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POET OF PROPORTION
The architect Sinan, known as the
Ottoman Michelangelo, pushed the boundaries of space and light,
says Gulru Necipoglu
Sinan is the most celebrated of all Ottoman architects,
particularly renowned for reconfiguring the cityscape of
Istanbul with stunning monuments. He lived until he was almost
100, was revered as the ‘Great Old Architect’ (‘Koca Mimar’) and
has been hailed as the Ottoman Michelangelo since the early
twentieth century, when several European orientalists recognised
the kinship of his work with Italian Renaissance architecture.
During his tenure as chief court architect (1539–88) at the
zenith of Ottoman power, Sinan built hundreds of monuments
including mosques, mausoleums, madrasas, hospices, hospitals,
palaces, bathhouses, aqueducts and bridges. His distinguished
idiom left its imprint over the terrains of a vast empire
extending from the Danube to the Tigris and encompassing the
eastern Mediterranean Basin.
Sinan's
Selimiye mosque complex
in Edirne, Turkey |
Sinan’s innovations reached their height in
mosque-centered socio-religious complexes, commissioned
by the sultans and prominent members of the ruling
elite, both men and women. His most influential
buildings were mosques, where his inventive
experimentation with domed spaces – often compared to
parallel developments in Renaissance Italy – produced
monuments in which the central dome appeared weightless
and the interior surfaces bathed in light. The elaborate
exteriors of his mosques, with their refined proportions
and cascades of half domes surrounding a central dome,
have been regarded as a triumphant reversal of the
traditional emphasis on the interior of mosques. Besides
creating domed canopies that push the boundaries of
structure, space and light, Sinan designed the
decorative schemes of his major monuments. He had
jurisdiction over the products of court workshops, such
as Iznik tiles and woodwork (examples of which are
featured in the Royal Academy exhibition, including the
wooden doors of a harem pavilion built by Sinan). |
Classical Iznik tile panels with joyful floral patterns
became a trademark of his principal mosques from the 1550s
onwards because their white background matched the colour of the
stone walls and created an illusion of transparency that blurred
the boundary between interior and exterior space. Boldly sized
cursive Koranic inscriptions complemented the harmonious forms
of his interiors to create a sense of heavenly space that
emanated into the garden precincts through windows and lavish
porticoes.
Sinan shaped his own legacy with the unprecedented
autobiography he dictated to the poet-painter Mustafa Sai. It
narrates his extraordinary accomplishments from an assertive,
first-person point of view and testifies to an acute sense of
individualism, which we associate with the Renaissance idea of
the artist. Sinan’s autobiography participated in the
Renaissance discourse on artistic genius by proclaiming his
divinely bestowed powers of invention and the unmatched
superiority of his masterpieces that marked the evolutionary
progress of civilisation.
His concern for global fame becomes apparent in the ambitious
Selimiye mosque in Edirne (in the European part of Turkey),
which aimed to contradict his rivals in Europe, ‘the so-called
architects of the unbelievers’, who challenged his ability to
create a dome as large as that of Hagia Sophia (the Byzantine
church which had become the premier imperial mosque of Istanbul
after the Ottoman conquest of 1453). Sinan immodestly declared
the Selimiye ‘matchless in the world’ and ‘worthy of the
admiration of humankind’. Crowned by the largest dome ever built
in Islamic lands, the Selimiye represents the epitome of Sinan’s
mature style with its perfectly centralised space. In his own
words, it represents ‘the ultimate realisation of art in terms
of utmost refinement and design’. Another masterpiece singled
out in his autobiography, the Süleymaniye complex in Istanbul,
was judged by the English travellers Fynes Moryson (1576) and
John Sanderson (1594) to be a landmark matching the seven
wonders of the world.
| We learn from Sinan’s autobiography that he was one
of the Christian ‘novice boys’ conscripted near Kayseri
(central Anatolia) under Selim I. The autobiography
stresses his identity as a pious convert, who belonged
to the Ottoman ruling elite and was one of the
distinguished aghas (household officers) of the imperial
court. The multi-ethnic identity of the Turkish-speaking
Ottoman elite (including the mothers and wives of the
sultans who originated from such diverse places as
Poland, Venice and Albania) was unified by cultural and
religious affiliation with Islam. Upon arriving in
Istanbul, Sinan chose to be trained in the ‘science of
geometry’ at the workshop of carpenters adjoining the
barracks of novices. He participated in Süleyman’s
military campaigns, which took him to Vienna, Puglia,
Corfu, the Balkans, Anatolia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq,
Syria and Egypt. These campaigns, during which
janissaries (professional Ottoman soldiers) constructed
fortifications, bridges, ships and mosques, provided him
with his earliest building experiences. |
The
Selimiye mosque interior |
As chief architect, Sinan enjoyed close relations with the
rich and powerful of the court: patrons whose public image
became increasingly bound up with impressive monuments in his
new signature style, one defined by harmonious proportions and a
new spirit of illumination. He had to negotiate the tension
between his identity as an individual artist and as the head of
an institution: the corps of royal architects. His
autobiographies, which list hundreds of monuments as his own
works, embody a collaborative notion of authorship with only the
most significant imperial projects fully supervised by him.
Sinan’s rich variety of mosque designs sprang from a process
of negotiation with his patrons, rather than from unrestrained
formal experimentation. He codified a layered system of mosque
types, reflecting hierarchies of social status and territorial
rank, shaped by notions of identity, memory and decorum. The
concept of decorum, or propriety, revolved around the restricted
use of visual status symbols, which reinforced the group
identity of the ruling elite and at the same time articulated
its gradations of rank, without daring to challenge the sultan’s
overarching supremacy. Decorum informed all levels of a project
from site selection, to scale, dome size and number of minarets.
For example, the use of four minarets and vast domes was allowed
only in the sultans’ mosques. They were strictly forbidden to
others on penalty of death.
Seen in this cultural context, Sinan’s mosques acquire
dimensions of meaning that have not been previously recognised.
The empire’s urban landscape simply was not the same after it
had been reconfigured with numerous socio-religious monuments
created during his half-century-long career: they came to embody
a new visual order with a particular set of urban institutions
and rituals. The stratified visual language of Sinan’s mosques
was intimately bound up with the hierarchical order of the
Ottoman state, whose image he defined in monuments that have
outlasted its vast empire.
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