Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [166]
The project had been in his mind since 1764, when he read one of the first Turkish printed books from the long-defunct press of Ibrahim Müteferrika, which I shall discuss in the next chapter. D’Ohsson planned his Tableau with care over many years. He employed artists to paint and draw locations, costumes, and grand events in conditions of secrecy. His governing principles were accuracy and utility, and the result was a work that lacked the sensationalism of the many Western images. The most telling example of this difference is in his engraver’s portrayal of the women’s bath. By the late eighteenth century this had already become a site of fevered lubricity for Westerners. What happened within could only be imagined, since men had no access. But the later painting by Ingres of The Bath was both the apogee of a long tradition of depicting naked female flesh en masse and also the beginning of a fertile theme in Orientalist art. How did d’Ohsson’s book display the women’s (as well as the separate men’s) bathhouse? The only naked flesh on show was that of a mother discreetly feeding her infant; everyone else was clothed in the tradition of Eastern modesty. Even on this point, where his Western audience expected a different (and possibly titillating) vision of the Ottomans, d’Ohsson adhered to what he knew to be true.
The first volume of the de luxe edition appeared in 1787, the second in 1789. The third and final volume was published in 1820, thirteen years after his death, by his son Abraham. Publication of what he hoped would be a mass market edition began in 1788, but that too was only completed in 1824. Plans for an English translation never came to fruition, nor did schemes for a grand Viennese German-language edition, although parts did appear in German, Swedish, and Russian, while a curious hybrid version was published in Philadelphia in 1788. The latter held out the allure of “Exhibiting Many Curious Pieces of the Eastern Hemisphere, relative to the Christian and Jewish Dispensation; with various Rites and Mysteries of the Oriental Freemasons.” D’Ohsson’s dignified presentation of a true image of the East had been debased. There is an extraordinary graphic quality to both his writing and to the carefully designed images that make his words real. But the market demanded something different: “Curious Pieces,” depicting Oriental lust, despotism, and cruelty. By the time that publication was finally completed, any substantial audience for the Tableau was about to vanish. After the massacre of Chios in 1822, few people in France wanted to read or see anything that presented the Ottomans in a benign light.
D’Ohsson’s attempt to defy the dominant discourse was doomed to failure: not even three volumes in elephant folio could disrupt it. But the form that the discourse took was not immobile. The West’s image of the Ottoman East, Asli Çirakman suggests, moved from a wide disparity of conflicting views in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to a single consistent hostility in the eighteenth. However, this process of change continued, and not always in the same direction. In her view, in the first period the image was a simple tyranny, in the second it appeared as a more complex despotism.40 But if we take the story forward into the nineteenth century, the shape changes again. After 1829, when the Ottomans abandoned the seductive silks and furs and put aside the turban in favor of the fez and Stambouline frock coat, they began to be depicted in the West as new men, set on the path of progress. Yet they still carried the irredeemable taint of their origins, as Gladstone presented it in his diatribe