webinar register page

Isfahan and Istanbul: European views before the long shadow of ‘Orientalism’

Professor Sussan Babaie's talk will focus on European town views of Safavid Isfahan and Ottoman Istanbul in the seventeenth century. Most Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries, acquired knowledge of these major cities of the Islamic world through the popular publishing genre of travel writing and their visual paraphernalia – maps, city views, lifestyle images, costume and physiognomic studies. I take the famous Entwurf einer historischen Architektur in Abbildung unterschiedener berümten Gebäude des Alterthums und fremder Völker by the Viennese architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (1656-1723) as the starting point to investigate the cultural location of the European town views in comparative perspective and trace in the European material on Istanbul and Isfahan an emergent recognition of a ‘universal’ urban-architectural profile particular to this early modern age and distinctive from the colonizing and orientalising views of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Feb 17, 2021 05:00 PM in London