This book provides a rare and authoritative glimpse at the splendid decorative military art of the Ottomans, and art that is both insufficiently known and insufficiently appreciated. Professor Zygulski describes in detail masterpieces from collections around the world, including the Topkapi Saray Museum in Istanbul, the National Museum In Cracow, the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, and elsewhere.
The complex political and cultural relationship between the German state and the Ottoman Empire is explored through the lens of the Ottoman Railway network, its architecture, and material culture With lines extending from Bosnia to Baghdad to Medina, the Ottoman Railway Network (1868–1919) was the pride of the empire and its ultimate emblem of modernization—yet it was largely designed and bankrolled by German corporations. This exemplifies a uniquely ambiguous colonial condition in which the interests of Germany and the Ottoman Empire were in constant flux. German capitalists and cultural figures sought influence in the Near East, including access to archaeological sites such as Tell Halaf and Mshatta. At the same time, Ottoman leaders and laborers urgently pursued imperial consolidation. Germany and the Ottoman Railways explores the impact of these political agendas as well as the railways’ impact on the built environment. Relying on a trove of previously unpublished archival materials, including maps, plans, watercolors, and photographs, author Peter H. Christensen also reveals the significance of this major infrastructure project for the budding disciplines of geography, topography, art history, and archaeology.
Ottoman Painting is an important corrective to a Western-dominated view of the art history of an era and a stimulating addition to our understanding of the cultural life of the late Ottoman Empire.
First published on the occasion of the exhibition 'The Sultan's Garden: The Blossoming of Ottoman Art' at the Textile Museum, Washington, D.C., September 21, 2012-March 10, 2013.
Focusing on travel images and cross-cultural exchange, examines interactions between the Ottoman Empire and Europeans from 1774 to 1839, highlighting mutual dependence and reciprocity.
This skillfully written text presents the full sweep of Ottoman history from its beginnings on the Byzantine frontier in about 1300, through its development as an empire, to its late eighteenth-century confrontation with a rapidly modernizing Europe. Itzkowitz delineates the fundamental institutions of the Ottoman state, the major divisions within the society, and the basic ideas on government and social structure. Throughout, Itzkowitz emphasizes the Ottomans' own conception of their historical experience, and in so doing penetrates the surface view provided by the insights of Western observers of the Ottoman world to the core of Ottoman existence.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire was one of the world's great powers. Generations of travelers, explorers, traders, tourists, scientists and artists were drawn to these magical lands. Whether depictions of contemporary life in the bustling street, the court, the harem, or elegiac evocations of the ruins of antiquity, the hundred images selected here by artists from David Roberts and Edward Lear to John Frederick Lewis bring a largely vanished world vividly to life.
In this book, Patricia Blessing explores the emergence of Ottoman architecture in the fifteenth century and its connection with broader geographical contexts. Analyzing how transregional exchange shaped building practices, she examines how workers from Anatolia, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and Iran and Central Asia participated in key construction projects. She also demonstrates how drawn, scalable models on paper served as templates for architectural decorations and supplemented collaborations that involved the mobility of workers. Blessing reveals how the creation of centralized workshops led to the emergence of a clearly defined imperial Ottoman style by 1500, when the flexibility and experimentation of the preceding century was levelled. Her book radically transforms our understanding of Ottoman architecture by exposing the diverse and fluid nature of its formative period. It also provides the reader with an understanding of design, planning, and construction processes of a major empire of the Islamic world.
