"Caught in a Whirlwind:" Painting in Baghdad in the Late Sixteenth-Early Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the province of Baghdad changed hands between the Aq Qoyunlu Turkmen tribal confederation, the Safavids and the Ottomans. From the last decade of the sixteenth to the first few years of the seventeenth centuries, there was a florescence of art production in Baghdad, at a time when the province was under Ottoman rule. This dissertation focuses on a period of rivalry and exchange between the Sunni Ottoman and the Shiʿite Safavid dynasties in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries and elucidates the appearance and disappearance of a lively, yet short-lived, art market in the frontier province of Baghdad. A close study of the corpus of over thirty illustrated manuscripts, often described as exhibiting an “eclectic” style, and produced in Baghdad within a decade, shows that there was a broadening base of patronage as well as an open market for the purchase of art.

While scholarship on the art of the book in Baghdad considers the corpus of illustrated manuscripts solely from the perspective of an Ottoman “context,” this dissertation takes a broader, transregional perspective and studies the art market in Baghdad through the complex layers of Ottoman and Safavid relations. It questions notions of a “school” of painting and emphasizes movement and encounters instead. It also proposes that in the context of an early modern consolidation of imperial identity (represented purposefully distinctly through monumental architecture, painting, decoration, objects in the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires), Baghdad as a frontier province between the Ottomans and the Safavids challenges notions of cultural, ornamental and decorative idioms. Its hybridity is the very product of the “whirlwind” of affairs between the Ottomans and the Safavids.

The dissertation begins with a study of Ottoman-Safavid relations from the last quarter of the sixteenth to the first quarter of the seventeenth centuries. Making use of an unpublished history of Baghdad along with other published and unpublished chronicles, it presents an overview of the complex relations between the two rival empires as well as between the center, Istanbul and the province, Baghdad. This sets the background to the following chapters. Chapter 2 concentrates on a group of single-page paintings produced in Baghdad, which have heretofore escaped scholarly attention. These paintings bespeak a broadening base of patronage as well as an increasing interest in collecting art. The following chapter concerns illustrated popular religious literature, which constitutes the majority of manuscripts produced in Baghdad. It raises questions on the use of models, repetition of compositions and production of illustrated manuscripts for the speculative market. The fourth chapter takes a different turn and concentrates on the patronage of one of the eminent governors of Baghdad, Sokolluzade Hasan Paşa (d. 1602). Focusing on the ambitious project of an illustrated universal history, which was composed for this governor by a Baghdadi author, this chapter deals with the conception of history in the province. The final chapter brings attention to a group of illustrated genealogies most likely produced for the open market. These Ottoman-Turkish genealogies place the Ottoman dynasty as the pinnacle of history. However, one early-seventeenth-century manuscript in Persian turns the genre on its head and presents a pro-Safavid view through text and image within a largely Ottoman genre. Alterations done to its text to then suit a possible Ottoman owner highlight the in-betweenness of Baghdad.