Picture in Picture:
Images of the Sultan in
Balkan Princely Portraits
Alison Terndrup
Synopsis:
This presentation dives into the relationship between power and sartorial symbolism by looking at portraits of hospodars, or local leaders of Ottoman-Balkan principalities. In the early- to mid-nineteenth century, territories in Southeastern Europe – including the areas we know today as Serbia and Romania – underwent a period of political, economic, and cultural dynamism associated with internal revolutionary movements and foreign influence. During this period, the trend for having one’s portrait painted in a heroic, post-Napoleonic style among elite military men coincided with a rare phenomenon in Ottoman pictorial history: the bestowal of the Sultan’s figural portrait, worn as a particular mark of honor and prestige.
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References:
Costache, Ştefania. “Westernization as Tool of Inter-Imperial Rivalry: Local Government in Wallachia between Ottoman Control and Russian Protection (1829–1848),” New Europe College Yearbook 2011–2012, ed. Irina Vainovski-Mihai (Bucharest: New Europe College, 2014): 55–70. 
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Philliou, Christine M. Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010).
Pointon, Marcia. “‘Surrounded with Brilliants’: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England,” The Art Bulletin 83, no. 1 (March 2001): 48–71.
Renda, Günsel. “Osmanlılarda Portreli Nişanlar,” in Uluslararası Sanat Tarihi Sempozyumu. Prof. Dr. Gönül Öney’e Armağan, 10–13 Ekim 2001 (Izmir: Ege Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Sanat Tarihi Bölümü, 2002), 491–502.
Terndrup, Alison. “The Sultan’s Gaze: Power and Ceremony in the Imperial Portraiture Campaign of Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839),” OpenBU, 2021.
Vintilă-Ghiţulescu, Constanţa, ed. From Traditional Attire to Modern Dress: Modes of Identification, Modes of Recognition in the Balkans (XVIth-XXth Centuries) (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011).
Citation:
Alison Terndrup, “Picture in Picture: Images of the Sultan in Balkan Princely Portraits” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 12 October 2023.
Alison Terndrup (Ph.D., Boston University) is a Temporary Assistant Professor in the Art History Department at the University of Delaware. Her research spans the fields of Islamic and nineteenth-century art histories, focusing on Ottoman imperial and sub-imperial identities, cross-cultural encounters, and the uses of visual art in supporting ideologies of power. Terndrup was an Institute of Turkish Studies-Koç Holding Research Fellow and the recipient of multiple travel grants to Turkey, Serbia, and Romania. Her forthcoming article, “Mapping the ‘Miracle-Showing’ Portrait in Istanbul” will be published in Muqarnas in 2024.