The image of the Turk between history and allegory. About an ‘ottoman’ drawing of Jacopo Ligozzi and its possible Florentine context

Abstract

This paper analyses the drawing attributed to Jacopo Ligozzi and datable to the ninth decade of the sixteenth century, which portrays Sultam Selim 13 Imperator de Turchi – the ottoman sultan Selim II with a big dragon.

In particular, aim of the paper will be the reconstruction of the historical, cultural and artistic context in which the drawing of the Sultan with the dragon should have been conceived. The analysis will start therefore from an introduction about the series of tempera drawings, of which the sheet, now in private collection, was originally part. Moving from the ‘ottoman series’ to the rest of Ligozzi’s artistic production, the sheet will be considered in the light of other works of art of the Veronese artist. These will help to better understand the practice of attributing allegorical meanings to animals, which was encouraged, at the end of the sixteenth century, by the emergence of emblem studies and books. The paper will then discuss the tradition of associating the image of the dragon to the representation of the ottoman Turks: this tradition was based upon the artistic and textual production using the image of the dragon as a metaphor of the infidel and related to the crusade ideology, which revived after the fall of Costantinopoli (1453) and continued to be an important paradigm of reaction to ottoman expansionism until the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and beyond. Finally, going back to the Sultan with the dragon, the paper will try to situate this sheet and all the others of the ‘ottoman series’ in the cultural and artistic Florentine context through the comparison with the forms and functions of the grotesque decoration of one of the Uffizi Armeria rooms, due to Ludovico Buti (1588).