ANAMED Talks

Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul
Speaker: Ünver Rüstem
Moderator: Ahmet A. Ersoy

For this month's talk, ANAMED will feature Ünver Rüstem. Moderated by Ahmet A. Ersoy, the talk will focus on one of the most dynamic periods in later Islamic art history. The talk explores the Ottoman Baroque, a new, globally resonant style of architecture that reshaped the Ottoman capital of Istanbul during the eighteenth century, when shifting political and cultural circumstances prompted the Ottoman court to develop novel strategies of self-representation. Ünver Rüstem will considers this new building style—which offered a distinctly Ottoman take on the widespread Baroque aesthetic—not as a sign of decline or "Westernization," but as a purposeful and locally rooted move that invoked Istanbul's Byzantine heritage and utilized the cross-cultural expertise of native non-Muslim artists. As contemporary sources reveal, the monuments that came out of this architectural rebranding won the admiration of audiences foreign as well as local, testifying to the success of the Ottoman Baroque in reasserting the empire's standing on a changing world stage.