Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-sxzjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T20:06:25.468Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Crusade Propaganda in Word and Image in Early Modern Italy: Niccolò Guidalotto’s Panorama of Constantinople (1662) *

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby
Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby*
Affiliation:
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The focus of this article is a vast seventeenth-century panorama of Constantinople, which is an exceptional drawing of the city, currently displayed at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The panorama is an elaborate piece of anti-Ottoman propaganda designed by the Franciscan friar Niccolò Guidalotto da Mondavio. Guidalotto also prepared a large manuscript, held in the Vatican Library, which details the panorama’s meaning and the motivation behind its creation. It depicts the city as seen from across the Golden Horn in Galata, throwing new light on both the city and the relationships between the rival Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire. It also trumpets the unalloyed Christian zeal of Niccolò Guidalotto and serves as a fascinating example of visual Crusade propaganda against the Ottomans in the early modern period.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , Summer 2014 , pp. 503 - 543
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 157/10) and was presented at the 2012 RSA Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, and at the 2012 conference for the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Toronto, “Early Modern Migrations: Exiles, Expulsion, and Religious Refugees.” I would like to thank Dr. Doron J. Lurie, chief conservator and senior curator of the Old Masters section in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art for his generous help. I would also like to thank the two anonymous readers for Renaissance Quarterly for their encouragement, constructive comments, and suggestions. All translations are by the author.

References

Albéri, Eugenio. Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al senato durante il secolo decimosesto. Series 3, vol. 1. Florence, 1840.Google Scholar
Angelo, Paolo. La Vita di Paolo Angelo. Venice, 1539.Google Scholar
Archivio Storico de Propaganda Fide, Rome, Scritture Riferite nei Congressi, vol. 177, fol. 59r, and vol. 290, fol. 13r. Cited as Archivio Storico de Propaganda Fide, SR.Google Scholar
Arquato, Antonio. De eversione Europa. Venice, 1544.Google Scholar
Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays. Ed. David Woodward. Chicago, 1987.Google Scholar
Beeching, Jack. La battiglia di Lepanto. Milan, 1989.Google Scholar
Benzoni, Gino. “A proposito dei baili veneziani a Costantinopoli: Qualche spunto, qualche osservazione.” Studi veneziani 30 (1995): 69–77.Google Scholar
Bertelè, Tomasso. Il palazzo degli ambasciatori di Venezia a Costantinopoli e le sue antiche memorie. Bologna, 1932.Google Scholar
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV), Archivio Chigi (sec. XIII–XX), Diario Chigi, vol. 4, fol. 58.Google Scholar
Bisaha, Nancy. Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks. Philadelphia, 2004.10.9783/9780812201291CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blanks, David, and Frassetto, Michael, eds. Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of Other. New York, 1999.10.1057/9780312299675CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brotton, Jerry. The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo. Oxford, 2003.Google Scholar
Brummett, Palmira. Ottoman Sea Power and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery. Albany, 1994.Google Scholar
Brummett, Palmira. “Turks and Christians: The Iconography of Possession in the Depiction of the Ottoman-Venetian-Hapsburg Frontiers, 1550–1689.” In The Religions of the Book: Christian Perceptions 1400–1600, ed. Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield, 110–39. Houndsmills, 2008.10.1057/9780230582576_6CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Todd. “The Rhetoric of Early Modern Cartography: Politics, Theology and Inspiration.” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 26.1 (2000): 45–71.10.1163/23526963-90000213CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Classen, Albrecht, ed. Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages. New York, 2002.10.4324/9780203951354CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coco, Carla, and Manzonetto, Flora. Baili veneziani alla sublime Porta. Storia e caratteristiche dell’ambasciata veneta a Costantinopoli. Venice, 1985.Google Scholar
Comment, Bernard. The Panorama. London, 1999.Google Scholar
Daniel, Norman. Islam and the West: The Making of an Image. Edinburgh, 1960.Google Scholar
Debby, Nirit Ben-Aryeh. “Guidalotto’s City View of Constantinople.” Historia 28 (2011): 25–53 (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
Dimmock, Matthew. New Turks: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England. Farnham, 2005.Google Scholar
Dursteler, Eric. “The Bailo in Constantinople: Crisis and Career in Venice’s Early Modern Diplomatic Corps.” Mediterranean Historical Review 16.2 (2001): 1–30.10.1080/714004583CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dursteler, Eric. Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Baltimore, 2006.Google Scholar
Dursteler, Eric. Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Baltimore, 2011.Google Scholar
Eldem, Edhem, Goffman, Daniel, and Masters, Bruce. The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul. Cambridge, 1999.Google Scholar
Envisioning the City: Six Studies in Urban Cartography. Ed. David Buisseret. Chicago, 1998.Google Scholar
Faroqhi, Suraiya. The Ottoman Empire and the World around It. Trans. I. B. Tauris. London, 2006.Google Scholar
Fenlon, Iain. The Ceremonial City: History, Memory and Myth in Renaissance Venice. New Haven, 2007.Google Scholar
Finkel, Caroline. Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1923. London, 2006.Google Scholar
Fiorani, Francesca. The Marvel of Maps: Art, Cartography and Politics in Renaissance Italy. New Haven, 2005.Google Scholar
Fischer, Erik. Melchior Lorck: Drawings from the Evelyn Collection at Stonor Park, England, and from the Department of Prints and Drawings, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen. Copenhagen, 1962.Google Scholar
Fischer, Erik. “Melchior Lorck: A Dane as Imperial Draughtsman in Con-stantinople in the 1550s.” In The Arabian Journey: Danish Connections with the Islamic World over a Thousand Years, ed. Kjeld von Folsach, Torben Lundbaek, and Peder Mortensen, 31–43. Aarhus, 1996.Google Scholar
Fischer, Erik. Melchior Lorck: Biography and Primary Sources. Vol. 4, The Prospect of Constantinople. Copenhagen, 2009.Google Scholar
Fleet, Kate, Faroqhi, Suraiya, and Kasaba, Reşat, eds. The Cambridge History of Turkey: The Later Ottoman Empire 1603–1839. Cambridge, 2006.Google Scholar
Fleischer, Cornell. Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Ali. Princeton, 1986.10.1515/9781400854219CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, Molly. A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Princeton, 2002.Google Scholar
Grotto, Luigi. Prognostico et giudicio universale del presente anno 1572. Venice, 1572.Google Scholar
Guidalotto da Mondavio, Niccolò. Parafrasi di Opera a Penna Rappresentante in Dissegno un Prospetto dell’Imperiale Città di Constantinopoli. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV), MS Chig. D. II, 22, fols. 1r–70r. Pesaro, 1622.Google Scholar
Metzger, Habel, Dorothy, . The Urban Development of Rome in the Age of Alexander VII. Cambridge, 2002.Google Scholar
Hankins, James. “Renaissance Crusaders: Humanist Crusade Literature in the Age of Mehmed II.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995): 111–207.10.2307/1291712CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harley, John Brian. “The Map and the Development of the History of Cartography.” In The History of Cartography (1987), 1–42.Google Scholar
Harley, John Brian. “Maps, Knowledge, and Power.” In The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environment, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, 277–312. Cambridge, 1988.Google Scholar
Harley, John Brian. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Ed. Paul Laxton. Baltimore, 2001.Google Scholar
Harper, James, ed. The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750: Visual Imagery before Orientalism. Farnham, 2011.Google Scholar
The History of Cartography, Vol. 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Ed. John Brian Harley and David Woodward. Chicago, 1987.Google Scholar
Howard, Deborah. “Venice as a Dolphin: Further Investigations into Jacopo de’Barbari’s View.” Artibus et Historiae 18.35 (1997): 101–11.Google Scholar
Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York, 1996.Google Scholar
Imber, Colin. The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power. Hampshire, 2002.Google Scholar
Itzkowitz, Norman. The Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition. Chicago, 1972.Google Scholar
Jardine, Lisa, and Brotton, Jerry. Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West. Ithaca, 2000.Google Scholar
Kafadar, Cemal. Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State. Berkeley, 1995.Google Scholar
Kafescioglu, Cigdem. Constantinopolis / Istanbul: Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital. Philadelphia, 2009.Google Scholar
Kedar, Benjamin Z. Crusade and Mission: European Approaches toward the Muslims. Princeton, 1984.Google Scholar
Krstic, Tijana. Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. Stanford, 2011.10.11126/stanford/9780804773171.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lane, Fredric. Venice, a Maritime Republic. Baltimore, 1973.Google Scholar
Mack, Rosamond E. Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art 1300–1600. Berkeley, 2002.Google Scholar
MacLean, Gerald M. The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire 1580–1720. Hampshire, 2004.10.1057/9780230511767CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacLean, Gerald M., ed. Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East. Hampshire, 2005.10.1057/9780230523869CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manners, Ian. “Constructing the Image of a City: The Representation of Constantinople in Christopher Buondelmonti’s Liber Insularum Archipelagi. ” Annals of the Association of American Geography 87.1 (1997): 72–102.10.1111/0004-5608.00042CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manners, Ian. European Cartographers and the Ottoman World 1500–1750: Maps from the Collection of O. J. Sopranus. Chicago, 2007.Google Scholar
Mappings. Ed. Denis Cosgrove. London, 1999.Google Scholar
Martin, John, and Romano, Dennis, eds. Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State. Baltimore, 2000.Google Scholar
Matar, Nabil. Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York, 1999.Google Scholar
Matteucci, Gualberto. Un glorioso convento francescano sulle rive del Bosforo: Il San Francesco di Galata in Costantinopoli, c.1230–1697. Florence, 1967.Google Scholar
McGinn, Bernard. Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions of the Middle Ages. New York, 1979.Google Scholar
McJannet, Linda. The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks. Hampshire, 2006.10.1057/9780230601499CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meserve, Margaret. Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought. Cambridge, MA, 2008.10.4159/9780674040953CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Naomi. “Mapping the City: Ptolemy’s Geography in the Renaissance.” In Envisioning the City (1998), 34–74.Google Scholar
Miller, Naomi. Mapping the City: The Language and Culture of Cartography in the Renaissance. London, 2003.Google Scholar
Monfasani, John. George of Trebizond: A Biography and Study of His Rhetoric and Logic. Leiden, 1976.Google Scholar
Morariu, Antonio. “La mission dei Frati Minori Conventuali in Moldavia e Valacchi 1623–1650.” Miscellanea Francescana 62 (1962): 68.Google Scholar
Morkoc, Selen. “City and Self in Three Accounts of İstanbul: Lorichs’s Panorama (1559), Le Corbusier’s Travelogue (1911) and Pamuk’s Memoir (2005).” Metu JFA 24.2(2007): 83–104.Google Scholar
Nazari, Giovanni Battista. Discorso della futura et sperata vittoria contra il Turco. Venice, 1570.Google Scholar
Necipoglu, Gurlu. Architecture, Ceremonial and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. Cambridge, 1991.Google Scholar
Necipoglu, Gurlu. The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton, 2005.Google Scholar
Niccoli, Ottavia. Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Princeton, 1990.Google Scholar
Norwich, John Julius. A History of Venice. New York, 1989.Google Scholar
Nuti, Lucia. “Mapping Places: Chorography and Vision in the Renaissance.” In Mappings (1999), 90–109.Google Scholar
Oettermann, Stephan. The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium. Trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider. New York, 1997.Google Scholar
O’Shea, Stephen. Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World. New York, 2007.Google Scholar
Pedani, Maria Pia. Venezia porta d’Oriente. Bologna, 2010.Google Scholar
Preto, Paolo. Venezia e i Turchi. Florence, 1975.Google Scholar
Pronosticatione in vulgare. Venice, 1511.Google Scholar
Raby, Julian. “The Serenissima and the Sublime Porte: Art in the Art of Diplomacy 1453–1600.” In Venice and the Islamic World (2007), 90–119.Google Scholar
Randolph, Daniel E. The Franciscan Concept of Mission in the High Middle Ages. Lexington, 1975.Google Scholar
Rees, Ronald. “Historical Links between Cartography and Art.” Geographical Review 70 (1980): 60–78.10.2307/214368CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rogers, J. M. “Itineraries and Town Views in Ottoman Histories.” In The History of Cartography (1987), 228–55.Google Scholar
Rothman, Natalie E. “Between Venice and Istanbul: Trans-Imperial Subjects and Cultural Mediation in the Early Modern Mediterranean.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2006.Google Scholar
Rothman, Natalie E. “Interpreting Dragomans: Boundaries and Crossings in the Early Modern Mediterranean.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51.4 (2009a): 771–800.Google Scholar
Rothman, Natalie E. “Self- Fashioning in the Mediterranean Contact Zone: Giovanni Battista Salvago and His Africa Overo Barbaria (1625).” In Renaissance Medievalisms, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler, 123–44. Toronto, 2009b.Google Scholar
Rothman, Natalie E. Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul. Ithaca, 2012.Google Scholar
Rusconi, Roberto. L’attesa della fine: Crisi della società, profezia ed Apocalisse in Italia al tempo del grande scisma d’Occidente (1378–1417). Rome, 1979.Google Scholar
Rusconi, Roberto. “Giovanni da Capistrano: Iconografia di un predicatore nell’Europa del ‘400.” Le Venezie Francescane: Predicazione francescana e società veneta nel Quattrocento, Atti del II Convegno internazionale di studi francescani. Padua 26–27–28 marzo 1987 6 (1989): 31–60.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York, 1979.Google Scholar
Schulz, Juergen. “Jacopo de Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views and Moralized Geography before the Year 1500.” Art Bulletin 60 (1978): 425–74.10.1080/00043079.1978.10787588CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schulz, Juergen. “Maps as Metaphors: Mural Map Cycles of the Italian Renaissance.” In Art and Cartography (1987), 97–122.Google Scholar
Schwoebel, Robert. The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (1453–1517). New York, 1969.Google Scholar
Setton, Kenneth. Venice, Austria and the Turks in the Seventeenth Century. Philadelphia, 1991.Google Scholar
Setton, Kenneth. Western Hostility to Islam and Prophecies of Turkish Doom. Philadelphia, 1992.Google Scholar
Shalev, Zur. “Sacred Geography, Antiquarianism and Visual Erudition: Benito Arias Montano and the Maps in the Antwerp Polyglot Bible.” Imago Mundi 55 (2003): 56–80.10.1080/0308569032000097495CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shalev, Zur. “Geographica Sacra: Cartography, Religion, and Scholarship in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” PhD diss., Princeton University, 2004.Google Scholar
Shalev, Zur. Sacred Words and Worlds: Geography, Religion, and Scholarship, 1550–1700. Leiden, 2011.10.1163/9789004209381CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shalev, Zur, and Burnett, Charles, eds. Ptolemy’s Geography in the Renaissance. London, 2011.Google Scholar
Silver, Larry. “East is East: Images of the Turkish Nemesis in Habsburg Europe.” In The “Turk” and Islam in the Western Eye (1453–1750): Visual Imagery before Orientalism, ed. James G. Harper, 185–216. Farnham, 2011.Google Scholar
Simon, B. “I rappresentanti diplomatici Veneziani a Costantinopoli.” In Venezia e i Turchi. Scontri e confronti di due civiltà, 56–69. Milan, 1985.Google Scholar
Southern, Richard W. Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, 1962.10.4159/harvard.9780674435667CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomson, Christine. “The New Babylon.” Cornucopia: Turkey for Connoisseurs 12.2 (1997): 30–33.Google Scholar
Tolan, John Victor. Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam. New York, 1996.Google Scholar
Tolan, John Victor. Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination. New York, 2002.Google Scholar
Valensi, Lucette. “The Making of a Political Paradigm: The Ottoman State and Oriental Despotism.” In The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair, 173–203. Philadelphia, 1990.Google Scholar
Valensi, Lucette. The Birth of the Despot: Venice and the Sublime Porte. Trans. Arthur Denner. Ithaca, 1993.Google Scholar
Venice and the Islamic World 828–1297. Ed. Stefano Carboni. New Haven, 2007.Google Scholar
Viallon, Marie F. Venise et la Porte Ottomane (1453–1566). Paris, 1995.Google Scholar
Vitkus, Daniel. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean 1570–1630. New York, 2003.10.1007/978-1-137-05292-6CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Westbrook, Nigel, Dark, Kenneth Rainsbury, and Meeuwen, Rene Van. “Constructing Melchior Lorichs’s Panorama of Constantinople.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 69.1 (2011): 62–87.10.1525/jsah.2010.69.1.62CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wheatcroft, Andrew. The Ottomans. London, 1993.Google Scholar
Wilson, Bronwen. The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity. Toronto, 2005.Google Scholar
Woodward, David. Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance: Makers, Distributors and Consumers. London, 1996.Google Scholar
Wunder, Amanda. “Western Travelers, Eastern Antiquities, and the Image of the Turk in Early Modern Europe.” Journal of Early Modern History 7.1–2 (2003): 89–119.Google Scholar
Yerasimos, Stefanos, Mango, Cyril, and Ertuğ, Ahmet, eds. Melchior Lorichs’ Panorama of Constantinople. Istanbul, 1999.Google Scholar