Nakkaşlık, the art of the nakkaş, was the broadest umbrella over Ottoman book and decorative arts. The craftsman who painted a miniature on a manuscript page, the one who gilded the opening of a sura, and the one who drew a design on paper for the ornament of a building were all known by the same title. Asked where and how Ottoman nakkaşlık began, the "Nakkaş" entry of the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam gives a brief answer: among the Ottomans the art began first in Amasya and Bursa and then developed in the Edirne Palace. With that sentence Amasya becomes one of the few cities named among the first stations of Ottoman painting. To see what lies behind it, one has to look first at the range of the word nakkaş, then at the most concrete example Amasya has left, and finally at the palace nakkaşhane that stretched from Edirne to Istanbul.

Who Was a Nakkaş

The word nakkaş comes from the root nakş, meaning "to colour in more than one hue, or to decorate by working with a needle or special tools." The dictionary sense is wide; the hakkâk (engraver), the carver and the illuminator could all fall under the title. In practice, however, the word was used mostly for a painter, above all a miniature painter. In the book arts, nakkaş gathers under one name craftsmen who did separate jobs: the müzehhip, siyahkalem, musavvir, cetvelkeş, renkzen and tarrâh. Even so, in common usage the miniaturist was called musavvir, the illuminator müzehhib, and the one who made line drawings without colour tarrâh. This division is a reminder that a book was never the work of a single hand; it was the product of a division of labour in which the calligrapher, the illuminator, the painter and the binder worked one after another.

In the Islamic world nakkaşlık had a long past before the Ottomans. The earliest surviving examples are the frescoes, reliefs and mosaics of the Umayyad period at the Dome of the Rock, the Umayyad Mosque and Qusayr Amra. Under the Abbasids, Baghdad alone had more than a hundred bookshops, and a part of the copied books was certainly decorated with miniatures. After the Seljuks took Baghdad, the acquisition of literary, historical and scientific works for palace libraries and their presentation to sultans played a major part in the growth of the art. After the Mongol invasion nakkaşlık advanced further; the Jalayirids are counted as a school in their own right. Under the Timurid Shahrukh (1405-1447), a book-arts academy was founded in Herat under the patronage of Ghiyath al-Din Baysunghur, and it reached its most brilliant period during the reign of Husayn Bayqara (1470-1506). Bihzad, regarded as the greatest master of the miniature, produced his valuable works there. Ottoman nakkaş met this accumulated tradition through branches coming both from Shiraz and from Herat.

A Ground Prepared in Amasya

While the Ottoman state was living through its founding and rising age it was looking for ground for the book arts, and Amasya was one of the cities that had prepared such ground in advance. The city's madrasa tradition, its calligraphic accumulation and its position as the seat of a princely sanjak point to a circle of people who wanted books written, decorated and bound. Where writing becomes beautiful, illumination, miniature painting and binding are expected to develop as well. This link is an interpretation; there is today no detailed series of documents naming the nakkaş who worked in Amasya or their workshops. What the sources say is that one of the first steps of Ottoman nakkaşlık was taken in this city, and the concrete support for that statement is the medical manuscript described below.

Amasya's tie to calligraphy completes the story of nakkaşlık. When a mushaf or a collection of poems was written, the sura headings and opening pages were illuminated, the page margins were framed with gold rules, and the headings were set within decorated frames called serlevha. The calligrapher's pen and the illuminator's brush worked together on the same book. That Amasya stood out in both writing and ornament may be thought of as a natural result of this partnership.

An older account of early illustrated books in Amasya is also in circulation. According to it, the first example of Ottoman painting was an illustrated Iskendernâme prepared in 1416 during Şehzade Murad's time in Amasya. The encyclopedia entries cited here do not confirm that date or place; the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam entry "Minyatür" names, as an Iskendernâme reflecting the early Ottoman style, only Ahmedî's copy prepared in Edirne in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. The Amasya Iskendernâme of 1416 therefore remains a tradition for as long as no document for it can be shown.

Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin and the Cerrâhiyyetü'l-Hâniyye

The most important illustrated manuscript that has survived from Amasya and that can be dated is Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin's Cerrâhiyyetü'l-Hâniyye, also known as Cerrâhiyye-i İlhâniyye. Şerefeddin came from the well-known physician family of a quarter in Amasya whose name, Sabuncuoğlu or Hacı İlyas, lives on today. He was the grandson of Mevlânâ el-Hâc İlyas Çelebi Bey, chief physician of Çelebi Sultan Mehmed. His birth year appears in the sources as either 1385 or 1386; the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam arrives at 1386 from his statement that he was eighty-three years old in the 1465 work and eighty-five in the Mücerrebnâme of 1468. He probably studied under Burhâneddin Ahmed en-Nahcuvânî at the Amasya Dârüşşifâ and practised there for fourteen years. For a time he stayed in Kastamonu during the reign of İsfendiyar Bey of the Candaroğlu. When he completed the Cerrâhiyye-i İlhâniyye he travelled to Istanbul and presented the book to Mehmed II the Conqueror, and on the way back he stopped in Bolu, Gerede and Tosya. The year of his death is unknown; since he wrote his last work in 1468, he must have died after that date.

The Cerrâhiyyetü'l-Hâniyye was written in 1465. It draws on the surgical section of al-Zahrawi's encyclopedia al-Tasrif, but it does not remain a translation; the author adds his own experience and his own drawings. Some of the pictures are borrowed, while the great majority are said to be Sabuncuoğlu's own. The book has two features of particular importance for the history of medicine: it contains a variety of pictures in miniature technique showing surgical procedures, and it is written in plain Turkish. Sabuncuoğlu deliberately chose Turkish in an age when the language of science was Arabic. In his preface he says that most surgeons in Anatolia could not read or write, that those who could read Turkish books, and that if the book were in Turkish physicians would be spared faulty procedures and patients would be spared complications. This choice, together with the fact that he lived in Amasya, is counted among the main reasons the work was not adequately known in the Ottoman scientific world. Sabuncuoğlu's name is first met in the surgeon İbrâhim b. Abdullah's work Alâim-i Cerrâhîn, dated 1505.

The value of the work for miniature painting lies in its function of conveying knowledge. The book treats many fields, from women's diseases to plastic surgery, from eye and ear-nose-throat diseases to chest and general surgery, and shows the methods and instruments in colour pictures. The physician's hands, the posture of the patient, the shape of the instruments and the dress of the period are visible on the same page. In these pictures function seems to come before aesthetics, because Sabuncuoğlu holds that surgery cannot be learned by reading alone. The study published in Paris in 1960 by Huard and Grmek presents the book as the first Turkish surgical manuscript illustrated with one hundred and forty miniatures. Of the three copies that have reached us, two are in Turkey and one is in France. The Ali Emîrî Efendi copy in the Millet Library and the copy numbered Turcs 693 in the Bibliothèque Nationale are listed in the "Minyatür" entry of the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam among the works prepared in Amasya in 1465 that represent the early Ottoman miniature period. A facsimile and transcription of the work was published in two volumes by İlter Uzel through the Turkish Historical Society in 1992.

Sabuncuoğlu's other two works come from the same milieu. The Akrâbâzîn Tercümesi is the Turkish translation of the final, pharmacological section of the Persian Ẕaḫîre-i Ḫârizmşâhî by İsmâil b. Hasan el-Cürcânî; Sabuncuoğlu expanded the section from thirty-one chapters to thirty-three with additions. The work was prepared at the request of Prince Bayezid during his governorship of Amasya. The TDV Encyclopedia of Islam gives the date of the translation as 1444; given that Bayezid was born in 1447, this date is problematic, and it is hard to name a firm year. The Mücerrebnâme, by contrast, was written in 1468 at the request of the circle of physicians in Amasya. It describes the preparation and use of remedies that the author tried on animals, on people and on himself, consists of seventeen chapters, and is regarded as the first monograph in Turkish medical history in which a physician describes remedies and treatment methods of his own discovery. Gıyâs b. Muhammed İsfahânî, one of Sabuncuoğlu's students, praises his teacher's achievements and says he took him as a model in the Mirʾâtü's-sıhha that he dedicated to Bayezid II; this shows that the medical circle of Amasya had an influence reaching the palace. Rusçuklu Hakkı first introduced the Mücerrebnâme to the Turkish public in the newspaper İkdam in 1920; part of the later scholarship on Sabuncuoğlu has examined individual fields of the surgical manuscript such as dentistry, the treatment of fractures and dislocations, and urology, and the work has thus become a shared subject of the history of medicine, of the Turkish language and of painting. That the work fits no single field of study also shows that medicine and the book arts developed together in Amasya. The work called Müfîd, which Bursalı Mehmed Tâhir attributed to Sabuncuoğlu, was shown by later studies to belong to his student Muhyiddin Mehî.

The Palace Nakkaşhane from Edirne to Istanbul

After Amasya and Bursa, Ottoman nakkaşlık developed in the Edirne Palace. According to the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, some nakkaş thought to have come from Shiraz to Edirne worked together with local masters. The "Minyatür" entry states that a group of artists thought to have come from the Timurid city of Shiraz to Edirne after 1440 worked together with nakkaş of Turkish origin, and it lists among the works reflecting the early Ottoman style the Dilsûznâme, the Külliyyât-ı Kâtibî and Ahmedî's İskendernâme, prepared in Edirne in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. The Cerrâhiyye-i İlhâniyye is the work that joins this list from Amasya.

Among the nakkaş who rose after the conquest of Istanbul are Sinan Bey, who made portraits of Mehmed II, Şiblîzâde Ahmed of Bursa, and Abdullah Nakkaş, who decorated the Şehnâme-i Melik Ümmî with miniatures. The oil portrait by Gentile Bellini, whom Mehmed II invited from Italy, and the bronze medals of Costanzo da Ferrara influenced the style of Sinan Bey and Şiblîzâde Ahmed. In illustrated literary works of the reign of Bayezid II (1481-1512) the influence of Western art is seen alongside the Turkmen style of the fifteenth century. The nakkaş whom Selim I brought from Iran and Egypt, representing different traditions, developed a new style recalling the Herat manner. Under Süleyman the Magnificent, Ottoman miniature painting moved toward a line of its own.

In time the nakkaş became one of the most important divisions of the Ottoman ehl-i hiref, the corps of palace artisans. A salary register of 1526 lists twenty-nine nakkaş and twelve apprentices, headed by Şahkulu, Melek Ahmed, Hasan b. Mehmed and Hasan b. Abdülcelîl. The nakkaş belonged to the kapıkulu, the sultan's household troops, and were therefore attached to the imperial army; they set out on campaign with it and continued their duties in wartime. Their pay was issued every three months on a daily rate, and their promotions were entered in the salary register. They were headed by a chief called sernakkâşân, and beneath him were administrators such as the kethüdâ, serbölük, ser-oda-i evvel and ser-oda-i sânî. In appointing palace nakkaş, the petition of the chief treasurer and the memorandum of the chief secretary were weighed together. If no suitable master was found within the corps for a work, someone was sought among the tradesmen of the market and employed for a fee. Süleyman the Magnificent assigned Şahkulu a private workshop and from time to time went to watch him at work. On holidays the sultan rewarded the nakkaş who brought him a special piece made for him with a kaftan or money. From the salary registers it is clear that some nakkaş were of Persian (Acem) origin, while those who came from Anatolia were known by the epithet Rûmî.

Şahkulu and the Saz Style

In the nakkaşhane of Süleyman's reign, the name that stands out for illumination is Şahkulu. The "Tezhip" entry of the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam writes that the decorative manner called saz yolu (the saz style) was created in the palace nakkaşhane in the first half of the sixteenth century by Şahkulu of Tabriz, a pupil of Âgâ Mîrek. The saz style was long admired in Ottoman art and was reinterpreted in the eighteenth century on lacquered book bindings. Among Şahkulu's designs are motifs of mythical animals; a design carrying them is preserved in an album in the Topkapı Palace Museum Library. Kara Memi, chief nakkaş of Süleyman's time, was his pupil, and the style he built from semi-stylised garden flowers was likewise applied with affection for a long time.

In local accounts Şahkulu is said to have been born in Baghdad and to have come to Amasya from Tabriz. The sources consulted state that he was from Tabriz and worked in the palace nakkaşhane, and give no document for his presence in Amasya. For that reason Şahkulu can be added to the city's story of nakkaşlık only with this reservation.

The Classical Style and After

The greatest master of the classical style, which emerged in the second half of the sixteenth century, is Nakkaş Osman. In this style the surface ornament of Süleyman's period loses importance; plain grounds are preferred and subjects are treated with a simple narrative and a documentary realism. The work completed in 1569 that recounts Süleyman's Szigetvár campaign and his death is the first that Nakkaş Osman illustrated in his own style. The first work in which his name appears as nakkaş is the Kıyâfetü'l-insâniyye fî şemâili'l-Osmâniyye of 1579. In the same circle Nakkaş Hasan Paşa stands out as a nakkaş trained in the Enderun who received the rank of vizier. The reign of Murad III is generally regarded as the classical age of Ottoman nakkaşlık. Under Sultan Ahmed I the making of murakka' (albums) in which single-leaf pictures were arranged in sequence gained importance. The Silsilenâme copies that Musavvir Hüseyin prepared in the Edirne palace in the seventeenth century led to the sultan portraits in Levnî's Kebir Musavver Silsilenâme at the beginning of the eighteenth. Levnî and Abdullah Buhârî are named among the last great representatives of this tradition.

Evliya Çelebi, in the Seyahatnâme, calls the nakkaş "esnâf-ı nakkâşân-ı musavverân." He says that because painting was forbidden by the sharia this guild had no patron saint, and he states that in his time they numbered four shops and some forty men. The nakkaş class, which lost its importance entirely at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is counted in a regulation of 1826 among the ten corps abolished because their services were no longer needed.

Gold, Pigment and Brush

The nakkaş's working method rested on the general technical tradition of the book arts. The information below rests not on documents specific to Amasya but on general knowledge of Ottoman and Islamic book arts. Pigments were mostly obtained from natural sources; blue was prepared from lapis lazuli, yellow from orpiment (zırnık), and red and green tones from various earths. Gold was beaten into thin leaf, ground and mixed with water and gum until it could be applied, and after being laid on the page it was burnished with agate. Brushes were made of very fine hairs, and some held only a few strands. Work on a single page could take days, even weeks.

Chronology

1385 / 1386: Birth of Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin (the sources give both years).

1444: Date given in the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam for the Akrâbâzîn Tercümesi; the date is disputed.

1465: The Cerrâhiyye-i İlhâniyye is completed in Amasya.

1468: The Mücerrebnâme is written.

1505: First mention of Sabuncuoğlu's name, in İbrâhim b. Abdullah's Alâim-i Cerrâhîn.

1526: A salary register lists twenty-nine nakkaş and twelve apprentices.

1569: Completion of the Szigetvár campaign manuscript, the first work Nakkaş Osman illustrated in his own style.

1826: The nakkaş class is counted among the abolished corps.

Sources

Primary sources

  • Rıfkı Melûl Meriç, "Osmanlı Sarayı'nda Ehl-i Hıref (Sanatkârlar) Defteri", TTK Belgeler, XI/15 (1981-86).

Books

  • İlter Uzel, Cerrahiyyetü'l-Hâniyye, Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, Ankara 1992.

Other sources

  • Nebi Bozkurt, "Nakkaş", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, 2006, vol. 32, pp. 326-328. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Nuran Yıldırım, "Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, 2008, vol. 35, pp. 358-359. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • "Minyatür", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi (section on Ottoman miniatures). islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • "Minyatürlerde Saklı Bir Hekim: Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin", Kırmızılar. kirmizilar.com
  • P. Huard - M. D. Grmek, Le premier manuscrit chirurgical turc, Charaf-ed-Dīn (1465) et illustré de 140 miniatures, Paris 1960.
  • "Tezhip", TDV Encyclopedia of Islam (section on Ottoman-period illumination styles).

Online sources