Ottoman Decorative Arts and Workshops

Ottoman decorative arts joined materials, skilled hands and particular uses. From the fifteenth century, court artists developed designs for commissions while town workshops supplied palaces, mosques, merchants and households. A flower could be redrawn for a tile, woven into silk or placed in a manuscript, but each medium required its own process.

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Court designs and town production

The court design workshop, called the nakkaşhane, prepared paintings, manuscript illumination and motifs for other crafts. Under Süleyman I (reigned 1520–1566), the painter Shah Quli developed the saz style, with sweeping leaves whose edges turn into sharp serrations. His successor Kara Memi expanded the court’s repertoire with recognizable tulips, carnations, roses and other garden flowers. Weavers adapted these patterns to loom-width repeats, while ceramic painters fitted them to a vessel’s rim or a tile panel.

Palace commissions and commercial output served different buyers. Istanbul court workshops made costly cloth for palace furnishings and robes of honour presented to courtiers and foreign ambassadors. Independent commercial workshops in Bursa and other towns also made silk for domestic markets and export. A building commission likewise required coordinated tiles, while individual dishes could be made for affluent households.

At the Green Mosque in Bursa, built in the early fifteenth century, black-line tiles with coloured glazes cover the mihrab, the niche marking the direction of Mecca, and the sultan’s lodge. An inscription in the sultan’s lodge dates its decoration to 1424, while the mihrab inscription credits craftsmen from Tabriz. Nineteenth-century restoration changed other parts of the interior.

İznik ceramics and tiles

From the late fifteenth century, potters in İznik, a town in northwestern Anatolia, made blue-and-white vessels from stonepaste, also called fritware. This pale ceramic body combined ground quartz or silica with glassy frit and a small amount of clay. Potters formed a vessel or tile, covered it with white slip, a thin coating of fine clay, and painted the design before applying a transparent glaze. LACMA’s dish dated about 1530–1535 shows cobalt blue and turquoise against that white ground.

By the middle of the sixteenth century the palette had widened to green and a strong red, sometimes raised above the surface. Ceramic painters used fine brushes to place flowers, cloud bands and other patterns beneath the glaze. Kiln firing set the painted colours beneath a clear glaze.

Large building projects created demand for tile panels. Repeated tiles could form a continuous border or larger field across an interior wall. The Metropolitan Museum dates to about 1578 a floral tile commissioned for the renovation of Sultan Murad III’s private quarters. Multiple firings clarified its colours and design, and its cut-off motifs continue onto neighboring tiles to complete a larger pattern. Kütahya also produced Ottoman ceramics, and its output continued after İznik’s prominence had waned.

Later ceramics and European imitations

As İznik production declined after the late seventeenth century, Kütahya became a major Ottoman ceramic center. European makers also imitated Ottoman wares in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A nineteenth-century European ewer in the West Bohemian Museum was once confused with an Asian original; its account record described it as a teapot made after a Persian model.

Bursa silk and patterned cloth

Bursa had an established silk industry by the fifteenth century. On a loom, lengthwise warp threads are held taut while the weft passes across them. Compound silks used more than one warp and several wefts, allowing a weaver to build contrasting patterns into the cloth itself. Bursa workshops made velvet and metal-ground silks, patterned with metal threads, for local buyers and export; court-controlled workshops in Istanbul made gold- and silver-threaded fabric for palace furnishings and robes of honour.

A metal-wrapped thread has a narrow strip of metal wound around a silk core. Woven beside coloured silk, it catches light without requiring the whole cloth to be made of precious metal. Patterns such as çintamani, three circles alternating with two wavy bands, could be repeated across a loom width. A cushion panel could be planned to the width of the loom so several covers could be cut from one bolt with little unused cloth.

By the later seventeenth century, as palace commissions weakened, court-style textiles increasingly appeared in bazaars and private workshops took a larger share of production.

Metal vessels and gilded surfaces

Ottoman metalworkers made silver, copper and copper-alloy vessels and fittings. A tankard made in Turkey about 1540–1560 shows how one object joined several operations: its bulbous body and cover were cast, its S-shaped handle was cast separately and soldered on, and its surface was embossed, engraved and punched with scrolls and split-palmette, or divided-leaf, patterns. A copper plaque probably made in the sixteenth century has an engraved arabesque on a punched ground; three of its rivets remain from a set that likely decorated a large door.

Another finish, tombak, made copper look like gold through gilding. A dated 1870 ewer and basin set from Istanbul illustrates the technique on objects for ritual washing. To gild copper, metalworkers spread a gold-and-mercury amalgam over the surface and heated it so the mercury evaporated and gold remained.

Writing, painting and binding books

A court manuscript brought several crafts onto paper. Calligraphers copied the text in ink; illuminators added gold and coloured borders or headings; painters supplied miniature scenes; and bookbinders covered and joined the pages in leather. Finished paper, ink, watercolour, gold and leather are all recorded in the materials of the Surname-i Hümayun, the illustrated account of Prince Mehmed’s 1582 circumcision festival.

Sultan Murad III commissioned the book for his palace library. The writer Intizami says that the painter Nakkaş Osman prepared it with a team. A 1588 court document names calligraphers, painters, illuminators and binders whose work was associated with the Surname and another palace manuscript. Its colophon, the closing note that can identify a manuscript’s production, is missing; an archival register establishes that the book was complete by 1588. Its 250 double-page miniatures show the guild processions, banquets and performances described in the account.