Venice was a repository for objects brought from Istanbul that attest to diverse ways in which the two cities were imbricated. One intriguing example is the Foggie diverse di vestire de' Turchi [Different styles of dress of the Turks], a manuscript in the Marciana library in Venice that consists of sixtytwo miniatures of Ottoman costumes (see figs. 1 -2, and 12, 14, 18 below). 1 Although painted by an Ottoman artist, the vestments are identified by Italian captions, indicating the manuscript was produced for a foreign visitor to Istanbul. The collection begins with six portraits of seated sultans who are identified in black ink in both Ottoman Turkish and Italian (for example, fig. 18). On the remaining sheets, court figures, army officers, and tradesmen stand alone, occasionally with a coworker, each surrounded by a simple frame. A more elaborate frame distinguishes the sultans who sit on cushions, but there is no setting for the rest of the figures who are positioned close to the picture plane, the shape and color of their costumes standing out against the plain white ground. In contrast to the sultans, these figures are generic types -centurion, janissary, court gardener, treasurer, night guard, city cleaner ( fig. 1, for example) -whose profession or trade is indicated by the cut and color of the vestments, headdress, tools of trade, and label. Ottoman attire adhered to strict rules and these visual codes organized social exchanges in terms of rank and status, and the pictorial strategies, explored below, demonstrate that the Foggie diverse offers a guide to this hierarchy. 2 The codex is also a microcosm, a collection of images that condenses the city and the court into a small book. Leafing through the pages, the viewer is presented with a parade of the elite and famous, the quotidian and the infamous: the sultans, the dwarf, the clerk, the cook, the artist, the eunuch, and the sultana (figs. 2, 14, 18, for example). The codex is an ambitious sort of artifact, one that aims to convey the breadth of imperial culture through its sartorial order with pithy rhetorical clarity.
In the Secret History of Domesticity, Michael McKeon explores the process through which the private and public realms were wrought by tracing changes in literary, architectural, and pictorial forms. One example is the Curtain Lecture, illustrated in 17th-century prints, in which earlier expressions of wifely authority, familiar from the topos of the woman-on-top, have been reduced to bedroom rants to oblivious husbands. This essay extends the geographical purview of McKeon’s framework to painted fresco decorations in a late 14th-century bedroom in Florence, the Sala della Castellana in the Palazzo Davizzi-Davanzati. Secrecy, seduction, betrayal, blackmail, suicide and revenge are themes from a 13th-century chivalric romance played out in a narrative frieze in which a verdant landscape with castellated structures is set within a continuous arcaded loggia. The female protagonists, and the threat of female authority and desire, are associated with the crenellated buildings in the frescoes, and thus the old order of magnates who had been expelled from Florence, but whose feudal values were making a resurgence. The loggia instead echoes recent urban developments designed to foster loyalties to new and more egalitarian forms of political representation. Bedrooms were not yet private spaces, but the frescoes anticipate the later English pamphlets by deflecting anxieties about masculine authority and loyalty onto the figure of the aggressive and philandering wife, thereby underscoring emerging but still entangled family and civic allegiances
Venetian printmakers in the sixteenth century were enthusiastic participants in what became a project of civic self-promotion as they looked beyond the local market to an international one. In response to the fascination of foreigners who marvelled at the city's singular topography and its reputation for liberty and licentiousness, the bird's-eye view and images of local social types – such as the doge and courtesan – became transmuted into icons of the city's urban identity. The medium and modes of representation used to reproduce the republic's social and physical organization on paper are crucial here, for it was the repetition and sedimentation of visual conventions that forged iconicity. Venice was redefined as a centre in which all the world could be seen. And the mechanisms for this redefinition, as this article argues, emerged, in part, out of print, for it was because the city could be seen from the eye of a bird, on paper as an image, by foreigners – that it could be re-envisioned from the outside in.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.