Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [24]
Persian influence on Turkish art was supplemented by Western influence. In the year 1479 Mohammed II asked the Venetian Senate to send him a qualified portrait painter. The Venetians exported Gentile Bellini, who provided the sultan with a number of portraits and with erotic pictures as well. Bellini soon left, terrified—as one story has it—when the sultan, who was dissatisfied with his picture of John the Baptist, decapitated a slave in his presence to show him what a severed head really looked like. But even after Bellini’s departure from the Ottoman court, Western influences remained.
Evidently the sultans maintained high aesthetic standards. Indeed, their standards were so high that they required foreign ambassadors to dress in robes of silver or gold brocade—supplied from the palace storerooms—before they were welcomed into the royal presence. But it was not aesthetic considerations alone that formed the royal art collection. Greed was also an important factor, for the Ottoman rulers acquired art the same way they did provinces or women for the harem. They were particularly eager to possess ingenious and beautiful machines. Queen Elizabeth I of England sent Murad III a mechanical organ “16 foute hie” on which “did stande a holly bushe full of blackbirds and thrushis, which at the end of the musick did singe and shake their wynges.” He loved it. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the sultans were the most powerful potentates in the world, and the custom that rulers have always had—and still have—of sending gifts to each other rewarded them considerably. The English sent gilt plate and beautiful clocks, the French parcels of Lyons silk. From Russia came bales of fur. Aside from gifts, there was booty. When the Turks conquered Cairo in 1517, and on several occasions when they invaded the Persian capital of Tabriz, they seized immense quantities of Chinese porcelain, whose influence is evident in the fine Turkish ceramics that were made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Much of the Chinese ware is—perhaps understandably—of the variety known as celadon, which was supposed to detect poisoned food by making it bubble and seethe. In 1922, after the last sultan was overthrown, a great store of porcelain was discovered in the palace, still packed in the cases in which it had come centuries before.
After the eighteenth century Ottoman power declined. The boundaries of the empire receded, and native art traditions decayed and all but disappeared, since artists now preferred to imitate Western work. The Grand Seraglio in Constantinople sank into decrepitude, as the sultan moved his home and his harem to palaces built in debased Western style. Nowadays one can gain only a faint idea of the splendor that the Seraglio displayed in its heyday. The brightly colored tiles, with their tulip patterns, remain; but most of the painted paneling and silk hangings have been destroyed or are rotting away. No trace is left of the sultan’s famous tulip garden. The gold paving of the floor of the royal reception chamber disappeared long ago. The sultan’s great firework displays, with their dragons, castles, giants, and representations of Noah’s ark, and the stately processions of soldiers and dignitaries in robes of satin and velvet and cloth of gold, can now be seen only in the miniatures which depict royal ceremonies and public festivals. The crumbling palace, the miniature paintings, and a fraction of the immense collection of royal treasures are all that survive of Osman’s ancient dynasty.
My brother-in-law, Gordon, and his wife, Jennifer, who went to Turkey on their honeymoon, told me that though there are so many things they loved about Istanbul, they think most often about their food experiences there: “the sandwich of fried mussels at a shack near the Black Sea; the freshest yogurt in the world from a guy who boarded the commuter ferry; the amazing kebabs from street stands; the Turkish pizza outside one of the mosques; the kokoreç (offal) from a street vendor (he was sitting in