At first glance, you might notice the cropping of this image, its similarity to a photograph. As you look closer, there are hints that this is not an ordinary house. Indeed. It is the mausoleum of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed I, who died on this day in 1421. Mehmed I is considered to be the second founder or restorer of the Ottoman Empire. Although he moved the capital from Bursa to another city, he left behind a magnificent work - the Yesgi (Green) Mosque - completed the year before his death. Its design was influential enough to give rise to the name Bursa Style. Mehemd's affection for the project can be inferred from the inclusion of his personal mausoleum on its grounds.
How an Italian artist got from Parma to Turkey is a story that detours through Paris. To lose your father at the age of two is a misfortune. For Alberto Pasini (1826-1899), the event also contained the seeds of his future career. Raised in the home of an uncle, a major patron of the painter Giovanni Bodini, the boy was encouraged to draw. The novice painter had been in Paris for only a year when, in 1855, he had the good fortune to become an attache to a French diplomatic tour of the Middle East - with stops in Persia, Syria, Turkey, Arabia, and Egypt.
Image: Alberto Pasini - The Mausoleum of Mehmet I at Brousse (Bursa), 1873, Musee D'Orsay, Paris.
Drawing on his fund of travels, Pasini created dozens of paintings in the saleable Orientalist style. His contemporaries detected melancholy in these works and perhaps they were right. Pasini found the demand for these genre pictures incessant and wearing, and retreated to Venice for refreshment in contemplating the master Canaletto Perhaps this late work in the style was an opportunity to mediate on the creative work of another individual without fanfare, to find what was essential in his own work.
Image: Alberto Pasini - The Mausoleum of Mehmet I at Brousse (Bursa), 1873, Musee D'Orsay, Paris.
3 comments:
I cannot believe your remarkable timing!! Blogging is magic.
We were talking about the Ottoman Sultans Mehmed I and II today in class. Not only were they important to Ottoman history; they were also critically important to Venice's imperialist expansion plans.
I cannot believe Jane's remarkable timing either. This is just the perfect post for today. I worked in Turkey for a year and miss it so much. Thank you Jane.
I'm happy that for Hels and Kate this piece was timely. I've been looking at The Green Mosque" for two and a half years and wondering what to do with it. The syntax of drawn images changed with the advent of photography and that appears to be the case with Pasini's painting shown here. It is quite unlike his other works, which strike me as old-fashioned. Sometimes it's the atypical work that is most intriguing.
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