Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

Tile panel in Rüstem Pasha

The art itself declined and gradually died out as the sultans stopped making conquests and building mosques. For the imperial mosques are monuments of victory, built and endowed out of the spoils of war. After the martial period of the empire came to an end with Süleïman I only one mosque of importance, that of Ahmed I, was built by a reigning sultan in his own name. But the tiles of the imperial factories, after many fires and much thieving, still make up what is most brilliant and most durable in the colour of Stamboul. The best tiles are Nicene of the sixteenth century, that extraordinary cinque-cento, when so many of the best things of the world were produced. They are distinguished by the transparent white glaze of their background, on which are drawn tulips, carnations, wild hyacinths, and a certain long bent serrated leaf common to the Rhodian plate. The chief colours are a dark and a turquoise blue and a tomato red, green and yellow occurring more rarely. And they are never quite smooth, the red in particular usually being in slight relief. This gives them a variety which is absent from many modern tiles.

The feeling for variety, in fact, was one great secret of Turkish tile making and tile setting. Sinan, for instance, used tiles very sparingly in his larger buildings. He was great enough to depend very little on ornament for his effect, and he knew that tiles would look like paper or linoleum—if such things existed in his day!—on a monumental surface. But he had a perfect tact of using this tapestry wherever he wanted a touch of colour or distinction—over a window, along a cornice, around a mihrab. His masterpiece in this decoration is the mosque of Rüstem Pasha, son-in-law and Grand Vizier to Süleïman the Magnificent. This mosque, lifted on retaining walls above the noise of its busy quarter, has a portico which must have been magnificently tiled—judging from the panel at the left of the main door—and the whole interior is tiled to the spring of the dome. The mosque is small enough for the effect of the tiles to tell—and to be almost ruined by the fearful modern frescoes of the vaulting. The guides of Pera have a favourite legend to the effect that Rüstem Pasha brought back these tiles from his wars in Persia and built a mosque for them to save giving them up to his imperial master. But no one need be an expert to see the impossibility of any such story. The tiles must have been designed for the walls which they incrust, and by a supreme master of decoration. I should not be surprised to learn that Sinan himself drew them all. There is a tall narrow panel on either side of the mosque, between two windows, which seems to me one of the most perfect ways imaginable of filling such a space. So are the spandrels of the arches supporting the gallery, and the niche of the mihrab, and the back of the mimber. All through the mosque, however, the way in which the artist has varied his designs and colours, while never losing his unity of effect, is a piece of genius. Narrow spaces and points of special interest are treated each in its own way; but unbroken surfaces of wall are never allowed to become monotonous by covering them with only one form of tile. They are broken up by narrower border tiles into panels, each of which is treated differently though harmonising with its neighbour and balancing the corresponding space on the opposite side of the mosque. Even within one of these spaces monotony is avoided by the fact that the tiles are almost never of a repeating pattern. Two or four tiles are required to make up the scheme. And then the pattern does not always fit the tiles, so that the interstices come in different places in different parts of the design, and you feel that the tiles could only have been made for that one space. In the case of special panels, of course, many tiles are required to make up the pattern. The splendid flowered panel in the portico contains forty-five tiles, exclusive of the border, and every one of them different. Such work was not commercial tile making. It was an art.

The mihrab of Rüstem Pasha

In Rüstem Pasha

Two mosques of a later period in Stamboul are completely tiled, that of Sultan Ahmed I and the one begun by his wife—Yeni Jami. They prove the wisdom of Sinan in not attempting to tile a large interior. Still, the gallery of Sultan Ahmed also proves that the architect was not altogether ignorant of what he was about. He put his best tiles there, where they can only be seen at close range. And his best is very good. I have counted twenty-nine varieties of tiles there, or rather of designs, divided, like those of Rüstem Pasha, into framed panels. The tiles facing the mihrab, where the gallery widens over the main doorway, are so good that I sometimes ask myself if the architect did not borrow from an earlier building. Two series of eleven panels, one above the other, make a tall wainscot whose only fault is that too much richness is crowded into too narrow a space. The lower series is the finer. Five panels to the right balance five panels to the left of a spindle-shaped Persian design. Its two neighbours are conventionalised cypress trees, than which nothing more decorative was ever invented. Then come two magnificent panels of larger spindles against a thicket of peach-blossoms or Judas blossoms, red with small blue centres, followed by two more cypresses. Five panels of the upper series, one of them forming the axis, are latticed again with blossoming sprays. In this case there is no spindle to hide the greater part of the flowers, which are blue with small red centres. The tiles are very nearly if not quite as good as those of the preceding century, and they make a wall more splendid than exists outside the old Seraglio.