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STORM ON HORSEBACK
In an unprecedented exhibition this winter, the Academy
reveals the drama and beauty of Turkic visual culture.
Introduction by John Freely and David Roxburgh, the co-curator
of the exhibition
Detail
of the Tugra (calligraphic signature)
of the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent,
c.1540-50. Topkapi Saray Museum, Istanbul.
Photo Hadiye Cangokce |
The successive empires created by the
Turkic-speaking peoples stretched from China to the
Mediterranean – a whirlwind series of conquests that led
one chronicler to call the waves of mounted Turkish
warriors ‘a storm on horseback’. The storm left behind
splendid architectural monuments, as well as an
incomparable artistic heritage, including the
extraordinary array of paintings, manuscripts,
calligraphy, textiles, carpets, ceramics, glass,
woodwork and metalwork on display in the RA’s exhibition
‘Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600–1600’.
Yet Turkish art remains a fascinating conundrum.
Given the obscure origins of the Turks and the number of
nomadic peoples they comprised, their civilisation is
hard to pin down, particularly since they absorbed the
diverse cultures and religions they encountered on their
wanderings. |
Over time, particularly from 1000 AD onwards, the Turks
conquered the native Persian and Arab rulers and became patrons
of the courtly arts, often assimilating ideas from China into
their predominantly Islamic culture.
Though not always the makers of art, their role as agents in
the shaping of dynamic artistic cultures was vital and remains
poorly understood. The task of unravelling the knots of these
interwoven cultural histories lies at the heart of the RA’s
exhibition.
The exhibition charts the artistic traditions developed by
Turkic ruling elites over a millennium and a terrain spanning
the modern geography of western China, the Central Asian
Republics, Iran, Iraq, Turkey and the Balkans. Drawing on
Turkey’s wealth of art collections, most of the 370 objects on
display are from Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace Museum and the Museum
of Turkish and Islamic Art. Many have never before been seen
outside Turkey.
Organised chronologically as a series of vignettes or
‘snapshots’ of artistic achievement, the exhibition does not
attempt to be comprehensive. Rather, it focuses on key Turkic
dynasties and their interactions with other ethnic groups. The
territories they dominated can be seen in the map above.
The show begins in the world of western China and Central
Asia with frescoes, silk banners and reliquaries from the sixth
to the eleventh centuries, found in the cave temples of Turfan
and its surrounding sites. With their portrayals of the pantheon
of Buddhist and other deities and demons, these objects reflect
the multiplicity of religions – Buddhism, Christianity and
Manichaeism – practised along the Silk Road. Their hybrid style
and subject-matter point to a diverse region ruled alternately
by Chinese and Turkic dynasties whose states were multilingual,
poly-ethnic mixtures of settled and nomadic peoples. Many of the
artefacts were made under the suzerainty of the Uighurs, a
Turkic people from western China who were the dominant power in
Central Asia for nearly a century (744–840 AD). After they were
overthrown by another Turkic tribe they became a secretarial
class, staffing administrations of later dynasties where their
script was used to write the Turkic language. This earned them a
reputation as ‘teachers of civilisation’.
The next section of the exhibition bears witness to the
flowering of the arts under the patronage of the Great Seljuks
(reigned 1040–1194). Led by the army chief Seljuk, who converted
to Islam in 985, an army of Turkic tribes overthrew the ruling
dynasties in Central Asia and Afghanistan. By 1055, the Seljuks
had spread across Iran to Iraq, where in Baghdad Seljuk’s
grandson Tughrul liberated the caliph, the supreme religious
leader of the Islamic faith, from the control of another
dynasty. Tughrul was heralded as the Sultan of Sunni Islam and
inaugurated a period of rule where the Seljuk military elite
supported Islam and became active patrons of art and
architecture. At its peak, the dynasty of the Great Seljuks
stretched from Arabia to the Indian border, taking in most
Muslim territories in Asia, but it fell to the Mongols in 1194.
The Seljuks decorated their palaces with painted sculptures
and textiles. A flourishing literary culture gave rise to
exquisite books – works of science and literature – illustrated
with figurative paintings. On display are several monuments of
Turkic literature from the eleventh century, including a Turkish
lexicon, epic tales, a book of advice for rulers and another for
interpreting omens. In ceramics and metalwork, craftsmen
developed new techniques and decorated their wares with diverse
themes, from princely epics to signs of the zodiac and the
calendar. In Great Seljuk art, we can witness the rise of the
human image as a subject of art. Scholars now believe this
development was engendered by a climate of humanism
characterised by a curiosity about mankind’s role in the
universe and a desire to attain knowledge and develop an ethical
system.
The artistic style forged under Seljuk patronage continued in
Iraq and Turkey under an offshoot dynasty known as the ‘Rum
Seljuks’ (reigned 1081–1307), because they occupied the
territory of the eastern Roman Empire, referred to by Muslims as
the Land of Rum. After the Rum Seljuks were defeated at the
first Crusade in 1097, they moved their capital to Konya in
Anatolia.
The Seljuk sultans of Rum erected splendid mosques and
institutions of learning and trade throughout central and
eastern Anatolia and commissioned objects to furnish religious
buildings. Their rule saw a cultural renaissance that produced
the mystical works of Sufi poets Rumi and Yunus Emre. Rumi wrote
in Persian and Yunus Emre in Turkish, for both languages were
used in the court, the madrasas and the Dervish lodges, part of
the synthesis of cultural traditions that occurred under the Rum
Seljuks.
| The next gallery is devoted to a single artist,
Muhammad Siyah Qalam (Muhammad of the Black Pen), whose
enigmatic paintings are among the Topkapi Palace’s most
prized possessions. On display is the vast majority of
his work, never before exhibited outside Turkey – a
powerful, mysterious and often humorous group of images.
Different proposals have been made about the Black Pen’s
identity, milieu (from the border of China to eastern
Turkey) and dates (c.1300–1500). His bold, expressive
pictures are unmatched in the Islamic world, showing
scenes of nomadic life; dancing and music-making demons;
and Sufi dervishes. These almost Goya-esque paintings
stage dramatic and animated figures as dark silhouettes
on blank paper.
The following two galleries introduce the art of the
Timurid and Turkmen dynasties which held sway in Iran
and Central Asia from around 1370 to 1500. They
inherited a political and cultural world created by the
Mongols, a Eurasian empire whose foundation was laid by
Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century. |
A silk
kaftan of Sultan Selim I, c.1515. Topkapi Saray Museum,
Istanbul.
Photo Haidiye Cangokce |
The Turkic tribesman Timur, or Tamerlane, took Genghis Khan
as his model and waged a brilliant and brutal military campaign
from the 1380s to 1405 that brought Central Asia, Afghanistan
and Iran under his control.
Timur established a pattern of patronage developed by his
successors, the Timurids, and by two other rival dynasties: the
Qaraqoyunlu (Black Sheep) and Aqqoyunlu (White Sheep),
confederations of Turkic tribes in Anatolia and Azarbaijan.
Collectively, their artistic legacy constitutes an intricate
hybrid of courtly and nomadic cultures, all of which used the
arts to legitimise their rule and impress their Persian and
Turkic subjects.
Monumental architecture played a key role in Timurid and
Turkmen cultural policy. Timur’s grandson, Ulugh Beg, built an
observatory in Samarqand (c.1420) which represents one of the
last monuments of Islamic science. Upon his death in 1449, the
observatory was wrecked and its scientists fled in the face of
opposition from religious authorities. One of the highlights of
the exhibition is an architectural scroll from the Topkapi
Palace Museum used by architects and builders to disseminate
designs for vaults and wall decorations in a variety of building
types. It represents the culmination of a century of
architectural experimentation. In addition, objects in wood,
jade, inlaid metal and ceramics are on display, which were made
to glorify the Timurid and Turkmen courts of Samarqand, Herat
and Tabriz.
Many of these were made in response to exquisite objects
imported from China, examples of which are also on show.The last
three galleries are devoted to the Ottoman dynasty. Tracing its
descent from a tribe of Oghuz Turks from Central Asia, the house
of Osman (late 1200s to 1924) rose to power in northwestern
Anatolia, founding capitals in Bursa and Edirne, before they
captured Constantinople in 1453 under Sultan Mehmed. Mehmed’s
rule (reigned 1444–81) ushered in a period of intellectual and
cultural variety that reflected Istanbul’s position at the
crossroads of Europe and Asia. Various objects explore this
confluence, a Janus-faced culture that is highlighted in
portraits of Mehmed by the Venetian Gentile Bellini from 1480
and the Ottoman painter Sinan Bey . The Ottoman advance was
continued by Mehmed’s successors, most notably Süleyman the
Magnificent (reigned 1520–66), who led his army to the gates of
Vienna, the campaign that marked the limit of Ottoman expansion
into Europe. Süleyman adorned his empire with numerous superb
buildings, most of them built by his great architect Sinan, who
continued his work under Selim II and Murat III.
An eleventh-century
Seljuk incense burner in
the form of a cat, made
from bronze with silver
and copper inlay |
Ceramics, particularly the fabled Iznik wares, also
flourished. Again, many of these objects were inspired
by the peerless collection of Chinese porcelain amassed
by the Sultans and housed in the Topkapi, the best
outside China. Süleyman’s patronage also extended to
textiles and carpets, which were made for the court and
architectural interiors. During the 1540s and ’50s, this
gave rise to an entirely distinct Ottoman aesthetic, a
sort of corporate brand, immediately identifiable with
the dynasty. It combined various artistic traditions –
East and West – into a unique style that was
characterised by floral forms with an infinite capacity
for expansion.This exhibition gathers together a panoply
of artistic subjects, techniques and media and considers
the multiple roles of patrons and artists. It explores
themes such as artistic exchange across Eurasia and the
nomadic Turks’ adaptation to the settled world and its
cultural systems. By introducing an intriguing era of
history and art traditions of extraordinary aesthetic
power and range, ‘Turks’ puts on stage an artistic
diversity of which few people are aware. The exhibition
comes at a time when a complex, multifaceted evocation
of the cultures of this region is sorely needed. |
The works of art of Süleyman’s reign in particular are
among the most exquisite in the history of art and are
richly represented in this exhibition. These include the
art of the illuminated book and calligraphy, which the
Ottomans took to new heights. As well as developing
scripts and imperial symbols (the Tughra) for official
documents and religious texts they also invented a new
genre of drawing called saz, characterised by full
blossoms and serrated leaves. Such drawings bristle with
the fluid and kinetic power of calligraphy. |
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