Publication : “Mediterranean Encounters : Artists between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1774–1839”.

FRASER Elisabeth, Mediterranean Encounters : Artists between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1774–1839, University Park, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017, 320 p.

Présentation de l’éditeur :

In this volume, Elisabeth Fraser shows that artists and the works they created in the Mediterranean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were informed by mutual dependence and reciprocity between European nations and the Ottoman Empire. Her rich exploration of this vibrant cross-cultural exchange challenges the dominant interpretation of European relations with the East during the period, revealing a shared world of fluid and long-sustained interactions.

Voyagers to and from the Ottoman Empire documented their journeys in prints, paintings, and lavishly illustrated travelogues; many of these helped define Europe’s self-identified role as heir to Ottoman civilizations and bolstered its presence in the Islamic Mediterranean and beyond. Fraser finds that these works illuminate not only how travelers’ experiences abroad were more nuanced than the expansionist ideology with which they became associated, but also how these narratives depicted the vitality of Ottoman culture and served as extensions of Ottoman diplomacy. Ottomans were aware of and responded to European representations, using them to defend Ottoman culture and sovereignty. In embracing the art of both cultures and setting these works in a broader context, Fraser challenges the dominant historiographical tradition that sees Ottoman artists adopting European modes of art in a one-sided process of ‘Europeanization’.

Theoretically informed and rigorously researched, this cross-cultural approach to European and Ottoman art sheds much-needed critical light on the widely disseminated travel images of the era—important cultural artifacts in their own right—and provides a fresh and inviting understanding of the relationships among cultures in the Mediterranean during an era of increasing European expansionism.

Elisabeth A. Fraser is Professor of Art History at the University of South Florida and the author of Delacroix, Art, and Patrimony in Post-Revolutionary France.

Plus d’informations sur le site de l’éditeur.

Table des matières :

Introduction: Interpreting Travel in the Ottoman Mediterranean

Part I: Power in Question
1 Reading Choiseul in the Gaps of the Orientalist Archive
2 In the Shadow of les Grands: Cassas’s Orientalist Self-Fashioning

Part II: Ottoman Culture Abroad
3 The Translator’s Art: Mouradgea d’Ohsson, Ottoman Dragoman in Paris
4 Miniatures in Black and White: Melling’s Istanbul

Part III: Contradictory Contact
5 Skin of Nation, Body of Empire: Louis Dupré in Ottoman Greece
6 A Painter’s Renunciation: Delacroix in North Africa