists. It explores themes such as artistic exchange across Eurasia and the nomadic Turks’ adaptation to the settled world and its cultural systems. By introducing an intriguing era of history and art traditions of extraordinary aesthetic power and range, ‘Turks’ puts on stage an artistic diversity of which few people are aware. The exhibition comes at a time when a complex, multifaceted evocation of the cultures of this region is sorely needed.
• This feature, by John Freely and curator David Roxborough, first appeared in RA Magazine. For more Turks features visit www.ramagazine.org.uk
• Click here to buy tickets for this exhibition, or telephone +44 (0)870 8488484.
• Click here to buy the Turks catalogue from the Royal Academy’s main website.
