Castiglione's Costume: a Symbol of the Other

Castiglione’s Costume: a Symbol of the Other introduces  Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione’s depictions of Oriental attire in the Oriental Heads etchings. Scholarship on the series is virtually nonexistent, and typically only briefly addresses the series in monographs. These monographs state that Castiglione was most likely inspired by the foreign traders he would have seen circulating throughout Genoa, but also demonstrated his technical virtuosity in these etchings.[1] These accounts explain that Castiglione was primarily interested in tronies by northern artists, specifically Rembrandt, which earned Castiglione the diminutive “the second Rembrandt.”[2] However, these explanations are insufficient because the term tronie has become a catch-all term for anonymous portraits, studies of heads or busts, and sometimes portraits of identifiable people; the disparities among different scholars' definitions of the term make tronie an inadequate avenue of analysis to understand the Oriental Heads.

Scholars including Timothy Standring and Anthony Blunt suggest that Castiglione’s Oriental Heads might be the result of his observations of foreigners circulating throughout Genoa, where he spent most of his life. Although he surely observed foreigners around the port, Castiglione’s residence in Genoa is not an adequate explanation for his creation of the etchings. The faces of the figures are generic, the costumes are simplified, and the high quality of the soft-ground etchings suggest that these were not studies of real people. Rather, Castiglione showed significant imagination in his Oriental Heads; the etchings should thus be treated as a record of Eurocentric cultural attitudes that prevailed among early modern Europeans.

The etchings are clearly connected by the repetition of Oriental clothing worn by the figures. Because these etchings are busts, the element of Oriental attire is largely restricted to headdresses, jewelry, and scarves. Specifically, turbans are a prominent feature of Castiglione’s Oriental Heads, and functioned as a symbol of the Orient. Castiglione depicted simplified oriental garb, and therefore was not interested in accurately depicting foreigners. Instead, his use of Oriental clothing functions as a distillation of the Orient into the Other. His etchings of Turks demand further examination because they (like so many other Renaissance And Baroque works of art) reveal much more about the culture that produced them than the cultures they depict.[3]

Renaissance images that relegate Oriental figures as the Other are critical predecessors to Castiglione’s etchings. During the early modern period, there was a prevalent fear of military domination by the Ottoman Empire, which became a catalyst for these images. Europeans viewed the Turk as the enemy both militaristically as well as spiritually; the prevalence of Islam in Middle Eastern countries was a major concern for Europeans, who believed Islam was heresy, perpetuating the relegation of the Orient as the Other. Western Europeans tried to explain Mohammed as the Muslim equivalent of Christ, resulting in attitudes towards Mohammed as the “imposter.”[4] Islam became the epitome of an outsider, against which early modern European society was founded.[5] This early modern Orientalism was an ignorant yet complex web of political domination and cultural misunderstanding. The military and spiritual vilification of the Turk is a critical component to the early modern images of Oriental figures, because the artists, patrons and viewers shared the same cultural attitudes of domination towards the Turk.

The images that follow speak to these Eurocentric cultural attitudes. The artworks in this project include works that span across Castiglione’s oeuvre in addition to his series of Oriental Heads. Additionally, this exhibit features images produced by Castiglione’s predecessors who depicted Oriental figures. Artists including Gentile Bellini and Albrecht Durer created pivotal images of the Turk, which affected later visual manifestations of early modern Orientalism. Portraits, drawings, and narrative paintings indicate the prominence of a visual language of domination throughout the Renaissance and Baroque.

Castiglione’s Costume: a Symbol of the Other explores Oriental attire to contextualize Castiglione’s Oriental Heads in a larger framework of Orientalism. By examining the strong precedence of artists’ depictions of Oriental figures that emphasize detailed Oriental costume, this exhibition investigates Castiglione’s depictions of generic clothing, jewelry and headdresses. Castiglione’s images of the Orientals represent the Orient as the Other, through this tendency to generalize. The Oriental Heads are not accurately rendered depictions of Turks because they were not trying to be accurate; rather, they are a critical case of early modern Orientalism, in which Castiglione incorporated the Orient schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience and actors are for Europe and only for Europe.[6]

To begin exploring the exhibition, click here.

 

 


[1] Timothy J. Standring, and Martin Clayton, Castiglione: Lost Genius (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2013), 81.
[2] Ibid.
[3] James Harper, The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450- 1750 (Burlington: Asgate, 2011), 1.
[4] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 66.[5] Said, Orientalism, 71.
[6] Said, Orientalism, 71-72.