1. Introduction
The principal focus of this paper is a vast and virtually unstudied seventeenth-century panorama of Constantinople that offers an exceptional visual representation of the city and is an elaborate piece of anti-Ottoman propaganda. Designed by the Venetian Franciscan friar Niccolò Guidalotto da Mondavio, the panorama, which depicts Constantinople as seen from across the Golden Horn in Galata, sheds new light on both the city itself and on the relationship between the rival Ottoman Empire and the Venetian Republic (fig. 1).Footnote 1 Guidalotto also prepared a manuscript, now in the Vatican Library, which explicates the features of the panorama and discusses the meaning of the work and the motivation behind its creation (fig. 2).Footnote 2 The image includes many figures representing political powers and complicated Christian and mythological allegories. The manuscript employs allegory, complex iconography, and quotations from the Bible to accuse the Turks of turning Constantine’s city from the New Rome into the New Babylon: Fra Guidalotto calls on the pope and the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire to join the Venetians in their struggle against the Turks.
Figure 1. Niccolò Guidalotto da Mondavio. A Panorama of Constantinople, 1662. Pen-and-ink drawing on paper, 6.12 x 2.58 meters. Private collection, Canada. Currently on display in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
Figure 2. Niccolò Guidalotto da Mondavio. Parafrasi di Opera a Penna Rappresentante in Dissegno un Prospetto dell’Imperiale Città di Constantinopoli. Title page. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV), MS Chig. D. II, 22, fols. 1r–70r. Pesaro, 1622.
The cityscape of Constantinople is but a small element in the panorama, inserted within a complex artistic and theological work. The image and text have not been previously studied at length in conjunction with each other. Pen and ink on linen-backed paper, the 6.12 × 2.58 meter illustration is on long-term loan to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. With the exception of some limited research reported in a few museum entries and short articles, the manuscript has never been studied in detail and it has never been published.Footnote 3
Guidalotto created his panorama for public display, intent on producing a major vehicle for propaganda, and when it was completed he presented it to Pope Alexander VII (Fabio Chigi, r. 1655–67). Guidalotto disclosed his intention in his manuscript: to remind people of the wonders of Constantinople and to foster nostalgia through his image of the city, which he described as an earthly paradise surrounded by sounds of hell and damnation. The panorama shows the city suspended midway between expanses of sky and water, both of which are peopled by an array of angels and tritons declaiming apocalyptic texts (fig. 3). Guidalotto explained that his reasons for embarking on the project were the Turkish attack on Crete; the ill-treatment of foreign diplomats, including the Venetians; and his own harsh experience of imprisonment.Footnote 4
Figure 3. Niccolò Guidalotto da Mondavio. A Panorama of Constantinople, 1662. Detail: angels and tritons.
The panorama is a prime example of anti-Ottoman Crusade propaganda in early modern Italy. The notion of crusade was deeply rooted and for centuries had remained a live part of mendicant tradition. Friars had preached fire and brimstone while collecting for the Crusade. For example, Saint John of Capistrano (1386–1456), a Friar Minor, had successfully led an army of untrained crusaders to relieve Belgrade in 1456.Footnote 5 After the Fall of Constantinople, the Turkish threat generated a renewed interest among Italians in crusading, as witnessed by Pius II’s efforts. That interest, however, focused less on reclaiming the Holy Land, as in earlier periods, than on returning the city of Constantinople to Christian rule. Franciscan and Dominican preachers continued the tradition of mendicant Crusade sermons in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries in support of papal crusading efforts. The mendicant movements developed special types of artwork to advance these efforts, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, and decorated maps — among them, the Constantinople panorama.Footnote 6
The city view was a newly emerging genre developing in Europe in the early modern period. Figured with a greater emphasis on a realistic representation and rendered amid various landscapes, most were drawn from a bird’s-eye perspective. Ostensibly realistic and precise, these views in fact combined artists’ interest in the city as a spatial entity and their perception of the urban image with the city’s political and religious meanings and contexts.
Prints and woodcuts of cities were invariably described as being true and ad vivum (lifelike), and the perspective plan emerged as the dominant form of topographic representation.Footnote 7 Early examples of this genre are the view of Venice by Jacopo de’ Barbari (1500), that of Rome by Alessandro Strozzi (1474), and that of Florence by Francesco Rosselli (1480). Gradually a style developed that had the city view drawn from an elevated vantage point located across from the city, known as the profile city view. This format allows for an accent on the skyline, emphasizing the principal buildings and monuments, and for the correct proportions and spatial relations between the buildings and the spaces surrounding them.Footnote 8 It was also sometimes called the city panorama.Footnote 9 Among the most important examples of this kind of work was the panorama of Constantinople created by Melchior Lorichs (1559), which he painted as viewed from across the Golden Horn from Galata, the same vantage point later chosen by Guidalotto. This became the view of the city favored by later artists, as in the anonymous, celebrated eighteenth-century cityscapes of Constantinople exhibited in Paris and Vienna.Footnote 10
The last three decades have witnessed a marked increase in cultural studies in which city views are treated not as simple mirrors of reality, but rather as exquisite works of art and as multivalent texts for the historian. Most city panoramas fulfilled not only aesthetic and artistic functions, but also served utilitarian and political ends. Creating a panorama was an occasion for the display of artistry, and the work was a form of decorative art to be exhibited either as a wall hanging or as a collector’s item. Seventeenth-century panoramas such as Guidalotto’s were framed with fluted columns and sensuous Baroque and rococo images: cherubs, fruit pendants, mythical females, muscular and heroic males, and wild horses. Yet panorama drawings also expressed issues of power and politics. For Denis Cosgrove, “all mapping involves a set of choices, omissions, uncertainties and intentions.”Footnote 11 In the words of John Brian Harley: “Through the cartographic process power is enforced, reproduced, reinforced and stereotyped.”Footnote 12 Perhaps more than any other pictorial form, panoramas alter, omit, and exaggerate to present cityscapes that represent a certain political agenda.
The present article explores the artistic features and historical significance of Guidalotto’s panorama in the context of East-West relationships in early modern Italy.Footnote 13 This panorama is a hitherto-little-known example of visual propaganda in the confrontation between the Ottoman Empire and the Venetian Republic.Footnote 14 The friar was among those cultural intermediaries who in different ways connected the empire and the republic, but bitter experiences and abiding religious convictions led him to emphasize the enduring enmity between the two and to call for Crusade. Guidalotto explained the panorama's complex and varied iconography in his manuscript, which presumably acted as a plan for the drawing. By combining word and image one can better understand the meaning and significance of the panorama’s complex visual imagery.
The panorama is indicative of the cultural interaction between Venetian Christians and Ottoman Muslims. Until the 1990s, much of the scholarship that explored the relations between Europe and the Ottoman Empire emphasized the differences, conflicts, and antagonism between these two civilizations. This treatment of conflict was heavily influenced by the theories of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and Edward Said’s Orientalism.Footnote 15 Recent scholarship has proposed a diverse approach, that posits more complex contacts between the Europeans and the Ottomans, as one finds in the works of Ottomanists such as Cemal Kafadar, Suraiya Faroqhi, and Palmira Brummett. Based on archival research of neglected sources, recent studies by Eric Dursteler, Natalie Rothman, and Molly Greene have altered the overall perception of confrontation and have charted a different picture that portrays varieties of coexistence between the two cultures. Based on diplomatic reports and letters, travelers’ accounts, and official and notarial documents, Dursteler suggests that coexistence rather than conflict was typical of Veneto-Ottoman relations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Constantinople. Rothman explores the intersecting worlds of those who traversed the early modern Venetian-Ottoman lines, including colonial migrants, redeemed slaves, merchants, commercial brokers, religious converts, and diplomatic interpreters. Rothman reveals the existence of populations that were situated between the two cultures as transimperial subjects, and Dursteler describes those who crossed the lines, such as renegade women.Footnote 16 Fra Guidalotto lived in the cultural world that Dursteler and Rothman explore, but he experienced it differently. His experiences, manuscript, and panorama reveal the persistence of more traditional approaches to Italian-Ottoman cultural and political relations in the early modern period, and so add a degree of nuance to the current scholarly debate on them.
2. Biographical Sketch and Historical Background
Niccolò Guidalotto was ordained in 1636 and received a doctorate in theology. He served as a missionary in Walachia before coming to Constantinople, and in 1653 received an honorary acknowledgment from the Vatican for his service. His mother lived in Pesaro, in the Marche, not far from the Franciscan Conventual friary of Mondavio to which he was attached. His skills as a cartographer suggest that earlier in his life he might have been apprenticed to the famous Oliva family of mapmakers.Footnote 17 In 1646, shortly before his departure for Constantinople, he dedicated a fine, ornate, very professional manuscript atlas of the Mediterranean (now in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice) to Giovanni Soranzo, the Venetian ambassador, which included an invective against the Ottomans for their invasion of Crete and the ill-treatment that Soranzo had received at their hands (fig. 4).Footnote 18
Figure 4. Niccolò Guidalotto da Mondavio. Atlas, 1646. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice.
Once in Constantinople, Guidalotto’s resentment toward the Ottomans grew, owing to his struggle to restore the Church of St. Francis in Galata, which had been a favorite meeting place of the Venetians for more than 150 years. There was a danger that the church would be turned into a mosque, so he strongly urged that the coming peace treaty between Venice and the Ottoman Empire include a clause for the church’s restoration. There are two plans that he sent to the curial congregation of Propaganda Fide in 1653 for the rebuilding of the church. Guidalotto was an ardent campaigner, and the church was indeed restored in 1656, only to be burned down four years later.Footnote 19
In Constantinople, Guidalotto was attached to the Venetian embassy, which consisted of the ambassador and his staff. The embassy was originally in Galata, but in the mid-sixteenth century, construction began on another residence in Vigne di Pera in the hills above Galata, and the embassy was moved there a few decades later. Venice maintained a permanent ambassador in Constantinople, the bailo, who was responsible for defending Venetian property and citizens, his main task being to represent the interests of the republic. The bailo combined the roles of consul and ambassador and was regarded as the most senior foreign posting in the Venetian diplomatic service, and the highest paid.
The baili were also responsible for the religious life of the Catholics in the Ottoman Empire. They attempted to secure the churches used by the Venetians and acted on behalf of Roman Catholics in times of need. In Constantinople, the baili were members in the confraternities of Galata and sometimes served as patrons of religious works of art for its churches. Among their political duties, the baili were responsible for providing Venice with intelligence regarding the Ottoman Empire. They obtained such information from a wide variety of sources, including Venetian subjects in the Ottoman Empire, merchants, and many individuals within the Ottoman bureaucracy itself,Footnote 20 and they sent sporadic dispatches to the authorities in Venice.
There was a distinction between the irregular short dispatches sent when the bailo was in Constantinople and the oral reports that he delivered before the Senate upon his return to Venice. The latter were later deposited in the Senate archives. Starting in the mid-sixteenth century these Venetian relazioni became very popular, and some circulated in print. They convey highly ambivalent perceptions of the Turks, ranging from pragmatic and realistic to hostile and fearful. After 1571, following the Battle of Lepanto, they became more negative, stressing the corruption of the Turkish government.Footnote 21 This officially hostile Venetian attitude toward the Ottomans during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, together with his own personal experience, would inform Guidalotto’s strong prejudices.
The Venetian embassy household served as a model for other diplomatic residences in the Ottoman capital. The famiglia of the embassy numbered between twenty-five and thirty-five functionaries and servants attached to the bailo. It usually included a secretary, assistants, an accountant, a chaplain, a doctor, a household manager, dragomans, giovanni della lingua (young men training to be dragomans), and servants. Guidalotto served as the embassy’s chaplain, celebrating Mass daily in its small chapel with the bailo and the famiglia in attendance, and acting as a spiritual advisor to the bailo.Footnote 22 The dragomans were the diplomatic interpreters employed by the Venetians and thus had an important function in the embassy. The embassy itself recruited adolescent apprentice dragomans across the Venetian and Ottoman territories, and gave them linguistic and other training, with the explicit purpose of turning them into loyal and useful Venetian subjects.Footnote 23
The most important position in the embassy after that of the bailo was the secretary, who was responsible for communication between the balio and his many correspondents and who served as a notary for the entire Venetian community. In the years that Guidalotto was in Constantinople, the secretary was Giovanni Battista Ballerino, chief advisor to Giovanni Soranzo, who had an impressive career as a diplomat in Vienna and Candia before being sent to Constantinople. Guidalotto mentions Ballerino in his manuscript, describing him as one of the most devoted servants of the holy Republic of Venice and noting that he, too, was mistreated by the Ottomans.Footnote 24
Apart from the Venetians, several other European countries had embassies in Constantinople, located in Pera, on the hills above Galata. These embassies were peopled with spies, interpreters, doctors, missionaries, and merchants, and were frequently visited by Ottoman officials. In some cases when the Ottoman sultan became displeased with a particular ambassador or his country, he had the diplomat and possibly some of his staff imprisoned in the Fortress of the Seven Towers at the Golden Gate, the traditional ceremonial gate to the city under Byzantine rule. After the final capture of Constantinople in 1453, Sultan Mehmed II (1432–81; r. 1444–46, 1451–81) built a new citadel in 1458 and used the Fortress of the Seven Towers as a treasury, an archive, and a state prison, and this was where the ambassadors of states currently at war with the Ottoman Porte were imprisoned.Footnote 25 The Austrian ambassadors were incarcerated in 1541, 1596, and 1716 and the Venetian ambassadors in 1644, 1649, and 1714. Even though France was often an Ottoman ally, French ambassadors were interned there in 1616 and 1658. The interrogation of foreign emissaries became typical of diplomatic relationships in the city. Thus the experience of Guidalotto was not particularly exceptional, but rather was a recurring feature of the way in which Ottoman authorities treated foreign diplomats and related to their countries.Footnote 26
Guidalotto was in Constantinople as an official attached to the Venetian embassy from 1647 to 1655. Coming so soon in the wake of the Turkish invasion of Crete (1645), this was a period of heightened tensions between the city’s Venetian residents and the Ottoman rulers.Footnote 27 The regime itself was marked by instability. Soon after Guidalotto’s arrival in the city, Sultan Ibraim I (1615–48, r. 1640–48) was deposed and executed. He was succeeded by Mehmed IV (a child at the time, 1642–93, r. 1648–87), who was supported by his grandmother Valide Kösem Sultan, who was also eventually murdered. Guidalotto describes this period of instability in detail in his manuscript, considering it a window of opportunity for the Venetians owing to the fragility of the Ottoman rule.Footnote 28
The experiences that informed Guidalotto’s panorama and manuscript were also shaped by the Ottoman siege of Candia in Crete, Venice’s largest and richest overseas possession, from 1645 onward.Footnote 29 The War of Candia, waged between the Republic of Venice and its allies — chief among them the Knights of Malta, the Papal States, and France — and the Ottoman Empire lasted nearly twenty-five years. There were battles on the island itself and naval engagements and raids around the Aegean Sea, with Dalmatia as a secondary theater of operations. Throughout the war, Venice maintained overall naval superiority, winning most of the naval battles, but the republic’s efforts to blockade the Dardanelles were only partially successful, and there were never enough ships to fully cut off the flow of supplies and reinforcements to Crete. Although the Turks were hampered in their efforts by domestic turmoil, as well as by the diversion of some of their forces northward toward Transylvania and the Habsburg monarchy, and despite the republic’s naval victories, Venice was finally obliged to surrender Candia in 1669.Footnote 30
The conflict between the Ottomans and the Venetians culminated in 1644.Footnote 31 In that year, a ship of Hospitallers attacked the Turkish fleet in the Aegean Sea, and Soranzo, who was the bailo at the time, and the French ambassador Jean Delahaye were summoned before the grand vizier for an inquiry. The Venetians were accused of assisting the Hospitallers’ aggression, but Soranzo and the Venetian dragoman, Giovanni Antonio Grillo, categorically denied any Venetian involvement.Footnote 32
In the escalating tensions preceding the outbreak of hostilities, Giovanni Soranzo had been put under house arrest.Footnote 33 In March 1649, during the siege of Candia, his delegation, now including Ballerino and Guidalotto, was summoned to the Topkapi Palace and interrogated in the presence of an executioner. Dispatches record that the entire Venetian delegation was subjected to the indignity of stocks and chains and then led in a procession through the city.Footnote 34 Illustrations of their humiliation survive in a manuscript held in the Museo Correr in Venice (the Cicogna Codex 1971, Memorie Turchesche). That museum’s collection includes three Turkish miniatures: one shows Guidalotto and the Venetian delegation being led through the city in chains (fig. 5); the second, the Rumeli Hisari, a fortress that in the seventeenth century was used as a prison primarily for foreign prisoners of war, where they were held and where a Venetian dragoman was executed (fig. 6); and the third, the bailo undergoing interrogation in the presence of the grand vizier’s executioner (fig. 7).
Figure 5. Memorie Turchesche. Procession, Cod. Cicogna 1971. Courtesy of Museo Civico Correr, Venice.
Figure 6. Memorie Turchesche. The Rumeli Hisari, Cod. Cicogna 1971. Courtesy of Museo Civico Correr, Venice.
Figure 7. Memorie Turchesche. The Interrogation, Cod. Cicogna 1971. Courtesy of Museo Civico Correr, Venice.
A key role in these events was apparently played by one of the Venetian dragomans, Giovanni Antonio Grillo, who was executed as a result of his efforts to negotiate between the Ottoman court and the bailo and his party. He was declared a martyr by the Venetian government and became a symbol of Venetian heroism against the Ottomans.Footnote 35 Fra Guidalotto and another member of Soranzo’s staff were released and allowed to return to the official Venetian residence in order to keep watch over it. Two other secretaries, who had escaped the interrogation, were able to gather important papers and documents and bring them to the French embassy. Jean Delahaye worked hard to achieve the release of the rest of the Venetian delegation, and Soranzo was finally set free two months later, in May 1649.
Fra Guidalotto returned to Italy in 1655 and recorded in his manuscript that diplomats in Constantinople continued to be expelled, arrested, and humiliated. He noted particularly that Jean Delahaye and his son were also imprisoned and humiliated by the Ottomans.Footnote 36 Lamenting the ill-treatment of foreign ambassadors, Guidalotto writes: “The wisest Ambassador of England never erred, when through the order of Ibraim he was treated with furious barbarism and one can say was dragged out of his House and subjected to horrible treatment in the sight of the World, publicly conducted, through Pera and Galata.” He describes the miserable fortune of the Austrian ambassador, who, “with the heaviest irons upon his feet, was held for three months on a public balcony, in the sight of the whole of Constantinople, miserably chained around the throat.”Footnote 37 Yet most tragic of all was the fate of the Venetian ambassador: “What unprecedented destruction, of a like never seen since, was not carried out in the public and busy streets of Constantinople on the Knight Giovanni Soranzo, most worthy ambassador of his most strict [holiness]: in remembrance of which the mind is so much horrified, when the heart bows to the merit of those noble efforts with which his faithful Hero so laboriously served the Prince, for the Fatherland, and for the Faith, now makes himself worthy of a martyr’s crown, who holds up the Empire of Acrep Bassà Primo Vizier as a minority under the now reigning Sultan Mehmed?”Footnote 38
Guidalotto retired to the friary of Mondavio in the province of Pesaro near Urbino in 1659, where he maintained a keen interest in political developments. He continued to work on his manuscript and panorama using drawings he had made in Constantinople. Indeed, the meticulous detail of the portrayal can be attributed to his long sojourn in the city, which had afforded him ample opportunity for firsthand observation. It seems likely that he made his sketches on the spot and painted the panorama only after he returned to Italy.
The manuscript accompanying the panorama is inscribed “Pesaro 1662,” the year in which they were both apparently presented to Pope Alexander VII. It was intended for viewing and the condition of the back side of the panorama suggests that it was indeed once hung for public display. The year 1662 was a critical time in the extended War of Candia. As of 1657, the papal fleet, led by its newly appointed captain general, the Venetian Giovanni Bichi (1613–76), the pope’s nephew, had enjoyed partial success against the Ottomans. At one point he left his fleet in the Dardanelles and went to Rome to convince Alexander that the Venetian troops had achieved a significant victory and to gain further support for the Venetian cause, but came away without having achieved any practical result.
For the next few years the Venetian fleet, under the command of Francesco Morosini, tried and failed to maintain the blockade of the Dardanelles. It was also during this period that Ottoman forces were redirected northward and into an eventual confrontation with the Habsburgs. When the war between France and Spain ended, the Venetians were optimistic about the possibility of receiving increased assistance from the other European powers, which indeed came through volunteers supporting the Venetian cause. This sequence of events encouraged Guidalotto, who called in his manuscript for all of the Christian forces — England, France, the Habsburgs, and the papacy — to join Venice in order to defeat the Ottomans.Footnote 39 Despite this increase in strength, Morosini’s operations in 1660 were a failure. Although the Ottomans were heavily engaged with the Austrians in Hungary and their fleet rarely set forth, the Venetians failed to make use of this opportunity, and apart from the interception of a supply convoy from Alexandria off Kos in 1662, there was little action.Footnote 40
Niccolò Guidalotto’s appeal was directed to both Pope Alexander VII and Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I of Austria in the hope that they would unite against the Ottomans at a critical moment of the conflict. Despite increased aid from other Christian nations, by the 1660s war-weariness had set in in Venice. The Ottomans, on the other hand, having managed to sustain their forces on Crete, launched a final great expedition in 1666 under the direct supervision of the grand vizier. This began the final and bloodiest stage of the Siege of Candia, which lasted for more than two years and ended in an Ottoman victory.Footnote 41
Guidalotto produced his panorama at the beginning of this final stage of the conflict. The only extant external evidence of its existence is a brief entry in Pope Alexander VII’s art diary for October 1662. Among the list of presentations, acquisitions, and commissions for his New Rome, there is a record of “Il Constantinopoli in quadro grande a penna di quell frate” (“Constantinople in a large painting by the pen of that friar”).Footnote 42 This almost certainly refers to the panorama, and Pope Alexander’s diary entry describing Guidalotto as “that friar” suggests that he had some knowledge of Guidalotto. It is not clear whether Alexander commissioned the panorama or, as is probably more likely, that he was simply a grateful recipient. In his manuscript Guidalotto wrote: “The work was already completed, after such an extended effort, and brought into view, on 4 October 1661.”Footnote 43 There is no further surviving evidence regarding the patronage of this work. It is hard to determine whether it was a personal initiative on the part of Guidalotto, a task conferred on him by the Franciscan order, a request by the Venetian government, or a commission from the pope. Until further documentation is found, one can only speculate. The note in Pope Alexander’s diary suggests that the panorama made an impression on the pope, yet subsequent events show that it did not bring about the practical result that the artist-author Guidalotto had hoped for.
3. Word and Image: Panorama and Text
The manuscript, entitled Parafrasi di Opera a Penna Rappresentante in Dissegno un Prospetto dell’Imperiale Città di Constantinopoli, is held in the Chigi archive in the Vatican Library. Dated “Pesaro 1662” it is a large volume comprising seventy folios, written in Italian and replete with Latin quotations from scripture. The text moves between a comprehensive description of the panorama and a complex theological discussion. Some parts of the text appear as explanatory instructions regarding the plan of the painting. Others are highly rhetorical, prophetic in nature, and convey theological arguments and apocalyptic messages. The text alternates between technical descriptions of the figures peopling the panorama, explanations of its allegories, and Scholastic sermons based on biblical citations. In the opening paragraph of the manuscript Guidalotto presents himself as a theologian. The work is indeed a theological treatise, but one filled with practical information regarding the panorama as well as with political and historical references.Footnote 44
The first twenty folios of the manuscript expand upon and interpret the imagery in Guidalotto’s panorama of Constantinople. It opens with an appeal to Pope Alexander VII, which includes a description of the dedication plate that appears on the panorama itself in the center of the upper frieze. Guidalotto declares that he is bringing to the pope’s attention the great city view of Constantinople, which he called the “Babilonie dei nostri tempi” (“Babylon of our times”), thus alluding to the corrupted and decayed nature of the city. He then turns to the conquest of Constantinople and to the early history of the city in the age of Byzantium. The language has scattered apocalyptic references, with Constantinople defined as “Filia Babylonis Misera” (“O Daughter of Babylon, Who Art to Be Destroyed”).Footnote 45 As Guidalotto never tires of stating again and again throughout the manuscript, the Ottomans transformed the city of Constantine from the New Rome into the New Babylon: this claim carried the implication that the city of Constantinople was damned and would be destroyed.Footnote 46 The only question was who ought to carry out this divine mission. Guidalotto’s political message, clearly stated at the beginning of the work, was that Pope Alexander should deploy all the religious and military might at his disposal, coupled with the temporal might of Emperor Leopold I, in the fight against the Turks. Inscribed on the lefthand side of the panorama is the year “1645,” a clear reference to the start of the Turkish offensive against Crete.
The manuscript then moves on to a detailed description of the figures arranged on the upper frieze. Guidalotto proceeds from figure to figure, providing an explanation and interpretation of each together with the relevant lines of scripture.Footnote 47 The figures include allegories of the Christian virtues of Justice, Strength, Faith, Charity, Love of God, and Prudence, figures symbolizing Italy, victorious Rome crowned with a laurel, and so on. He frequently pictures the Christian virtues as mythological figures, for example, Perseverance in prayer imaged as Mercury with his hands cut off, or Fortitude imaged as two soldiers locked in each other’s arms above a shield showing Hercules killing the hydra.Footnote 48
Guidalotto occasionally intersperses his theological explanations with concrete historical references to the grand achievements of the pope and the emperor. For example, “As a hieroglyph of Magnanimity is a woman with a scepter and a horn of plenty filled with money; she is above the shield in which are the arcades they are now building in the Vatican square.”Footnote 49 Here Guidalotto was alluding to, and was probably intending to glorify, the extensive building projects done in Rome under the patronage of Pope Alexander VII. Guidalotto closes his description of the frieze with the note that it was completed “when the two royal infants were born like two suns into the world,” and follows that reference to the birth of Emperor Leopold I’s heirs with a hymn of praise for this happy event.Footnote 50
The panorama is set within an elaborate allegorical border decorated with the pope’s Chigi emblems and dominated by the symbol of the Church Militant. The descriptions of Alexander and Leopold as “ecclesiae telamones” (“pillars of the Church”) would appear to come from the book of Revelations: “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar.” These allusions to the pillars of Solomon’s Temple were used repeatedly by Renaissance rulers as personal emblems denoting strength. It might have been a graceful likening of Alexander and Leopold to the great emperor Charles V, the scourge of the Turks, whose emblem imaged the twin pillars of the temple. The vignettes of the seven Eastern churches are shown in the sky above Constantinople and are described in the manuscript. Guidalotto used Pope Alexander’s Chigi family emblems, the mountain and the star, to form a border that was also gilded with the Chigi oak leaf. There are references to Siena, the Chigi family’s city of origin (and still heavily favored by the pope), and depictions of the Austrian eagle in a complimentary iconography demonstrating the virtues of the Holy Roman emperor. In a final tribute Guidalotto placed medallion portraits of the pope and the emperor in the corners of the panorama (fig. 8).Footnote 51
Figure 8. Niccolò Guidalotto da Mondavio. A Panorama of Constantinople, 1662. Detail: portrait medallions.
In the manuscript, Guidalotto describes the Austrian eagle holding a flayed hydra as a representation of the Ottoman Empire, its seven heads devouring one another: “Underneath her she holds imprisoned a lioness, a bear, and a leopard, representing the heads of the Assyrian monarchy: Medes, Persians, Greeks” (fig. 9).Footnote 52 Here Guidalotto expands on the prophecy of Daniel, which served as a central theme of his treatise.Footnote 53 The myth of the four kingdoms based around the prophecy in Daniel 2:29–45 were recurring motifs in the apocalyptic thought of the period. The four monarchies, Babylonian-Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman, were to be succeeded by the ultimate Kingdom of God on Earth, which in Guidalotto’s view was the Venetian Republic.Footnote 54
Figure 9. Niccolò Guidalotto da Mondavio. A Panorama of Constantinople, 1662. Detail: eagle gripping hydra.
From the sixteenth century, various apocalyptic prophecies about a universal empire ushering in the Second Coming of Christ cast the Venetian Republic as that coming empire. This underscored the contrasting vision of the Ottomans as the Antichrist. Prophecies predicting the defeat of the Ottomans and the victory of the Christians led by the Republic of Venice were promulgated in numerous Venetian pamphlets, treatises, sermons, and orations. Publications such as the anonymous Pronosticatione in vulgare (1511); the treatises of Paolo Angelo, a refugee from Albania who wrote against the Turks; and De eversione Europae (1534–44), by Antonio Arquato, predicted the coming Ottoman defeat.Footnote 55
By the end of the sixteenth century, following the Christian victory in Lepanto, there was a flood of optimistic predictions foretelling the coming victory of Venice, for example, the Discorso della futura et sperata vittoria contra il Turcho by Giovanni Battista Nazari, which was rich with citations from Old Testament prophets, full of astrological calculations, and also included an oration by Luigi Grotto and the popular treatise Pronostico et giudicio universale del presente anno 1572.Footnote 56 There was a renewed wave of prophetic treatises regarding the Ottomans following the 1645 Turkish invasion of Crete. During the War of Candia, the prophecies of the influential mystic Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202) gained renewed popularity in Venice, with authors and editors adding interpretations that named the Venetians as the powers of salvation and the Ottomans as the cursed infidels within the familiar eschatological messages.Footnote 57 This prophetic anticipation was the basis for Guidalotto’s eschatological expectations, and his work was part of the rich literary-prophetic output in Venice during the War of Candia.
Guidalotto explicitly interpreted the images on the panorama — the eagle and the hydra and the surrounding angels and tritons — as the prevailing political powers of the Austrian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Venice, and the papacy. The manuscript cites the quotations found on the scrolls held by the tritons and angels in full.Footnote 58 Here Guidalotto invests the discussion with explicit historical references and emphasizes the weak and corrupt nature of the Ottomans in order to encourage the pope to help the Venetians. A negative evaluation of the Ottomans is emphasized and their total separation from the worthy Venetians is clear. He claims that the Ottomans’ weakness at sea was due to the inferior quality of their ships and because they had no slaves, but had recruited Asian peoples instead as sailors. Against so weak an enemy, the Christian powers, and especially the celebrated Venetian fleet, had an excellent chance of victory. Guidalotto reinforces this section of propaganda and practical advice with numerous theological references cited from the prophets that predict the triumphs of the righteous (the Venetians) and the defeat of the evil (the Ottomans).Footnote 59
Guidalotto then turns back to describing the composition of the panorama. Its sea and sky are filled with allegorical vignettes and emblems, and at the center of it all is God the Father and the archangel Michael (fig. 10). Two central figures, Saint Peter and Saint Paul, dominate the upper part of the painting under the archangel Michael. The discussion of these figures is filled with theological references and prayers, as well as citations from scripture.Footnote 60 Guidalotto explains in his text that Saint Peter offers the infidels the opportunity of peaceful conversion, noting that while the archangel Michael uses the sword, Saint Peter uses the book.Footnote 61 Returning to the political discussion, Guidalotto reminds his readers that “Christianity ever again penetrated as far as the Dardanelles with armies, targeting them with cannons and lining them up under siege for whole months, each year during the course of seventeen campaigns.” He predicted: “Happy victories will follow also to the Glory of God, and the well-being of his Holy Church… . [T]he most holy Alexander will receive answers to his prayers from God: he will carry them out through his works, and he will sing giving thanks to the Divine Majesty and praising all the Princes of Christianity, Amen… . The princes in the League are always victorious and ‘Ibraimo (the Turkish sultan), frantic with his desire to have the Kingdom of Candia, brought about his own ruin, and that of the Empire.’”Footnote 62
Figure 10. Niccolò Guidalotto da Mondavio. A Panorama of Constantinople, 1662. Detail: archangel Michael and God.
In the second part of his manuscript Guidalotto moves from a description of the panorama to a theological oration offering visions of Christian victory and Ottoman defeat.Footnote 63 He excoriates the Ottomans for their corruption and glorifies the coming triumph of the Christian powers. The discussion is infused with references to the books of Daniel and the Apocalypse, focused explicitly against the cosmic evil represented by Islam: “The Omnipotent will light his voracious flames, will incinerate, will consume, and will annihilate Mohammedanism, follower of the impiety of the Antichrist, and of the ancient Satan… . You happily will ruin the proud Colossus of Mohammedanism: you will burn their false volumes, hack off the hostile heads … and burn with fire the life of this hydra.”Footnote 64 He goes beyond rhetoric to stress the logistics, declaring that it would take 100 vessels to overcome the Turks.Footnote 65
The manuscript and the panorama abound with apocalyptic images. The language of the former, fierce and forceful, is filled with curses against the Ottomans and calls to annihilate them. Citations from scripture reinforce Guidalotto’s eschatological sermon depicting the End of Days and the coming victory of Christianity.Footnote 66 Particular details of the panorama further illustrate this theological prophecy. In the middle of the sea, a double-headed Austrian eagle grips in his talons the nine-headed hydra of the Ottoman Empire, and is torn open to reveal a lion, a leopard, and a bear. This, with the surrounding apocalyptic imagery, reflects Guidalotto’s vision of a New Babylon ripe for destruction. The quotations appearing in both the panorama and the manuscript are taken from the books of Daniel, Jeremiah, and Isaiah, and especially from the book of Revelations of Saint John (the Apocalypse). Guidalotto uses the panorama and manuscript, replete with apocalyptic texts and imagery presenting the Turk as a predator, to show that the Church Militant represented by archangel Michael could win a righteous victory. His aim when donating them to Pope Alexander VII in 1662 was, above all, to persuade the pope to act.Footnote 67
4. Early Modern City Views
Whatever its propagandistic purposes, the panorama was also an artistic object that shows that Guidalotto was familiar with recent developments in the city-view genre. The skyline of Constantinople extends across the central part of the panorama, revealing his firm grounding in medieval and Renaissance cartographic traditions, particularly as they had been developed in Venice. The city was a leading center of geographical knowledge from the middle of the sixteenth century. Giovanni Battista Ramusion compiled an important collection of travel accounts; Giacomo Gastaldi Piemontese painted maps for the doge’s palace between 1550 and 1553; and Michele Membré produced a map of Asia in the 1550s. Painted wall maps and manuscript charts served a symbolic and practical function for the Venetian state and were often displayed as a decoration for the Palazzo Ducale. Various types of maps were developed in Venice, including the portolan for merchants and sailors, mappamundi, atlases, and cityscapes. There was actually a fruitful exchange between the Ottoman court and Venice in the early 1550s, when Venice was asked to provide world maps for Ottoman princes.Footnote 68
Guidalotto would almost certainly have known of Barbari’s large and accurate woodcut map of Venice (fig. 11), dated to 1500, done in a bird’s-eye view, which is a supreme example of accuracy and perspective resulting in remarkable fidelity to the city. It is more than likely that he was inspired by the complexity and technical mastery of this celebrated piece.Footnote 69 Given its dimensions and age, Guidalotto’s Constantinople panorama has survived in good condition. It remains a remarkable artistic feat, drawing the viewer’s gaze first to the city itself and then to the surrounding iconography. Guidalotto noted in his manuscript that his was not the first comprehensive depiction of Constantinople. An earlier view by the Venetian cartographer Giovanni Andreas di Vavassore done in the 1530s, a bird’s-eye view of Constantinople, was probably based on a source from 1480 (fig. 12). Vavassore’s woodcut provided the model for all the later maps of the city printed in the sixteenth century, including the revised 1550 edition of Sebastian Munster’s Cosmographia and Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg’s great city atlas Civitates Orbis Terrarum (1572), which contains 546 bird’s-eye views, prospects, and maps of cities of the known world. The engraving of Constantinople in the atlas is an idealized bird’s-eye view and, given the similarity, is almost certainly based on the earlier Vavassore view.Footnote 70
Figure 11. Jacopo Barbari. Panorama of Venice, 1500. Woodcut, 135 x 282 cm. Courtesy of Museo Civico Correr, Venice.
Figure 12. Giovanni Andreas di Vavassore. Byzantivm sive Costantineopolis, 1535. Houghton Library, 51-2570, Harvard University.
The images of Braun and Hogenberg were reproduced extensively into the eighteenth century. Another image of Constantinople done in the fifteenth century, which appears in Hartmann Schedel’s Liber Chronicarum (1493), includes a double-page bird’s-eye perspective of the city viewed from across the Bosphorus.Footnote 71 An unusual sequence of manuscript maps of Constantinople that accompanies Christopher Buondelmonti’s Liber Insularum Archipelagi provides another insight into the ways this city was viewed and represented in Western Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. According to Ian Manners, the maps present a careful rendering of the city’s topography and features, emphasizing the Christian character of the city and presenting it as a contested territory between the Christian powers and the Ottomans.Footnote 72 Guidalotto’s panorama also represents an attempt to achieve accuracy and attention to detail along with an emphasis on particular monuments that highlight the Christian history of the city.
An important depiction of Constantinople resembling Guidalotto’s in its accuracy and sheer size is the panorama by Melchior Lorichs noted earlier. Dated to the mid-sixteenth-century reign of Suleiman the Magnificent (1494–1566, r. 1520–66), it is held in the Leiden University Library (fig. 13). Even though this work was never printed, it was nevertheless accessible and quite popular among the educated elite of early modern Europe. In attention to detail and realism, the 11.45-meter-long and 45-centimeter-high drawing transcends earlier depictions of the city. It features Constantinople along its northern shore fronting the Golden Horn and shows Ottoman and Byzantine monuments in detail. An artistically trained nobleman, Melchior Lorichs of Flensberg (1526–83) was a member of the Holy Roman Empire’s entourage to the court of Suleiman. He published several treatises on the Turkish army, as well as detailed studies of the architecture and the people. From the perspective of the high ground of Galata, Lorichs created a vast panorama of Constantinople, showing the city skyline with inscriptions labeling the points of interest.Footnote 73
Figure 13. Melchior Lorichs. Byzantium sive Constantineopolis, 1559. Leiden University Library (PK-P-BPL 1758/11).
The monuments and the landscape depicted by Lorichs are impressive in their accuracy. The way he labeled each building is further proof of his empirical study of the city. Among the more prominent buildings, it is possible to note Suleiman’s imperial mosque, Hagia Sophia; the Church of St. Irene; and the sultan’s new palace at Topkapi. There are also some fantastic structures, such as Egyptian pyramids and Mesopotamian ziggurats.Footnote 74 Guidalotto’s panorama is similar to that of Lorichs in its scale and in the inclusion of captions with the monuments. It is also similar in the mix of realistic representation and fantastic and decorative elements. However, in Guidalotto’s image the city view accounts for only a relatively small part of a more complex, baroque work of art, and in this it differs from Lorichs’s example, where the cityscape is the focus of attention.
Apart from the European examples, Guidalotto’s cartographic methods were influenced by the Ottoman tradition of depicting the city of Istanbul. As early as the fifteenth century, Ottoman geographers developed a distinct tradition of their own in charting urban views, and an increasing number of cartographic depictions and narratives concerning regions in the Ottoman Empire appeared between 1453 and 1730. The celebrated world map that Piri Reis (1465–1555) presented to Selim I (1465–1520, r. 1512–20) in 1517 is an excellent early example of intellectual exchange between Ottoman and European geographers in the Mediterranean. Military conflict over control of the Mediterranean area in the early sixteenth century spurred production of the earliest Ottoman cartographic literature, and the creation of mappamundi, charts, and portolan atlases coincided with the long-drawn-out Ottoman conquest of Cyprus. This cartographical output bespeaks a growing intellectual curiosity about the Mediterranean among the Turks, as well as an interest in maps as aesthetic objects among the Ottoman ruling elite.Footnote 75
Their elaborate and colorful ornamentation and detailed depictions of such cities as Genoa, Venice, and Constantinople suggest that the Ottomans enjoyed the European art of mapmaking. As Manners has noted, the Ottomans were active participants in the intellectual current of the early modern period as commissioners, cartographers, and audience.Footnote 76 A later copy of the Piri Reis map, which appeared in the Kitab-i-bahrìye (The Book of the City), dated to 1670, adds the Yeni Cami Mosque, which was completed in 1665, to the depiction. Here the city is shown surrounded by walls, and the two walls that encompass the Topkapi Palace and the Yedikule Fortress, occupying two corners of the triangular-shaped metropolis, are the most visible features of the plan. There are representations of two Byzantine landmarks, now in ruins: the column of Arcadius in the city center and the Tekfur Sarai near the walls. The city’s shorelines and the islands in the Bosphorus with a group of sailing ships are also depicted. It is noteworthy that this example, created about the same time as Guidalotto’s panorama, was probably painted from the same point of reference, which indicates the importance of this particular spot for charting the view of the city.Footnote 77
It is worthwhile to try to define what city these different artists saw. Ottoman examples from the later sixteenth century represent Constantinople in largely naturalistic terms. Memories of Byzantium had faded and the Ottoman monuments became the focal point. Panoramic views drawn from Galata grew in popularity together with the development of the city’s monuments and feature a multiplicity of domes and minarets. Matrakci Nasuh’s view of the Ottoman capital (1537) highlights its dynastic and Islamic identity, whereas in Piri Reis’s panorama (1513), the city’s Byzantine history is ignored almost completely. Hagia Sophia, the Hippodrome, and the city walls are the only visible remnants of Byzantium, whereas the city’s Islamic identity is portrayed prominently. In the course of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman cartographic image of Constantinople was transformed to affirm a newly defined Ottoman identity. By contrast, Guidalotto’s panorama represents a Christian response to this Islamic focus by stressing the Byzantine heritage of the city.Footnote 78
Who actually completed Guidalotto’s panorama remains an open question. An enigmatic figure with a sketchpad occupies the lower lefthand side in front of the cityscape, next to the allegorical border: many contemporary city views include similar figures, which are often taken to represent the artist (fig. 14). Melchior Lorichs placed a similar figure in the center of his panorama, depicting himself as a well-dressed youthful European in a dark costume, seen from the back, who is preparing to draw while a Turkish assistant stands by his side.Footnote 79 In his manuscript, Guidalotto notes that he drew the panorama from the vantage point of Galata on the Christian bank and that he chose this of three possible views because it was the safest. Had he made his drawings at sea (possibly the best option), he might have drowned. Had he gone to the Asian bank, he might have risked being taken for a spy. So he placed himself in a good position on the European shore from where, using his rough pen, he could design the panorama to be similar in all its parts and without danger from the Muslims.Footnote 80 By including his own image in the panorama and offering this detailed explanation of his choice of vantage point, Guidalotto emphasizes that it was the product of his own meticulous eyewitness observations.Footnote 81 His inclusion of a self-portrait is thus reminiscent of the idealized self-portrait Melchior Lorichs placed in the center of his painting.Footnote 82
Figure 14. Niccolò Guidalotto da Mondavio. A Panorama of Constantinople, 1662. Detail: self-portrait.
Vatican records regarding the Guidalotto panorama suggest that the painter might have employed a scribe to write the description of the panorama or an artist to draw it. Yet in his manuscript Guidalotto claims unambiguously that he executed the work himself, noting that “my unskilled pen and my rough chisel have done the project.”Footnote 83 Technical examination indicates that the same ink was used for the cityscape and the surrounding drawings. Guidalotto was clearly the author as far as conception and planning were concerned, and by his own statement and the inclusion of a self-portrait might well have been responsible for its execution.Footnote 84
Guidalotto’s captions define the major landscape features and the central monuments. The title of the panorama is La Vista del Porto di Constantinopli. He marked the European side on the panorama as “Riviera di Galata,” subsequently “Riviera di Vigna di Pera” and then “Riviera di Arsenale,” with an emphasis on the location of the Venetian embassy and other foreign embassies in the city. The Monti di Bursa, the mountains of Bursa, were identified. At the far end of his drawing, he included the Eyüp Sultan Camii (Eyüp Sultan Mosque), in the district of Eyüp on the European side of the city, outside the city walls near the Golden Horn. Built in 1458, it was the first mosque constructed by the Ottomans following their conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The mosque rises next to the place where Aby Ayyub al-Ansari (Eyüp Sultan), the standard-bearer of Muhammad, is said to have been buried during the Arab assault on the city in 670. His tomb is venerated by Muslims and attracts many pilgrims.Footnote 85
Within the painted city view, Guidalotto gives an accurate caption and precise location for each major monument. His depictions of neighborhoods, markets, mosques, and palaces include the layout of narrow, winding streets; a skyline dominated by domes and minarets; imperial mosques; and small crowded houses that line the Golden Horn from the palace to the city walls. In terms of topographical accuracy and as a record of mid-seventeenth-century Constantinople, one of the criteria for determining the panorama’s authenticity would be whether it includes the Valide Mosque on the Golden Horn. Begun by Valide Safiye Sultan in 1597, work on the mosque was suspended on her death in 1603 and it was only completed by Valide Turhan Sultan in 1663. Moreover, the partially built structure was damaged by fire in 1660. Guidalotto’s panorama does indeed depict a structure whose position and the adjacent market seem to correspond to the unfinished mosque. One must therefore believe Guidalotto when he says that he sketched this view of Constantinople before he left the city, probably sometime between 1650 and 1652, but certainly before his departure in 1655, when the mosque was standing in its abandoned state but prior to the fire.Footnote 86
The monuments that Guidalotto chose to single out and emphasize in his captions are those belonging to the city’s Byzantine history. One can discern a major emphasis on Hagia Sophia, marked by its Latin name, Sancta Sophia. In 1453, Sultan Mehmed II ordered the building converted into a mosque. The bells, altar, iconostasis, and sacrificial vessels were removed, many of the mosaics were plastered over, and Islamic features, such as the four minarets, were added. Guidalotto depicted the building in its new state as a mosque yet called it by its Latin name, designating it as a church. Other Byzantine structures imaged by Guidalotto are the aqueduct of Valens, which appears between the Hippodrome and Mehmed II’s complex, and the column of Theodosius, indicating the ancient forum of the city, which was part of Mehmed II’s Old Palace. Guidalotto included the palace and its principal outer buildings and gardens, but did not mark it as an Ottoman structure, identifying it rather by the ancient ruin of the column.Footnote 87 He described the Topkapi Palace, constructed on the site of the ancient acropolis of Byzantium, as “Il Seraglio Byzantium” (“the Byzantine Palace”), with no mention of the new palace of Mehmed II.Footnote 88 Omitting any reference to the Topkapi Palace is in striking contrast to Ottoman examples such as Piri Reis’s map discussed above, which placed particular emphasis on the Topkapi Palace as the seat of government and as a symbol of Ottoman rule.
Guidalotto’s panorama does include three principal mosques: the Süleymaniye Camii, the second largest mosque in the city, located on its third hill, which was built on the order of Suleiman the Magnificent between 1550 and 1558; the Sultanahmet Camii (the Sultan Ahmed Mosque), popularly known as the Blue Mosque for the blue tiles adorning the walls of its interior, built from 1609 to 1616, during the reign of Ahmed I (1590–1617, r. 1603–17); and Beyazit Camii (Bayezid II Mosque), located near the ruins of the Forum of Theodosius.Footnote 89
The panorama works on two levels. First, it provides an accurate topographic depiction of Constantinople from the vantage point of Galata. Second, it offers a symbolic depiction of the city as a lost Christian capital, with a didactic focusing of attention on the city’s Christian heritage. By underscoring the Byzantine tradition of the city, Guidalotto followed the examples of earlier Italian depictions of the city, such as those by Vavassore and Buondelmonti. The captions identifying the buildings clearly mark all those elements in the urban landscape that were part of the city’s Byzantine past. Guidalotto included the main mosques and palaces but preferred to call them, where possible, by their Latin, Christian names. He did not identify the palaces of the Turkish government, thus ignoring the major seats of the Ottoman power. His city view, then, embodies an accurate portrait of the city and its topography, but uses the captions attached to the monuments to highlight its Byzantine heritage and its Christian legacy.
5. Conclusion
Amanda Wunder has commented on the phenomenon of educated Europeans visiting Constantinople on diplomatic, scholarly, or commercial enterprises in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She notes that they shared a common culture of antiquarianism and that their passion for the antiquities of the East shaped their accounts of Ottoman Constantinople. The traveling antiquarians Augier Ghislain de Busbecq (1522–92), Pierre Gilles (1490–1555), Melchior Lorichs, Pieter Coecke van Aelst (1502–50), and Nicholas de Nicolay (1517–83) produced a diverse range of printed works based on their firsthand experiences in the Ottoman Empire. They used traditional Renaissance genres such as the urban encomium, the city view, historia painting, and the costume book to depict the Turks either as the enemies of antiquities or as exotic objects of study like the relics of the past. Although some of the antiquarian travelers, most notably Lorichs, Coecke, and Nicolay, demonstrated the diversity that could be found among the Turks, the ultimate impact of sixteenth-century antiquarian accounts of the Ottoman Empire, Wunder concludes, was to deepen the Western perception of Eastern difference.Footnote 90
By the sixteenth century an enormous corpus of printed material — prophesies, warnings, sermons — was in circulation, and informed popular opinion about the Turks. As the Ottoman Empire advanced westward from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, humanists responded on a grand scale, leaving behind a large body of fascinating yet understudied works, including Crusade orations and histories; ethnographic, historical, and religious studies of the Turks; epic poetry; and even tracts on converting the Turks to Christianity. Nancy Bisaha and Margaret Meserve, following a pioneering book-length article by James Hankins, offer an in-depth look at Renaissance humanist works focusing on the Ottoman Empire, Islam, and the Crusades. Throughout, these authors probe the texts to reveal the significant role Renaissance writers played in shaping Western views of self and other. Medieval concepts of Islam, in which Muslims were depicted as enemies of the faith, were generally informed and constrained by religious attitudes and rhetoric. Although humanist thinkers of the Renaissance were never able to progress beyond this stance, these works suggest that their understanding of secular and cultural issues was remarkably complex, and marked a watershed between medieval and modern thought. Humanist histories of the Turks were sharply polemical, portraying the Ottomans as a rogue power, but writings on other Muslim polities include some of the first positive appraisals of Muslim statecraft in the European tradition.Footnote 91
Niccolò Guidalotto belonged to a tradition distinct from both the traveling Europeans described by Wunder and the learned humanists studied by Hankins, Bisaha, and Meserve. He was motivated not by an antiquarian pursuit or intellectual inquiry, but by religious fervor and fanatical zeal. He was a Franciscan friar working within a Franciscan context. The panorama and manuscript suggest that he took little from those who had gone before him, whether humanist commentators or antiquarian travelers. One should bear in mind the impact of Guidalotto’s bitter personal experiences in shaping his views, and particularly the injury he suffered when he was led around the city in chains and then banished to Italy. A sense of personal revenge prevails in both the written and visual sources, and became the lens through which he refracted those earlier models that he drew upon. His language and images are reminiscent of Franciscan apocalyptic sermons of such fifteenth-century preachers as Bernardino da Siena, and of the earlier medieval eschatological thought of Joachim of Fiore.Footnote 92 Guidalotto followed this Franciscan tradition and referred explicitly to established apocalyptic images. Moreover, he updated these older models by investing them with contemporary apocalyptic expectations common in Venetian circles, reworking Daniel’s prophecy about Christianity’s victory over the Antichrist such that it became a divinely ordained defeat of the Ottoman demon by the united forces of the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church.
Guidalotto was not an occasional visitor to Constantinople, nor was he a bookish scholar invested in texts. He had been a resident of the city for eight years and a member of the Venetian embassy. He had an intimate knowledge of Constantinople’s cultural and social environment and of its international diplomacy. He was deeply involved in internal and external politics and was committed to the Venetian interests. Guidalotto directed his panorama and manuscript toward achieving practical results. His manuscript is full of political and military evaluations, contending that the Christian powers, the Venetians in particular, are superior to the Ottomans and that the Venetian fleet could defeat the Turks. He appealed over and over again to the Christian powers, the pope and emperor, to England and to France, to send troops to support the Venetian cause. His appeal to the English forces was exceptional since he was calling for the unification of the Christian powers beyond political realities in a utopian sense, prophesying a Christian victory over the Muslim infidels.
Guidalotto’s story is an extreme case. Typically, Venetian delegates were neither imprisoned by the Ottomans nor known for creating exquisite panoramas in response to the Turkish dominion over Constantinople. But an extreme case can often reveal patterns in everyday experience. Guidalotto’s experience can tell us much about Venetian-Ottoman relations at the time and about the use of the visual icon for political ends. His appeal highlights that conflict and animosity were continuing factors in relations between the Ottomans and the Venetians. He was clearly opposed to any kind of dialogue with the Ottomans and preached in favor of open conflict. His story reveals that together with those who crossed the lines between the Ottomans and the Venetians and in effect had a foot in both worlds, as indicated by Dursteler, Rothman, Greene, and others, there remained others like Fra Guidalotto who were perpetuating hatred and animosity and calling for a Crusade rather than peaceful coexistence.
Guidalotto presented his panorama to Pope Alexander VII to encourage him to participate in the Crusade for Crete and to act against Muslim encroachment. He obviously envisaged this work as something magnificent enough to offer his pope. Although the artist-author was clear and blunt in his message of hate, he transmitted it in a sophisticated and enchanting way. He had learned cartographical methods and stylistic techniques — including baroque imagery and complex visual language — from the humanists and even from the Ottoman cartographers. The more one observes this elaborate piece of artwork, the more one is drawn to its visual elements, which totally captivate the imagination. The work stands out not merely for its huge dimensions, but for its wealth of detail and the sheer beauty of its design and execution.
Pope Alexander was a celebrated patron of the arts. He devised a rebuilding program for Rome and surrounded himself with artists and architects (notably Pietro da Cortona and Gian Lorenzo Bernini), mapmakers, and engravers (particularly Giovanni Battista Falda and Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi). Moreover, in Alexander’s Rome many mapmakers were at work recording his additions to the city, and he provided detailed instructions on how to publicize the glories of Rome. More than any of his predecessors, Alexander felt a need to employ art in the service of public relations, both domestic and foreign.Footnote 93 It was against this background that Guidalotto planned and presented his panorama. Alexander would have understood and appreciated the concept of a city view with a message, and indeed, he very likely understood Guidalotto’s particular message. Yet if it is important for us to recognize that crusading messages like Guidalotto’s continued to be sent in the seventeenth century, it is equally important to remember that powerful and influential recipients like the pope failed to respond. Although he might have valued the panorama’s artistic and topographic excellence, the pope, who was in a delicate political situation, declined to follow the friar’s fantastical plan in an age of diplomacy. Guidalotto’s effort to merge visual and written propaganda in the panorama and accompanying manuscript was unsuccessful, and his call remained unheeded. As a result, Guidalotto’s panorama, a symbol of medieval apocalyptic expectations transmitted through an early modern scientific and artistic medium, shows an unfulfilled dream that adds another layer to the complexity of Italian-Ottoman dynamics in the early modern world.
