Tales from 1001 Nights
Foreign lands, people and exotic cultures have always fascinated me, and it wasn't just as a child that I enjoyed reading the tales of the Arabian Nights. These brought to life deceitful viziers, poor beggars, tyrannical sultans, beautiful but unhappy princesses, and adventurous young men who were actually the unrecognized true heirs to the throne. These brave heroes saved entire sultanates and dynasties without giving a thought to tigers, deserts, or sea monsters. They were always given good advice by simple people, and their hearts were always true. Repeated readings of the Arabian Nights tales eventually got me interested in addressing their themes in a more serious manner.
The Orient in Painting
entitled Man in Oriental Costume. I then went off in search of illustrations of the painting. While looking through various art publications, I found reference to the fact that the expression turcxe tronie ("Turkish head") had come into frequent use after the 1930s. This expression is of course misleading, since for hundreds of years the typical Turkish head covering has no longer been the turbans worn by the sultans. Nevertheless, the authors of the article and the readers of that time connected this object with the Orient.
Several fantasy portraits of these "Turkish heads" can be found in museums. Most of them depict men clothed in rich robes, wearing a colorfully decorated turban on their heads.
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The most impressive of these is definitely Rembrandt's painting, which is currently on display in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The life-sized figure in the painting is dressed in a broad gold-braided coat and stands out from a gray background, whose monotony is mitigated by the lighting effect and loose brushstrokes. The man actually looks more like a Dutchman who modeled as a Turk as one might have encountered such an Easterner on the streets of cosmopolitan Amsterdam at that time.
The Stories:
All pictures of the series 'Tales from 1001 Nights' is shown below.
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