Summary

The visual arts of western Islam in the early modern period begin as discrete styles characteristic of political entities: Nasrid Spain and the Maghreb, Mamluk Egypt and Syria, and the early Ottoman Empire. By the end of the 15th century ce, with the end of Muslim rule in Spain, the Ottoman Empire gradually established a Mediterranean hegemony that had varying impacts on the pre-existing regional artistic styles of the Islamic West. The Maghreb, while divided into different dynastic political units, showed a remarkable unity of style that had formed in the 14th century ce under both Nasrids and Marinids in Spain and northwest Africa, respectively. Even during the period of maximum Ottoman political power, the distinctive Maghreb style has continued to reflect the visual characteristics of its 14th-century apogee into the early 21st century. The Ottoman conquest of Syria and Egypt in 1517 resulted in a stylistic mixture of pre-existing Mamluk art and architecture coupled with Ottoman efforts to effect what Oleg Grabar has termed the “visual appropriation of the land.” In the core Ottoman lands and southeastern Europe, the Ottoman imperial artistic style, under court patronage in Istanbul, formed an essential visual element of symbolic rulership, including the emblematic lead-covered domes and pencil-shaped minarets found throughout the former Ottoman lands in the early 21st century, and the visual decorative vocabulary developed in the Istanbul design atelier. With the passage of time, various elements of European styles began to appear in Ottoman visual arts, but the essential elements of the 16th-century Ottoman style were subject to continual and self-conscious revival, a process that outlived the empire and can still be seen in the art of the Republic of Türkiye in the early 21st century.