Arts of the Islamic
World, including Fine Carpets and
Textiles
Sale: L07222 | Location: London, New
Bond Street
Auction Dates: Session 1: Wed, 24 Oct
07 10:00 AM
LOT 267
f - PORTRAIT OF SULTAN MEHMED II, BY
A FOLLOWER OF GENTILE BELLINI, ITALY,
EARLY 16TH CENTURYA RARE AND
IMPORTANT PORTRAIT OF THE OTTOMAN
SULTAN MEHMED FATIH "THE
CONQUEROR"
200,000—300,000 GBP
Lot Sold. Hammer Price with
Buyer's Premium: 468,500 GBP
MEASUREMENTS measurements note
21 by 16cm. 36.2 by 31.8cm. framed
DESCRIPTION oil on panel, framed
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 Sultan
Mehmed II by a Follower of gentile
Bellini
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PROVENANCE
With Thomas Agnew & Sons Ltd., London,
1931;
Jackson-Higgs collection, New York;
(From which sold?) Sale, New York, American
Art Association, December 1932;
William Fox collection;
Arthur Erlanger collection, New York;
With Acquavella, New York;
Baron Waldemar von Zedtwitz collection, New
York, 1962.
EXHIBITED
Venise et l'Orient 828-1797, Institut du
monde arabe, Paris, 2006;
Venice and the Islamic World 828-1797, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2007.
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES
F. Heinemann, Giovanni Bellini e i
Belliniani, Vol. III, Supplemento e
Ampliamenti, Verlag 1991, p.116, footnote 32,
reproduced p. 303, fig. 202 (as 'After
Gentile Bellini')
C. Campell and A. Chong, Bellini and the
East, London-Boston, 2005, reproduced p.78,
fig.29
Venise et l'Orient 828-1797, exhibition
catalogue, Paris, 2006, cat. no.24
Venice and the Islamic World 828-1797,
exhibition catalogue, New York, 2007,
reproduced p.109, cat. no.24
CATALOGUE NOTE
Executed in
Venice some thirty years after the famous
prototype by Gentile Bellini in the National
Gallery, London, this is one of the few
western images of an eastern potentate done
by a European artist.
By the late 1470s relations between the
Republic of Venice and its powerful
neighbour, the recently-established empire of
the Ottoman Turks, had reached a state of
relative calm. The preceding two and a half
decades had witnessed a seismic upheaval in
the geo-political landscape of the
north-eastern Mediterranean; beginning in
1453, when the 21-year-old Ottoman sultan,
Mehmed II, marched in triumph through the
streets of Constantinople, sending shockwaves
through the ancient lands of Eastern
Christendom. Throughout the 1460s and 70s,
Mehmed continued to extend his empire with
territorial gains in Greece, Bosnia and
Albania.
By 1479, his power and prestige greatly
enhanced, Mehmed was able to effect a peace
treaty with the Venetian Republic that ceded
further land and strategic fortresses in the
Aegean to the Ottomans. We are told that in
the course of the negotiations between the
Sublime Porte and the Venetian senate, Mehmed
expressed a wish for a "good
artist" to be sent to Istanbul, and the
Doge duly dispatched Gentile Bellini
(1429-1507), who at that time was regarded as
the leading painter working in Venice.
The Venetian 'embassy' to Istanbul in 1479,
which included diplomats as well as painters,
resulted in Bellini's celebrated portrait of
Mehmed Fatih, dated 25 November 1480, now in
the National Gallery, London, as well as a
medal, several drawings and studies of
figural subjects (and their ravishing
costume) observed during the artist's
two-year sojourn in the Ottoman capital.
Bellini's "journey to the east",
and his measured and sensitive reponse to an
unfamiliar 'oriental' culture, finds a
counterpart in Mehmed's own fascination with
the 'occidental' tradition of figural
representation and his concern to express his
own place within that tradition as a
conqueror, and now ruler, of an empire that
spanned both east and west. These
preoccupations are evident in Bellini's
portrait where imperial symbolism and
allegory are manifest: the bust-length pose
and triumphal arch harking back to imperial
Roman models; the three crowns referencing
the three domains of Greece, Trebizond and
Asia; and the proud profile alluding to a
lineage of great conquerors going back to
Iskandar (Alexander). In appropriating the
ancient realm of Byzantium, Mehmed
consciously viewed himself as the new 'King
of Rum [Rome]', heir to Alexander the Great
and the Caesars.
A year after Bellini's portrait was painted
Mehmed Fatih was dead. His successor,
Bayezid II (1481-1512), "was as
averse to figural painting as his father was
fond" (Venice and the Islamic World,
2007, p.107) and, according to Giovanni
Angiolello, the historian, all of Mehmed's
paintings including the Bellini portrait were
disposed of in the bazaar where they were
acquired by Venetian merchants and brought
back to Venice (Bellini and the East, 2005,
p.95). The present portrait must have been
painted soon after as the pose has been
updated with a fashionable cross-shoulder
glance in the manner of Giorgione and Titian.
Bellini's iconic image, which encapsulates
the imperial ambitions of 'The Conqueror',
became quite literally an icon, when in 2003
Turks of all ages queued in their tens of
thousands to catch a glimpse of the painting
when it returned briefly to the Turkish
capital. The appearance on the market of this
lesser-known but hugely important second
painting provides an exceptional opportunity
for a major institution or private buyer to
acquire a work of outstanding public interest
and historical importance.
Seen on www.Sothebys.com
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