Picturing the Square, Streets, and Denizens of Early Modern Istanbul: Practices of Urban Space and Shifts in Visuality

Abstract

Abstract Exploring intersections of spaces, practices, and representations of urbanity and the city in late sixteenth-century Istanbul, this paper traces the emergence of a new set of themes centered on the main public square, the streets, and the denizens of the Ottoman capital in illustrated court histories. It considers new visual imaginings of city and urbanity in view of three issues that resonate with the history of early modern Istanbul: modalities and the lexicon of vision as they took shape parallel to changing spatial practices; the making of a new urban public, and polyphonic forms of representation concomitant to the emergence of new publicities; the conflicted political environment that turned the city’s public spaces into arenas of contestation in the later decades of the 1500s. To this end, the article focuses on narrative paintings and texts of a set of manuscripts created between the late 1580s and the turn of the seventeenth century, and with particular attention to the Sūrnāme-i Humāyūn (Book of Festivities, 1588), explores the notions and connections that shaped them.