East meets west: Orhan Pamuk’s words paint a thousand pictures

The novel My Name Is Red offers a compelling evocation of the cultural dialogue between Venice and the Ottoman empire

Sultan Mehmet II

Gentile Bellini’s portrait of a young scribe at the court of Sultan Mehmed II evokes the world about which Orhan Pamuk writes in My Name Is Red. Photograph: Corbis

Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red is my summer book, and one of the most fascinating works of art history I have ever encountered. It also happens to be a gripping novel.

My Name is Red
by Orhan Pamuk

The book is one of several about Istanbul that won Pamuk the 2006 Nobel prize in literature. It is set among the art community of the Ottoman capital in the 1590s, at a time when the Islamic art of book illustration is under threat from new European innovations including perspective and portraiture. Should Istanbul’s miniaturists adopt some of the new European methods, or preserve beautiful traditions handed down from the old masters of Persia?

There’s no danger of me revealing the end of a novel structured as a murder thriller – I haven’t finished it yet – but the art history in Pamuk’s book has me absorbed just as much as the whodunnit plot. It imagines the workshops of the miniaturists and lets them discuss, in erudite detail, the history of book arts, the influence of China, the belief that pictures must illustrate stories, the exquisite beauty of detail.

The knowledge these artists have of European art comes entirely from Venice, the “Frankish” city that traded most closely with the powerful Ottoman empire. Contact between east and west is a powerful phenomenon in Venetian art. A portrait that conveys the very world this novel recreates can be seen today in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It is by Gentile Bellini – at least that is the usual attribution, questioned by some – and portrays a young scribe at the court of Mehmed II in Istanbul. Sitting in profile in ornate and gorgeous robes, he concentrates on his work while the European artist visiting the Ottoman court concentrates on portraying him.

How do we know it’s a European artist? Because the young scribe’s face is modelled in the round with explicit individuality. It is a great example of the type of Venetian portraiture that Orhan Pamuk’s characters argue about. Is such a revelation of the individual in a painting a brilliant artistic triumph or a symptom of amoral selfishness? Would it be decadence or development for Ottoman artists to adopt such techniques?

In fact, the portrait, which was bound into a Turkish album, may have been intended to help young miniaturists learn those Venetian skills. Bellini visited the Ottoman court in the late 1470s. If he is the author of this work, did he leave it behind as a teaching aid? If so, it cleverly appeals to artists trained in Islamic traditions by respecting their own abilities. This is in fact a masterpiece of cultural dialogue. While the scribe’s face is a Venetian portrait, his pose and the details of his fine clothes have the calm abstraction and jewel-like accuracy of a great Islamic court painting.

Venetian artists learned enthusiastically from the east. Venetian painterly light and colour have little in common with other Italian Renaissance art. They have much more in common with the rich eastern cultures whose crystal treasures were brought back from wars and trade. While Venice embraced Islamic decorative sensuality, by the late 15th century Venetian artists were showing off their modern portrait skills in Istanbul.

Pamuk creates a world where east and west are at a turning point in their relations, and art reflects this moment of choice, on the brink of modernity. My Name Is Red is a beautiful novel and opens up a story of art that is new, unfamiliar, and magical.

via East meets west: Orhan Pamuk’s words paint a thousand pictures | Art and design | guardian.co.uk.