Chapter 7 Istanbul Merlin's Bosphorus

Of the Western painters who painted the Bosphorus, I think Merlin's paintings are the most nuanced and convincing.His Scenic Journey to Constantinople and the Coast of the Bosphorus - even the title seems to me picturesque - was published in 1819.My uncle Lardo, a poet and publisher, published a half-format photocopy in 1969, and because I was passionate about painting at the time, he gave us a copy.I spent hours studying various parts of the paintings, discovering in them what I believed to be the true splendor of Ottoman Istanbul.This beautiful illusion comes not from his pastels (whose attention to detail befits an architect or a mathematician), but from engravings reproduced from his pastels.Sometimes when I try desperately to believe in a glorious history—those of us who are too heavily influenced by Western art and literature do often succumb to this Grand Istanbulism—I find Merlin's prints reassuring.But as I allow myself to revel in it, I know that part of what makes Merlin's paintings so beautiful is that he knows the sadness they paint that no longer exists.Maybe I look at these paintings because they make me sad.

Merlin, born in 1763, was a true European—German with French and Italian ancestry.After apprenticeship with his father Karlsruhe, court sculptor to Archduke Friedrich, he traveled to Strasbourg to study painting, architecture and mathematics with his uncle.He set off for Istanbul at the age of nineteen, perhaps inspired by the Romantic movement that was gaining popularity in Europe at the time.Little did he imagine the day he arrived that he would spend eighteen years in the city.At first he worked as a tutor in the vineyards of Pella, a city that gradually expanded around the embassy district and the prototype of today's Beyoglu.When Selim III's sister, Princess Hattis, visited the former Danish ambassador Baron Wolfgang's garden in Björkdeer, she expressed her wish for a similar courtyard, and he recommended Merlin.Merlin first designed a Western-style maze garden planted with acacia and lilacs for Hades, and then set up a labyrinthine garden for her in Deit Dabnu—on the European coast of the Bosporus, between what is now called Kurussesme. Between the two towns of Otakoy and Otakoy - a small ornate pavilion was built in the palace.The neoclassical columned building no longer exists, so we know only from Merlin's paintings that it not only showed something of the Bosporus, but established what the novelist Tampina would later call A standard of "complex style", this Ottoman neo-architecture successfully combines western and traditionally derived themes.Merlin then supervised and decorated the extension of the Besiktas Palace, Selim III's summer residence, with the same ventilation

The neo-classical style is ideal for the climate of the Bosphorus.He also served as what today is known as the "interior designer" for Hattis.He bought her flowerpots, oversaw the sewing of pearls on embroidered napkins and the weaving of mosquito nets, and acted as tour guide for the ambassador's wives on Sunday tours of the palace. We know all this from the correspondence between the two men.In these letters, Merlin and Haytis conducted a small intellectual experiment: 130 years before Turkey's founding father Kemal Kemal implemented the "alphabet reform" in 1928, they had used Latin letters to spell Turkish .Memoirs and novels were not fashionable in Istanbul in their time, but thanks to these letters we get a glimpse into the conversations of the sultan's daughter:

Master Merlin, when will the nets be delivered? Pls tell me it's tomorrow...Tell them to start work right away so I can see you sooner...a quirky engraving...the painting of Istanbul is on the way and it hasn't faded ...I don't like that chair, I don't want it. I want a gilt chair...I don't want a lot of silk but a lot of silk...I have seen the picture of the silver box but I don't want you to make it like it, please use the old picture please don't mess with it Smash... I'll hand you pearls and stamp money at Martedi (Tuesday)... It is clear from these letters that Haydis was not only proficient in the Latin alphabet, but also had some command of Italian.She was not yet thirty when she and Merlin began to correspond.Her husband, Ahmed Pasha, is the governor of Erzurum, so it is rare for him to be in Istanbul.When news of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt reached the city, a strong anti-French sentiment arose in court circles.At about the same time, Merlin married a Genoese woman, and we can see his inexplicable fall from grace in his letters of lament to Hades:

Your Royal Highness, Your Humble Servant I sent my valet to collect my monthly salary on Saturday...they told him that my salary has stopped...after seeing His Royal Highness's benevolence, I can't believe it was you Order... It must be some jealous gossip... because they saw Her Royal Highness pampering her subjects... Winter is coming, I will go to Beyoglu, but how? I have no money.The landlord is begging for rent, we need coal, firewood, kitchen supplies, and my wife has smallpox, the doctor asks for fifty kulu, where do I go to raise money? No matter how many times I beg, no matter how much I plan to spend on a boat or Take a ride, but still haven't received any positive answer... I beg you, I am penniless... Your Royal Highness, please don't abandon me...

Hades didn't respond to his last entreaties, and Merlin was ready to return to Europe and start thinking about other ways to make money.It seems to have occurred to him that he might benefit from his close ties to court by turning the large-scale gouache miniatures he had been working on for some time into a book of engravings.Assisted by the French Chargé d'Affaires in Istanbul and orientalist Hu Fang, he began correspondence with publishers in Paris.Although Merlin returned to Paris in 1902, the book was published seventeen years later (when he was fifty-six).He was able to collaborate with the best printmakers of his generation, and from the outset he was determined to be as faithful to the original as the form allowed.

When we look at the forty-eight engravings in this large volume, it is his precision that strikes us first.Our thirst for verisimilitude is fully satisfied as we view these landscapes from a lost world, admiring the exquisite architectural detail and mastery of perspective.Even the harem scene - of the forty-eight engravings, it is the most fanciful, yet still exhibits a precise drawing, a study of the possibilities of "Gothic" perspective, and a calm and elegant depiction of the scene , which is quite different from the overly exaggerated sexual fantasies of the harem in the West, and its seriousness even convinced the Istanbulites who watched his paintings.Merlin balances a slightly academic air in the painting with human details creeping in to the edges.On the bottom floor of the harem, we see two women standing next to the wall, they embrace affectionately, lips to lips, but Merlin is different from other Western painters, he did not put these women in the center of the painting to render them or the relationship between them intimacy.

Merlin's Istanbul landscapes have almost no center in sight, and this quality, along with his attention to detail, is perhaps what fascinates me about his paintings of Istanbul.Merlin attached a map at the end of the book, pointing out the locations of the forty-eight scenes one by one, indicating from which angle they were observed, thus showing his persistence in viewpoints.Yet, like the cinematography of a Chinese scroll or a widescreen film, perspectives seem to be in constant flux.Since Merlin never put the drama of life at the center of his paintings, looking at these paintings to me is a bit like driving along the Bosporus coast when I was a child: a bay suddenly appeared from behind another bay, in the Every turn on the coast road reveals views from unexpected new angles.Therefore, while reading this book, I began to think that Istanbul has no center and endlessness, and I felt that I was in the story I loved as a child.

Looking at the Bosphorus scenery in Merlin's paintings not only reminded me of the first time I saw Bosphorus The scene of this scene—the slopes, valleys, and hills that had not been built at the time—has an irrevocable purity to the ugly buildings that will appear in the next forty years.As I turn the pages of his books, I feel a certain ecstasy at the thought of the sights and houses I've known all my life in this lost paradise.It was at this moment of joy and sorrow that I noticed a little continuity that only those who knew the Bosphorus well could see.When the time comes to leave this lost paradise and return to real life, the same effect works in reverse.Yes, I will tell myself—just as you are leaving Tarabya Bay, the sea is no longer calm, and the north wind blowing from the Black Sea makes waves on the sea surface. On the rushing waves, there are the same Small, angry, irritable bubbles that appear in theyes night

At that time, the woods on Bebeka Hill receded into that kind of darkness, and only people like me or Merlin who have lived here for at least ten years know what kind of darkness it is from within.Cypresses are striking in Islamic gardens and Islamic paintings of paradise, and cypresses in Merlin's paintings also serve the function they have in Persian miniatures: standing quietly like a mass of dark stains, bringing the painting to a poetic mood.When Merlin painted the curving cypresses of the Bosporus, he refused to follow the path of other Western painters, who did not exaggerate the branches in order to create dramatic tension or provide a frame.In this sense Merlin is like the miniaturist: just as he sees the trees from a distance, so he sees the people he paints, even in moments of heightened emotion.True, he is not very good at depicting human poses, and his ships are sometimes awkwardly positioned on the Bosporus (they appear to be coming towards us); despite his great attention to buildings and figures, Sometimes they are drawn out of proportion like a child.But it is in these flaws that we see Merlin's poetic sentiment, and his poetic mood makes him a poet for contemporary Istanbulites.

Speak to the painter.Merlin's innocent vision makes us smile, and his intimacy with the miniaturist makes us proud when we discover that many of the women in Hades' court look like sisters to the Sultan's harem wives and concubines. He brings us to the city's glory days, with a fidelity to architecture, topography, and everyday details that no other Western painter, influenced by Western ideas of representation, has ever achieved.He pointed out on the map where he had drawn Kozta and Uskudar from Pera—only forty paces from the study in Chihag where I am writing these lines.He painted Topkapi Palace as he looked out of a café on the slopes of Tophane.He paints the Istanbul skyline from the slopes of Eyup.Amongst the landscapes we know and love, he offers us a vision of a paradise in which the Ottomans no longer saw the Bosphorus as a string of Greek fishing villages, but as a place they claimed for themselves.While architects were drawn to the West, these landscape paintings also reflected the loss of authenticity.The Ottoman Empire before Selim III seems so far away because Merlin provides us with such an accurate picture of the transitional culture. Yourcenar once described her viewing Piranesi's etchings of eighteenth-century Venice and Rome "with a magnifying glass in hand," and I would do the same for Merlin's portraits of Istanbul.Starting from this painting of Tophane Square and Tophane Fountain - Merlin often visits here and keeps looking carefully, down to the centimeter - I look at the watermelon seller on the left and happily discover today's watermelon The peddlers still display their wares in the same way.Thanks to Merlin's insight, we can see that the fountain was elevated above the street level in Merlin's time; now, long after the streets around the fountain were paved with cobblestone and then layers of asphalt, the fountain sits in a pit.In every garden, in every street, we see mothers clutching their children's hands (fifty years later Gautier concluded that Merlin liked to paint women with children, finding them less disturbing and less disturbing than walking alone. Women deserve respect); his city (like ours) is full of peddlers of farm clothes and food, displaying their wares on three-legged tables; a young boy fishing in an old fishing station in Besiktas ( I love Merlin as much as I do, but I can’t say that the sea in Besiktas is not as calm as he portrayed); there are two mysterious men who are only five steps away from the young man, and they appear on the cover of the Turkish version; A man with a dancing bear on the hills of Candili, his assistant shaking a gong; in the center of Sultanami Square (the Byzantine Coliseum, according to Merlin's painting), a man seems to ignore the crowd and The monuments, in true Istanbul, slowly run side by side with the donkeys laden with goods; in the same painting, a man sits with his back to the crowd, selling sesame donuts that are still called "sesame", while his The three-legged table is exactly the same as the three-legged table still used by some "Chimi" vendors today. No matter how great the historical monuments, however magnificent the scenery, Merlin never let these things take the lead in his paintings.Although Merlin shares Piranesi's penchant for perspective, his paintings are not dramatic (even when Tophane's boatman quarrels!).In Piranesi's engravings, the dramatic violence of his architectural verticals falls on the figures, reducing his characters to freaks, beggars, cripples, and ragged oddities.The scenery of Merlin gives us a certain level of movement, nothing jumps into the eye.Drawing on the infinite possibilities of geography and architecture of Istanbul, he offers us a wondrous paradise that invites us to wander as we please. Merlin had spent half his life here when he left, so it would not be correct to consider his time in Istanbul as some kind of "training".He discovered his qualities over the years; this is where he started to make a living, making some of his earliest work while making a living.as The details of the local residents viewing Istanbul are the same as the material. Merlin has no intention of adopting the methods of many painters and printmakers to foreignize or orient the scene, such as Barrett's "The Beauty of the Bosphorus", Arom's "Constan Views of Timburgh and the Seven Churches of Asia Minor" and Farandin's "Orient".Merlin didn't think it was necessary to fill in the characters in his paintings. He was not at all interested in the Western Romanticism movement that was so popular at that time, and he never played tricks. Play with light and shadow, fog and clouds, or draw cities and their inhabitants more curved, undulating, fatter, poorer, or "Arabian" than they really are to add atmosphere. Merlin's views are those of insiders.But since the Istanbulites of his day didn't know how to paint themselves or their city—indeed, they weren't interested—the techniques he brought from the West still gave these candid paintings a certain foreign flair.Merlin looks at the city like an Istanbulite, but paints it with the sharp eyes of a Westerner. Therefore, Merlin's Istanbul is not only decorated with the hills, mosques and monuments we can recognize, but also a beautiful place.