An engaging new book about a legendary portrait by Gentile Bellini prompts renewed awareness of the need for globally consistent textile terminology.
From time to time a book will inspire us more than most, or convince us that the direction our own thinking has recently taken is worthwhile, or simply engage us in a thought-provoking historical story that is very well-told. Elizabeth Rodini, a distinguished art historian based in Rome, has achieved all this and more with her latest book, Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II: Lives and Afterlives of an Iconic Image (I.B. Tauris, 2020). For more than four centuries, a portrait of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, the ‘Conqueror’ (r. 1444–46, 1451–81), painted by the Venetian artist Gentile Bellini (c. 1429–1507), circulated between Istanbul, Venice and London. (Figure 1). Rodini recounts the painting’s journeys in the form of a meticulously researched biography of an object, bringing the story of the sometimes-controversial portrait into the present with a final chapter set in contemporary Istanbul – or at least pre-pandemic Istanbul. In the process, Rodini considers current concerns in art historical and museum methodology as she traces the painting’s physical journey, and also its reception, appreciative or otherwise, at its various destinations. In the first few pages, she introduces the portrait as an ‘artifact of survival’, and goes on to use the work as a platform from which to address questions about the nature and history of portraiture, conservation and restoration, changing priorities in collecting and display in museums, the emergence of cultural patrimony, and the rights and obligations of individuals in the ownership of works of art.
Gentile Bellini arrived at the Ottoman court in 1479, twenty-six years after Mehmed II conquered Constantinople, the once-great seat of the Byzantine empire. The young sultan transformed the city into Istanbul, an Islamic capital and cosmopolitan cultural centre like no other. Bellini made the journey, along with several assistants, in response to Mehmed II’s request to the Venetian doge, Giovanni Mocenigo, for a painter and a sculptor to join other Italian artists already resident at his court. Bellini painted the sultan’s likeness in 1480, a year before Mehmed II’s death at the age of forty-nine. Beyazid II (1481–1512), his son and successor, was more conventionally religious than his father and disapproved of European art and its depiction of lifelike images. It has therefore been surmised that Beyazid II soon disposed of the Bellini portrait, along with other works from his father’s collection. There followed a long period when the whereabouts of the painting was unknown and it remained as a trusted likeness of the sultan that, in the words of Rodini, ‘existed only in memory’. Then, from 1865 to 1912 after it surfaced in Venice, the portrait hung in the canal-side palazzo of the eminent English archaeologist, Sir Austen Henry Layard (1817–94), who later bequeathed it to the National Gallery, London, where he was a trustee. The work arrived in England in 1916, a few years after the death of Layard’s widow, escaping unsuccessful challenges by the Italian authorities to its export.
Fig. 1: Gentile Bellini, Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II, 1480, oil on canvas, 69.9 x 52.1 cm. The National Gallery, London. The Layard Bequest, 1916.
By mid-1917, the portrait was hanging in the entrance to the National Gallery, a position of prominence that was eventually followed by its removal, along with other works, for safekeeping in Wales for the duration of WWII. On its return to the National Gallery, the portrait was soon relegated to a basement where it remained more or less unseen, along with other paintings deemed problematic. In 2008, the portrait was moved as a long-term loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in South Kensington, where it now hangs upstairs in one of the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries dedicated to objects that, through their mobility and trade, convey the cross-cultural nature of the Early-Modern eastern Mediterranean.
Bellini usually painted Venetian aristocrats, and in his portrait of Mehmed II, he positioned the Ottoman sultan in a similar manner – almost in profile, his robe a deeply saturated madder red, his turban softly folded and his fur wrap and beard seemingly painted single hair by single hair with highly skilled brushwork. Mehmed II is seen from the chest up, framed within a decorative arch with a carved marble balustrade in the foreground, thereby obscuring his arms and distancing the viewer from the sitter. Over the balustrade hangs a sumptuous embroidery, again in the manner of Renaissance Venetian portraits that often included an Ottoman carpet as a prestigious and costly accessory. And it’s at this point that Rodini’s book unintentionally joins the ongoing conversation about how textile specialists, art historians and other scholars best describe the cloths, fabrics, and costumes that add such interest and beauty to their research and publications.
Like many historians, perhaps unfamiliar with the materiality and technique of historic textiles, Rodini refers to the draped embroidery as a ‘tapestry’. She does so from the outset, although she first refers to the cloth as a ‘tapestry, embroidered and studded with gems’ and thereafter it is a ‘tapestry’. This is really a minor quibble because, in general usage, the term ‘tapestry’ has many meanings. It may refer to a technique used to achieve pictorial or geometric patterning; or to the patterning itself; or to any patterned fabric, regardless of technique that is hung, draped, framed, used as upholstery, or fashioned into shoes, bags or clothing. Within this broad definition lies the renowned Bayeux Tapestry of the eleventh century which is technically an embroidery. It is worked in wool, in stem stitch and laid-and-couched stitches on a linen foundation made up of a number of panels stitched together for a length of 70 metres. Surely only the most pedantic textile scholars would now insist it be renamed the Bayeux Embroidery.
Tapestry is a weft-faced weave that uses discontinuous coloured wefts woven on a loom across plain warps to build up blocks of design to make a pattern or a picture, in the same way that mosaics are composed of segments of coloured glass or ceramics. Tapestry weave is one of the rare examples of woven cloth in which all the warp threads are hidden by the wefts. Early fragments of tapestry date back to the second millennium B.C. in Egypt and archaeological evidence suggests tapestry-woven textiles were used at Çatal Höyük, near Konya in present-day Turkey at least as far back as the eighth millennium BCE. Historic pictorial tapestries at European courts, from the Middle Ages onwards, were significant status symbols as well as being luxurious, mobile and decorative. Therefore, it is understandable that the term often conveys a level of prestige and is applied as a catch-all description in otherwise authoritative books such as Rodini’s, or in exhibition catalogues and the occasional scholarly lecture.
This is because, despite a strong movement beginning in the late-1960s that urged specialists and curators to use globally consistent textile terminology, there is still no such resource which completely addresses the required level of detail and accuracy. Irene Emery’s The Primary Structure of Fabrics: An Illustrated Classification (first edn. Textile Museum, Washington, D.C.,1966, revised 1980, third edn. Thames and Hudson, 2009), remains the benchmark in English-language publications. In her foreword, Emery wrote that her aim was to counteract ‘the bewildering inconsistencies and incongruities encountered in museum records and labels, and in published descriptions and discussions.’ Agnes Geijer made another major contribution with her A History of Textile Art (Pasold Research Fund and Sotheby Parke Bernet, London,1979). And in the mid-1990s, Anne Rowe’s paper ‘In Search of a Classification of Textile Techniques’, CIETA Bulletin 73 (1995–96): 123–39, reminded us that the issue remained largely unresolved. It continues to be so. Despite this, textile specialists hope that historians and curators will nevertheless aim to use correct and consistent terms when describing their subject matter and, where possible, accurately describe the technical details of the fabric in question. These details can assist in our shared understanding of places of origin and dating of many historic textiles and also help identify new typologies, lost fragments, replaced linings and the like, as well as the migration of design motifs, designers and makers.
Fig. 2: Ottoman throne cover, embroidered with gold plaques, gemstones, and silk. Istanbul, late 16th–early 17th century. Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul. Louise Mackie, Symbols of Power, 280, fig. 8.2.
The embroidery, so realistically depicted in Bellini’s painting, is a smaller version of a type of luxury textile used from the fifteenth century onwards at the Ottoman court to cover a dais or low throne-like seating platform. The textile type is well documented, described by textile scholar, Louise Mackie, as ‘embroidered with gold plaques, gemstones and silk’, and a late sixteenth–early eighteenth-century example is illustrated in her Symbols of Power: Luxury Textiles from Islamic Lands, 7th–21st Century (Yale University Press, 2015). (Figure 2). The textile in Mehmed's portrait is the same kind of jewelled embroidery, but a smaller version, possibly designed to be a bolster cover like the one Lady Layard described in her diary in 1877 when Sir Henry was an ambassador to the Ottoman court of Sultan Abdül Hamid II (1876–1909). Rodini quotes her as describing the Treasury in the Topkapi Palace’s secluded Third Court as being ‘full of beautiful things’, including a kind of ‘platform on legs’ with ' a gold cushion embroidered with pearls.' The portrait embroidery clearly shows a crown motif positioned so that it would not work with the horizontal mode of display of a cushion or bolster, but this is likely Bellini’s artistic addition as it echoes the symbolic three-crown motif he has painted on either side of the archway that frames the sultan, and which appears on the reverse of a bronze portrait medallion Bellini designed for the sultan the same year as the portrait.
In mid-2019, the last time I was in the Topkapi Palace Museum, there was a comparable rectangular embroidered cover on display in one of the palace pavilions known as the Chamber of Petitions. The ground cloth was a deep red silk velvet embroidered with gold plaques, various unidentified precious stones, pearls and laid-and-couched silk and gold-covered thread. It was dated as early eighteenth century. A detail of a very similar example may be seen in figure 3. Few of its type are extant, yet this style of embroidery was also known elsewhere in the Islamic world and in parts of Europe centuries earlier. It survives in the magnificent so-called ‘coronation’ robe linked to the multicultural court of Roger II in Sicily in the twelfth century – a medieval textile masterpiece now permanently displayed in the Imperial Treasury at the Hofburg Palace, Vienna.
Fig. 3: Detail, Ottoman cover, early 18th-century, silk velvet embroidered with gold plaques, laid-and-couched gold-covered thread, diamonds, emeralds and pearls. Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul. Photo: Alamy stock.
Like Bellini’s portrait of Mehmed II, this powerfully graphic embroidered garment does not enjoy pride of place in its dimly lit corner of the museum. As with Bellini’s portrait, it too may be described as an ‘artifact of survival’, reminding us of the mobility of objects and accompanying ideas in the Middle Ages and Early Modern era that Rodini’s book probes so well. Bellini’s majestic portrait of Mehmed II with its prominently displayed, bejewelled embroidery now sits in Room 63 of the V&A in comfortable dialogue with other textiles that likely share comparable historic encounters – a sixteenth-century, so-called ‘Lotto’ knotted pile carpet, a sixteenth century French embroidered panel, and two exquisite fragments of green, Italian figured velvet, dated to the late fifteenth century, with designs of stylised roses, leaves and vines that, like Sultan Mehmed II once did, look equally east to Asia and west to Europe for artistic inspiration.