East versus West
IMAGES are full of power and danger. They can be used in multiple ways by different groups of people. To the Byzantine Christians, the image could be a literal representation of a diety, it was venerated, and sometimes fed and worshipped in place or as a conduit to a god. It contained power, and that power made it dangerous. But it did not literally try to present a god, it presented those characteristics of god that made him great—kindness, beauty, perfection, magesty. Some emperors of the Byzantine world believed that they fit these descriptions, too, and like Roger the II of Sicily as Jesus Christ, permanently edified in brilliant tiles, unifying the powers of heaven and earth.i Allah prohibits the veneration of images, in My Name is Red, the miniaturists discuss the problems with trying to imitate works that Allah has created. To make something in the way that Allah sees it is akin to blasphemy. Instead the miniaturists rememberii , using their mind’s eye to generalize the image so that they are not directly reproducing the created world.
I am conflict
“To know is to remember that you’ve seen. To see is to know without remembering. Thus, painting is remembering the blackness.”iii The masters are even said to paint the memories of Allah himself. And so the illuminations on the page become assistants in the telling of great stories, pictures of generalized things, not animated people in their own right.iv People are undifferentiated and no longer does a god obtain an Emperor’s face. In fact these pictoral arts are generally considered to be subservient to calligraphy, which is a literal embodiment of the word of god. Paintings are inherently flawed by alterations in brushstroke, line, form, subtly indicating the painter’s hand and revealing its mortal provenance.v The painters are charged with a difficult task—to assist in storytelling without detracting from the narrative. To create characters without direct reference to a face, to recreate the memories of Allah that he draws from the blackness.
You may call me the scene
The blackness, this primordial soup, contains the platonic form that the painter seeks to recreate. Where the eye can no longer go, the memory creates. The biggest honor that Allah can bestow upon a miniaturist is to make him go blind, so that at the end of his life, he may see only his own memories, which gain in prominence without the pollution of sight, and those images which Allah creates for him—a world linked to our own, but existing on a different, a higher plane. “Blindness is the greatest virtue of Allah’s grace…”vi The illuminators of Istanbul are not those noble divine beings of the western cosmology. In Renaissance and even later thought, the artist is possessed with a divine sight of his own, genius, which he uses to reproduce the forms of the world. He is not infringing upon God’s world by accurately representing objects in it, instead he is infusing them with divine spirit.vii His vision of the world, then, is just as valid—adding to God’s magnificence, not detracting from it. And thus, the Venetians and the Franks come to Istanbul with a foreign concept called style.
we the lovers Style. The acknowledgement of an individual vision of the world, an imitation of it. A signature. Early in My Name is Red Butterfly tells three parables pertaining to style. viii In each of them, the artists who attribute their works to their supposed divine hand, or have hidden their attribution within the work. All of the sudden, the images are imbued with a mysterious power, they compete with the lives of those that view them. The sultan grows jealous of the image of his lover, the son sees his father murdered, the signatures are singularly the downfall of the culture. If an illuminator shows Allah’s memories, then he needs no signature. However, the western painters come in and show the world in a different way. They use optical space to render scenes as they are, not as diagrams to assist in storytelling.
the crime
The miniaturists must grapple with this—are they to represent the world as it is, as their eyes see it and as the Franks render it, or are they to adhere to the restrictions set forth by Allah and maintain the world as an idealized form. This provides the crux of the story. Most of the miniaturists choose to give their images the power that the Franks and the western mode provides—Black imagines and paints his dear Shekure in Shirin’s face. The images are given voices, power, opinions, as they title various chapters in the novel. Is this possibly a result of their rendered style? Finally, Olive renders the ultimate blasphemy, worse than Justinian. Instead of depicting the Sultan Murad III in the centerpiece of the book, but his own face, clumsily because he had not mastered the art of differentiation. In the novel, they assert themselves in the role of narrators. They are aware of their own creation, and speak of the atrocities they witness. Is their voice also a memory of Allah, or a personification of those parables of Butterfly’s? Had the illuminators decided to remain anonymous, would they still have the voices they retain in the book? Their use as a vehicle for story-telling illustrates that in this new world of confusion between east and west, that the image may have usurped the text. The image is the text, as it speaks to us in the pages of the novel. On the other hand, however, if we take an even farther step back to examine the meta-narrative within the narrative, the whole of the novel is not, in fact, an image, but words. Words that represent an image telling a narrative. Which then is subservient to which? Before the Franks came, the illuminators would assert that they were only working in service to the manuscripts they helped to create. Many of the images would not be readily identified, in fact, were the stories not there to aid in their understanding. Pamuk’s images are created in our minds, using words. He is creating the ultimate fusion of east and west, word and image, by allowing our mind’s eye to create that which is illuminated. At the same time the images speak for themselves.
I, painter
Can an image be an icon if it exists in prose? Perhaps the prose is an intermediary, a way to understand the images in the way the raised finger to the mouth would indicate surprise. The reader must re-create the image in his mind, remembering that ultimate image. I must act as the illuminator. As text and image, the creator of an illuminated manuscript, I am both miniaturist and calligrapher, and I have perhaps completed what Pamuk has not, images fitted to his very words. Like the illuminators of My Name is Red, I too seek guidance from the masters, and seek no individuality in my art. However, stylistic changes do become apparent as I explore shifts in perspective, medium, and line. My pictures are supplemented by words, both the words on my pages and those in Pamuk’s text. Are they subservient to his own writings or do they stand on their own? If this text becomes unbounded, perhaps the pages will flit into other works, as they had in the lost manuscript Black and the Ottoman painters’.
To God belongs the East and the West. -Orhan Pamuk
note: this text was intended to be read in a conversational style akin to that of Pamuk’s narrator in My Name is Red. All schoarly work is referenced here. This is discussed in further detail in Nickies “Builders, Patrons and Identity: The Domed Basilicas of Sicily and Calabria” in which this phenomenon is demonstrated. While the artistic styles in and of themselves are a fusion of Islamic and Byzantine types, this form of representation woud have been considered blasphemous by the Islamic rulers. ii Pamuk page 77 iii Pamuk page 77 iv Reyhanli discusses this convention often, and while some of these characteristics may have come to the Ottomans from the Persians and before them the Chinese, their emphasis on aniconism transforms their work into a communicative and symbolic nature, sign systems in the images are the primary form of communication. Reyhanli, Tulay. “The Portraits of Murad III” presented at symposium for Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, 1982. v Based on the novel, this type of variation is something to be avoided, and differs greatly from the western conception of style. See David Summers, Real Spaces, London: Phaidon Press, pg 69. vi Pamuk pg 81 vii This fetishism of the author is demonstrated in many works, such as the writings of Michel Foucault, in which the “author” provides a unifying force, and the sole source of the text. Similarly with painting, artists are endowed with “The Gift” instead of channeling a pre-envisioned world. viii There is an additional parable told that the painter attempted to rival God by making things appear, but cannot bring them to life as God can, and thus are condemned. David Summers, pg 299. i