From the 15th century on, Europeans were avid importers of drawings and paintings of Turks. They were also avid creators of drawings and paintings of Turks. Any image that fell into European hands was likely to be copied, recopied, engraved, re-recopied, bastardized, and copied again. Or just made up. The result is a swampy mess of bad copies, bad engravings, and outright inventions, with the occasional genuine piece floating alone and far from land.
This research is my attempt to sieve through the mess.
- Ratings
- Periods
- A Note of the Circular Nature of the Classifications
- Pre-16th Century Art
- 16th-Century Art
Ratings
The ratings are:
Authentic
The piece was created by a Turk, or by a European who traveled to Turkey. The extant work is from the hand of the original artist.
Authentic with reservations
The piece is:
- A copy of an authentic work, and
- It has not seriously altered the details of the original, and
- It is the only extant version of this piece of art.
Woodcutters, engravers, and other copyists changed the originals substantially, stylizing their subjects according to European aesthetics and misinterpreting details, sometimes comically. This rating is reserved for reproductions that don’t appear to have introduced obvious errors, and that are the only version of a piece of art. If the original is extant, then any reproduction, no matter how good, is listed as Copy.
This rating is also for art by artists who didn’t travel to Turkey, but who had an opportunity to observe Turks in Europe, and whose depictions are reasonably authentic.
Authentic, Non-Turkish
The piece is authentic but it depicts a Persian, Eastern European, or another group whose clothes are similar to Turks.
Many authentic artists depicted both Turkish and non-Turkish subjects. For example, bazaar albums are full of drawings of Greeks, Arabs, and Persians. I’m not going to mark every individual picture, since most of the time it’s obvious from context that a particular image isn’t of a Turk. (For example, images in bazaar albums generally have labels.) This rating is for orphaned images that float around the net with no clear explanation of their subject.
Copy
The piece is a copy of a known work. The quality may be near-perfect, but let’s be honest–most of the copies are crap. Don’t accept copies. Always go for the original.
Invention
The artist made it up. Bears no relationship to real life. Shun it like the lie it is.
Periods
Because I’m a SCAdian with an interest in 16th-century women’s clothing, I divided the art into periods based on how useful it is for garb research.
- Pre-16th Century
- 16th Century
- Early 17th Century – Before approximately 1635, the overall shape of both male and female clothing was basically unchanged from the late 16th century. Images from this period are useful for clothing research as long as you take into account the subtle differences.
- Mid- to Late 17th Century – Fashion has changed enough that these works are misleading to period researchers.
- 18th Century
- 19th Century
I won’t do much rating of works past the early 17th century. They’re listed here mainly to alert you to when a given work is too late to be useful for period research.
A Note on the Circular Nature of the Classifications
I settled on these classifications after a few years of researching Ottoman art and clothing. The state of 16th-century Turkish clothing scholarship is poor, so much of my research involved looking at authentic art until patterns emerged, then applying those patterns to text sources and other pieces of art, looking up new sources with good dates, comparing them, revising my theories, lather, rinse, repeat until everything fell into semi-neat order. This leads to a certain amount of circular reasoning. A given piece of European art may be ruled inaccurate because it doesn’t match Turkish art, even though the European artist may be a superior observer to the overworked bazaar painter cranking out paintings by the dozen. Another piece of European art may be ruled accurate because it looks right to me, even though in reality it’s pure fantasy.
Part of the reason I’m doing this research is to cut through my own circular reasoning. Reality-checking my assumptions against the history of a piece of art has already been revelatory. Digging into the history of the pieces, determining what was drawn from observation and what is merely a convincing fantasy, should continue to be illuminating.