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Friends of Art History Visual Culture Series: “The Sartorial-Chorographic Impulse: Prospects and Portraiture in Italian and French Travel Accounts of the Ottoman Empire”
March 1, 2019 at 2:30 PM to 4:00 PM
| Location: | 412 St. Patrick's Building |
| Audience: | Anyone |
| Key Contact: | Nancy Duff |
| Contact Email: | nancy.duff@carleton.ca |
“The Sartorial-Chorographic Impulse: Prospects and Portraiture in Italian and French Travel Accounts of the Ottoman Empire”
by Justina Spencer, Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture Québec (FRQSC) Postdoctoral Fellow, Art History, SSAC, Carleton University
Georges de la Chapelle, Recueil de divers portraits des principals dames de la porte du Grand Turc, tirée au naturel sur les lieux, et dediez a Madame La Comtesse de Fiesque. Paris: Antoine Estienne, 1648.
European travel to the Ottoman Empire rose steadily throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries resulting in a flurry of travel books replete with detailed descriptions of foreign dress, land, and customs. This paper takes as a case study a costume book produced by French artist Georges de la Chapelle wherein figures are set within a vertical frame set against a sprawling panorama of Constantinople. Through comparative analysis with costume books produced by Ottoman artists, I argue that artist-travelers adapted established Ottoman visual idioms and translated them for a European market. The process of creating costume illustrations was thus itself a cultural encounter whose traces were concretized in the final publication for the viewer-reader to experience second-hand. Ultimately, I argue that La Chapelle’s superimposition of costume illustrations on maps participates in an established tradition—seen first in early modern atlases—wherein the sartorial is juxtaposed with the chorographic as a means of contemplating a nation’s civic qualities by the physiognomy of dress.