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No mention of Pamuk’s Nobel Prize winning novel My Name is Red, which is all about Istanbul and the underrated art form of Islamic miniatures. I came across th
by keiferski 6y ago
No mention of Pamuk’s Nobel Prize winning novel My Name is Red, which is all about Istanbul and the underrated art form of Islamic miniatures.
I came across this book in a bizarre way, but if I told you, you probably wouldn’t believe me. Let’s just call it a “completely unexplainable coincidence.”
In any case, it’s a really fascinating look at an art form virtually no one in the Western world has heard of, yet played a huge role in the various Turkish, Persian, Mughal/Indian and Arabic empires. All set in 1500s Istanbul. Highly recommended.
One idea from it that has stuck with me: the Ottoman miniaturists criticized Western forms of drawing perspective, as they presented the world from the view of a human being and not from an omniscient God figure’s viewpoint. Hence the top-down viewpoint of most miniatures. I had always associated the progression toward realism as an “improvement” over pre-perspective paintings, but the omniscient viewpoint really makes a lot of sense conceptually.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Red https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Red
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_miniature https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_miniature
- yial 6y agoI know you say we wouldn’t believe it, but would you be willing to share how you discovered the book?
- keiferski 6y agoSure! At the time I was living in Brooklyn. For whatever reason, I was reading the Wikipedia article about Islamic aniconism, the prohibition on figurative artwork, one morning [1]. I had very little knowledge of Islam and didn’t know anything about Ottoman miniatures. Not sure why or how I came across the Wikipedia article, probably just a random click from something else. A few hours later, I was walking through Bed-Stuy (neighborhood in Brooklyn) and saw a red book just laying on a stoop. It looked like someone meant to throw it away, so I picked it up and read the description. It turns out to be My Name is Red, which is all about the Islamic prohibition on images; the main plot line is about an artist who is killed while working on a figurative artwork for the Sultan. I’ve had two or three other experiences like this in my life, each with unexplainable coincidences. I’m not sure what to make of them. Clearly they are much more than a mere Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniconism_in_Islam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniconism_in_Islam
- yial 6y agoThank you for sharing! Coincidences like that are strange but absolutely do occur.