| Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.  |
| att. George Gower, Queen Elizabeth I, 1588 (National Portrait Gallery, London) |
This portrait of Queen Elizabeth I painted in honor of the biggest victory of her reign over the Spanish Armada of 1588 brings back a distant memory of standing in the middle of the National Portrait Gallery, listening to my niece relaying the story of having to count the pearls on the queen's dress for a school assignment. While we stood before the life-size portrait of 'Bess', admiring the elaborate treatment of the surfaces and observing her intrinsic features, I realized we did not have any equivalent to this, from our own history except for the one portrait, The Sultan Mehmed II, by Gentile Bellini. In an earlier post, I had discussed the mobility of artists, influences and ideas as well as works of art in the fifteenth-century in regards to Mehmed II. However, after Mehmed's death, commissions for portraiture in the Italian Quattrocento tradition seems to completely disappear from the Ottoman court. The common belief that this was due to the religious inclinations of Bayezid II seems to be unanimous. As a consequence of this, instead of portrait galleries full of life-size, oil on canvas likenesses of the Ottoman Sultans, Topkapi Palace museum contains folios full of manuscript illuminations with depictions in the Ottoman tradition. What I want to discuss here is where the images for the Sultan portraits in these manuscripts came from if no known likenesses existed?
