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.
This portrait of Ottoman ruler Mehmed II (r. 1451-81), pasted into an album, shows him in his later years. The
artist is believed to be Shiblizade Ahmed, a pupil of the Ottoman artist Sinan Bey (active c.1475—1500), to whom the painting was previously attributed. Stylistically and iconographically it combines Western (Italian) and Eastern-Islamic (late Timurid) representational concepts. Exposure to Western techniques is particularly evident in the painter’s use of colour tones in rendering the folds of the sitter’s clothes and his handkerchief, in order to suggest voluminosity. This approach was entirely abandoned in the later Ottoman artistic tradition, which preferred flat, unmodelled colour. The sultan’s bust and facial features are similar to those in Bellini’s depiction of the same subject, but the Ottoman painter depicts the sultan sitting in a cross-legged posture — the pose preferred in medieval Islamic royal iconography. The archer’s thumb ring refers to his hunting and military skills. Mehmed smells a rose — an iconographic feature adopted by later Ottoman painters and also by sixteenth-century European artists who worked from an Ottoman model. Although enthroned personages with flowers are not rare in the Islamic visual tradition, there is no agreement about the symbolic meaning of the rose. Flowers may refer to the grace of paradise, and the rose in particular is associated with Prophet Muhammad, whose complexion is compared to rose petals. As a symbol of beauty and smoothness in Persianate-Islamic literature, the rose may also refer to the literary refinement of the sultan or, simply, to his well-known fondness for his gardens. He wears a Timurid inner garment with a croisée collar and a furlined outer kaftan with a large collar, in keeping with the contemporary Ottoman fashion. His bulbous turban is a direct reference to the traditional headgear of men of learning, and reflects his own preference.
Serpil Bagci
• 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.
