The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire

by Gülru Necipoğlu

During his tenure as Chief Royal Architect (1539-1588) in the "Golden Age" of the Ottoman Empire, Sinan designed hundreds of structures that helped create the renowned urban image of Istanbul, particularly mosques with seemingly weightless, light-filled centralized domes that have been compared with developments in Renaissance Italy. His distinctive architectural idiom left its imprint over a vast empire extending from the Danube to the Tigris, and he became the most celebrated of all Ottoman architects.

In this lavishly illustrated, major new assessment of Sinan's oeuvre, Gulru Necipoglu challenges standard views of Sinan as a "Turkish Michelangelo" driven solely by an insatiable urge for artistic experimentation. Her innovative analysis shows that Sinan's rich variety of mosque designs sprang from a process of negotiation between the architect and his elite patrons, both men and women. Defined though they were by social and territorial hierarchies and associated notions of identity, memory, and decorum, Sinan's mosques simultaneously shaped these conceptions. "The Age of Sinan" draws on a wealth of primary sources to reveal the chief architect's monuments as bearers of previously unrecognized dimensions of meaning. A sophisticated study of the cultural and social history of Ottoman architecture, interpreting the oeuvre of a seminal figure in the early modern eastern Mediterranean world, it is must reading for scholars and students of art history and other fields with an interest in the Ottoman Empire.
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Genres: History, Architecture, Art, Islam

Hardcover

First published April 29, 2005

About the author

Gülru Necipoğlu has been the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture since 1993 at Harvard University’s History of Art and Architecture Department, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1986. She specializes in the arts and architecture of the pre-modern Islamic lands, with a focus on the Mediterranean. She is interested in questions of aesthetic cosmopolitanism, transregional connectivities between early modern Islamicate empires (Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal), and cross-cultural artistic exchanges with Byzantium and Renaissance Europe. Her studies have also addressed pre-modern architectural practice, plans and drawings, the aesthetics of abstract ornament and geometric design. Her critical interests encompass methodological and historiographical issues in modern constructions of the field of Islamic art.

Professor Necipoğlu edits the journal Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World (Brill) and her books include: Architecture, Ceremonial and Power: The Topkapı Palace (1991); The Topkapı Scroll–Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture (1995); The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (2005, 2011). She recently edited the following volumes: Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3-1503/4) (2 vols, 2019, coeditors Cemal Kafadar and Cornell H. Fleischer); The Arts of Ornamental Geometry: A Persian Compendium on Similar and Complementary Interlocking Figures (2017); A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, in the Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Art History (coeditor F. Barry Flood, 2017); and Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local (coeditor Alina Payne, 2016).

Professor Necipoğlu is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Archittettura Andrea Palladio in Vicenza.

Reviews

[AskNezka · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was interested to read this art history book as Elif Shafak mentioned it as the inspiration for the writing of her novel, THE ARCHITECT'S APPRENTICE, which explored the Ottoman Empire during the life of Sinan. This is one of the most amazing biographical and architectural art history tomes I've ever come across, a true master work. The information on the designs, plans, decoration of the works overseen by Sinan during his long tenure, as well as the biographies of the Ottoman nobility and agents who commissioned his works, is so in depth and complex.

A very in-depth review here http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/925...

[Mehdi Faraji · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I lose my mind and read that book again like the first time

[John Kaye · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful, if long, book. AT times the historiography became overwhelming, getting in the way of a straightforward description and evaluation of Sinan's works and the environment they occurred in. But with that caveat, and the admission that I didn't read every chapter with the same dedication, this is a magisterial book!