INTRODUCTION
In the upper right, in front of a blue mountain, you see three men, most likely hunters, on horseback. The man on the left points at the birds in the sky. He wears a special glove, a black one, of the sort used by keepers of wild birds. The man in the middle is about to shoot an arrow. The other hunter hangs onto the bridle of his horse with one hand while with the other he seems to make a gesture that remains obscure to us.
Above the hill, in the sky, the birds go at each other in a spirited fray. Two appear to be fighting. Another, colourful bird carries something in his beak. Two gazelles watch the scene in the air behind the mountain. A few clouds, two of them painted in purple, hang in the sky – or on the empty page.1
This miniature visualizes the “Stableman” story. It recounts the tale of a king who decides to go hunting with his retinue. Having suspicions that his brother might kill him, the king asks the stableman to spy on the prince. The stableman agrees, but soon enough he reveals his mission to the prince. When the king dies and is succeeded by the prince, the stableman is condemned to death. When asked the reasons for his verdict, the new king explains that the stableman cannot be trusted, as he had given away the previous king's secrets.
The miniature depicts the king talking with his stableman while his other retainers hunt in the far distance. The artist's placing of the figures outside the picture plane, on the margins of the page emphasizes the space between the conversing pair and the others. People familiar with the Ottoman literature of the era, or those who had been exposed to the tale through extratextual means, would recognize the story upon seeing certain pictorial elements and gestures – the hunting scene, the animated gestures between the figure wearing regal headgear and a man who looks like his servant, and so on. Other details, such as the gazelles, the black glove worn by one figure, and the colourful bird in the sky, are not mentioned in the text but are nevertheless present in the image. They add up to the visual narrative and govern the ways we read the image (Figure I.1).
This study is concerned with instances when images “surprise” their viewers, thus requiring a demanding process of viewing. They generate moments of bewilderment, which encourage the viewer to think along with the image and initiate an interpretive process that brings about, rather than the “truth” of the image, a performance of the encounter.
If the viewer is willing to go beyond the mere identification of textual elements, the Stableman miniature provides this sort of “surprising” experience. What, for example, is the iconographic meaning of the root that is sticking out of the ground right beneath the hooves of the king's horse, below the image, into the text? Resolutely, it has none. The text makes no mention of roots – it has no need to, as the story aims to make an unremarkable statement about the virtues of trustworthiness and fidelity. According to the representational coordinates of the miniature, the roots appear to penetrate into the subterranean realm.2 However, there is no pictorial element of the “earth” – such as a tree – that might help us to explain the roots' presence. The roots make up an ambiguous figure reaching into the underground as that which is always there but nevertheless remains invisible to the viewer.
Figure I.1 The Stableman, Hümâyunnâme, undated, artist unknown, Topkapi Palace Museum (R. 843, f. 136b), 7.3 × 20 × 16.2 cm.
However, if the miniature is considered in its inevitable relation to the handwritten text, the figure of the roots might initiate an interpretive game that opens up a new array of theoretical inquiries concerning one of the oldest, most persistent issues pertaining to representation: the relation between word and image. As Mieke Bal notes, “[t]he very phrase ‘word and image’ suggests that two different, perhaps incompatible things are to be shackled together”, emphasizing “the difference, not the common aspects between the two” (1991: 27). The binding of the pictorial and the textual is perhaps nowhere more tangible than in illustrated manuscripts in which the two realms are inextricably linked and display their inevitable mutual dependence.
The page from the Hümâyunnâme brings together the word and the image in a way that invites the viewer to continually translate the realm of the visual into the verbal, and vice versa. This mutual empowerment resonates with W.J.T. Mitchell's “polemical claim” that “all media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous; there are no ‘purely’ visual or verbal arts, though the impulse to purify media is one of the central utopian gestures of modernism” (1994: 5). “The Stableman” image, on the contrary, fashions a premodern gesture promoting a composite, synthetic work that combines image and text as an instance of what Mitchell calls an “imagetext” (1994).
The root, as the only pictorial element that literally intervenes in the realm strictly reserved for the textual, is a metaphor for how the encounter between the two can be envisioned in visual terms. It points out that the visual is anchored in and fed from the verbal as if it were the ground itself. The textual, on the other hand, is never pure; rather, it is always already tainted by the visual that slips into its realm. In this capacity, the encounter between the root, which reaches out to the textual, and the letter Alif, which seems to shy away from the intruding not-fully-developed weak tips of the root, “pictures theory”.3 By means of this detail, the image comes to theorize the ways in which the visible and the readable interact – as if to illustrate this passage from Mitchell's Picture Theory (1991):
If the relation of the visible and the readable is (as Foucault thought) an infinite one, that is, if “word and image” is simply the unsatisfactory name for an unstable dialectic that constantly shifts its location in representational practices, breaking both pictorial and discursive frames and undermining the assumptions that underwrite the separation of the verbal and visual disciplines, then theoretical pictures may be mainly useful as de-disciplinary exercises. (83)
The figure of the root, then, can be a starting point for a critical reading of the miniature as a “self-aware image”, to borrow the title of Victor Stoichita's 1997 book, commenting upon itself and on the concerns of painting by inviting its viewer to question what pertains to the visual and the verbal. This brief reading of “the Stableman” miniature exemplifies the ways in which miniature paintings operate as “theoretical objects”, rather than being only historical documents that reflect the aesthetic concerns and artistic tastes of the cultural era within which they were produced.
Let me return to the allegorical function of the “photoshopped” version of the page from the Hümâyunnâme mentioned at the outset. I replaced the original script with my own text not only to make a clever introductory gambit but also to demonstrate what miniatures can do beyond their conventional illustrative function. I consider this altered picture to be an allegorical image embodying the logic of this work. Each miniature discussed in this book is anchored in my text; their roots creep into my writing and ways of thinking about visuality and visual representation. In this sense, the miniatures do not simply illustrate my words – this is never the case. Rather, my words are informed, tainted, and sometimes misguided by the miniatures' imagery, which, in the first place, lured me into writing this book.
A Miniature History
This book centres on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ottoman miniature paintings found mostly in illustrated manuscripts. Miniature painting – or taswir and nakish, as the Ottomans called it – was the dominant form of Ottoman pictorial art until the eighteenth century. It developed together with medieval Islamic book illustration – alongside illumination (tezhip), calligraphy (hat), paper marbling (ebru), and bookbinding (cilt). Manuscript production formed an integral part of Ottoman institutional activities. Miniatures were produced mostly in the imperial studio (Nakkashane) founded in the mid-fifteenth century under the patronage of Mehmed the Conqueror (1451–81). It was an art of the court commissioned, largely, by Ottoman sultans and powerful courtiers.
The imperial studio was responsible for creating a unique style, designed by the head masters, such as Nakkash Osman, Matrakçi Nasuh, and Nigari from the sixteenth century; Nakkash Hasan, Nakşî Bey, and Musavvir Hüseyin Istanbulî from the seventeenth century; and Levnî and Abdullah Buharî from the eighteenth century. The preparation of an illuminated manuscript engaged various craftsmen – the author, the calligrapher, the gilder, the illuminator, the margin-drawer, the illuminator of intricate floral ornamentation, the marbled-paper maker, the painter, the master binder, and the artist who ornamented the bindings with lacquer work.4 That the miniatures were not signed until the eighteenth century alludes to the collective nature of their production.
According to Günsel Renda, the representational modes of miniature painting were formed by artists who “imbued with the abstract worldview of Islam, reflecting a conception of painting based in primary colours, emphasized contours, and a preference for decorative surfaces and two-dimensional depiction omitting light and shade” (1995: 16). This conceptual approach to figural representation was handed down to the Ottomans from Persian and Timurid schools (particularly those developed in Shiraz, Tabriz, and Herat) as well as from Chinese and Byzantine painting – even if the latter influence is rarely mentioned. The Ottomans conceived miniature painting as an art in the service of the Empire and therefore regularly commissioned works depicting the daily events and activities related to the palace circles.5 This approach obliged the miniaturists to “develop ways of representing incidents and persons realistically” while “adhering to the formalist representational mode of Islamic miniatures” (20). In this sense, Ottoman miniature painting differs from its artistic counterparts such as those flourishing in the Safavid (Persian) and Mughal schools, which have poetic styles.
Illustrated books fall into classifications including history, cartography, urban topography, science (cosmology, geography, astronomy, pharmacology, botany, alchemy, and physics), (sultanic) portraiture, literature, and religion (with the exception, of course, of representations of the Qur'an). The formative period (c.1451–1520) of Ottoman miniature painting does not appear to have a unified visual language.6 It was initially influenced by the examples of Western schools brought by Venetian artists – such as Gentile Bellini and Costanzo de Ferrara – who were invited to Constantinople by Mehmed the Conqueror. Simultaneously, local artists were grappling with Persian, Timurid, and Chinese masterpieces so as to find a unique Ottoman visual voice. Going forward, the sixteenth century, which has been considered the “golden age” of Ottoman miniature painting, was the period in which the imperial visual language was institutionalized, especially in the works of Nakkash Osman, which tended not to use the effects of Italianate painting introduced in the previous century and created a more “Eastern” style of expression.
This book looks at the so-called “declining period” of miniature painting, namely the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The decision to focus on that period in particular is due to the fact that miniatures of the seventeenth century have received less scholarly attention because very few examples, especially from the second half of the century, have survived. According to Atasoy and Çağman, the second half of the century is, in fact, “the most obscure period in Ottoman miniature painting” (1974: 71).7 Another reason why I have decided to study the period has to do with certain shifts in the production of miniatures. The few illustrated books remaining from the epoch demonstrate that the imperial language of the sixteenth century began to give way to less established ways of representation.
The first modification can be observed in the amount of works collected in murakkas – albums in which numerous miniatures from different periods and styles were assembled. Even though some single-page miniatures had been produced in the previous periods, only in the seventeenth century did such miniatures generate a genre in its own terms. Second, the lessening of the material and textual constraints of the book allowed miniaturists to experiment with new subjects, most notably the everyday scenes that had not previously been possible under the thematic reign of the book. In this period, the supremacy of the imperial studio was challenged by urban miniaturists – mostly located in Istanbul – who, not restricted by imperial constraints, worked in a distinct style and took up new subject matter. At the same time, new schools of miniature painting, such as those in Aleppo and Baghdad, sprang up in the provinces. These schools, though marginal and short-lived, managed to bring about a new idiom, marked by a flexible use of the page and the frame and a wider colour scheme. In this sense, rather than “declining”, as the conventional art historical categorization states, the cultural production of the era proves to be fairly experimental.
Scholars have argued that Ottoman miniature painting underwent certain transformations as the Empire's interaction with the West deepened in the eighteenth century. During this period, known as the beginning of modernization, the Ottomans showed themselves to be rather interested in European art and architecture, epitomized in the so-called Ottoman Rococo, even as they themselves became objects of desire for Europeans, as seen, for instance, in the writings of Mary Wortley Montagu and paintings by Jan Baptiste Vanmour. The cultural encounter with the West had certain effects on Ottoman arts. Accordingly, contemporary art historians have focused on the ways in which European techniques of representation (such as modelling, illusionism, perspective, and shading) have been incorporated into traditional Ottoman arts, most notably in miniature painting.
In these inquiries, considerable attention has been given to the oeuvre of Levnî, who by and large revised traditional miniature painting by experimenting with new expressive forms (see, Atıl, 1999, 1993; Tansuğ, 1993; Irepoğlu, 1999). Working in the so-called Europeanized style, Levnî's contemporary Abdullah Buharî created single-page miniature paintings that depicted scenes from everyday life and made paintings of costumes and flowers as well as landscapes frescos that become popular in the second half of the century. Among the last examples of book illustration are Hubanname and Zananname by Fazil Enderunî and Hamse-i Atayî by Nevizâde Atayî, completed in the last quarter of the century. Several illustrated copies of these works demonstrate that traditional methods in miniature painting – such as mixing pigment with gum arabic and employing non-overlapping layers of paint – have been replaced by new techniques adopted from the West – such as the use of watercolour, which allowed for subtle gradations of light and shade. By the end of the century, miniature painting was gradually supplanted by new media such as murals (landscapes) and oil-on-canvas painting (sultanic portraits).
To study the visual production of the period under consideration, three miniatures from each century have been selected. The corpus drawn together – from early-seventeenth-century work to that of the mid-eighteenth century – covers a wide span of existing trends, styles, and genres. In this way, this study considers various levels of style, genre, geography, material, and illustrative function. It largely concentrates on works executed in the imperial atelier (Chapter 2, 3, 4, and 6). Yet a miniature in the provincial style of the seventeenth-century Baghdad school (Chapter 5), as well as a work by an independent local painter, most probably from Istanbul have also been included (Chapter 1). The miniatures encompass diverse genres, encompassing the historical (Chapter 3 and 5), the literary (Chapter 6), the religious (Chapter 1), portraiture (Chapter 4), and the nude (Chapter 2). Three of the miniatures were part of illustrated manuscripts (Chapter 3, 5, and 6), two were conceived as single-page miniatures that were bound in a codex later on (Chapter 1 and 4), and one was executed as an independent miniature (Chapter 2).8
Most of the extant illustrated manuscripts from the Ottoman period are now preserved in the Library of the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul. Other museums and libraries in Istanbul (such as the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum and the Süleymaniye Library) also house rare manuscripts. In addition, Ottoman miniatures can be found in museums, private collections, and libraries around the world, most notably the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin and British Library in London. All these manuscripts are kept in special sections in these museums and, with few exceptions, they have no public visibility except when they are displayed in special glass vitrines for specific exhibitions. In this sense, the contemporary viewer's encounter with miniatures is not only historically but also physically mediated.9
Michael Camille, one of the most stimulating art historians writing about Medieval European art, suggests that when manuscripts are exhibited, the viewer “can only peer through the glass at one opening.” This means that one has to “relinquish the crucial dynamic of the turning page, and usually ha[s] access to only one frame from a complex cumulative experience of seeing and reading” (1984: 509). For this reason, the viewer can never encounter the miniatures in the ways they had once been experienced. For Camille, this discrepancy presents a challenge that must be overcome. He suggests that “[u]nlike the largely defunct visual orders of icon, altarpiece and, some would even say, easel painting, we still all utilize and learn to deal with this form of communication in the ways that our ancestors did” (509).
This study, however, starts from the impossibility (and ineffectuality) of reenacting such an authentic encounter with miniatures. Instead, it proposes to revisit the tradition in order to investigate and complicate ways in which we look at images today.
Miniatures as Theoretical Objects
Until now, the scholarly research on Ottoman miniature paintings have been carried out in the discipline of art history. These works have concentrated on conventional issues pertaining to patronage, attribution, and periodization, as well as the formal, stylistic, and iconographic analysis of miniatures.
These works are of course valuable – especially for making the corpus available for further study. This book diverts from previous art-historical inquiries through claiming the contemporary cultural agency of miniature paintings. Rather than conceiving miniatures as historical products of an era to which only the diligent researcher has access, this approach is grounded in one of the main tenets of cultural analysis, namely that it must be, in the words of Mieke Bal, “based on a keen awareness of the critic's situatedness in the present, the social and cultural present from which we look, and look back, at the objects that are always, already of the past, objects that we take to define our present culture” (1999: 1). Therefore, for Bal, the practice of cultural analysis is not indifferent to history; on the contrary, it foregrounds “the active presence of the object, or text, in the same historical space as is inhibited by the subject, ‘me’” (12). Following Bal, the analyses of the miniatures are built on the principle that one should not reify an historical state but rather must look at the present situation as a starting point to understand historical objects. This standpoint, based on a clear commitment to contemporariness, considers miniatures in their relevance for the present.
Certainly, such an approach entails and privileges anachronism, regarding it not as a shortcoming in dealing with historical images but as an enabling condition for research. This allows us, following Georges Didi-Huberman, to account for the richness of images that combine different temporalities – the moment of their production as well as the moment when we look at them. Didi-Huberman suggests, in line with Walter Benjamin, that in every historical object “all times meet” (2000: 91). Therefore, the history of images is one of “objects that are temporally impure, complex, overdetermined. It is therefore a history of polychronistic, heterochronistic, or anachronistic objects” (2003: 42).
To consider images as a montage of different temporalities is to acknowledge that historical images exert their agency in the present. This impure understanding of history encourages the analyst to reflect on the potentially productive dialogue between historical images and those theories and concepts pertaining to what images do, today – in other words, to visuality, as we have come to call it in the past decade. This book asserts that miniature paintings are not merely historical artefacts but rather theoretical objects, which in their historical specificity engender “general, transhistorical, and philosophical questions” (van Alphen, 2005: xiv–xv).
As outlined by the French art historian and philosopher Hubert Damisch, the notion of the “theoretical object” advances the potential of works of art to transform the way we think about art – formulated in the axiom “art thinks”.10 According to Damisch, a theoretical object
[o]bliges you to do theory but also furnishes you with the means of doing it. Thus, if you agree to accept it on theoretical terms, it will produce effects around itself. […] [I]t forces us to ask ourselves what theory is. It is posed in theoretical terms; it produces theory; and it necessitates a reflection on theory. (Bois et al, 1988: 8)
Therefore, Damisch's approach does not consider artworks as mere manifestations of a culture or historical period or as the reflection of the creator's intentions.11 For him, as van Alphen summarizes it, art is a form of thinking that compels the viewer to start a “dialogue with it by articulating questions of a more general – for instance, philosophical, political, or social – nature” in which the artwork becomes a historical articulation of a general, more fundamental problem (2005: 4).
Theoretical objects, however, are not simply phenomena to be observed; rather, they are actively constructed by the analyst in her close encounter with the cultural object. Miniature paintings as theoretical objects pose questions that go beyond the concerns of the eras of their production and in so doing offer us modes of thinking about art and visuality. Thereby, the analyses of the miniatures were informed – but not directed – by material and intellectual conditions affecting the production of miniatures. Therefore, contemporaneous philosophical and religious documents that might “explain” the aesthetic concerns of Ottoman miniatures have been deliberately left out.
In the introduction to her insightful book Beauty and Islam (2001), Valérie Gonzalez explains that historical sources, such as Islamic ones, “alone cannot supply the necessary methodology for dealing with complicated aesthetic problems”, which “therefore means that one has to use tools which do not belong a fortiori to the cultural area under observation” (3). Whereas Gonzalez mounts a phenomenological inquiry to understand the peculiarities of Islamic art and architecture, my study maintains an interdisciplinary “concept-based methodology” (Bal, 2002: 5). Here I employ concepts as tools for a critical and situated analysis of the miniatures. They are the third partner in the otherwise “totally unverifiable and symbiotic interaction between the critic and object”, as Bal writes (23).
However, the partnership does not entail the imposition of the theoretical concept on the cultural object so as to “apply” the concept. In his introduction to the Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Brian Massumi reflects on the shortcomings of “application”:
The first rule of thumb if you want to invent or reinvent concepts is: don't apply them. If you apply a concept or system of connection between concepts, it is the material you apply it to that undergoes change, much more markedly than do the concepts. The change is imposed upon the material by the concepts' systematicity, and constitutes a becoming homologous of the material to the system […] It has less to do with “more to the world” than “more of the same.” It has less to do with invention than mastery and control. (Massumi, 2002, 17)
In line with this caution against application, the practice of cultural analysis does not so much seek to master, predict, or explain the object by way of concepts – rather, it aims to specify, analyze, and get an eye for differences of the object and the concepts we work with. Such theoretical practice, to follow Bal's maxim, “helps us to understand the object better on its – the object's – own terms” (2002: 8).
The object's own terms can be grasped by adopting the technique of close reading as an active negotiation and confrontation with the cultural object. The literary method of close reading certainly undergoes a significant change when one deals with images. In visual analysis, close reading's attention to detail is taken to a level of productive obsession – particularly with those details that somehow fall out of the representational “logic” of the image and by so doing do not conform to a swift process of interpretation (of, for example, the figure of the root in the Stableman image). Such details not only enable a novel interpretation of the object but also encourage the analyst to revisit her theoretical framework.
In Reading in Detail (1987), Naomi Schor warns us that a detailed reading does not bring about the truth of an image or a text. Rather, it shows that the “truth value of the detail is anything but assured” (7). Accordingly, she proposes that the detail, as a guarantor of meaning, is “constantly threatened by falsification and misprision” (7). Keeping Schor's observations in mind, I realize that my analyses of the miniatures that saturate even the tiniest details with meaning are under constant threat of overinterpretation. These small elements do alter the overt, overall meaning so as to inscribe something that did not seem to be there. Rather than seeing overinterpretation as a negative attribute of analysis I contend, with Jonathan Culler, that “interpretation needs no defence; it is with us always” and that, “like most intellectual activities,” it is “interesting only when it is extreme” (1992: 110). Indeed this book aims to demonstrate how overinterpretation as a method can “let the object speak back”, to use a methodological figure Bal advances. Hence the aim of my book is to develop a novel mode of reading that allows the miniatures to look back at us and disorient our encounters.
Disorienting Encounters
The metaphor of the object speaking back has evident anthropomorphic undertones to it. Another notion, namely the encounter, which is used throughout this study – as well as in the title – also inevitably advances a not-so-hidden anthropomorphic agenda. As I conceptualize it, the notion of the encounter describes simply what happens when the viewer starts reading an image. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the term refers to “[a] meeting face to face; a meeting (of adversaries or opposing forces) in conflict; hence, a battle, skirmish, duel”.12 This definition underlines a few of the reasons why the term, “encounter” has been chosen as a key term. First, it emphasizes that looking does not happen at once – as in an Augenblick – but rather is a process (“a meeting”), an event that takes place in a historically and culturally specific situation. In this capacity, the encounter with an image cannot be anticipated in advance but is instead performed as an event in which both sides are active participants. Second, it underscores the reciprocity between the seeing subject and object seen that is involved in the process (“face to face”). In Bal's terms, this understanding amounts to the “empowerment of the object” (2002: 10), in which the object “from subject matter becomes subject, participating in the construction of theoretical views” (1999b: 13). Finally, the notion of the encounter refers to the potential of conflict that is always already inherent to “intersubjective” relations (“skirmish”, “duel”). Yet the conflict between the viewer and image does not entail closure; rather, as I have persistently argued so far, it provides an opening whose outcome is thought.
The term “encounter” has been advanced in this sense notably by Gilles Deleuze. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze suggests that “[s]omething in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter” (1994: 139, my emphasis).13 Departing from Deleuze's statement, Simon O'Sullivan defines encounter's relation to recognition as follows:
An object of an encounter is fundamentally different from an object of recognition. With the latter our knowledges, beliefs, and values are reconfirmed […] an object of recognition is then precisely a representation of something always already in place. With such a non-encounter our habitual way of being and acting […] is reaffirmed and reinforced, and as a consequence no thought takes place. With a genuine encounter […] our typical ways of being in the world are challenged, our systems of knowledge disturbed. We are forced to thought. (2006: 1)
The encounter, according to O'Sullivan, operates as a rupture, producing a crack in our habitual ways of thinking. The rupture, however, contains “a moment of affirmation” of “a new way of seeing and thinking” (1). It is a creative rupture that encourages us to think otherwise. Following O'Sullivan, this study deems miniature paintings partners of different encounters that force us to think about the ways in which images affect us.
The encounter, understood in this way, involves an underlying characteristic of disorientation, another notion I would like to touch upon briefly. Disorientation might, initially, have negative connotations. The OED entry defines it as “[t]he condition of having lost one's bearings; uncertainty as to direction.” It also refers to a “confused mental state, often due to disease, in which appreciation of one's spatial position, personal identity, and relations, or of the passage of time, is disturbed”. Certainly an academic work on miniature paintings should not aim to drag its readers into such a state.
The notion could be theoretically productive exemplified by Inge Boer's employment of disorientation in her book entitled Disorienting Vision (2004). Boer shows how a detailed rereading of French Orientalist texts and images can dislocate stereotypes about the Orient. Even though the objects discussed in this book are decisively different than Boer's, my approach has a similar agenda of destabilizing stereotypical approaches to the manifold cultural encounters between East and West. Without refuting the claim that the “East” and the “West” are historical discursive constructions, this study shows that miniature painting, as the most authentic artistic form of the Ottomans, has always been a hybrid site where different notions of representation have been negotiated. As it is argued in the fourth chapter, the genre of Ottoman sultanic portraiture has developed through a dialogue between the traditions of Timurid and Venetian portraiture. In this sense, the visual idiom of Ottoman miniature painting should be understood as a site of cross-cultural encounters that entails a “deviation from the eastward position” (OED).
This book indeed aims to disturb the reader's appreciation of her spatial position and of the passage of time by maintaining that historical images are objects of encounter that can teach us how to think, speak, and write about art here and now.
From the Detail to the Threshold: The Design of the Book
Rather than imposing one overarching theoretical argument that would allegedly explain the truth of the miniatures, this book engages with each of them in their specificity by addressing different theoretical issues concerning visuality and visual representation that the encounter with them generates. In so doing, it aims to not only make the practice of miniature painting resonate with contemporary theory but also to critically assess the concepts through which we understand what a work of art does. This study's objects, then, are both miniature paintings and those theories and concepts we work with to understand what visuality is and does.
The book consists of chapters that each focus on one miniature in its singularity. Every chapter is organized around a central theoretical problem raised by each miniature that is brought to light by engaging with a set of concepts to bear on the miniature. The selection of concepts is deliberately eclectic, as I do not strictly follow either a body of disciplinary literature or a theoretical body of work but engage with the ways in which the objects make statements about issues pertaining to visual representation. As such, each chapter should be seen as an essay founded on an argumentative structure triggered by the encounter with the miniature. Moreover, the chapters take along the unresolved issues of preceding ones. In this way, they collectively bring about not only a novel methodological approach to the study of miniature painting but also a coherent theoretical work.
The first chapter explores the narrative function of the pictorial detail in our reading of images. Does it not only inquire into the ways in which words and images interact but also sketches out the methodological stance of this study. This chapter wishes to demonstrate how a viewer's detailed, performative reading can alter the conventional and official interpretations of images. To address the issues pertaining to reading, I examine a seventeenth-century miniature painting that visualizes a story that is allegedly universally known: the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise. Conventionally, an informed iconographic analysis suffices to make a “correct” assessment of pictorial elements in the miniature by relating them to different literary sources (in this case the Qur'an and other religious sources). As I will demonstrate, certain iconographically dysfunctional details that do not easily fit in the pre-textual framing of the miniature open up a process of narrative reading, which privileges the detail as a site of meaning on its own.
Reading the Fall of Adam and Eve miniature through details that have no apparent iconographic meaning not only empowers the image as a new text that reiterates the founding myth but also asserts the dynamic status of such myths. Moreover, and more importantly, it allows us a way to read for the victim (Eve) and offers an alternative story that is as acceptable as the standard interpretation, even if one insists on remaining within the context of theology. In so doing, the first chapter demonstrates that images are not merely prefigured by official texts but also, and above all, post-performed by the viewer, a premise developed in the following chapters.
The following chapter advance the take on the process of reading in greater detail by engaging with the notions of rereading (Roland Barthes) and palimpsest looking (Boer's reworking of Barthes' notion of rereading). The chapter deals with conventional modes of viewing and visual discourses invoked by images and imposed on them by their viewers. It looks at an eighteenth-century single-page nude miniature entitled Woman bathing in the Hamam by the court artist Abdullah Buharî. This miniature, a unique occurrence in the scarcely existing genre of the nude, appropriates the style and content of so-called bazaar miniatures, produced by local miniaturists working outside the imperial atelier, which drew on Orientalist images from costume albums produced by European artists. Negotiating with the Orientalist gaze handed down to it from these albums as well as local bazaar miniatures, the miniature encourages us to ponder the conventional ways of addressing a nude that have been formulated in binary oppositions such as gazing and glancing, or returning/subverting the gaze.
The mode of viewing proposed by Woman bathing in the Hamam involves a performance of what I call an “intimate encounter”, a process of rereading that produces a new text that can serve as an alternative to the distanced, voyeuristic, and almost rapist reading enabled and indeed encouraged by the Orientalist imagery. The miniature fosters a spatial, embodied, haptic, and erotic intimacy that plays on the boundaries between knowing and not-knowing the other's body. As such, the miniature, while proposing an intimate look as a mode of engagement, simultaneously prompts us to reconsider the concept of intimacy. Ultimately, by constructing two diverse understanding of the intimate advanced by Gérard Wajcman and Hamid Dabashi, the chapter argues that the miniature promotes an instance of intersubjective intimacy in which the image looks back at and touches the viewer.
Chapter 3 takes the reader on a rather adventurous journey. I look at the Sûrname-i Vehbi by Master Levnî, the only Ottoman illustrated manuscript with a historical subject from the eighteenth century. It gives, in 137 single-page miniatures, a day-to-day visual and verbal account of the 15-day circumcision festival of Sultan Ahmed III's sons held in 1720. By presenting the festive occasions as events taking place in the here and now of the viewer the miniatures perform a sort of visual storytelling.
To address the ways in which the miniatures of the Sûrname visually perform an event, the chapter provides a close reading of a set of miniatures that depict the procession of Sultan Ahmed III consisting of three sets of double-page miniatures spread over three folios. I propose that the use of individual miniature panels arranged in a sequential order has an anachronistic cinematic touch to it because the technique underlines a problem of representing an event – a problem that extends into the treatment of time and space within motion. The comparison between the two visibly incompatible media does not rely on a forced analogy but on an understanding of the “critical loop” between media – a concept inspired by the writings of the Soviet cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein – through which the problematic tradition of representation that has been handed down to the figurative arts over time can be “put in image”. This interpretative method allows one to address issues concerning representation in the miniature series through engaging a chain of cinematic concepts such as the notions of the still developed by Roland Barthes (1977) and the out-of-field articulated by Gilles Deleuze (1993a, b) and Jacques Aumont (1997) among others, as well as the notions of montage and the interval. This montage of concepts allows us to mediate on the ways in which the procession miniatures produce an idea of event-ness in effect and affect in the service of constructing an imperial visuality.
The following chapter traces the production of the imperial visuality further by focusing on one of the most established genres in Ottoman painting, namely, portraiture. The focus of this chapter, the portrait of Sultan Ahmed III by Levnî, is an exceptional miniature in sultanic portraiture since its ornamentation, taken to the level of horror vacui, nearly overwhelms the main subject – the figure of the sultan. The miniature problematizes not so much the core issues of referentiality and likeness but the very function of imperial portraiture. To delineate what this portrait does to its viewer, the chapter first asserts that the ornamental, in its various associations with the arts of Islam, is a site of meaning, a constructive supplement, or a parergon that constructs a resolutely flat and opaque pictorial space. Additionally, the ornamentation provides the miniature with an “auratic” shield, a notion Walter Benjamin advanced (1969a, b; 1930), distancing the viewer from the image seen and simultaneously screening her gaze from access to the sultan's inner qualities, a characteristic that has been considered to be among the finest traits of a “successful” portrait.
The question here is how the miniature is successful as a portrait of the sultan. The image, it is argued, does not represent an individual – Ahmed III – but presents the sultan, conceptually, as an image. The viewer is not provided with a sultan, but is shown the meaning of sultan-ness. The miniature does not “intend” to be a portrait in the conventional sense but rather seeks to be an idea or an event that affects its viewer precisely by keeping her outside, at a distance. This view concords with Gülru Necipoğlu's argument that the Ottoman sultan differs from his contemporaries by an irreconcilable invisibility that is epitomized by the architectural structure of the Topkapi Palace (2000). In this sense, the miniature portrait reinforces the sultan's power to not be seen, or to be seen only as a silhouette that cannot be imbued with individuality.
The fifth chapter dwells on material aspects of miniatures by engaging with physical and conceptual features of their primary medium, the book. A miniature depicting the campaign of King Timur (a.k.a. Tamerlane) against Sultan Husayn taken from the seventeenth-century book Rawdat al-Safa, directs me to focus on the scale, dimension, and physical orientation of miniatures as conditioned by their placement in books so as to disentangle their implications for the process of reading. The directionality of reading proposed by the Timur miniature, which is analogous to that of reading a book, brings about a problem concerning the orientation of the viewing process. The mode of reading encouraged by the miniature is significantly different from the viewing trajectory promoted by the tableau and wall painting, which follows the vertical orientation of the human body. Following critiques of verticality offered by Walter Benjamin (1928), Leo Steinberg (1972), and Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois (1997), as well as their arguments concerning the horizontal image in modernism, this chapter argues that the miniature suggests a total horizontalization of the viewing process that affects the viewer's body as much as her intellect.
Additionally, the image combines the experience of horizontalization with a process of miniaturization, which, according to Gaston Bachelard (1958), Susan Stewart (2001), and Ralph Rugoff (1997), has a subversive potential that affects our physical and intellectual encounter with objects. In the Timur miniature, at the juncture of miniaturization and horizontalization, an invisible “object”, a detail in the centre, takes over the image. This invisible detail offers a narrative reading by operating as a device for what has been conceptualized as a “pregnant moment” – a moment that opens up to a future-to-come that cannot be incorporated within the miniature. Moreover, it functions as a symptom, as Georges Didi-Huberman (2005) called it, indicating a passage to “another state of painting”.
The final chapter scrutinizes this other state of painting by introducing the concept of the threshold, which is proposed as an alternative to one of the “founding” metaphors of visual theory, namely the window. The miniature entitled The Theological School of Gazanfer Ağa, executed by Nakshi Bey in the Divan-i Nadiri, is one of the seventeenth-century miniatures in which the artist seems to be dealing with representational techniques – such as the illusion of depth – foreign to the idiom of traditional miniature painting. Scholars have proposed that this miniature should be seen as a negotiation with – and not an imitation of – the notion of painting as a window.
Accordingly, I trace the logic of the tableau window, as Wajcman called it, and suggest that it is an “epistemological metaphor” that produces the knowledge of its object and the conditions under which it becomes knowable. The trope achieves these ends by juxtaposing the discourses of the frame and of transparency, both of which are burdened with the baggage of the window-object. The Theological School of Gazanfer Ağa miniature enters into a complex negotiation with both discourses. This chapter proposes to understand this encounter through another architectural metaphor, namely, the threshold. The miniature frame, instead of offering up the painting as immediate readable object, as suggested by the discourses of the frame and of transparency, encourages a liminal experience of looking that is caught between different modes of representation: looking, reading, and sensing. Moreover, the viewer's acts of looking are “thresholded” by means of horizontal layering of the pictorial plane tainting the encounter with opacity rather than imbuing it with transparency. In this sense, the miniature as a threshold prompts a process of looking that constantly questions the status of the frame as well as the instantaneous visibility and readability of the image being seen. As it will be shown, in so doing it provides an alternative visual epistemology by encouraging the analyst to dwell in a way of knowing that is transitional, relational, opaque, and precarious, rather than being in the state of certainty, transparency, and unconditioned visibility that is epitomized by the window metaphor.
The book is concluded by tracing the “afterlife” of miniature painting in the realm of practice so as to underscore reverberations of this study in a wider realm. Contrary to the common conviction that Ottoman miniature painting ceased to exist by the end of the eighteenth century, as it had lost its original function and context, I propose that its aesthetic concerns survived and can be found in the “cracks” of modernity. I discuss the ways in which two contemporary works, namely Orhan Pamuk's novel Benim Adım Kırmızı (My Name is Red, 1998/2001) and Derviş Zaim's film Cenneti Beklerken (Waiting for Heaven, 2006), engage with the tradition of Ottoman miniature painting and develop a novel literary and cinematographic language conditioned by their encounter with miniatures. These works, I feel, not only reverberate with the concerns of this book in the field of artistic practice but also open up a further realm of theoretical inquiry.