An illustrated Mecmua: The Commoner's voice and the iconography of the court in seventeenth-century Ottoman painting

Abstract

A small Mecmua, a seventeenth-century manuscript that includes a variety of narratives and paintings and is currently housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, is a rare example of commercial painting production outside the Ottoman palace workshop. The Mecmua includes nineteen single-page portraits of sultans, specific individuals, and heroes of popular literature as well as paintings of animals. Most of the illustrations are accompanied by texts that relate a brief story about the depicted person. Using the Mecmua as an example, I will attempt in this essay to show how certain aspects of popular painting functioned in two specific environments. I will describe how court-based narratives and images became popularized; how the interaction between two spheres, the court and the city, was manifested in the oral literary tradition and visual culture; and how text and images changed as a result. In addition, this essay will address the following questions: what was the relationship between images and text? Were they changed at the same time? Did the text change in different ways than the images did? Was the textual transformation more substantial when compared to the images, or vice versa?