Gentile in Red
Author(s): David Young Kim
Source: I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance , Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 157-192
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Villa I Tatti, The Harvard
Center for Italian Renaissance Studies
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IS L A M A N D T H E ME D ITE R RA N EA N W O R L D
Gentile in Red
David Young Kim, University of Pennsylvania
AMONG THE MANY AND FAR-REACHING voyages undertaken by Italian
Renaissance artists, the sojourn of Gentile Bellini at the Ottoman court in 1479–
81 surely counts among the most fascinating. The events leading to the Venetian
artist’s journey to Istanbul are well known: after more than a decade of conflict in
the Adriatic and Aegean with the Ottomans, the Venetian Republic dispatched
their emissary Giovanni Dario to Constantinople to broker a peace treaty. In
March 1479, the Venetian Senate approved a treaty with Sultan Mehmet II that
professed a renewed friendship and peace “with the villages, fortresses, islands,
and lands that raise the sign of San Marco.”1
One month later, on April 27, the
Ottoman ambassador was received in Venice, and on August 1 a request from Sultan
Mehmet II for a painter was announced to the Senate. This important undertaking
was bestowed on Gentile Bellini, or, as Sanudo referred to him transcribing
the intonation of Venetian dialect, “Zentil belin optimo pytor,” then occupied
with executing a cycle of paintings for the Great Council Hall.2
In September 1479,
Contact David Young Kim at Jaffe History of Art Building, 3405 Woodland Walk, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104 (davik@sas.upenn.edu).
The exhibition Bellini and the East (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, National Gallery, London,
2004–5) provided the initial impetus for the conception of this essay. I am grateful to the curators of
the exhibition, Alan Chong and Caroline Campbell, for including me in the research and planning of
that landmark exhibition. For their comments and suggestions, I would like to thank Ivan Drpić, Eric
Dursteler, Holly Hurlburt, Timothy McCall, Gülru Necipoğlu, Elizabeth Rodini, Jane Tylus, Alberto
Saviello, Rossitza Schroeder, Lydia Spielberg, Hugo van der Velden, Diana Wright, and the two anonymous
reviewers. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
1. Stipulations for the renewed friendship between the two great Mediterranean powers included
the republic’s payment of an annual tribute of 10,000 ducats to the Ottomans to secure the position of
the Venetian bailo in Constantinople and a further 100,000 ducats to settle outstanding debts, as well
as the surrender of the Albanian fortress of Skodra, the island of Lemnos, and fortresses and lands in the
Morea. See Franz Miklosich and Joseph Müller, eds., Acta et diplomata graeca medii aevi sacra et profana
(Vienna, 1860–90), 3:295–98. For the translation and commentary on the terms and place names in the
treaty, see Diana Gilliland Wright’s meticulous analysis of the text, “Mehmed II Confirms Peace between
the Ottomans and Venice: Text and Translation,” http://nauplion.net/1478-Peace.pdf.
2. Jürg Meyer zur Capellen, Gentile Bellini (Stuttgart, 1985), doc. 14a, 109.
I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 18, number 1. © 2015 by Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University
Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. All rights reserved. 0393-5949/2015/1801-0007$10.00
157
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Gentile, in the company of two assistants, boarded a galley captained by Melchior
Trevisan and departed for Istanbul.3
The corpus of extant work associated with the
artist’s experience of the Ottoman world includes the famed portrait of Mehmet II
(fig. 1); the so-called Gardner scribe; drawings, most likely preparatory, after ethnographic
types that include annotations for coloring in Venetian dialect; and a series
of portrait medals.4
Aside from the visual import of the works themselves, the event of Gentile’s
travel has regularly received attention over the centuries, albeit colored at times
by an orientalist imagination of a Western artist venturing eastward. On the occasion
of an exhibition at the Brera in 1834, for instance, the Milanese painter
Francesco Hayez, in a gloss on a seventeenth-century anecdote, painted the horrifying
scene of the sultan ordering the decapitation of a slave’s head for Gentile’s
benefit to serve as a realistic model for a depiction of St. John the Baptist.5
Less
fanciful and more engaged with the tradition of documentary reportage is the
literary historian Louis Thuasne’s Gentile Bellini et Sultan Mohammed II. Thuasne
brought to light the historian Giovanni Maria Angiolello’s description of Gentile’s
stay at the Ottoman court in the Historia turchesca (ca. 1482), an account
Thuasne characterized as “particularly interesting for the study of the events
contemporary to the author who knew how to relate them with impartiality.”6
Modern scholars, such as Franz Babinger, Jürg Meyer zur Capellen, and Julian
Raby have refined our knowledge of the historical context of Gentile’s travel, and
a number of publications appeared concurrent to the exhibitions Bellini and the
East (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, National Gallery, London) and Venice
and the Orient (Metropolitan Museum of Art, L’Institut du Monde Arabe). The
present-day increasing concern with the Islamic world and the more general topic
3. Ibid., doc. 17, 110.
4. See Elizabeth Rodini, “The Sultan’s True Face? Gentile Bellini, Mehmet II, and the Values of
Verisimilitude,” in The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750: Visual Imagery before Orientalism,
ed. James G. Harper (Aldershot, 2011), 21–40; Julian Raby, “Opening Gambits,” in The Sultan’s
Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman, ed. Selmin Kangal (Istanbul, 2000), 64–71, 80–81. For further
references in museum publications, see n. 7.
5. For a contemporary account of the exhibition, see Ignazio Fumagalli, “Esposizione degli oggetti
di Belle Arti nell’I. R. Palazzo di Brera,” Biblioteca italiana, ossia giornale di letteratura, scienze ed arte
75 (1834): 312–17. On the Hayez painting and its relation to seventeenth-century Venetian biographies
of Gentile Bellini, see Fernando Mazzocca, Francesco Hayez: Catalogo ragionato (Milan, 1994),
236–37; David Young Kim, “The Horror of Mimesis,” Oxford Art Journal 34 (2011): 335–36.
6. Notably, Angiolello’s prose is compared with the characteristics of Venetian relazioni. Louis
Thuasne, Gentile Bellini et Sultan Mohammed II: Notes sur le séjour du peintre vénitien à Constantinople
(Paris, 1888), vi.
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Figure 1. Attributed to Gentile Bellini, Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II, 1480. Oil on canvas, perhaps
transferred from wood; 69.9 × 52.1 cm. (National Gallery, London, Layard Bequest, 1916 (NG3099);
© National Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York.) Color version available as an online enhance-
ment.
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of transcultural exchange has only accentuated interest in Gentile’s career, so
much so that the portrait of Mehmet II has become a touchstone for East-West
relations in exhibitions, press, and the theater.7
Scholarly inquiry has understandably focused on the circumstances bringing
together the seemingly incongruous pair of Ottoman patron and Italian Renaissance
artist, this despite the fact that Leonardo and Michelangelo, among others,
reportedly received sultanic commissions.8
In this essay, however, I intend to displace
the usual focus of attention away from Gentile’s occupation in Istanbul
and examine instead the Venetian reception of his voyage. How did the artist’s
contemporaries understand the significance of his travel? What kinds of behavior—artistic
practice, participation at the Ottoman court, membership in the Venetian
ambassadorial entourage—elicited commentary? How did Gentile himself
fashion his time abroad upon returning to his native place? Such questions are
worth asking due to premises that often underlie interpretations of Gentile’s
time abroad as a court artist. Specifically, these assumptions concern the audience
and motivations guiding Gentile’s realistic style in portraiture. It is taken
for granted that Gentile received and was permitted to retain the privileges and
knighthood conferred by Mehmet II due to the artist’s skill in fulfilling the sultan’s
request for, as the fifteenth-century Venetian observer Domenico Malipiero
put it, “a good painter who knows how to make portraits.”9
Or as Giorgio Vasari
declared in his biography of the Bellini family published in the Lives, Gentile’s
portrait of Mehmet II di naturale appeared to the sultan “more miracle than
art,” and upon taking leave from the Ottoman court, the artist received “infinite
7. Exhibition publications that have featured the Bellini portrait include Caroline Campbell and Alan
Chong, eds., Bellini and the East (London, 2005), 78–79; Trinita Kennedy, “Gentile Bellini (1429–1507)
Portrait of Sultan Mehmet II,” in Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797, ed. Stefano Carboni (New
York, 2007), 303. On the attributions to Bellini proposed by exhibitions, see Jürg Meyer zur Capellen,
review of Bellini and the East, ed. Caroline Campbell and Alan Chong, Kunstchronik 60 (2007): 124–30,
Miles Unger, “Hi, Venice? It’s Istanbul. Can You Send a Painter?” New York Times, December 11, 2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/arts/design/11unge.html, Heather Lee Rogers, review of Bellini and
the Sultan: A Comedy in Istanbul, written and directed by Ed Stevens, Robert Moss Theater, New York,
August 13, 2013, http://www.nytheatre.com/Review/heather-lee-rogers-8132013-bellini-and-th. On the
display of the portrait in Istanbul upon Turkey’s acceptance for admission to the European Union, see
Rodini, “The Sultan’s True Face?” 35.
8. Franz Babinger, “Vier Bauvorschläge Leonardo da Vinci’s an Sultan Bajezid II (1502/3),”
Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften (Phil.-hist. Kl) Göttingen 1 (1952): 1–13. On the Ottoman
patronage of these artists for engineering projects, see Gülru Necipoğlu, “Süleyman the Magnificent and
the Representation of Power in the Context of Ottoman-Hapsburg-Papal Rivalry,” Art Bulletin 71
(1989): 424–25.
9. Meyer zur Capellen, Gentile Bellini, doc. 14a, 109: “El Signor Turco recerca la Signoria per so
letter, presentade da un zudio vegnudo a posta, che la ghe mandi un bon depentor che sapia retrazer:
e per gratificarlo è stà pagà la spese del viazo.”
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praise” for the works executed in the sultan’s service.10
Writ large, such statements
participate in a larger body of early modern discourse that would appreciate
naturalistic and lively portraiture not merely for its faithful rendition of a
sitter. The court artist demonstrates ingenium, or acute intellectual skill, a quality
setting the manual act of painting apart from craft and equating it instead
with a humanist pursuit of studying and representing nature.11
This line of thinking necessarily restricts the reception of Gentile’s work in
Istanbul to reports gauging the response of his primary patron there, Sultan
Mehmet II, all too often likened exclusively to a patron fashioning himself after
Western aristocratic commissioners of art. This perspective is in and of itself a
matter of concern, given that it supports the long-standing notion, perpetuated
by Vasari and Lodovico Dolce, among others, that Ottoman and Islamic viewers
had primitive standards for artistic taste and were all too easily awed, even overwhelmed,
by the performance of naturalistic depiction.12
Scholars such as Gülru
Necipoğlu, Julian Raby, and Emine Fetvaci have made notable contributions to
the field by exploring the reception of the Bellini portrait in Ottoman histories,
imperial genealogies, and physiognomic treatises.13
And as Elizabeth Rodini has
claimed, Gentile’s naturalistic style itself was complex, depending as it was on the
expectations of the portrait’s audiences and maker: for Mehmet II, the portrait
may have provided a site to contemplate the possibilities of mimetic portraiture;
for the artist, a demonstration of his professional obligations; and for the Venetian
public, a transcription of the Ottoman ruler’s appearance.14
On these views,
Gentile’s work signals an interest in a painter’s imitation of nature undertaken for
its own sake as well as a protoethnographic fascination in foreign dress and facial
features.
10. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori: Nelle redazioni del 1550 e
1568, ed. Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi (Florence, 1966), 3:436–37.
11. On the concept of ingenium in art historical scholarship, see Patricia A. Emison, Creating the
“Divine” Artist: From Dante to Michelangelo (Leiden, 2004), 321–48.
12. Note Vasari’s description of Filippo Lippi’s ability to escape his Islamic kidnappers by drawing a
portrait. See Vasari, Le vite, 3:329–30. On Dolce’s statement regarding the supposed Islamic prohibition
of images, see Mark W. Roskill, ed. and trans., Lodovico Dolce’s “L’Aretino” and Venetian Art Theory of
the Cinquecento (Toronto, 2000), 116–17.
13. Julian Raby, “Pride and Prejudice: Mehmed the Conqueror and the Italian Portrait Medal,”
Studies in the History of Art 21 (1987): 171–94; Gülru Necipoğlu, “Visual Cosmopolitanism and
Creative Translation: Artistic Conversations with Renaissance Italy in Mehmed II’s Constantinople,”
Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World 29 (2012): 1–81; Emine Fetvaci,
“From Print to Trace: An Ottoman Imperial Portrait Book and Its Western European Models,” Art
Bulletin 95 (2013): 243–68.
14. Rodini, “The Sultan’s True Face?” 21–40.
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S IG N A T U R E A S V E R SE
A preliminary piece of evidence concerning the reception of Gentile’s stay at
the Ottoman court is the artist’s pithy signature that accompanies his series of
paintings decorating the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Ducal Palace. Although
the cycle was destroyed in the fires that ravaged the Ducal Palace in 1574
and again in 1577, a passage in Francesco Sansovino’s Venetia città nobilissima
(1581) provides a description of the lost paintings and their accompanying inscriptions,
including Gentile’s signature. Upon returning to Venice, Gentile resumed
work on the cycle of paintings in the Great Council Hall that illustrated
Doge Sebastiano Ziani’s intervention in a conflict between Pope Alexander III
and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1177.15
Accompanying the paintings was
a series of inscriptions elaborating on the iconography of the cycle’s narrative.16
Gentile’s signature was located beneath the episode in which Doge Ziani sent ambassadors
to the emperor to broker peace with the pope.17
Located on the north
wall of the Great Council Hall, the inscription described the event as follows:
PRO PACE TRACTANDA MITTUNTUR AD IMPE[-]
RATOREM TUM IN APULIA RESIDENTEM, SOLEN[-]
NES AMBASCIATORES [C]UM LIT[T]ERIS DUCALIBUS[QUAS]
PAPA MANDAT PER DUCEM MUNIRI
BULLA PLUMBEA CUM FIGURA S. MARCI [A]TQUE
DUCE.
15. Francesco Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima et singolare, descritta in XIIII. libri da M. Francesco
Sansovino (Venice, 1581), fol. 127v. An edition of Sansovino’s earlier guidebook entitled Delle cose
notabili che sono in Venetia, quale con ogni verità fidelmente si descrive was published in 1570. As
recounted in a sixteenth-century Historia di Papa Alessandro III, the pope, wary of the emperor’s military
excursions into Italy, escaped to Venice, “believing that the great worries he held in his heart would be
extinguished by mercy of the generous and humble Venetians.” The pope gave the doge gifts, including a
white candle, lead seals, a sword, a ring, an umbrella, eight banners and silver trumpets, each of which
played a role in the narrative recounting the conflict with the emperor. On the manuscript sources for this
chronicle and further discussion, see Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, NJ,
1981), 103–18. On the cycle’s visual rendition of this subject matter, see David Rosand, Painting in
Sixteenth-Century Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (Cambridge, 1997), 2–5, 177–78. Gentile had been
working on the paintings for five years when he was summoned by Mehmet II in 1479. A deliberation
held in the Great Council on August 29, 1479, however, stipulated that “our faithful citizen Gentile Bellini
the painter” complete the Great Council paintings once back in Venice (see Meyer zur Capellen, Gentile
Bellini, 110). Gentile’s brother, Giovanni Bellini, undertook work in the Great Council Hall during
Gentile’s absence.
16. Attributed by Pietro Dolfin to Petrarch, the inscriptions accompanying Gentile’s paintings
were composed by Sabellico. See Patricia Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of
Carpaccio (New Haven, CT, 1988), 82.
17. Ibid., 272–79.
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[To negotiate peace, official Ambassadors are sent to the Emperor then
residing in Apulia, with ducal letters, which the Pope orders through [the
agency of] the Doge to be furnished with a Lead Seal with the image of
St. Mark and the Doge.]18
The doge’s diplomatic correspondence was most often sealed with wax, yet the
pope declared that he wished the letters to be sealed with lead stamped with the
insignia of St. Mark.19
The privilege to employ lead seals was significant. Unlike
other Italian political entities whose chancelleries employed wax, Venice was
permitted to use lead seals, a practice followed by the Byzantine elite, Italian
dukes, and Norman princes.20
It was under this inscription affirming Venice’s diplomatic standing via a
distinguished secretarial practice that Gentile signed his name: “Gentilis patriae
dedit haec monumenta Belinus, / Othomano accitus, munere factus Eques” (Gentile
Bellini has given these monuments to the fatherland, / Having been summoned by
the Ottoman and made a Knight as a reward).21
That a signature would do anything
other than identify an artist, and in some cases his patron, seems anomalous at first.
In the case of fifteenth-century Venetian painting, signatures often functioned as
trademarks, serving to standardize painting in terms of commercial business prac-
tice.22
Other markers of authorship, such as “Giottus Fiorentinus” or “Sebastianus
18. Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima et singolare, fol. 127v. The Latin in this inscription is
problematic, in particular the lines after “dum” (which later editions give as “cum,” which makes for a
more coherent reading). For instance, “ambasciatores” instead of “legati”; “mandat” + passive infinitive
instead of “ut” + subjunctive, “mandat ut muniatur”; “per ducem” instead of “a duce.” The final UTQUE
should be read as ATQUE. The translation therefore is only a suggestion and has been made according to
the context of Pope Alexander’s gifts to the doge. For other poems on the donation of lead seals, see
Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, 104 n.3.
19. O. Zenatti, “Il poemetto di Pietro De’ Natali sulla pace di Venezia tra Alessandro III e Federico
Barbarossa,” Bullettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano 26 (1905): 194: “Io voio che questa letera sia bollada
con bolla de plombo, sula qual sia da un ladi misier san Marcho e lo doxe apresso, e dal’oltro ladi sia
scrito el nome del doxe; cossì como vien bollade le mie letere con bolla de plumbo e con misier sen
Pietro entro.” Cited in Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, 104 n. 3. On seals as indicators of
social status, see Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak, “Medieval Identity: A Sign and a Concept,” American
Historical Review 105 (2000): 1489–1533.
20. Note, however, that Byzantine emperors customarily used golden seals that were affixed to
significant documents of state, especially those pertaining to diplomatic communication. See Philip
Grierson, “Byzantine Gold Bullae, with a Catalogue of Those at Dumbarton Oaks,” Dumbarton Oaks
Papers 20 (1966): 239–53. The earliest lead seal known in Venice dates from the reign of Doge Pietro
Palani (1130–48). See Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, 113.
21. Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima et singolare, fol. 127v.
22. Notable recent contributions to the study of Renaissance artists’ signatures include Karin
Gludovatz, Fährten legen—Spuren lesen: Die Künstlersignatur als poietische Referenz (Paderborn,
2011); Debra Pincus, “Giovanni Bellini’s Humanist Signature: Pietro Bembo, Aldus Manutius and
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Venetus,” could also assert the maker’s regional identity, particularly in the case of
works destined for export to a foreign market or of an artist working abroad.
Gentile’s signature, however, goes beyond the standard “Bellinus fecit” that signals
authorship and workshop standards. These two verses suggest how, in both form
and content, an artist’s acceptance of work for a patron far removed serves the
fatherland and bolsters his own standing. The double-line format and primarily
dactylic meter, for example, suggest parallels to elegiac couplets.23
In addition, the
format “Gentilis . . . Bellinus” is a variety of hyperbaton, the rhetorical technique of
separating words usually belonging together. Such similarities with poetic verse
associate Gentile’s diplomatic and artistic accomplishments, however concisely expressed,
with the genre of classicizing poetry. Fittingly, Gentile’s paintings are not
mere illustrations but “monuments,” works akin to grand built structures such as a
tomb or statue that commemorate historical episodes significant to a community of
viewers.24
And Gentile, as will be discussed below, leaves Venice as an artist and
returns as a knight.25
Humanism in Early Sixteenth-Century Venice,” Artibus et historiae 29 (2008): 89–119; Patricia Lee
Rubin, “Signposts of Invention: Artists’ Signatures in Italian Renaissance Art,” Art History 29 (2006):
563–99; Albert Dietl, “Epigraphik und räumliche Mobilität: Das Beispiel italienischer Künstler des
Hochmittelalters und ihrer Signaturen,” in Geschichte “in die Hand genommen”: Die Geschichtlichen
Hilfswissenschaften zwischen historischer Grundlagenforschung und methodischen Herausforderungen,
ed. Georg Vogeler (Munich, 2005), 153–80; Rona Goffen, “Signatures: Inscribing Identity in Italian
Renaissance Art,” Viator 32 (2001): 303–70; Louisa Chevalier Matthew, “The Painter’s Presence:
Signatures in Venetian Renaissance Pictures,” Art Bulletin 80 (1994): 616–48.
23. Although it should be noted that the couplet does not scan entirely as a conventional distich.
For instance, “dedit” is short-long when in fact it should scan short-short.
24. In classical Latin, “monumentum” usually denotes a statue, trophy, or building erected to commemorate
a past event. The word appears in Cicero’s In Verrem (4.75): “quod imperator monumentum
victoriae populi esse voluisset.” In the Vocabolario della Crusca, s.v. “monumento,” the term denotes a
sepulcher, as a passage in the Esposizione de’ Vangeli demonstrates: “Le sepulture son detti monumenti,
cioè per ammonire gli huomini a pensar, che deon morire.” It makes perfect sense that Gentile employs
the term “monumenta,” for his paintings indeed commemorate the donation of Pope Alexander III. The
term also aggrandizes the importance of his painting, inserting it into the Albertian hierarchy of images
in which history paintings commanded the most prestige. In 1493 Sanudo referred to the cycle as
“historia on the canvases of the Roman Pope, Alessandro III, and of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa”
(see Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting, 32).
25. The subject matter of the painting itself also bears associations with the signature. Although
Gentile’s work does not survive, its replacement executed by Benedetto and Carletto Caliari in 1589
offers a visual rendering of the scene. The Caliaris’ version engages with the inscription by designating
the ambassadors as well as the doge as the composition’s principal characters. While it would be
specious to assume any visual parallels between this painting and that by Gentile, it seems reasonable to
suggest that Gentile’s composition would have also followed the inscription’s demands for prominently
representing the ambassadors and doge. This episode may have also resonated with the historical circumstance
in which Gentile was dispatched in a diplomatic contingent to Mehmet II during the months after
the peace treaty between Venice and the Ottoman Empire. See Luciana Crosato, “Per Carletto Caliari,” Arte
veneta 21 (1968): 108–24. Brown has suggested that fifteenth-century Venetians, notably Marin Sanudo,
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As a testament to the enduring memory of his travel more than a century after
the fact, Sansovino’s commentary correlates Gentile’s painting with his journey:
“Et perciochè il ditto Gentile era ritornato da Costantinopoli, dove haveva fatto il
ritratto del Turco, dal quale era stato creato Cavaliero (si come hò veduto nel suo
privilegio) con molti ricchi doni, scrisse sotto al predetto quadro i seguenti versi”
(And because the said Gentile had returned from Constantinople, where he had
executed a portrait of the Turk, by whom he had been made a Knight with many
rich gifts (as I have seen in his privilege), he wrote beneath the said painting the
following verses).26
Sansovino’s “Et perciochè” affirms the causal link between Gentile’s
travel to the Ottoman court and his decision to place his signature under this
particular painting. These connections between the painting and inscription suggest
that Gentile’s decision to locate his signature where he did was far from arbitrary.
As stated in the Maggior Consiglio’s resolution on August 28, 1479, granting
Gentile permission to travel, the artist was participating in a mission “ad serviendum
nostro Dominio”—on behalf of the doge and the republic; the signature, therefore,
inserts a note of allusion to the real event of travel within a larger field of painting
depicting legendary events.27
T H E R E D A N D T H E B L A C K
The portrait of Gentile in St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria (1507) also broaches
the issue of the artist’s diplomatic service. While fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
representations of confraternities tend to de-emphasize individual distinction in
favor of a sense of collectivity, this painting depicts Gentile standing out from his
fellow confraternity members. Dressed in a brilliant red costume, Gentile appears
strikingly conspicuous among the more sober garments immediately surrounding
him (fig. 2). Due to the richness of Gentile’s dress and his prominence among
his fellow confraternity members, Patricia Fortini Brown has suggested that Gentile’s
portrait is an assertion of artistic individualism, making “transparently clear
to his contemporaries his pre-eminent status in Venetian society, his rank in the
confraternity, and his devotion to the cult of St. Mark.”28
In another vein, Alan
may have viewed the political conflicts depicted in the painting cycle in terms of Venice’s contemporary,
and often tense, relationship with the Ottoman Empire. Sanudo writes, “And he [Alexander III] returned
to his seat in Rome with the help of the Venetians, who have always fought for the faith of Christ against
all comers—especially Turks—who had prolonged the war such a long time”: Marin Sanudo, De origine,
situ et magistratibus urbis Venetae, ovvero, la città di Venetia (1493–1530), ed. Angela Caracciolo Aricò
(Milan, 1980), 34–35; cited in Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting, 10.
26. Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima et singolare, fol. 127v.
27. Meyer zur Capellen, Gentile Bellini, doc. 16, 110.
28. Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting, 233.
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Figure 2. Gentile Bellini, St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria, detail, 1504–7. Oil on canvas. (Pinacoteca
di Brera, Milan; Scala/Art Resource, New York.)
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Chong has observed that condition reports and infrared reflectographs indicate
that Gentile’s portrait lacks the underdrawing seen on this canvas and in his other
works. Giovanni Bellini may have, therefore, inserted Gentile’s portrait at a later
stage in the painting process in commemoration of his elder brother who had
passed away before the painting’s completion.29
Yet another possibility relates to
the fact that Gentile offered his services as a painter to the confraternity of St. Mark
with limited financial obligation on the latter’s part. His portrait, therefore, may
function as a portrait of a donor, a visual homage distinct, however, from more
traditional kneeling donor portraits in supplication to saintly or divine protectors.30
While consensus regarding the authorship of Gentile’s portrait has yet to be
reached, this image of the artist certainly fulfills the function of portraiture, as
Alberti put it, to keep alive the “faces of the dead.”31
We might attend even more
closely to the culture of memory informing Gentile’s portrait by indicating how
his costume bears a range of social connotations, specifically in respect to the
garment’s color, silhouette, and ornamentation.32
The artist’s scarlet toga, pronounced
sleeves, and golden chain form a matrix of associations that collectively
call attention to Gentile’s status as an artist who performed a diplomatic service
on behalf of the Venetian Republic. Rather than neatly matching a certain style of
dress with a fixed position in Venetian hierarchy, however, I am more interested
in the irregularities in the system of clothing, namely, how dress can also shape
and twist the very relation between identity and class. Performance of the self via
dress pertains to more than just the circumscribed notion of local context; it can
29. Alan Chong, “Gentile Bellini in Istanbul: Myths and Misunderstandings,” in Campbell and
Chong, Bellini and the East, 116. Compare Peter Humfrey who also claims that Giovanni Bellini conceived
the figures in the foreground: Peter Humfrey, La pittura veneta del Rinascimento a Brera (Florence,
1990), 88–94. Cited in Rodini, “The Sultan’s True Face?” 37 n. 54. See also Katherine T. Brown, The
Painter’s Reflection: Self-Portraiture in Renaissance Venice, 1458–1625 (Florence, 2000), 61–63.
30. See doc. 65 in Meyer zur Capellen, Gentile Bellini, 118: “E se per j ditj chusik eletj dito teler
fuse extimado solum j ditj duchatj duxento jn questo chaxo se habia de j ditj a sbater e disfalchar
duchatj zinquanta chel dito messer Zentil liberamente dona a dita schuola nostra.” While the literature
on the origins and functions of donor portraits is enormous, see esp. Hugo van der Velden, The
Donor’s Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive Portraits of Charles the Bold (Turnhout, 2000).
31. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and on Sculpture, trans. Cecil Grayson (London, 1972), 61.
32. Among the most famous anecdotes concerning artists’ dress and social status is Vespasiano da
Bisticci’s anecdote concerning Donatello’s refusal to wear the red mantle, cowl, and cloak bestowed on
him by Cosimo (Il Vecchio) de’ Medici. See Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le vite, ed. Aulo Greco (Florence,
1970), 2:194. By contrast, Pliny in his Natural History (35:62–63) reports that Zeuxis possessed an
elaborate wardrobe. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, bks. 33–35, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA,
1952), 306–8: “opes quoque tantas adquisivit, ut in ostentatione earum Olympiae aureis litteris in palliorum
tesseris intextum nomen suum ostentaret” (also he acquired such great wealth that he advertised
it at Olympia by displaying his own name embroidered in gold lettering on the checked pattern of his
robes).
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also refer to the key event of displacement and the achievement of successful return.
Color and cut can bear narrative dimensions.
In Venetian painting of the late quattrocento, we so frequently encounter
figures dressed in red gowns similar to that worn by Gentile that we might mistake
it to be standard dress. Yet at least one contemporary source suggests otherwise.
In his La città di Venetia, after identifying the city’s three classes of male inhabitants,
“patricians—who govern the state and the Republic . . . citizens, and artisans
or lesser people,” Sanudo then explains how patricians and citizens dress “quasi
a un modo” (almost in the same way).33
Stella Mary Newton has described this
costume as the “uniform of the adult male Venetian.” It consisted of a veste, a long
black gown tied at the neck with puffed sleeves; a bareta, a black hat; and a becheta,
a piece of black wool or velvet draped over the shoulder.34
As Paul Hills has observed,
this uniform affirmed the “dignified uniformity or mediocritas of the patrician
and citizen groups.”35
An exception to the standard black toga was the dress “di color,” most often
worn by patricians serving as “senators of the magistrate” during their term of
office. The term “di color” referred to a fabric’s hue as well as the type of material,
usually cloths of gold, velvet, or silk. One of the more standard costumes di color
were togas dyed red, the shades and hues of which seem to have been a specialty
of the Venetian dyers’ guild. Fifteenth-century Venetian manuals on dyeing contain
a vast range of recipes for variations on red, far surpassing recipes for other
colors, such as blacks and greens.36
Moreover, the term “red” does not encompass
the rich lexicon of terms employed to designate the many gradations of this color.
Cremesino was the most prestigious color next to cloths of gold and was the appropriate
dye for official gowns made of velvet, damask, and silk.37
The word
33. Sanudo, De origine, situ et magistratibus urbis Venetae, 22: “Sono tre generation di habitanti:
zentilhomeni—che governano il stato, et la Republica—le caxade delli quali di sotto si farà mentione,
cittadini, et artesani overo populo menudo. Li zentilhomeni da’ cittadini in habito non sono
conosciuti perchè tutti vanno vestiti quasi a un modo, eccetto li senatori delli magistrate mentre sono
in officio—come dirò al luoco suo—che vanno vestiti di color, per lezze. Li altre portano sempre quasi
veste negre longe fino a terra, con maneghe a comedo, barretta negra in testa, et becheta de panno
negro, et anco di veluta; et zà si portava capuzzi molto grandi, la qual forza fu buttata zoso.”
34. Stella Mary Newton, The Dress of the Venetians, 1495–1525 (Aldershot, 1988), xx.
35. Paul Hills, Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass, 1250–1550 (New Haven, CT,
1999), 173.
36. One hundred nine of the 159 chapters in a fifteenth-century Venetian manual on dyeing treat
the process of dyeing reds. In Giovanventura Rosetti’s Plictho, published in 1548, the thirty-five
recipes for red far outnumber those for other colors. Hills, Venetian Colour, 174.
37. Newton, Dress of the Venetians, 18. The term derived from the principal ingredient used to
produce the dye, the dried bodies of the insect kermes, or the Scarlet Grain insect (the pregnant
female of Coccus Ilicis).
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scarlatto denoted a heavy cloth, usually wool, dyed a bright red. Less costly was
verzino, made from brazilwood imported from India and robbia, or madder.
Listing the prices of these shades of red, Sanudo in his La città di Venetia notes
that a length of velvet crimson cloth was worth 90 ducats, crimson damask 45 ducats,
and scarlet cloth 26 ducats.38
It would be difficult to declare with utter certainty whether Gentile’s garment
might be a gown of cremesino velvet or scarlatto silk. More important is to recognize
the fact that Gentile’s costume does not conform to Sanudo’s description
of Venetian inhabitants. According to this scheme, defining and visually recognizing
the three types of Venetians depend on the color of dress—generally black
for patricians and citizens and red, or “di color,” for patricians serving in the
Senate. Assuming Sanudo to be correct, Gentile’s toga becomes somewhat of an
anomaly. The Bellini family were cittadini, not patricians, and therefore Gentile
Bellini would not have occupied a patrician office permitting dress di color.39
There
were, of course, exceptions. A law passed in 1486, for instance, permitted citizens
working as secretaries to the Chancery to wear a red toga. Thus, the chronicle of the
cittadino Freschi family shows the Chancery secretary Zaccaria in robes indistinguishable
from patrician garb.40
However, although his nephew Alvise di Giovanni,
the son of Giovanni Bellini, served in the Chancery, no documents have
shown that Gentile himself held this office.41
Furthermore, Gentile’s costume is all
the more atypical when compared to other portraits of Venetian artists. For instance,
in the Miracle of the Relic of the Holy Cross in Campo S. Lio (ca. 1494),
Giovanni Mansueti depicts himself wearing a noticeably modest gown of mostly
black cloth with red sleeves.42
What, then, might account for Gentile in red? One possibility is that Gentile’s
red toga takes on the type of dress usually reserved for Venetian ambassadors.
The act of adoption and transference inherent in this claim is critical, as I view
this portrait as evidence that Gentile was represented dressing like an ambassador
rather than understanding the image as evidence that the artist held the office of
38. Sanudo, De origine, situ et magistratibus urbis Venetae, 58; as cited in Newton, Dress of the
Venetians, 175.
39. On the basis of the status of their profession, we might even think that the Bellini were part of
the “populo menudo,” or the artisan class. Gentile’s father was himself an artist, and his grandfather
was a tinsmith. See Rona Goffen, Giovanni Bellini (New Haven, CT, 1989), 3–4.
40. Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting, 5.
41. From 1305 cittadini originari were required to register themselves and from 1486 had to
prove legitimacy by reporting births with the Avogaria di Comun. See Goffen, Giovanni Bellini, 4,
294 n. 14.
42. Giovanni Mansueti holds a cartellino that identifies him: “Opus Joannis de Mansuetis Veneti
recte sentientium Bellini discipli.” See Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting, 233.
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ambassador. The difference between the two claims is significant, the first being
metaphorical, the second official. To begin uncovering, then, the metaphorical
import of Gentile’s red dress, a number of visual sources offer examples of the
role of red dress in diplomatic ceremony. One prominent instance is the Reception
of the Venetian Ambassadors in Damascus (1511) attributed to a follower
of Gentile Bellini.43
The painting depicts the Mamluk viceroy of the Damascus
receiving a visit from a Venetian contingent.44
Several Venetians, perhaps merchants,
wear the standard dress of black gowns and caps, while their representative,
the bailo or consul, wears the official ambassadorial dress: a red toga, a stole
draped over his shoulder, and a black cap (fig. 3).45
Contemporary written sources
also indicate that togas in either crimson or scarlet fabric comprised one of the
possible costumes acceptable for ambassadorial missions.46
In his Diario, Sanudo
consistently describes those Venetian ambassadors as wearing some sort of dress
in crimson or scarlet. For instance, he reports that Tomà Contarini, the ambassador
to the Ottoman court, arrived in Venice wearing a costume of crimson velvet
and delivered a letter that, unusually, bore a seal with the sultan’s portrait.47
Furthermore, when the podestà to Brescia, Zuane Badoer, returned to Venice to
43. Other examples of Venetian ambassadorial dress could be cited, such as the figures in
Carpaccio’s Disputation of St. Stephen (1514) or the Venetian ambassadors depicted among Borso
d’Este’s courtiers in the frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia.
44. It should be noted that while the bailo, or resident consul, often carried out diplomatic tasks,
the two offices were in fact separate. The consul was mainly responsible for representing his compatriots
and their mercantile interests to the foreign state. See Donald E. Queller, The Office of Ambassador
in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ, 1967); Eric Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation,
Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, 2006).
45. To be sure, the bailo’s dress is not an exact match to Gentile’s red costume. The bailo seems to
wear a darker and heavier fabric, most likely a crimson velvet gown, while Gentile wears a brighter
fabric, perhaps of silk. Gentile does not wear a stole and his sleeves, while displaying a lining, do not
seem as elongated as that of the bailo. This comparison does demonstrate, however, that a variety of
red costume was worn during diplomatic occasions. Caroline Campbell, “The Reception of the
Venetian Ambassadors in Damascus,” in Campbell and Chong, Bellini and the East, 22–23. Queller
observes that “a crimson robe seems to have been customary for an ambassador, but in the three
paintings of Carpaccio’s St. Ursula cycle, considerable variety of dress is indicated”: Donald E.
Queller, “The Development of Ambassadorial Relazioni,” in Renaissance Venice, ed. John Rigby Hale
(London, 1973), 191 n. 37.
46. Ambassadors sometimes claimed expenses for fabrics and other plumes. See Queller, Office of
the Ambassador, 191.
47. Marin Sanudo, I diarii di Marino Sanuto (MCCCCXCVI–MDXXXIII) dall’autografo Marciano
ital. cl. VII codd. CDXIX–CDLXXVII, ed. Rinaldo Fulin, Federico Stefani, Nicolò Barozzi,
Guglielmo Berchet, and Marco Allegri (Venice, 1879–1903), 49:182: “Venne ser Toma Contarini,
venuto orator dal Signor Turco, vestito di velluto chermisi alto e basso, e portò la letter che’l Signor
Turco scrive alla Signoria nostra, molto larga, in un sacchetto di panno d’oro, alla turchesca, bollata
col la testa del Signor, e uno saibacco d’oro con uno rubinetto in cima, cosa insolita a far da altri Gran
Turchi; ma questo l’usa farlo; e io vidi il sacchetto e bolla jeri, a casa del prefato ser Tomà Contarini.”
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deliver his relazione, or diplomatic account of recent events, he was observed to
be wearing a gown of crimson damask.48
Figure 3. Follower of Gentile Bellini, Reception of the Venetian Ambassadors in Damascus, detail, 1513–
16. Oil on canvas; 175 × 210 cm. (Louvre; © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York. Photo:
Thierry Le Mage.) Color version available as an online enhancement.
48. Ibid., 27:444: “La matina vene in Colegio sier Zuane Badoer dotor e cavalier, ritornato podestà
di Brexa, vestito damaschin cremesin, et fe’ la sua relatione, et lo steti dentro a udirla.” Later that year,
after having served as ambassador to France, Badoer appeared in Venice wearing the mantle of the
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Dress di color, in fact, was such a part of diplomatic protocol that contemporary
Venetian observers took note of its absence. For instance, Sanudo recorded
that in March 1504 the Ottoman ambassador arrived in Venice. Due to heavy
rainfall, only ten patricians came to welcome the Ottoman delegation. Even worse,
only one patrician, Francesco Morosini, was wearing scarlet, a breach in diplomatic
etiquette, which, when reported, displeased the signoria.49
While the wearing of
scarlet or crimson costume demonstrated the importance of Ottoman ambassadorial
visits, these same colors were also worn to celebrate this adversary’s misfortune.
In October 1520, for example, news arrived that the Ottoman sultan,
Selim I, had just died in Edirne. Due to this “most wonderful news,” the members
of the Venetian government immediately changed into scarlet.50
Red cloth also served as a Venetian ambassadorial gift. The French ambassador
Philippe de Commynes noted that during a procession in the Piazza San Marco
several of the foreign ambassadors were “in crimson velvet gowns, which the Signoria
had presented to them, at least to the Germans.”51
The giving and receipt
of crimson cloth occurred not only in Venice proper but also in the republic’s
ambassadorial dealings abroad. The Venetian representative in the Morea, Bartolomeo
Minio, recounted in several letters the handling of a border dispute with
the Ottomans in 1482. Minio complained that before handing over the treaty
document, the representatives of the sultan were satisfied with no less than twelve
braccie of scarlet cloth, 97 ducats, sweetmeats, and other gifts.52
knight of the republic, a garment made of crimson velvet, open to the right-hand side and decorated
with large buttons. Ibid., 28:46. Also dressed extravagantly in red was the Venetian delegation sent to
celebrate the election of Pope Adrian VI in April 1523. The head envoy Marco Dandolo wore a gown
with a crimson silk lining along with a crimson mantle with ten golden buttons. His companions,
including Alvise Mocenigo, wore similar crimson mantles. Ibid., 34:215.
49. Ibid., 5:981: “In questo zorno e con pioza, vene l’orator dil Turcho. Vi andò pochi zenthilomeni
contra con li piati, solum 10, tra i qual sier Francesco Morexini el cavalier solo vestito di scarlato. Sichè,
inteso questo de la Signoria, si ave molto a mal.” A Venetian law of 1284 stated that four ambaxatores
should greet any foreign legatus arriving in Venice. See Donald E. Queller, The Venetian Patriciate:
Reality versus Myth (Urbana, IL, 1986), 149.
50. Sanudo, I diarii, 29:303: “da poi disnar fo Gran Consejo e tutti li Consieri veneno vestiti di
scarlato per tal optima nova.”
51. Philippe de Commynes, Mémoires, ed. Joël Blanchard (Geneva, 2007), 1:603: “Et après la
messe, que chanta l’ambassadeur du Pape, qui a tout homme donna absolution du peyne et de coulpe
qui seroit a la publication, ilz allerent en procession par ledict chemin, la Seigneurie et ambassadeurs,
tous bien vestus; et plusieurs avoient robes de veloux cramoisi que la Seigneurie avoit donnee, au
moins les Almans, et a tous leurs serviteurs robbe neufves (mais elles esoient bien courtes).” Commynes
also describes how upon arriving in Venice he was greeted by twenty-five gentlemen, all
wearing crimson robes. Along the Grand Canal, he was transported in boats bedecked with crimson
satin and tapestries.
52. Diana Galilland Wright, “After the Serenissima and the Grand Turk Made Love: The Boundary
Commissions of 1480 and 1482,” in 550th Anniversary of the Istanbul University International
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The border dispute recounted by Minio also raises another explanation for
Gentile’s puzzling dress. According to Francesco Negro, Gentile left Istanbul
“adorned with a Phrygian mantle, a headdress, high boots and a gold collar.”53
Although this account may be more laudatory rhetoric than reportage, we might
speculate that Gentile received some sort of cloth as a gift upon taking leave from
Mehmet II. Indeed, a common gift bestowed on departing ambassadors was
reams of cloth. In 1510 Nicolò Giustiniani informed the republic that the Ottoman
sultan presented the Sudanese ambassador several cloth stuffs in addition to
thirty slaves and 300,000 aspers.54
The gift of cloth was so familiar that it was
often just mentioned in passing. Reporting on Andrea Zancani’s mission to Istanbul
in 1499, Sanudo remarked that the ambassador said nothing about the
gifts from the Sultan, which included “two robes, cloths of gold, etc.”55
Despite
the ambassador’s silence about the cloths, their presence in Sanudo’s entry evokes
the visual image of the golden fabrics physically displayed for all to see. We
might discount the possibility that Gentile was given a gift of cloth, as he was not
the official ambassador in Istanbul but only part of a larger diplomatic contingent.
However, it seems that gifts of cloth were presented not only to the ambassador
but also to the members of the ambassadorial party. Upon leaving his post
in Cairo in 1512, the Venetian ambassador, his son, and the consul in Alexandria
received several pieces of cloth. The ambassador’s secretary and the dragoman, or
translator, received a less valuable cloth befitting their lower status.56
In light of these examples, it seems reasonable to raise the possibility that
Gentile’s red toga alludes to his participation in diplomatic affairs. Also significant
to translating the social code of Gentile’s costume are his wide, bell-shaped
sleeves. As Elisabetta Gonzaga remarks in The Courtier, this variety of sleeve was
particular to the Venetians, just as rolled hoods were to the Florentines.57
Visitors
to Venice also mused on the prominence sleeves held in Venetian dress.
Arnold von Harff, a knight from Cologne stopping in Venice en route to the Holy
Byzantine and Ottoman Symposium (XVth Century) 30–31 May 2003, ed. Sümer Atasoy (Istanbul,
2004), 207 n. 46.
53. For a possible link between Gentile’s gifts and Enrico Dandolo’s armor, see Julian Raby, “El
Gran Turco: Mehmed the Conqueror as a Patron of the Arts of Christendom” (PhD diss., Oxford
University, 1980), 111ff.
54. Sanudo, I diarii, 10:22: “Chome l’orator dil soldan havia tolto licentia dal Signor turcho, et
auto 30 shiavi, alcune gambelli, 300 milia aspri et altri doni ut in litteris.”
55. Ibid., 2:702: “nulla disse dei presenti dati, né quelli have che fo do veste, cazache d’oro etc. Le
qual poi le presentò a la Signoria.”
56. Charles Henri Auguste Schéfer, Le voyage d’outremer; suivi de la relation de l’ambassade de
Domenico Trevisan auprès du soudan d’Égypte, 1512 (Paris, 1884), 206.
57. See Newton, Dress of the Venetians, 9.
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Land, quipped that sleeves worn by the Venetians were “like a sack, just as we
make clothes for jesters in our country.”58
Although amusing for von Harff, such
sleeves bore a range of significant connotations in Venetian society. A member
of the cittadino class would have been expected to wear sleeves a comeo, a
type of sleeve hung to form a puffed bell shape at the lower arm and closed at the
wrist. Contrary to his social standing, Gentile’s portrait depicts him raising his
arm to his side to display maniche dogali, a sleeve that was open at the wrist and
displayed a cloth lining, often of silk or fur. Suggesting the importance of exhibiting
such sleeves is the gesture of a figure to Gentile’s left, conspicuously pulling his
toga to the side to reveal his own maniche dogali (see fig. 2). Sanudo refers to the
prestige associated with maniche dogali with an ironic comment about slothful
members of the Venetian government: “there are those who would like to occupy
the office of Censor, in order to receive ten ducats a month, do nothing, and wear
manege dogal.”59
Originally restricted to the doge, maniche dogali toward the turn of the fifteenth
century were also permitted to procurators and doctors of medicine. In
addition, the right to wear maniche dogali was also conceded to ambassadors and
captains who had served with distinction during a commission. Sanudo reports
that in 1500 a captain returning from service abroad appeared to the Collegio in
dress similar to Gentile in his portrait: a crimson robe and maniche dogali.60
Although
a man in his position was not usually allowed to combine the red toga
with ducal sleeves, it seems that when announcing a triumphant mission to the
Collegio, these regulations were waived. For instance, in March 1511 Stefano Contarini
recaptured Padua for the republic and was received in the Collegio wearing
a crimson robe with “manege dogale.”61
From this evidence, we could speculate
58. Arnold von Harff, Die Pilgerfahrt des Ritters Arnold von Harff von Cöln durch Italien, Syrien,
Aegypten, Arabien, Aethiopien, Nubien, Palästina, die Türkei, Frankreich und Spanien, ed. Eberhard
von Groote (Cologne, 1860), 45: “dan die seuenhundert die degelichs so rayed gaynt sijnt ydeliche
senteloman, dat sijnt edellude, alles schone menner koestlich lanck gekleyt vss off die voesse, die
hueffder all gar geschoren dar off eyn kleyn bonetgen ind tragen gemeynlich alle grijse berde. Sij
gurden sich gemeynlich off die roeck. Dar zoe sijnt die armen van der rocken vur off der hant enge
ind hinden hengt it aeff wayl eynre elen wijdt wye eyn sack, as man die gecks rock in dessen landen
maicht, as die sentelomen sulche rocke dragen moissen ind gaynt in deser gestalt” (cf. Newton, Dress
of the Venetians, 11).
59. Sanudo, I diarii, 24:347: “Fo etiam posto, per li Cai di X, una parte in dito Consejo, che non si
portasse manege dogal per la terra niun excepto quelli sono in li magistrate; actualmente et vanno
acompagnar la Signoria; et non fu presa di poche balote.”
60. Newton, Dress of the Venetians, 23.
61. Ibid., 87.
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that Gentile’s engagement in diplomatic activity granted him the license to wear
maniche dogali, otherwise inconsistent with his social standing.62
One further aspect of Gentile’s costume that bears consideration is his gold
chain and medallion. Believed to have been given by Mehmet II, the golden
chain has been predominantly characterized in the secondary literature as an
acknowledgment of Gentile’s artistic talents.63
More generally, Warnke conceives
the golden chain given by sovereigns to artists as a mark of honor and duty for
future service and loyalty.64
Later in the sixteenth century, artists self-portraits’ in
which they depict themselves wearing golden chains have been taken as evidence
for the rise of the artist from artisan to gentleman such as we witness in selfportraits
of Titian and Federico Zuccaro.65
Yet also worthy of mention is fifteenthand
sixteenth-century diplomatic protocol in which golden chains played a prominent
role in ceremonies commemorating departure and repatriation. As Maulde-LaClavière
stated in his classic work La diplomatie au temps de Machiavel, the
golden chain was the “l’objet classique” to present to departing ambassadors, although
to be sure this gift was bestowed in general on those who carried out
services to a ruler. A treasury document dated December 20, 1509, for example,
indicates that Jacques d’Albion, the ambassador of the King of Aragon, received
a golden chain valued at 563 livres.66
Pope Julius II presented the Venetian am-
62. If Gentile’s sleeves were not appropriate, it would be strange indeed if his portrait depicted him
in perpetua wearing them. Such was the social import of maniche dogali that Venetians were criticized
for wearing them without good reason. One such instance involved Nicolò Aurelio, a Grand Chancellor
accused of corruption. Aurelio appeared before the Collegio wearing maniche dogali. The investigatory
committee immediately ordered him to return and wear a robe “other than in maniche dogali.”
The next day, wearing a black robe with the more modest sleeves a comeo, Aurelio was charged and
banished to Treviso in exile. There seems to have been a certain degree of regulation on maniche dogali,
not only by the Venetian government but by the Venetians themselves, at least by rowdy adolescents.
One day a certain Marin Grimani was overtaken by a group of patrician youths for wearing maniche
dogali. Having never served the Pregadi, Grimani did not have the right to wear the ducal sleeves,
apparently known to the youths, who harassed the vain Grimani and demanded ten ducats from him,
lest they cut the sleeves off. Sanudo, I diarii, 36:421–22, 29:630–31. Cited in Newton, Dress of the Venetians,
24.
63. For Vasari, the chain was one of the many gifts demonstrating the sultan’s appreciation of Gentile’s
skill in portraiture. Vasari, Le vite, 3:437: “perciò Maometto gli fece fare una lettera di favore molto calda, e
sopra quella gli diede molti onorati doni, et appresso lo fece cavaliere con molti previlegi e li pose al collo
una catena lavorata alla turchesca, di peso di scudi 250 d’oro—la quale ancora si trova appresso agli eredi
suoi in Venezia—, e di più gli concesse immunità per tutt’i luoghi del suo imperio.”
64. Martin Warnke, The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist, trans. David McLintock
(Cambridge, 1993), 139.
65. Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and
the Social Status of the Artist (New Haven, CT, 1998), 159–68, 170–86.
66. Maulde-La-Clavière, La Diplomatie au Temps de Machiavel (Paris, 1892), 3:370 n. 5.
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bassador Antonio Giustiniani a golden chain worth 200 ducats.67
The Venetian
ambassador to France, Zuan Badoer, attended a mass in San Marco wearing a costume
of crimson velvet and a heavy golden chain given to him by the French
king.68
Finally, offering a visual example of this practice is Carpaccio’s Return of
the Ambassadors (ca. 1499) in which the ambassadors, all wearing golden chains,
kneel in the presence of the sovereign.
However, while secondary literature at times represents the sultan’s gift of the
golden chain and knighthood, as well as Gentile’s travel to Constantinople in general,
with a fascination verging on orientalism, delving into Venetian ambassadorial
legislation suggests that what is more remarkable is the republic’s concession
to Gentile to retain these honors. As early as 1268, Venetian ambassadorial legislation
constrained all ambassadors to “give and consign upon their return all gifts
and provisions that shall have been made to them . . . in those embassies and
legations except for food . . . and eleven soldi worth in addition.”69
A decree in
the Senate in 1400 reinforced this policy toward ambassadorial gifts. Gifts received
from foreign sovereigns—including reams of cloth and golden chains—were to be
relinquished and sold at public auction, and moreover, ambassadors were forbidden
to buy back those gifts at these auctions.70
Venice’s policy toward her own ambassadors
thus made a distinction between receiving honors from a foreign sovereign
on one hand and, on the other, having the right to retain those honors
upon returning to the republic. Given this legislation, the letter declaring Gentile’s
knighthood and describing the golden chain and medallion could be understood
as an appeal for the artist to retain the honors upon returning to Venice.
More generally, Gentile’s portrait medal proudly exhibiting both the golden chain
and declaring his knighthood emphasizes Venice’s acknowledgment of his honors
received abroad. An episode in Vasari’s Le vite of Dello Delli, a Florentine painter
of humble origins, epitomizes artists’ aspirations to retain privileges received at
foreign courts. After having worked for the Spanish court, Dello returned to Florence,
“only to show his friends how from so much poverty that had once tormented
him he rose to such grand riches.” When the legitimacy of these honors,
67. Ibid.
68. Sanudo, I diarii, 28:46. Cited in Newton, Dress of the Venetians, 81.
69. Donald E. Queller, Early Venetian Legislation on Ambassadors (Geneva, 1966), 41.
70. Ibid., 113–14: “In reversione mea, siqua recepissem dona ad aliquo domino, Illa in termino
trium dierum tenebor presentare Officio Rationum novarum, et officiales teneantur et debeant dare
mihi iusiurandum . . . Que dona vendantur per officiales ad publicum Incantum.” There were exceptions
to the prohibition of ambassador’s buying back gifts. See Sanudo, I diarii, 28:46: “era sier Zuan
Badoer doctor e cavalier con uno manto di veludo cremexin aperto su la spalla e campanoni e con una
grossa cadena d’oro al collo, che fo quella li donò el re di Franza; qual La comprò de la Signoria.”
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which included a knighthood, were questioned, the artist “wrote immediately to
the Spanish king, complaining of this insult, and the King wrote the [Florentine]
Signoria in warm support of him, that he was given without resistance that for
which he had asked.”71
The mocking of Dello’s privileges recalls Andrea Michieli’s
satiric verses calling Gentile an “ignoramus” and “the arrogant knight of the Golden
Spur,” suggesting that the elevation of the craftsman to nobleman was not received
without derision and contempt.72
The network of associations related to Gentile’s dress demonstrates that the
phenomenon known as the rise or ennoblement of the artist in the early modern
era was not only related to artists’ engagement with humanism or with the
charge to reinforce images of rulership. Gentile’s necklace, while no doubt a sign
of Mehmet II’s appreciation of his artistic talent, was also an honor accorded to
ambassadors. The same can be said for Gentile’s red toga with the maniche dogali
sleeves. The act of travel, in Gentile’s case diplomatic travel, could endow an
artist with honors, thereby elevating his status from its artisanal origins. It is
crucial to bear in mind, however, that ambassadorial positions were in theory
restricted to the patrician class, and, moreover, the primary sources never refer
to Gentile as an ambassador or the more customary title of “orator.” And in the
documents directly connected with his travel to Istanbul, Gentile is called “fidelis
civis noster” and “pictor egregius.”73
It is therefore helpful to make the distinction
between Gentile being an ambassador versus Gentile dressing as if he were an
ambassador. The first statement suggests an equation between Gentile and the station
of an ambassador, an equivalence that is, however, historically untenable. The
second statement, more probable, makes a metaphorical link between Gentile and
his service to a diplomatic position, with stress placed on the hypothetical circumstances
of this appointment. Gentile’s dress exemplifies what readers of Bourdieu
might describe as a transfer of social currency from a reserve of social capital normally
restricted to the Venetian patrician class.74
An even more apt term for social
capital in the context of Renaissance Venice might simply be “honor.” As a fluid
and intangible value, honor could be lost, as in the case of a woman losing her
chastity, or contested, as in the ritual of dueling. Honor, though, could also be
gained, either through the acquisition of wealth and sanctity or, in Gentile’s case,
71. Vasari, Le vite, 3:40.
72. Andrea Michieli’s satire declares that “in quattro facultà quatro ignoranti si trova . . . / Ma poi
in pittura segue lo arroganti / cavalier spiron d’or Gentil Bellino.” Cited in Meyer zur Capellen, Gentile
Bellini, 121.
73. Ibid., 110.
74. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice
(London, 1986).
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through diplomatic travel, due to his services rendered to the republic through his
satisfactory completion of an artistic mission. And far from remaining in the domain
of text in the reportage of Sanudo, Malipiero, Angiolello, and others, honor—
that intangible quality of esteem and admiration accorded from one person or
entity to another—assumes physical shape in Gentile’s representation, the portrait
of his costumed self in profile.
MEHM ET II’ S P O RT RA I T A S R E L A Z I O N E
What was the nature of the ambassadorial service that conferred honor on Gentile?
Did the Venetian Republic grant Gentile the privilege to keep the honors
received from Mehmet II simply because the artist successfully met the demands
of the sultan’s commission? Several artists who were dispatched to the Ottoman
court returned to Venice before bringing their commissions to completion, dissatisfaction
with their work most likely precipitating their prompt return.75
However,
we might also consider whether Gentile performed any specific deed expressly
for the Venetian Republic aside from fulfilling Mehmet II’s request for “un bon
pytor.” It is well known, of course, that early modern artists during their employ
in a foreign state participated in political negotiations on behalf of their homelands;
the existence of the experienced corps of Venetian ambassadors and mercantile
representatives, however, makes it highly unlikely that Gentile engaged directly
in diplomatic affairs per se.76
The most relevant body of evidence that might help clarify the appreciation
of Gentile’s service is the work executed during his sojourn in Constantinople,
chiefly his portrait of the sultan himself (fig. 1). Previous assessments have rightly
emphasized the image’s aspirations to convey the sultan’s appearance for posterity,
proclaim his imperial aspirations, and consolidate his lineage.77
The six crowns,
all’antica arch, cloth of honor, and inscriptions on the parapet certainly impart
Mehmet II’s ambitions, and the staging of the ruler beneath an architectural frame
75. This is, as Raby has suggested, the case for the sculptor and collaborator of Donatello Bartolommeo
Bellano. In correspondence with the doge dated January 7, 1480, the sultan expressed thanks
for Bellano’s service but requested another bronze worker “like the one your Excellency sent me
before, or even better.” See Raby, “Pride and Prejudice,” 183–84. On Bellano’s mixed reputation and
derision by such writers on art as Pomponius Gauricus in his treatise on sculpture (1504), see Sergio
Bettini, “Bartolomeo Bellano ‘ineptus artifex’?” Rivista d’arte 13 (1931): 45–108.
76. On artists as ambassadors, see Francis Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance
Artist (New Haven, CT, 2000), 64–65; Molly Bourne, “The Art of Diplomacy: Mantua and the
Gonzaga, 1328–1630,” in The Court Cities of Northern Italy, ed. Charles M. Rosenberg (Cambridge,
2010), 138–95.
77. See nn. 4 and 7 and esp. Fetvaci, “From Print to Trace.”
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may even refer to the ceremonial processions practiced at the Ottoman court.78
Even so, the visual character of the portrait seems less an aggrandizing depiction
of the sultan and more a careful study of his facial features. Gentile does not place
Mehmet II’s face in classicizing profile, as is seen in the portrait medals. Employing
a format approaching a three-quarter’s view, Gentile executes a meticulous delineation
of each of the sultan’s attributes, going so far as to register the delicate
eyelashes and pursed lips. Gentile’s method of rendering the face may not appear
to be an absolutely precise likeness, all the more so due to the painting’s current
condition, an aspect to be discussed below. What is apparent, however, is an interest
in individual facial features along with their various characteristics, among
them shape, size, and color. If Gentile’s style is in any way “naturalistic,” it is so
insofar as it takes a diagnostic approach to the sultan, breaking the face into constituent
parts.
Given this approach to presenting the ruler’s face, the question arises as to
how such a portrait may have been seen in light of the artist’s self-fashioning as a
diplomatic figure. The close analogies between Venetian diplomatic reportage of
foreign sovereigns’ appearance and the portrait’s keen presentation of the sultan’s
facial features calls for a discussion of how verbal and visual representations of a
ruler may have functioned.79
Proposing such an approach raises further questions
regarding method: How might portraits be understood not in the context of
ruler-artist patronage but as a means to communicate over geographic distance?
How can a foreign face be transmitted and what cultural expectations guide its
visual form and reception? Ever since Vasari referred to the artist’s acquisition of
“the principles of disegno with care,” Gentile’s mimetic technique has been understood
as meeting the art-theoretical precepts for the imitation of nature.80
Yet given Gentile’s diplomatic status, the artist’s naturalistic style complements
a very significant task of Venetian ambassadors, namely, describing in detail the
appearance of the sovereign, geography, and peoples of the foreign land to
78. Roberto Valturio, a humanist in the employ of Sigismondo Malatesta, commented in a letter to
Mehmet II on portraiture as a means to acquire fame and immortality. See Raby, “Pride and Prejudice,”
187. On the cloth of honor depicted in paintings, see Johann Konrad Eberlein, Apparitio regis-revelatio
veritatis: Studien zur Darstellung des Vorhangs in der bildenden Kunst von der Spatantike bis zum Ende
des Mittelalters (Wiesbaden, 1982). On the sultan’s appearance against the backdrop of framing architectural
settings, see Gülru Necipoğlu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the
Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1991), 32, 40, 56, 89, 97–98. Cited in Rodini, “The Sultan’s
True Face?” 37 n. 46.
79. On artists’ motivation for naturalistic representation of rulers, see Stephen Perkinson, “Rethinking
the Origins of Portraiture,” Gesta 46 (2007): 135–57.
80. Vasari, Le vite, 3:428.
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which they were dispatched. Here the exercise at hand was not the mere empirical
rendering of a ruler’s face or his possessions but rather communicating the
political significance of these details to the citizenry.81
This distinctly Venetian
type of diplomatic writing was commonly termed relazione, considered at times
as a genre of literary and historical composition in itself.82
Relazioni differed from
other Italian diplomatic records such as rapporti or dispacci, which conveyed the
outcome of a specific diplomatic mission or spontaneously recorded day-to-day
events. Instead, relazioni offered “comprehensive political tableau,” an expository
essay treating the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the foreign country
under scrutiny.83
Relazioni thus served many functions, from guiding the formulation
of foreign policy to acting as a textbook of sorts to prepare ambassadors for
future diplomatic assignments.84
Given the sensitive nature of relazioni, ambassadors
were required from at least 1401 to release all papers and correspondence related
to diplomatic missions within fifteen days of their return to the republic.
And although relazioni were ostensibly classified documents, there were instances
in which these reports were copied and circulated to the public at large. As Filippo de
Vivo has shown, such was the appeal of the restricted information contained within
relazioni that their contents were sometimes leaked, becoming sought after items
in collectors’ libraries and finding their way into print.85
81. On the important distinction between self-contained and realistic likeness versus intelligibility
of the face to a public, see Bronwen Wilson, “The Renaissance Portrait: From Resemblance to Representation,”
in The Renaissance World, ed. John J. Martin (London, 2007), 452–80.
82. The ambassadorial relazione dates back to at least 1268, when an act passed in the Great Council
required ambassadors to submit in writing any information “ad proficium et honorem Veneciarum”
within fifteen days of returning to Venice. A piece of legislation dated July 24, 1296, stated that the
ambassador ought to deliver his relazione not only to the doge but to the Great Council as well. It seems
that some returning ambassadors neglected to produce a written document after the oral delivery
of their relazioni, for an act of 1425 explicitly demands the submission of the written account of the
relazione. In the Chancellary there were two books designated for relazioni, one for the relazioni of
rectors and syndics and another for the relazioni of baili and ambassadors. On ambassadorial protocol
in Venice, see Queller, Early Venetian Legislation on Ambassadors, 46–49. On relazioni constituting
a particular variety of literary writing, see Marco Foscarini, Della letteratura veneziana ed altri scritti
intorno ad essa (Bologna, 1976), 488.
83. Queller points out that the “classic” sixteenth-century relazione differ from those of the fifteenth
century, which tend to be a mixture of both report and description. A law passed in 1401 required
ambassadors to augment their reports with a more general description of the country. See
Queller, Office of Ambassador, 82 n. 43.
84. “Et lesdiz rapports, beaucoup de foys, sont mis par escript et enregistrez a la chancellerie, et si
après quelqun est esleu pour aller a ladicte ambassade, il lit et estudie ledit register et va bien informé
et instruit en toutes choses”: Traité du gouvernement de la cité et seigneurie de Venise, as cited in PaulMichel
Perret, Relations de la France avec Venise (Paris, 1896), 2:292.
85. Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics
(Oxford, 2007), 55–70.
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One feature common to almost all relazioni was a description of a ruler’s
physical appearance. On December 2, 1496, Sanudo noted that the ambassador
Alvise Sagudino began his relazione with an illustration of Sultan Bayezid II:
“First, that the Turkish Lord was of 56 years of age, of a yellow and often bruised
color, lover of peace, given more to gluttony and other indulgences rather than to
war.”86
Delivering his relazione in the Pregadi on June 9, 1526, Pietro Bragadin also
prefaced his account by saying: “To begin with: this most Serene Lord called
Suleyman . . . is 32 years of age, pale, colorless, with an aquiline nose, thin, with a
long neck.”87
Zaccaria Contarini received an audience with Charles VIII on June 18,
1492, and reported his impression of the king’s appearance and mannerisms:
“The Majesty of the King of France is twenty-two years of age, small and badly
formed in person, ugly of face, with great and white eyes more apt to see little
than enough, an aquiline nose similarly large and knobbier than it ought to be,
his lips being full, which are continually held open and he has some spasmodic
movements of the hand that appear very ugly to watch, and he is extremely slow
in speech.”88
Such descriptions break down the whole of the face into parts in
order to assess the character and disposition of the entire person. In contrast to
the topos of non so che, the maxim suggesting that words fail to adequately describe
the power of visual phenomena, the verbal portraits in relazioni imply that
physical appearance can be conveyed and analyzed, with implications for the assessment
of character and disposition toward foreign policy.
Among the physical attributes relazioni recount, skin color seems to have been
of particular interest to diplomatic observers. From exhibiting a “yellow and bruised
color,” seven years later Bayezid II bore a dark olive-like color, according to Andrea
Gritti.89
In 1553, the ambassador Bernardo Navagero reported that Sultan Süleyman
86. Sanudo, I diarii, 1:397: “Primo, che el Signor turcho era de etade de anni 56, de color zalo et
più presto livido, amador de paxe, dedito più presto a la golla et altre voluptà che a la guerra.”
87. Eugenio Albèri, Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al senato, ser. 3, vol. 3 (Florence, 1839),
101: “Dicendo prima: quell Serenissimo Signor chiamato Soliman (al quale baciò la man per due volte
solamente e li parlò, una quando entrò bailo, l’altra quando tolse licenzia di partirsi) è di anni 32,
pallido, smorto, naso aquilino, magro, collo lungo, di statura, . . . di poca complessione; tamen ha una
forte man, e così parve a lui quando gliela baciò, ed è fama tiri più forte un arco di ogni altro. È di
natura melanconico, molto libidinoso, liberal, superbo, subito, e tal’ora umilissimo.”
88. Ibid., ser. 1, vol. 4, 15: “La maestà del re di Francia è di età di ventidue anni, piccolo e mal
composto della persona, brutto di volto; la prima ha gli occhi grossi e bianchi e molto più usi a veder
poco che assai, il naso aquilino similmente grande e grosso molto più del dovere, i labbri eziandio
grossi, i quali continuamente tien aperti ed ha alcuni movimenti di mano spasmodici che paiono
molto brutti a vederli, ed è tardissimo nella locuzione.” Compare Queller, “Development of Ambassadorial
Relazioni,” 177–78.
89. Albèri, Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al senato, ser. 3, vol. 3, 20: “ha il viso tinto di color
olivastro.”
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was of “gloomy color.”90
Gasparo Contarini described Charles V as being of “average
height, not very big or small, white, of a color more pale than ruddy.”91
Following
the principles of physiognomy, the description of skin color often led the
ambassador to speculate on the mixture of humors governing the ruler’s character.
For instance, in his relazione dated June 3, 1534, Daniello de’ Ludovisi’s description
of the Ottoman sultan’s skin color quickly elided into a brief diagnosis
of personality: “This emperor Suleyman is of great height, thin, with an aquiline
nose, of color earthy, healthy, hot-tempered, melancholic, given more to leisure
than to deeds, catholic in his faith, and not of sad customs . . . of a mind . . . not
very lively, neither in prudence and virtue.”92
Such comments concerning the relation between a ruler’s outward physical
characteristics and his “inner” personality have led some scholars to believe that
the Venetian ambassadors were “believers in the false science of physiognomy.”93
For instance, in portraying Pope Pius V’s appearance, one relazione stated that
the pontiff had an “aquiline nose that denotes a generous spirit and an ability to
rule.”94
This connection drawn between appearance and personality also appears
in other regional contexts: Bartolomeo Facio, the renowned humanist in the
employ of Alfonso of Aragon in Naples, also indicated that the art of portrait
painting required the artist to discern a sitter’s character. Here Facio was drawing
from the Imagines of Philostratus the Younger who argued, “to master the art
[of] painting properly, one must . . . be able to distinguish, even when they are
silent, the signs of men’s character, what is revealed in the state of their cheeks, in
the expression of their eyes, in the character of their eyebrows.”95
Some scholars
90. Ibid., ser. 3, vol. 1, 72–73: “Il sultan Solimano, al presente imperatore dell’Oriente, è uomo, per
incominciar da questo, di anni circa sessantadue, lungo della persona che eccede la statura mediocre,
magro, di color fosco ed ha in faccia una mirabil grandezza insieme con una dolcezza che lo fa
amabile a tutti che lo veggono.”
91. Giovanni Comisso, Gli ambasciatori veneti, 1525–1792: Relazioni di viaggio e di missione
(Milan, 1985), 193: “La cesarea Maestà è giovane d’anni venticinque . . . è di statura mediocre, non
molto grande, né piccolo, bianco, di colore più presto pallido che rubicondo.”
92. The ambassador’s statement indicates the belief that a person with too much “earth” would
be of a melancholic disposition. Albèri, Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al senato, ser. 3, vol. 1, 28:
“È questo imperatore Solimano di anni circa quarantaquattro, di statura grande, magro, con naso
aquiline, di color terreo, sano, collerico, malinconico, dedito più all’ozio che a facende, cattolico nella
fede sua, e di non tristi costumi; d’ingegno poi, per quanto comunemente si ragiona, non molto vivo,
nè di quella prudenza e virtù che a tanto principato di converrebbe.”
93. Queller, “Development of Ambassadorial Relazioni,” 190 n. 30.
94. Pius V was described to have “il naso aquiline che denota animo generoso ed atto a regnare.”
Albèri, Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al senato, ser. 2, vol. 4, 200.
95. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators (Oxford, 1971), 102. See also Luke Syson, “Circulating
a Likeness? Coin Portraits in Late Fifteenth-Century Italy,” in The Image of the Individual:
Portraits in the Renaissance, ed. Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson (London, 1998), 113–23.
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have even gone so far as to suggest that judgments of a ruler’s personality derived
from physiognomic analysis may have constituted a rather important body of political
knowledge. In his compilation of Venetian diplomatic sources, the historian
of Renaissance politics Franco Gaeta claimed that a sovereign’s idiosyncratic personality
and habits affected to a large extent his judgments and political engagements.
Knowing intimate aspects about a sovereign’s person and his entourage
could be thus “more useful in substance and more valuable than the pure critical
faculties of a politician.”96
Such “physiognomic” knowledge, however, was just one piece of information
out of many on which diplomats assessed the particular stance a foreign ruler
held toward the republic. To offer but one example: Andrea Gritti did register for
the diplomatic record a description of Bayezid II’s olive skin, his melancholic
nature, and a way of looking “that demonstrates in his spirit his great gravity of
thoughts.”97
Even so, the ambassador prefaced his description of Bayezid II with
the important qualification: “I will refer to that which I could understand and
conjecture by myself about the nature and wishes of the said Bayezid and his
pasha.”98
Gritti’s remarks suggest that the task of diplomacy was not mere reportage
or the blunt correspondence between outward appearance and inner character.
At work was a mode of description that involved reasoned speculation, an
assessment made by inferring from variegated particulars.
The inherent visual interests of these verbal portraits, the construction of a
ruler’s likeness in the reader’s mind through the assemblage of choice words and
phrases, have long drawn the attention of historians. The German ambassador and
man of letters Alfred von Reumont was among the first commentators on these
verbal portraits in Della diplomazia italiana dal secolo XIII al XVI, his 1857 study
of Italian diplomacy. He compared reading the relazioni’s descriptions of rulers
to entering a picture gallery exhibiting portraits by Titian, Paris Bordone, Paolo
Veronese, and Giambattista Moroni.99
In his monumental survey of Venetian archives
published in 1870, Armand Baschet called the relazioni’s verbal portraits
“témoins oculaires éloquents,” offering Venetian senators knowledge of the passions,
hidden interests, and individual physiognomy of those who had political
96. Franco Gaeta, Relations des Ambassadeurs Vénitiens (Paris, 1969), v.
97. Albèri, Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al senato, ser. 3, vol. 3, 20: “È si statura più presto
grande che mezzana; ha il viso tinto di color olivastro, con una guardatura che dimostra nell’animo
suo gravità grandissima di pensieri; è di natura melanconica.”
98. Ibid., ser. 3, vol. 3, 2: “Riferirò anco quelle che ho potuto intender e da me stesso congetturar
della natura e volontà del suddetto Baiaxet e delli suoi bassà, dalli quali per il più si ha resoluzioni di
negozj importantissimi.”
99. Alfred von Reumont, Della diplomazia italiana dal secolo XIII al XVI (Florence, 1857), 79.
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affairs in their hands.100
More recently, Donald Queller has taken a more measured
approach to these illustrations, stating that although invaluable, “portraits
of princes . . . are not the stuff of most modern historical writing.”101
It is true that
these descriptions may not contain hard data for the empirical historian. From
the viewpoint of an art historian, however, these verbal portraits in relazioni offer
the possibility to underscore the function of Renaissance portraiture as a medium
to convey diplomatic information.
Venetian ambassadors themselves, in fact, compared the verbal portraits delivered
in a relazione to an artist’s visual representation of a ruler.102
In 1566, for
instance, Giovanni Correr wrote that “using words in the place of a brush, I will
attempt to represent to your Serenity a portrait of this Duke of Savoy.”103
Giovanni
Michiel, the Venetian ambassador to the English court in 1557, created interweaving
analogies between sitters and their painted portraits, mother and daughter,
when describing Queen Mary, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon: “she is thin
and delicate, completely unlike her father, who was tall and stocky and her mother
who, if not large, was, however, full-bodied and well-formed of face, apparent in
the features and looks one sees in her portraits.”104
Alvise Mocenigo’s relazione of
1548 makes a particularly suggestive comparison between verbal and painted portraits:
before describing Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the ambassador prefaced
his observations by stating: “I shall try to represent in words . . . a portrait
of the body, soul, and disposition of the Emperor as closely as I can, imitating
good painters, who, wanting to draw a body from life, study the picture to omit
not a single thing that is seen in that body, so that their portraits appear to be
more alike [to the original].”105
In this multilayered analogy, Mocenigo correlates
100. Armand Baschet, Les archives de Venise: Histoire de la chancellerie secrète (Paris, 1870), 360–61.
101. Queller, “Development of Ambassadorial Relazioni,” 178.
102. The portraits in relazioni might also be considered in the context of physiognomies and
literature. See Jean-Jacques Courtine and Claudine Haroche, Histoire du visage: Exprimer et taire ses
émotions (Paris, 1988); Edouard Pommier, Théories du portrait: De la Renaissance aux Lumières
(Paris, 1998); Alessandro Pontremoli, ed., Il volto e gli affetti: Fisiognomica ed espressione nelle arti del
Rinascimento (Florence, 2003).
103. Albèri, Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al senato, ser. 2, vol. 5, 3: “servendomi delle parole
in luogo di pennello, cercherò di rappresentare a Vostra Serenità un ritratto di quell Sig. Duca.”
104. Reumont, Della diplomazia italiana dal secolo XIII al XVI, 96: “La regina Maria è donna di
statura piccolo più presto che mediocre. È di persona magra e delicata, dissimile in tutto dal padre,
che fu grande e grosso, e dalla madre che, se non era grande, era però massiccia e ben formata di
faccia, per quello che mostrano le fattezze e i lineamenti che si vedono nei ritratti.”
105. Joseph Fiedler, ed., Die Relationen der Botschafter Venedigs über Deutschland und Österreich
im siebzehnten Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1866–67), 12: “et quali si possino gli huomini sauij imaginare et
giudicare, che siano li disegni suoi, et come li possi mandare ad effetto, sforzandomi di rapresentare
in parole alla presentia di Vre
Serta
et di Vre
Eccme
S.ie
uno ritratto del corpo, del animo et delle
dispositioni di Cesare quanto piu simile potrò, et imitando in questo li buoni pittori, li quali volendo
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the verbal and painted portrait to the actual “body, soul, and disposition” of the
ruler. He also associates the process of creating verbal portraits with their painted
counterparts; both require close study from life (“dal naturale”) so as not to omit a
single thing. Most strikingly, Mocenigo’s statement also indicates a correspondence
in function. What prompts the analogy between the ambassador and the artist is
that a portrait will allow the “wise men” of the Pregadi “to imagine and judge
what his [Charles V’s] designs are, and how he might put them into effect.”106
Portraits,
in both word and image, allowed Venetian politicians to envisage and evaluate
foreign sovereigns and their appearance, with such recommendations serving
as pieces of evidence in their foreign policy appraisals and decisions.
Aside from acknowledging that the immediate function of Gentile’s portrait
of Mehmet II was to fulfill the sultan’s commission, is it possible that the work
operated as a conduit of diplomatic information in the Venetian context? This
question must be approached by first bearing in mind the many other demands
portraits of foreign sovereigns might address. In the case of a likeness of an Ottoman
sultan, a potential enemy of the Venetian Republic, the need for an accurate
likeness was especially acute. The images of Süleyman executed by Titian and prints
of Turks in Paolo Giovio’s collection demonstrate not only a general commercial
interest in the sultan’s appearance but also the demand for trustworthy and authoritative
images.107
Other arguments against considering the portrait as a counterpoint
to a relazione include the basic yet important fact that it remains unknown
when Mehmet II’s portrait reached the republic. One possibility often raised in the
literature is that Sultan Bayezid II sold his father’s paintings at auction soon after
his succession to the throne due to his stringent religious observance.108
Another
unsubstantiated claim is that the portrait was sold to a Venetian merchant in Pera
after Mehmet II’s death.109
Several copies after the work attributed to Gentile or
ben trazer un corpo dal naturale, studiando nella pittura sua non ommetter cosa, che in quell corpo si
veda, accioche’l ritratti suo pari piu simile.”
106. Ibid.
107. See Diane Bodart, Tiziano e Federico il Gonzaga: Storia di un rapporto di committenza
(Rome, 1998), 154, 306–7; T. C. Price Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of
Sixteenth-Century Italy (Princeton, NJ, 1995), 190.
108. Caroline Campbell, “Portrait of Mehmed II, 1480,” in Campbell and Chong, Bellini and the
East, 78. Another objection might be that the triumphal inscription (now damaged) on the parapet
would be disconcerting to a Venetian audience. However, the many portrait medals of Mehmet II
diffused throughout Italy often bear inscriptions proclaiming Mehmet II’s titles. See Susan Elizabeth
Spinale, “The Portrait Medals of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1451–81)” (PhD diss., Harvard
University, 2003).
109. See Franz Babinger, Mehmed der Eroberer und seine Zeit: Weltenstürmer einer Zeitenwende
(Munich, 1953), 417: “Auf diese Weise geriet das berühmte Bildnis Mehmeds II., das laut Beischrift
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his followers attest to its presence in Venice from the late fifteenth to the early decades
of the sixteenth century.110
JOURNE YS OF T H E P ORTR AIT
We might also consider the possibility that a replica of Mehmet II’s portrait or
even the version itself now in the National Gallery, London, was brought back to
Venice and elicited the attention of a local viewing public. Admittedly this claim
concerning the painting’s late fifteenth-century arrival must remain conjectural until
further evidence comes to light that documents the work’s provenance before
Sir Austen Henry Layard acquired the painting in 1865 in Venice.111
In this regard,
it is worth noting that Carlo Ridolfi in his Le meraviglie dell’arte ovvero delle
vite degli illustri pittori veneti e dello stato (Venice, 1648) locates the portrait in the
residence of Pietro Zen and asserts that Gentile transported the painting himself
back to Venice.112
One material piece of evidence in favor of the portrait’s fabrication
as a portable good is the work’s support. Technical investigation of the painting
reveals that the principal part of the painting is on a piece of canvas, albeit
heavily damaged, with other sections of the painting composed of later additions
of canvas and insets.113
In addition to their use in banners carried in religious
processions, festival ephemera, or large-scale wall decoration, linen and canvas due
to their lightness provided congenial painting support for works intended for ex-
port.114
The many Flemish paintings on linen and canvas, at times rolled and transported
in bundles to Italian courts and collectors throughout the fifteenth and
am 25. November 1480 vollendet ward und einen schwerkranken, vorzeitig gealterten Mann darstellt,
in den Besitz eines venedischen Kaufmanns in Pera und späterhin nach Venedig.”
110. Among them, a double portrait now in a private collection in Switzerland of Sultan Mehmet
II and another male figure, possibly one of his sons, and a version of Gentile’s portrait of Mehmet II,
now in a private collection in New York. See Campbell and Chong, Bellini and the East, 109, 133
n. 24.
111. On Layard’s purchase of the painting and its subsequent reception regarding its authenticity,
see Alan Crookham, “Art or Document? Layard’s Legacy and Bellini’s Sultan,” Museum History
Journal 8 (2015): 28–40.
112. Carlo Ridolfi, Meraviglie dell’arte, ovvero Le vite degli illustri pittori veneti e dello stato, ed.
Giuseppe Vedova (Padua, 1999), 77–78: “Riportò eziando Gentile da Costantinopoli il ritratto di
Maumetto, ch’è nelle case del signor Pietro Zeno.”
113. Caroline Campbell and Rachel Billinge (National Gallery, London), e-mail message to author,
July 21, 2014.
114. For instance, Gentile’s paintings for the Great Council Hall were done on canvas. Jill
Dunkerton et al., Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery (London, 1991),
160. For the use of canvas for large-scale wall decoration, see Alison Wright, “Piero de’ Medici and
the Pollaiuolo,” in Piero de’ Medici “Il Gottoso” (1416–1469): Kunst im Dienste der Mediceer, ed.
Andreas Beyer and Bruce Boucher (Berlin, 1993), 129–49.
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sixteenth centuries, testify to this material practice.115
Artists even commented at
times that a painting’s ultimate destination could determine the type of support to
be employed. On July 6, 1477, Mantegna wrote Ludovico Gonzaga, 2nd Marchese
of Mantua, to ask what support he ought to employ for a painting. The artist presented
Gonzaga with two choices—on panel or on canvas. “If your Lordship wishes
to send the painting far away,” Mantegna explained, “it can be done on a fine canvas
in order for it to be wrapped around a rod.”116
Remarking on differences in
support almost a half century later, Giorgio Vasari noted that “painting on canvas
was invented so that paintings could be carried from country to country; canvas
weighs little and can be easily transported in any size.”117
Against the background
of this commentary, it is worth noting that Gentile’s portrait of Mehmet II is on
canvas, in contrast to several of his other portraits of prestigious sitters, among
them those of Doge Agostino Barbarigo, Doge Giovanni Mocenigo, and Caterina
Cornaro as well as a copy of his portrait of Doge Niccolò Marcello, both of which
are on wood and executed “locally.” What is more, the two copies after Gentile’s
portrait of the sultan, in all likelihood executed in Venice, are on panel, thus
indicating a correlation between place of execution and category of support.118
Could there have been two versions of the portrait, one that stayed in Constantinople,
another accompanying the artist upon his return to Venice? Future contributions
might consider the canvas support as a factor in ascertaining whether the
London version of the sultan’s portrait was executed for the purpose of transport
back to Venice.119
115. On panni dipinti, see Paula Nuttall, From Flanders to Florence: The Impact of Netherlandish
Painting, 1400–1500 (New Haven, CT, 2004), 187–91.
116. Paul Kristeller, Andrea Mantegna (Berlin, 1902), 534: “in tavola o in tela . . . Se la S. vostra li
volesse mandare lontano se possono farli suso tela sotile per poterli avoltare suso un bastonzelo.”
Compare Jill Dunkerton, “Mantegna’s Techniques,” in Mantegna and Fifteenth-Century Court Culture,
ed. Francis Ames-Lewis and Anka Bednarek (London, 1993), 26–38.
117. Vasari, Le vite, 1:137. On the logistics of transporting paintings, see Michelle O’Malley, The
Business of Art: Contracts and the Commissioning Process in Renaissance Italy (New Haven, CT,
2005), 84–85; Peter Humfrey, “The Venetian Altarpiece of the Early Renaissance in the Light of
Contemporary Business Practice,” Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte 15 (1986): 75–79.
118. Kennedy, “Gentile Bellini,” 303–4.
119. In this regard, caution should be taken in addressing the condition of the painting with
Gentile’s representational precision. Photographic reproduction tends to emphasize the delineation of
the sultan’s facial features. Observation of the painting in person, however, calls attention to the
painterly rendition of the face and turban that verges on sfumato, an impression not least due to the
interaction between the pigment and rough canvas support. Moreover, it is not always the case that
support corresponds to the mobility, or lack thereof, of a painting. For instance, Emperor Maximilian
sent Henry VII of England two portraits of his daughter, Magarethe, on panel and canvas as part of
diplomatic discussions concerning marriage. See Warnke, Court Artist, 222.
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The diplomat Philippe de Commynes in his Mémoires notably refers to a certain
portrait of the Ottoman sultan: “I saw him painted, and it certainly seemed that
he was a man of great spirit.”120
Commynes does not go on to describe the portrait
in detail, instead recounting Mehmet II’s conquests in the present-day Balkan
Peninsula and his illness caused by “vices of the flesh.”121
Due to Commynes’s reticence
concerning the painting, Thuasne suggested that Commynes was referring
to a portrait other than that executed by Gentile.122
However, we might also consider
that Commynes had seen Gentile’s portrait of Mehmet II during his several
trips to Venice, the first of which lasted eight months, from October 2, 1494, to
May 31, 1495.123
Commynes described Venice as “the most triumphant city I have
ever seen, and one which honors ambassadors and foreigners.”124
He recounts
that he toured the principal sites of the city, including the Palazzo Ducale, the
doge’s private chambers, the treasury of San Marco, and the arsenal. He would have
most certainly seen Gentile’s frescoes decorating the Great Council Hall, where
he was first received, and it is not unreasonable to speculate that he may have seen
the other works by Bellini, among them his portrait of Mehmet II. More important,
Commynes’s comment demonstrates that the work was observed in the context
of diplomatic circles.
Granted Commynes’s brief comment and other instances in the relazione literature
that refer to portraits cannot entirely support the claim that Gentile’s painting
prompted a diplomatic mode of viewing for its Venetian audiences. Even so,
these sources point to a larger pattern of using the genre of portraiture as a diplomatic
tool. Portraits were exponents in diplomatic transactions in what Luke
Syson has called the “circulation of likenesses,” the practice of presenting portraits
as gifts, souvenirs for relations far removed from home, or documentation
120. Philippe de Commynes, Mémoires, ed. Joseph Calmette and Georges Durville (Paris, 1924–
25), 2:338: “Je l’ay veü painct, et sembloit bien qu’il fust home de grant esprit.” Girolamo Seripando’s
oration in 1554 before a portrait of Phillip II by Titian offers a later example of a description made
before a ruler’s image. See Andrea Zezza, “Giovanni Battista Castaldo e la chiesa di Santa Maria del
Monte Albino,” Prospettiva 93–94 (1999): 41 n. 51.
121. Ibid., 339: “Quant aux plaisirs du monde, ce Turc en a prins à coeur saoul et y usé grand
partye de son temps. Et eust encores faict plus de maulx qu’il n’a, s’il ne se fust tant occupé au vice de
la chair.”
122. Thuasne, Gentile Bellini et Sultan Mohammed II, 36–37.
123. It should be noted that Commynes’s memoir of Louis IX was supposedly finished in 1492–
93, before his first trip to Venice. However, the Mémoires themselves were not entirely finished until
1498 and not published until 1524, thus raising the possibility that Commynes might have emended
the text to include his observations on Venice. Commynes died on October 18, 1511, in Argenton. See
the useful biographical sketch in Philippe de Commynes, Mémoires sur Louis XI: 1464–1483, ed. Jean
Dufournet (Paris, 1979), 531–39.
124. Commynes, Mémoires, ed. Calmette and Durville, 3:110.
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in assessing marriage prospects.125
There are numerous recorded instances in
which portraits served for the last of these purposes: especially well known is Jan
van Eyck’s inclusion in Burgundian diplomatic missions in 1427 and again in 1428
to the Iberian peninsula, where the artist presented portraits of Phillip the Good as
well as rendered the likenesses of two prospective brides, Isabella of Urguell and
Isabella of Portugal.126
Such commissions sometimes led to the felicitous union of
ruling houses or outright refusal and insult. The absence of a portrait might even
arouse suspicion: upon considering marriage with Queen Juana of Naples, King
Henry VII of England requested a portrait to be made of his potential bride. When
no painting came to be realized, the English monarch informed the Aragonese
ambassador that he suspected the queen most likely to be “ugly and not beauti-
ful.”127
The many recorded instances of portraiture as a diplomatic instrument to
broker alliances between houses through marriage raises the thorny issue of the
conditions under which Gentile’s portrait was observed and employed. Do any extant
sources indicate that the sultan’s image or the likeness of any ruler for that
matter was displayed in tandem with the recitation of a relazione? As of yet, I
have not uncovered any evidence to this effect. The evidence assembled thus
far does demonstrate, however, that discourse concerning the ruler’s likeness was
a key feature in diplomatic reportage, a discourse in which Gentile’s painting may
have participated. On this view, the traveling artist, portrait, and relazione form
interlocking parts of a cultural machine that registers and attempts to gain from
insights culled from the outside world.
Indeed, contemporary responses to images of the sultan pursue a logic of description
that works in tandem with Gentile’s mode of painting. Just as the artist
carefully assembled the particularities of facial features and expression into a
whole, so too do accounts offer detailed, minute, and precise renditions of Mehmet
II’s face, so much so that they become verbal portraits on paper. One source
that indicates the portrait of Mehmet II was understood in terms similar to those
employed in Venetian relazioni is the 1486 edition of Jacopo Filippo Foresti da
Bergamo’s Supplementum chronicarum, which describes the facial characteristics
of the sultan “as is shown by his own portrait.” Moreover, the manner in which the
125. See Syson, “Circulating a Likeness?”; Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European PortraitPainting
in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries (New Haven, CT, 1990).
126. Documents pertaining to the account of the embassy to Portugal are published in James
Weale, Hubert and John Van Eyck, Their Life and Work (London, 1908), lv–lxxii, transcription of
Registre 132 of the Chambre des Comptes, fol. clvii–clxvi, Brussels, State Archives.
127. Warnke, Court Artist, 222.
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description proceeds is reminiscent of the verbal portraits contained in Venetian
relazioni:
His appearance, however, as is shown by his painting, bore the face of a
man whose appearance was horrible and fierce: his eyes were ugly, not
straight, but turned back in the corners, especially while looking at someone.
His brow was high with the back part of his head standing out. His
nose was swollen in the middle, and it hooked down over his lips. In fact,
his thin face curved in between his jaws and showed itself to be extremely
pale. His body was robust in bones and firm in sinews and it slightly exceeded
normal human size which from his tender years was accustomed
to all kinds of toil and especially in those activities which seemed to prepare
him to endure military campaigns: namely, running and riding, wielding
both javelin and spear. When he was learning the art of inflicting and
avoiding blows, he habitually used for play iron sticks as a sword, which afterwards
made a sword seem light and manageable.128
Aside from its biographical narrative, this passage employs what we might call a
“diplomatic” eye. It renders a detailed description of facial appearance, proceeding
from individual parts (eyes, brow, nose, jaw, skin color, and bodily constitution)
and from there extrapolates more general assessments concerning character
and manner of physical activity. To be sure, this mode of description is hardly unique
to diplomatic writing per se; it appears in a wide range of biographical and physiognomic
genres. Thus, if there is a “diplomatic” style at all, it is notable not necessarily
128. Jacopo Filippo Foresti da Bergamo, Supplementum Chronicarum (Venice, 1486), fol. 290r: “Ejus
autem facies, ut ex ejus pictura ostenditur, hominis faciem pre se ferebat. Cujus quidem aspectus
horridus et atrox erat: oculi fedi haud recti sed in angulis reflexi, videlicet quum aliquem aspiciebat.
Frons alta erat et posterior capitis pars eminens. Nasus in medio tumidus qui supra labrum deferebatur
incurvus. Macilenta enim facies intra maxillas concavata et pallidissima ostendebatur. Corpus robustum
ossibus ac nervis firmum, quod communem hominis magnitudinem aliquantulum excedebat; quod certe
a teneris annis omnibus laboribus assuefecit et maxime in iis que ad tolerandam militiam sufficere
videbantur currendo scilicet et equitando, hastas gladiosque tractando. Qui quum artem inferendi
vitandique ictus perdisceret, fustum ferreum ad ludum pro gladio uti consuevit, quo gladius ei postea
levior et tolerabilior videretur. Denique, quum plurima patris exempla haberet imitanda, relicta benignitate,
clementia et liberalitate, vicia, preter justiciam maximam, complexus est. Solamque patris in
rebus gerendis animi magnitudinem complecti voluit; quam etiam quadam crudelitate atque militia
fedavit. Et licet christiana matre nobili captiva natus fuisset, christiano tamen nomini quoad vixit inimicissimus
fuit.” Note the parallels with Sallust’s description of the activities of young Jugurtha, which
employs the same tripartite distinction: “equitare, iaculari; cursu cum aequalibus certare” (Bellum
Jugurthinum, 6.1: riding, throwing the javelin, competing with his agemates in running). I am grateful
to Lydia Spielberg for pointing out this possible historiographical model for the characterization of
Mehmet.
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in the approach it takes to describe a face but rather in its effect in mobilizing a
characterization across space. This meticulous rendering of the face into words is
the handmaiden to the convention of distributing portraits among courts, principalities,
and kingdoms. In the particular case of an Ottoman sultan, this approach
to looking, describing, and painting becomes especially fraught: How might a potential
enemy appear?
Gentile’s portrait and diplomatic accounts furthermore constitute not only a
touchstone for encounters between prince and patron, East and West, Venetian
and Ottoman, as fascinating as those relations are. Painting and relazioni place
two modes of thinking and representation in tension: first, an authoritative image
of the ruler who via attributes such as the arch, cloth of honor, crowns, and
inscription embodies the imperial aspirations of the Ottoman empire; second, a
face whose distinct features register a specificity singular to an individual. This
tension is, to be sure, a characteristic of ruler portraiture with its need for both
decorum and distinction.129
Yet in the case of Gentile’s painting, this dialectic
also speaks to the capacity of painting to collapse and expand knowledge about
otherness. From the particularities of the face, the viewer can discern larger notions
about the character and behavior of a foreign ruler, people, and region.
Conversely, an entire empire can be collapsed into a few well-composed details.
The style of Gentile’s portrait and the body of diplomatic writing leads to an unexpected
if not paradoxical conclusion: a burgeoning awareness of otherness and
geographic breadth is accompanied by representational strategies that focus on
the particular, the detailed, and the miniature. As much as we might wish to take
Gentile’s portrait as an emblem of global encounters, the style of the image itself
and its related discourse in the genre of the relazione testifies to an impulse to work
on a more minute spatial level, to compress distance.
CON CLUSI ON
Taking the reception of Gentile Bellini’s journey to Constantinople into account
expands the range of factors that contributed to the “rise of the artist” in early
modern Europe. Traveling in the service of the patria could accord the artist honors
and grant him the license to commemorate his journey in both signature
and portrait. The artistic result of this mobility, Gentile’s portrait of Mehmet II,
not only reflects the noteworthy circumstance of Ottoman patronage of Western
artists. His likeness operates as a medium of transmitting information, a foreign
ruler’s appearance, personal attributes, and disposition that diplomats and paint-
129. Warnke, Court Artist, 215–19.
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ers alike attempted to convey. Contemporary responses to images of the sultan
pursue a mode of description that works in tandem with Gentile’s style: just as
the artist carefully assembled the particularities of facial features and expression
into a whole, so too did accounts offer detailed renditions of the face, so much so
that they become portable portraits on paper. When considered under the condition
of travel, Gentile’s “diplomatic style” functions not only as a response to
the humanist call for the imitation of nature for its own sake or the shaping of
historical narrative.130
His approach to painting becomes a vehicle to channel
knowledge of “il Gran Signor.” Portraits put a face to a ruler, a name, and in this
case, an empire.
130. On the strategies of naturalistic depiction of otherness later in the sixteenth century, see
Bronwen Wilson, “Reflecting on the Turk in Sixteenth-Century Venetian Portrait Books,” Word and
Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 19 (2003): 38–58, and The World in Venice: Print, the City,
and Early Modern Identity (Toronto, 2005), 142–56.
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