Sensory Subjectivities, 6-7 June 2024, Kellogg College, University of Oxford

“Alterity as visual disruption in early eighteenth-century Ottoman painting” by Suzanne Compagnon (June 7, 2024)

Abstract

This paper explores the visual construction of alterity in the single figures attributed to the early eighteenth-century Ottoman artist ʿAbdülcelīl Çelebi Levnī (d. 1732). These paintings include European and Persian stock figures. Alterity is denoted through these men and women’s attire and a small number of physical features. The representation of “Persianness” is particularly striking because it goes beyond the pictorial differentiation of a cultural group through its dress. Levnī clearly quotes the figural aesthetics of the late sixteenth-century Safavid artist Riżā-yi ʿAbbāsī (c. 1565–1635). This emulation disrupts the viewer’s experience by embedding Safavid visuality in the sensorial process. Alterity is experienced as the intrusion of another gaze, thereby removing the viewers from the immediacy of their perception. This sensory disruption also highlights the reflexivity of viewing. It can be connected to the widespread conception in the Islamic world of depiction as an intervisual cognitive process.

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