On the road again?

It won't be Istanbtul or Rome this time around... but I am waiting on dept. and university funding for travel grants to be officially announced to book my reservations. Summer plans include a week in England after two months of language study in Berlin, Germany. I am hoping to get to the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, in order to see the Freshfield Album. It's a portfolio of 16th century drawings, sketches of some of the antique monuments and contemporary (thus Ottoman) sites in Constantinople. I want to use the images for my comparative project (i.e., the dissertation proposal) on the recycling of 'place' in the 16th C and the use/construction of topographical images to do so.

The Freshfield Album has not been published or studied in much depth; the most popular of its images are the drawings of the Column of Arcadius (see above). The Column was historiated with a spiral staircase inside, rather like the Column of Trajan in Rome. And since it was demolished in 1729 following a severe earthquake, the drawings have important documentary value. The column is represented in a frontispiece engraving in the 1632 edition of Pierre Gilles' On the Antiquities of Constantinople. A topographical view of the city is presented below the column. This little volume is in the Special Collections of the U of C library; not my fingers holding the page open, by the way! The print has its own lineage. It is copied from a image of the Column of Arcadius published in the travel account of George Sandys. I find the gargoyle figures floating at the top of the engraving in Gilles fascinating. That and the way in which the Roman column dominates the cityscape behind it! There are covered structures suggesting a market or bazaar directly behind the column, with minarets and domes beyond them. I think the assertion of an antique past for the city is totally the point of the image. It is appropriate and in keeping with the whole project of topographical mapping that Pierre Gilles undertook when he published the antiquities of Constantinople. And the connection to the Freshfield Album? Well, obviously, I can't post pictures to illustrate it yet... but the sketches of monuments and buildings in Constantinople are all accompanied by references to the chapter/book of Gille's Topographia where he discusses them. The album works as evidence for how the printed text influenced the perception of western travelers and what they saw in Constantinople.

The Freshfield Album also represents the Column of Constantine, monuments from the Hippodrome, general views of this and of Hagia Sophia, the interior of Hagia Sophia, the Suleymaniye mosque, and the tombs of Sultans Suleyman and Selim with his 5 sons. There are also two images of an Abyssianian rhinoceros! These I have to see... Not sure yet how they all fit together or how the selection of monuments relates to other illustrations in printed guidebooks or travel accounts. =)

I'll post again as I figure out what's happening. Hopefully from someplace else than Chicago!