Some artists fall between stools in modern scholarship, because their country of origin no longer corresponds to contemporary boundaries, or else because their movements across boundaries fail to place them neatly under our usual museum-based notions of “national schools.” By this reckoning, Melchior Lorck (also known as Lorichs, indicative of his problematic situation; 1526/27-1583) has been too easily overlooked. But his time has come, first with the multi-volume catalogue (2009), the life’s work of the great Erik Fischer, and now this important exhibition catalogue, edited by his successor, Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen, and Hanne Kolind Poulsen, senior research curator at the museum Lorck study has also suffered from the concentration of his works in one collection, Copenhagen’s fabulous print room (also home to the largest collection of drawings by Maarten van Heemskerck, catalogued by Jan Garff, 1971). This important exhibition and its catalogue, under review here, further introduces the artist to wider art historical audiences. The exhibition, already reviewed for HNA by Mara Wade, remains distinct from this publication, which consists entirely of essays with an appended checklist of the works on display, thus, review of the Lorck scholarship requires this second review.
Lorck, the first Danish artist with biographical documentation, straddled several worlds. He began making anti-papal prints from his Lutheran perspective but ended up working for Catholic courts associated with the Holy Roman Empire. Though his artistic training was sponsored by Danish king Christian III, he soon migrated away from his homeland, eventually as part of a diplomatic mission to the Ottoman capital, Constantinople, home of avowed enemies of all Christian Europe. There he observed and recorded images of Sultan Süleyman, local costumes of both military and civilian classes, and major buildings, ancient as well as contemporary, notably a nearly twelve-meter-long ink panorama of the city skyline (1559; Leiden University Library).[1] That monumental composite image forms the focus of a separate essay in the catalogue by Cigdem Kafescioglu (“Between Worlds, Between Visualities”). Together, Lorck’s designs formed the basis for an eventual, if unrealized documentary Turkish Publication. Though most Lorck drawing studies are now lost, 128 woodcut illustrations for The Turkish Publication survive and comprise the bulk of his legacy (and of the exhibition). Its posthumous 1626 publication appeared with Michael Hering in Hamburg.
Rasmussen’s rich essay discusses the “Veracity and Impact” of Lorck’s work and sketches the artist’s biography, beginning as the son of a court-connected merchant who first trained as a goldsmith, then took up printmaking. However, Rasmussen omits the early Lutheran-oriented imagery (see Poulsen’s essay, below).[2] The artist’s life and career changed in 1555, when he joined an imperial delegation from Vienna, led by Ogier Ghislin de Busbecq to Constantinople to negotiate a treaty. Lorck made engraved profile portraits of Busbecq and his Hungarian counterparts (figs.4-5), but his own role remains unclear, possibly including espionage. Rasmussen outlines the range of activities and freedoms accorded to the delegation as well as the tensions with their Ottoman hosts as well as Lorck’s own access for making a portrait print of an aged Sultan Süleyman (1559; fig. 8).[3] He finally returned in 1582 to a Denmark now ruled by King Frederik II. Meanwhile, Lorck designed triumphal arches for the 1563 ceremonial entry of Emperor Maximilian II to Vienna, for which he was ennobled and accepted into imperial service. Later in Hamburg he charted the Elbe River in another long map and produced twelve woodcut images of famous mosques, including the Kaaba, likely as preludes to his Turkish Publication, though he shows ominous storm clouds above Süleyman’s mosque. Contacts with Antwerp’s leading publishers show the ambitions of his project, first published in abbreviated form in 1574 by Christophe Plantin, but with a more strident anti-Turkish fearmongering. The expense of cutting woodcuts doubtless contributed to the inability to make a final lifetime publication. In his final years until 1583 he was official portraitist to the Danish king, as he continued the production of his Turkish woodcuts, with the idea of producing a more focused costume book, akin to other contemporary illustrated ensembles.[4]
Rasmussen notes that the images of Ottoman Turkey filled a contemporary fascination with collecting knowledge as part of curiosity cabinets by “antiquarians, historians, and geographers with an interest in the Ottoman empire and the historical traces of the past found there.” (p. 26) These insights are expanded in the more focused following essays. In particular, Ernst Jonas Bencard delves into “Structure and Style in Melchior Lorck’s Turkish Publication,” chief among what he calls “shipwrecked projects.” (p. 63) Bencard attempts a reconstruction, which he follows in five truncated publication efforts. His bibliographic comparisons, steeped in the contemporary methodology of history of the book, reveal a prelude and eight thematic segments, roughly divided between civilian and military groups as well as motifs on two or four legs, plus sultanas, transport, everyday objects, and architectural motifs. Such taxonomic classifications accord well with outlines of collection organizations, such as the treatise of Samuel Quiccheberg.[5] In line with such systematic examination, figures usually appear in isolation at full-length, as specimens (compare later exotic painted and paired “ethnographic portraits” in Dutch Brazil by Albert Eckhout, also in Copenhagen, at the National Museum), emphasizing their documentary character.[6] He notes their detached and diverse representation, in contrast with Lorck’s anti-Ottoman publications elsewhere.
Robyn Dora Radway follows up on Bencard by adducing other album imagery of Turks in Lorck’s own century. Geographer Nicholas de Nicolay’s 1567 Navigations et peregrinations orientales, based on his 1551 stay in the capital and accompanied by engraved illustrations, provided a precedent, often reprinted and translated. Radway also adduces similar ensembles, such as Jost Amman’s 1572 costumed figures and Abraham de Bruyn’s costume books (ca. 1577, enlarged 1581). Clearly there was a market for such imagery, whether as isolated Turkish figures, sometimes in watercolor studies, or as included within wider, international costume ensembles. Radway also notes influences running in both directions across these images.
Jan Loop closely analyzes Lorck’s illustration of the Kaaba (1570), which he interprets as “an Abrahamic family house,” because it also assembles other monuments alongside the enclosed core of Islam. Featuring Muslim monuments in Mecca and other Islamic monuments, such as the Dome of the Rock, plus a Gothic church and an Orthodox church at right, these structures were identified later with a key appended to the published woodcut in a new 1688 context. Loop compares Lorck’s representation with other early images of the Kaaba, and he even sees Lorck’s single image as anticipating Fischer von Erlach’s ambitious Historische Architektur (1712; Fig. 4, Mecca). Images of the Kaaba itself, such as pilgrim tiles (fig. 6), were surely widely visible in Constantinople, because Süleyman claimed the title of caliph, that is protector of the Muslim holy places.
Turning to the mammoth Prospect of Constantinople, Kafescioglu cites a bird’s-eye precedent for the city by Vavassore (ca. 1520; fig. 1), possibly based on a lost view by Francesco Rosselli. But she also contributes two similar anonymous skyline views from Lorck’s own century (figs. 3-4). Interested readers might find another strong comparison in a later ink panorama (1662) with anti-Ottoman texts by a Venetian Franciscan friar, Niccolo Guidalotto da Mondavio, presented to Pope Alexander VII.[7] Kafescioglu particularly emphasizes the enforced movement of the viewer along the length of the work and Lorck’s own diverse viewing locations with multiple perspectives. She notes how individual buildings on the panorama are admixed within plausibly imagined generic settings as well as fictive ancient remains. A self-portrait beside an Ottoman court figure (with a missing third observer) plus a compass rose emphasize Lorck’s eyewitness documentation of this panorama.
The remaining two essays complete the position of Melchior Lorck and the Ottoman sultanate, by stressing their rival religions of Christianity and Islam. As Poulsen discusses (“Iconic Elegance. Lorck’s Works in a Lutheran Light”), the young artist began his career, not only with proven German images, such as his profile portrait of Albrecht Dürer (1550; Rasmussen, fig. 3), but also with explicit Lutheran subjects, whether a portrait etching of Martin Luther himself (1548; fig. 1) or a harshly anti-papal, albeit virtuoso Pope as Wildman in Hell (1545; fig. 3) with German text. Denmark under Lorck’s royal patron King Christian III was Lutheran, and Poulsen fills in further details of Lorck’s biography; he went on to work for Count Ottheinrich, Lutheran ruler of the Palatinate in 1553. She also sees ties to Lucas Cranach in an early drawing, Feeding of the Five Thousand (ca. 1550; Flensberg, fig. 2) and, more lastingly, in the spare, framed elegance of his style, here called “iconic elegance,” even “petrification,” which also stems from Cranach’s own Lutheran images, as signs rather than illusions, a trait emphasized all the more in the Lorck woodcuts.
Finally, the reciprocal Turkish view of Europeans is outlined in Emine Fetvaci’s essay, which largely draws on Süleyman’s official chronicle of his reign, the Süleymanname.[8] She points out that Turkish artists also distinguish “Franks” by costume but not by religion, though her first image shows the devshirme, or forced conscription of boys in occupied Balkan territories. Most images about Europe show military conquests or meeting with vassal allies with emphasis on the Ottoman military power and dominance. These are all political pictures to glorify the sultan and record his deeds, so they contrast utterly with the more detached and diverse imagery of Lorck.
Taken together, these essays richly amplify what could be shown on the walls of the exhibition and make significant contributions to our understanding of both Lorck and his imagery. In our era of global encounters, future scholars must attend to this less familiar, but truly international artist.
Larry Silver
University of Pennsylvania
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[1] Nigel Westbrook, Kenneth Rainsbury Dark, and Rene van Meeuwen, “Constructing Melchior Lorichs’s Panorama of Constantinople,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 69 (2010), 62-87, with literature.
[2] Erik Fischer et al. Melchior Lorck (Copenhagen, 2009), vol. I. 70-71, no. 1545, 1. In 1548 Lorck produced a small engraving of the pope as a basilisk (no. 1548, 2).
[3] The proud Latin signature inscribed below its Turkish script: “Melchior Lorichs from Flensburg, Holsteiner, highly learned in the antiquities.” Süleyman is called “Emperor of the Turks in the East.”
[4] Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up. Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, 2010); Margaret Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones, The Clothing of the Renaissance World. Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni (London, 2008); Elizabeth Rodini and Elissa Weaver, eds., A Well-Fashioned Image. Clothing and Costume in European Art, 1500-1850, exh. cat. (Chicago: Smart Museum, 2001).
[5] The First Treatise on Museums. Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones 1565, trans. Mark Meadow and Bruce Robertson (Los Angeles, 2013).
[6] Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise. Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam, 2006), esp. 113-169.
[7] Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, “Fra Niccolo Guidalotto’s City View, Nautical Atlas and Book of Memories; Cartography and Propaganda between Venice and Constantinople,” in Ingrid Baumgärtner, Nirit Ben Aryhe Debby, and Katrin Kogman-Appel, eds., Maps and Travel in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Knowledge, Imagination, and Visual Culture (Berlin, 2019), 342-351; also her book, Debby, Crusade Propaganda in Word and Image in Early Modern Italy: Niccolo Guidalotto’s Panorama of Constantinople (1662) (Toronto, 2016). The edited volume contains other valuable studies of mapping, including an article by this reviewer about another sixteenth-century port city skyline, Antwerp (1515), and related works: Larry Silver, “Antwerp’s Civic Self-Portraits,” ibid. 315-341.
[8] Kaya Sahin, Peerless among Princes. The Life and Times of Sultan Süleyman (Oxford, 2023), esp. 245-50.