Sabancı University
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
HISTORY SEMINAR
Baghdad Governors and Art Patronage in the Early Seventeenth Century
Melis Taner
(Özyeğin University)
Monday, April 9, 2018
15:30-17:30 FASS 2031
This talk discusses the art patronage of two governors of Baghdad in the early seventeenth century. In the final decade of the sixteenth century, fed partly by an exodus of artists from Shiraz and sustained by an Ottoman socio-cultural milieu, a lively art market flourished in Baghdad. We will focus on two governors, Sokolluzade Hasan Paşa and Yusuf Paşa, who greatly contributed to this artistic flowering by commissioning unique works: an illustrated universal history and an illustrated travelogue-cum-campaign logbook, respectively. These texts, composed around the same time, show the different directions the two viziers took as they strived to establish their power base in Baghdad at a time when art and cultural life was burgeoning, but also when there was much unrest locally and on the international front.
Dr. Melis Taner has Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University (2016), and is currently teaching in the Department of Architecture at Özyeğin University.