Global Renaissance

Portraits made for centuries for different purposes carry the images of the monarchs to the present, as well as the traces of the cultural characteristics of the period in which they were made. Although there is no clear rule against portraits in Islam, portraits of rulers in the Ottoman Empire were not made until the reign of Mehmet the Conqueror. The portraits of the sultans, which started with the tendency of westernization of the Ottoman Empire, were usually made by foreign painters invited to the country. The subject of research is the symbolic expressions in the portraits of the Ottoman sultans and the interaction of these symbols with the portraits of the European monarchs in accordance with the periods. The research focuses mainly on the clothes and accessories used in the portraits of monarchs and aims to reveal the messages that are intended to be conveyed to the audience by the details of the clothes, such as color, pattern, and material. The research, which included the portraits of the sultan in the Topkapı Palace inventories, also included comparisons with the portraits of European rulers. The portraits of the Ottoman sultans were not used as political propaganda material as widely as European portraits. However, it is understood that with the influence of Ottoman painters who were educated in Europe, or the painters invited form Europe, symbols such as power, wealth, religiosity, nobility royalty and traditionalized in European portraits were also used in portraits of sultans. It is understood that these symbols, which are sometimes used directly as in European portraits, are mostly adapted to Islam and Ottoman traditions, and reflected on the clothes and accessories of the sultan portraits.

In epideictic oratory, ekphrasis is typically identified as an
advanced rhetorical exercise that verbally reproduces the
experience of viewing a person, place, or thing; more specifically, it
often purports to replicate the experience of viewing a work of art.
Not only what was seen, but also how it was beheld, and the
emotions attendant upon first viewing it, are implicitly construed
as recoverable, indeed reproducible.
This volume examines how and why many early modern pictures
operate in an ekphrastic mode: such pictures claim to reconstitute
works of art that solely survived in the textual form of an ekphrasis;
or they invite the beholder to respond to a picture in the way s/he
responds to a stirring verbal image; or they call attention to their
status as an image, in the way that ekphrasis, as a rhetorical figure,
makes one conscious of the process of image-making; or finally,
they foreground the artist’s or the viewer’s agency, in the way that
the rhetor or auditor is adduced as agent of the image being
verbally produced.

Series Editors: Claire Jowitt, University of East Anglia, UK & John McAleer, University of Southampton, UK

Editorial board: Mary Fuller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; Fred Hocker, Vasa Museum, Sweden; Steven Mentz, St John’s University, USA; Sebastian Sobecki, University of Groningen, Netherlands; David J. Starkey, University of Hull, UK; & Philip Stern, Duke University, USA

Early modern oceans not only provided temperate climates, resources, and opportunities for commercial exchange, they also played a central role in cultural life. Increased exploration, travel, and trade, marked this period of history, and early modern seascapes were cultural spaces and contact zones, where connections and circulations occurred outside established centres of control and the dictates of individual national histories. Likewise, coastlines, rivers, and ports were all key sites for commercial and cultural exchange.

Interdisciplinary in its approach, Maritime Humanities, 1400–1800: Cultures of the Sea welcomes books from across the full range of humanities subjects, and invites submissions that conceptually engage with issues of globalization, post-colonialism, eco-criticism, environmentalism, and the histories of science and technology. The series puts maritime humanities at the centre of a transnational historiographical scholarship that seeks to transform traditional land-based histories of states and nations by focusing on the cultural meanings of the early modern ocean.