In this volume, Elisabeth Fraser shows that artists and the works they created in the Mediterranean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were informed by mutual dependence and reciprocity between European nations and the Ottoman Empire. Her rich exploration of this vibrant cross-cultural exchange challenges the dominant interpretation of European relations with the East during the period, revealing a shared world of fluid and long-sustained interactions.
Voyagers to and from the Ottoman Empire documented their journeys in prints, paintings, and lavishly illustrated travelogues; many of these helped define Europe's self-identified role as heir to Ottoman civilizations and bolstered its presence in the Islamic Mediterranean and beyond. Fraser finds that these works illuminate not only how travelers' experiences abroad were more nuanced than the expansionist ideology with which they became associated, but also how these narratives depicted the vitality of Ottoman culture and served as extensions of Ottoman diplomacy. Ottomans were aware of and responded to European representations, using them to defend Ottoman culture and sovereignty. In embracing the art of both cultures and setting these works in a broader context, Fraser challenges the dominant historiographical tradition that sees Ottoman artists adopting European modes of art in a one-sided process of Europeanization.
Theoretically informed and rigorously researched, this cross-cultural approach to European and Ottoman art sheds much-needed critical light on the widely disseminated travel images of the eraimportant cultural artifacts in their own rightand provides a fresh and inviting understanding of the relationships among cultures in the Mediterranean during an era of increasing European expansionism.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Interpreting Travel in the Ottoman Mediterranean
Part I: Power in Question
Chapter 1 Reading Choiseul in the Gaps of the Orientalist Archive
Chapter 2 In the Shadow of les Grands: Cassas’s Orientalist Self-Fashioning
Part II: Ottoman Culture Abroad
Chapter 3 The Translator’s Art: Mouradgea d’Ohsson, Ottoman Dragoman in Paris
Chapter 4 Miniatures in Black and White: Melling’s Istanbul
Part III: Contradictory Contact
Chapter 5 Skin of Nation, Body of Empire: Louis Dupré in Ottoman Greece
Chapter 6 A Painter’s Renunciation: Delacroix in North Africa
Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index
“A welcome contribution to the growing scholarship on representations of alterity that looks beyond the Saidian binary of an ever-authorial and authoritative West and subservient East (one that she rightfully asserts has injuriously transcended Said’s own ‘own supple thinking’). Her work also poses a powerful critique of Bernard Lewis’s Ottoman-decline paradigm in his 2002 book What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response.”
—Deniz Türker, International Journal of Islamic Architecture
