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Architecture without Images
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2013
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The Venetian nobleman Ambrosio Bembo (1652–1705) included this panorama of Aleppo by the French artist G.J. Grélot (see Figure 1), as one of the fifty-one carefully observed line drawings of cities, buildings, and people integral to his travelogue, proudly entitled Travels and Journal through Part of Asia during about Four Years Undertaken by Me, Ambrosio Bembo, Venetian Noble. During his visits to Aleppo between 1672 and 1675, Bembo may have crossed paths with the great Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi (1611–82?), who included his own description of that commercial capital of the eastern Mediterranean in his monumental Seyahatname (Book of Travels). Evliya's book does not include a single illustration. This divergence is emblematic of the distinct ways in which early modern societies (in this case, Middle Eastern and European) visualized cities and architecture, and highlights a major challenge to writing the architectural and urban history of the Middle East before the 19th century: the almost complete absence of images that represent architecture.
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References
NOTES
1 I thank Marguerite Ragnow, curator of the James Ford Bell Library, for her assistance during my research on this manuscript. For an Italian edition of Bembo's text, see Bembo, Ambrosio, Viaggio e giornale per parte dell'Asia di quattro anni incirca fatto da me, Ambrosio Bembo, nobile Veneto, ed. Invernizzi, Antonio (Turin, Italy: CESMEO, 2005)Google Scholar. For an English translation and introduction, see The Travels and Journal of Ambrosio Bembo, ed. Anthony Welch and trans. Clara Bargellini (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2007). The earliest study on Bembo seems to be Morelli, Jacopo, “Ambrogio Bembo,” in Dissertazione intorno ad alcuni viaggiatori eruditi veneziani poco noti . . . (Venice: Stamperia di A. Zatta, 1803), 50–79Google Scholar.
2 For an edition of the section of the Ottoman text that discusses Aleppo, see Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi, vol. 9: Anadolu, Suriye, Hicaz (1671–1672) (Istanbul: Devlet Matbaası, 1935). For a study on Evliya and an orientation to the rich scholarly literature, see Dankoff, Robert, An Ottoman Mentality: The World of Evliya Çelebi (Leiden: Brill, 2004)Google Scholar.
3 This manuscript was edited in facsimile with an introduction by Yurdaydın, H. G., Nasuhü's-Silahi (Matrakçı) Beyan-i menazil-i sefer-i ʿIrakeyn-i sultan Süleyman khan (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1976)Google Scholar. See Rogers, J. M., “Itineraries and Town Views in Ottoman Histories,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 2, book 1: Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, ed. Harley, J. B. and Woodward, David (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 209–27Google Scholar; and Ebel, Kathryn A., “Representations of the Frontier in Ottoman Town Views of the Sixteenth Century,” Imago Mundi 60 (2008): 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Quoted in Abu al-Wafaʾ b. ʿUmar al-ʿUrdi (1585–1660), Maʿadin al-Dhahab fi al-Aʿyan al-Musharrafa bi-him Halab, ed. ʿAbd Allah al-Ghazali (Kuwait: Maktabat Dar al-ʿUruba, 1987), 35.
5 Watenpaugh, Heghnar Z., “Deviant Dervishes: Space, Gender and the Construction of Antinomian Piety in Ottoman Aleppo,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 37 (2005): 535–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, “The City's Edge: Rethinking Sources and Methods for the Study of Urban Peripheries,” in The Exercise of Ruling Power in the Age of Sultanates: Practices and Representations of Power in Middle Eastern and North African Societies (13th–18th Centuries), ed. Sylvie Denoix, Irene Bierman-McKinney, and Jere Bacharach (forthcoming).