MELLING

VUE DE LA PLACE ET DES CASERNES DE TOP-HANE A L’ENTREE DU PORT DE CONSTANTINOPLE

(lithographiee a la Calcographie Royale de J. Goubaud)

35 x 23 cm.

Antoine Ignace Melling (27 April 1763 – No­vem­ber 1831) was a painter, ar­chi­tect and voy­ager who is counted among the «Levantine Artists». He is fa­mous for his ve­dute of Con­stan­tino­ple, a town where he lived for 18 years. He was im­pe­r­ial ar­chi­tect to Sul­tan Selim III and Hat­ice Sul­tan and later land­scape painter to the Em­press Josephine of France. His most in­flu­en­tial work is pub­lished as Voyage pit­toresque de Con­stan­tino­ple et des rives du Bosphore.

Melling’s two given names are often writ­ten in hy­phen­ated form as Antoine-Ignace.

Melling was born Anton Ignaz Melling in Karlsruhe, Baden, in 1763. After the death of his sculp­tor fa­ther, he lived with his painter uncle, Joseph Melling, in Strass­bourg (Al­sace). As a young man he vis­ited his older brother, and stud­ied Ar­chi­tec­ture and Math­e­mat­ics at Kla­gen­furt. At the age of 19, he went to Italy, Egypt, and fi­nally Con­stan­tino­ple as a mem­ber of the Russ­ian Ambassador’s ret­inue and house­hold with the aim of draw­ing pic­tures for var­i­ous dig­ni­taries. He was in­tro­duced to princess Hat­ice Sul­tan, sis­ter and con­fi­dant of the Ot­toman Sul­tan Selim III.

At Hat­ice Sultan’s sug­ges­tion, Melling was em­ployed as Im­pe­r­ial Ar­chi­tect by Selim III. In 1795 the princess com­mis­sioned Melling to de­sign a labyrinth for her palace at Ortaköy in the style of the Dan­ish am­bas­sador Baron Hübsch’s gar­den. De­lighted with the re­sult, she asked Melling to re­dec­o­rate the palace in­te­rior, and sub­se­quently, a com­pletely new neo­clas­si­cal palace at Def­ter­dar­burnu. He also de­signed clothes and jew­ellery for her.

Melling Pasha’s eigh­teen years as Im­pe­r­ial Ar­chi­tect gave him a priv­i­leged op­por­tu­nity to ob­serve the Ot­toman Court. He be­came more fa­mil­iar with the Ot­toman palace than any West­ern artist since Gen­tile Bellini. He made many de­tailed draw­ings of the Sultan’s palaces, Ot­toman so­ci­ety, and ve­dute of Con­stan­tino­ple and its en­vi­rons. He was rightly known as »the un­ri­valled painter of the Bospho­rus«. As stated in an anony­mous trav­el­ogue writ­ten in about 1817, »Some­times these pic­tures con­tain an ex­ces­sive amount of de­tail in an en­deav­our to re­flect the re­al­ity but they de­pict the mod­ern build­ings and land­scapes of this city, every view of which is at­trac­tive, in a man­ner more suc­cess­ful than that achieved in the most sen­si­tive writ­ten de­scrip­tions.« He worked in a far more re­al­is­tic man­ner than Matthäus Mer­ian (1593–1650). Merian’s panorama en­grav­ing of Con­stan­tino­ple, pub­lished in 1653 and ex­ten­sively reprinted, whilst claim­ing to rep­re­sent the view of the city from the heights of Galata and Beyoğlu, de­picts Ot­toman cap­i­tal as a city con­sist­ing only of minarets.

He went to Paris in 1803, and pub­lished a prospec­tus for the Voyage pit­toresque de Con­stan­tino­ple et des rives du Bosphore. With the help of Tal­leyrand Melling was ap­pointed land­scape painter to the Em­peror Napoleon’s wife, the Em­press Josephine. By 1809 he had set up an en­grav­ing stu­dio for the pur­pose of re­pro­duc­ing com­pleted im­ages of his draw­ings. A se­ries of fac­sim­i­les were sent out to sub­scribers, be­tween 1809 and 1819. Ex­am­ples of etch­ings with en­grav­ing by Schroeder, Duplessi-Bertaux, and Pi­geot after Melling, with later pro­fes­sional hand-colouring, in­clude:

• Cérémonie d’une noce turque.
• Fontaine de Sari-Yéri, près de Buyuk-Déré.
• Intérieur d’une partie du Harem du Grand-Seigneur.
• Kiâhd-Hané, Lieu de Plaisance du Grand-Seigneur.
• Prairie de Buyuk-Déré; Sur la Rive Européenne du Bosphore, à quatre lieues de Constantinople.
• Vue de l’un des Bend, dans la forêt de Belgrade.
• Vue d’Aïnali-Kavak près de l’Arsenal, dans l’intérieur du port de Constantinople.
• Vue d’une partie de la Ville de Constantinople, avec la pointe du Sérail, Prise du Faubourg de Péra, Résidence des Ministres Etrangers.
• Vue de Hounkiar-Iskelesi, Échelle du Grand-Seigneur.
• Vue de Kara-Aghatch, au fond du port.
• Vue de l’embouchure de la mer Noire.
• Vue de l’Isle de Ténédos, dans l’Archipel.
• Vue de la grande Arcade de l’aqueduc de Baktché-Kieuï, et du vallon de Buyuk-Dèrè.
• Vue de la partie Orientale de Buyuk-Dèrè, Sur la Rive Européenne du Bosphore.
• Vue de la première cour de sérail.
• Vue de la Seconde Cour Intérieure du Sérail.
• Vue de la Ville de Scutari, prise à Péra.
• Vue du Champ des Morts, près de Péra.
• Vue du château des Sept-Tours, et de la ville de Constantinople, telle qu’elle se présente du côté de la mer de Marmara.
• Vue du grand Bend, dans la forêt de Belgrade.
• Vue du Village Tarapia, sur la rive européenne du Bosphore.
• Vue générale de Constantinople, prise du chemin de Buyuk-Déré.

His 1812 jour­ney to the Netherlands (under French rule at the time) is doc­u­mented by Melling not only by a large num­ber of sur­viv­ing draw­ings but also by the let­ters sent to his fam­ily in Paris. The joys and in­con­ve­niences of that jour­ney, which took him as far as the Hanseatic towns, are re­ported in a lively style, as are var­i­ous as­pects of Dutch life, the mon­u­ments and in­hab­i­tants of large cities, like Rotterdam and Amsterdam, and the »over­whelm­ing ap­peal« of vil­lages such as Broek in Wa­ter­land and the peace­ful Sun­day at­mos­phere of Zwolle. The il­lus­trated and an­no­tated let­ters, pre­ceded by an in­tro­duc­tion – like a travel diary in­tended for a Voyage pittoresque – were never pub­lished. In 1815 he trav­eled with his daugh­ter, draw­ing the cap­i­tals of all the French départements, and vis­ited Britain in 1817.

After 1821, he was sent by the French Gov­ern­ment to doc­u­ment the Pyre­nees and demon­strate that their nat­ural beauty ri­valled that of the Alps. Seventy-two fine aquat­ints, based on orig­i­nal sepia wa­ter­colours, were is­sued – to­gether with text by Joseph An­toine Cervini – as Voyage Pit­toresque dans les Pyrénées Françaises et les Dé­parte­ments Adjacents (Pic­turesque Trav­els in the French Pyre­nees and the Ad­ja­cent Areas), Treut­tel and Wurtz, Paris: 1826–30, (Bib­li­ogra­phie na­tionale Française, BnF, The French na­tional Bib­li­og­ra­phy ISBN 978-2-911715-12-9). Ex­am­ples of hand-coloured aquat­ints from this work in­clude:

• Port de Vénasque
• Le Pont d’Espagne
• Le Lac de Gaube
• Vue prise de l’Hôtel Gassion à Pau
• Le Perthus et le Fort de Bellegarde
• Le Lac de Séculejo et ses Cascades
• Grotte du Mas-d’Azil
• Site de la Vallée d’Aure
• Ermitage de Saint-Antoine de Galamus
• Fontestorbes

The Nobel Prize-winning Turk­ish nov­el­ist, Orhan Pamuk ded­i­cates a whole chap­ter to Melling in his au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal mem­oir, Istanbul: Mem­o­ries and the City. Pamuk claims that Melling saw the city like an Is­tan­bullu but painted it like a cleareyed West­erner.^[1]

On the oc­ca­sion of the 700th an­niver­sary of the foun­da­tion of the Ot­toman State, cor­re­spon­dence be­tween An­toine Ignace Melling and Hat­ice Sul­tan, be­tween 1763 and 1801; was re­viewed in a paper by Fréderic Hitzel – at the 1999 In­ter­na­tional Con­gress on Learn­ing and Ed­u­ca­tion in the Ot­toman World. The In­ter­na­tional Con­gress or­gan­ised by IR­CICA in co­op­er­a­tion with the Turk­ish His­tor­i­cal So­ci­ety and the Turk­ish So­ci­ety for His­tory of Sci­ence, with the sup­port of the Min­istry of For­eign Af­fairs of the Re­pub­lic of Turkey. The con­gress took place under the pa­tron­age and in pres­ence of the Pres­i­dent of Turkey. 175 schol­ars and re­searchers from 28 coun­tries par­tic­i­pated in it. The pa­pers pre­sented – sub­se­quently re­vised by their au­thors – are pub­lished in three sep­a­rate vol­umes: Ara­bic, (Vol. 1), Eng­lish, (Vol. 2), and Turk­ish, (Vol. 3), re­spec­tively.

Melling is in­cluded in the Sabancı Uni­ver­sity Fac­ulty of Arts & So­cial Sci­ence course: Major Works of Ot­toman Culture, (HUM 203). This course, »fo­cuses on a se­lected few mas­ter­pieces of Ot­toman artis­tic and lit­er­ary pro­duc­tion, picked on the basis of not only their high aes­thetic qual­i­ties, but also their rep­re­sen­ta­tive­ness across dif­fer­ent gen­res and his­tor­i­cal pe­ri­ods«.

The Ertuğ & Kocabıyık fac­sim­ile edi­tion of the com­plete Voyage pit­toresque de Con­stan­tino­ple et des rives du Bosphor was pro­duced from the orig­i­nal »ele­phant folio«, an un­folded first edi­tion in the col­lec­tion of Ahmet Ertuğ. The tech­ni­cal as­pects of the pro­ject were done under the su­per­vi­sion of Ertuğ in Switzer­land by fac­sim­ile spe­cial­ists. This fac­sim­ile edi­tion was avail­able in two dif­fer­ent bind­ings. One is bound in Japan­ese cloth and the other is a very lim­ited edi­tion of only 50 copies bound in leather – in­tended for con­nois­seurs of fine books. The bind­ing and dec­o­ra­tion of all the leather-bound copies were done by hand. The book in­cludes 48 views of Con­stan­tino­ple in the late 18th cen­tury and also three maps. The fac­sim­ile pub­lish­ers also of­fered 25 copies of an edi­tion of the un­folded image plates pre­sented in a leather-bound case. The text for this edi­tion is bound sep­a­rately and pre­sented in a pocket in the leather case. The de­scrip­tions of the views in the fac­sim­ile edi­tion are in the orig­i­nal French, with an Eng­lish trans­la­tion.

• Antoine Ignace Melling, Lettres de Hollande et des villes anséatiques. La correspondance d’un artiste-voyageur avec sa famille à Paris en 1812. (Letters from Holland and the Hanseatic towns. Correspondence of an artist-traveller with his family in Paris in 1812). Presented and annotated by C. Boschma, Waanders, Zwolle/Fondation Custodia, Paris-1997.
• Souren Melikian (December 22, 2006). »From Turkey, a new genre in art publishing«. International Herald Tribune. Report on the Ertuğ & Kocabıyık facsimile edition of the complete Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople et des rives du Bosphor.
• Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople et des rives du Bosphore,(Paperback, 350 pages), Antoine Ignace Melling, Adamant Media Corporation, (in French), ISBN 978-0-543-97318-4 ISBN 978-0-543-97318-4.
• Correspondence between Antoine Ignace Melling (1763–1801) and Hatice Sultan, Fréderic Hitzel, Session VII, C. Papers in English (Vol. 2): Proceedings of the International Congress on Learning and Education in the Ottoman World on the Occasion of the 700th Anniversary of the Foundation of the Ottoman State, Istanbul, 12–15 April 1999 in 3 volumes. 2000–2002, IRCICA Publications. ISBN 978-92-9063-090-6
• Elisabeth A. Fraser, »Miniatures in Black and White: Melling’s Istanbul,« in Mediterranean Encounters: Artists Between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1774-1839, Penn State University Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-271-07320-0