The Irony of Imperial Decorative Styles: The Role of Diversity in the Production of Unified Cultural Identities in the Ottoman Empire and France, c. 1500–1700

Abstract

At the height of their classical period, the Ottomans drew the regional landscape indoors, making West Asian flowers the symbols of their most coveted objects. By the mid-sixteenth century, they had synthesized a great stylistic and horticultural inheritance from across the arid Anatolian and Iranian Plateaus in the production of a new imperial identity. Ironically, this unified cultural expression benefitted from the transnational artistic exchange that took place at the naḳḳāşḫāne (kārḫāne-i naḳḳāşān, the imperial court workshop) in the first half of the sixteenth century following the immigration of many highly trained artisans from Iran. At almost the same time, some of the uniquely Ottoman decorative style’s featured blossoms were first introduced and popularized in Northern Europe as exotic bulbs. And in a similar period of state-building a century onward, France’s own proto-imperial floral decorative style emerged in the wake of ‘Anti-Italianism’. Here, too, the production of knowledge required to produce luxury goods with the quality and quantity of the Italians or Ottomans was largely based on the influx of foreign actors and materials - as well as their manipulation through the state’s mercantilist agenda. This essay posits court ateliers as spaces of artistic knowledge-production that depend on the exchange of cultural expertise at the scale of the artisan to generate new floral styles at the scale of empire. Thus, taking a comparative approach, it focuses on parallel patterns of development in the Ottoman Empire and France - both in terms of the formation of a unified political entity and the associated production of a stylistic identity. At the heart of this comparative analysis is what weaves the two stories together: the celebration and popularization of flowers through silk.