The crystalline and prismatic forms of Sinan’s externally articulated domed mosques are often regarded as somewhat untypical regional offshoots of “truly Islamic” architecture…
-The Age of Sinan, Gulru Necipoglu
Melchior Lorck captured the sweep and swagger of Istanbul at its most imperious acme.
-Julian Raby, former Director of the Freer-Sackler Galleries, Washington D.C.
My first desire was to visit the Church of St. Sophia…it is indeed a magnificent mass of buildings…with its huge vault or dome in the middle…Almost all the Turkish mosques are modelled upon [it].
-The Turkish Letters, 1581, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Austrian Empire’s Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, in whose embassy the artist Melchior Lorck worked when in 1559 he produced a panoramic ink drawing, 11 1/2 meters wide on 21 contiguous paper sheets, of Constantinople’s skyline drafted in exquisite architectural detail, showing the domed articulations of the city’s mosques including the converted church Hagia Sophia, the Mehmet II aka Fatih (before it was destroyed and rebuilt in 1771), the Bayezid II, the Yavuz Selim, and Mimar Sinan’s masterpiece the Suleymaniye newly completed in 1557, drawn from a vantage point on the heights across the Golden Horn
The Ottoman-style domed mosque rules the world. Even many Saudi-financed mosques in the most remote places, especially in former Soviet Central Asian lands, are marked by the work of Hagia Sophia-inspired protractor and compass-wielding architects. That some art historians might have ever called this style an untypical regional offshoot of something truly Islamic seems hard to accept.
Tourists in Istanbul have many vantage points from which to see the city on either side of the Golden Horn or across the Bosporus. The Galata Tower is a good place and so is from the foredeck of any ferry crossing from Uskudar. But five centuries ago Melchior Lorck found the best place of all and it has been rediscovered in modern times by clever digital geometricians recreating his angles of perspective and lines of sight.
What they find is that in order to have seen the entire skyline, Lorck must have done what all tourists have to do in order to see it all- walk around a bit. By doing just that, you will find that domed mosques are everywhere. Non-domed mosques in Istanbul are rare, usually those that have been converted from Byzantine-era churches. Most converted churches in fact are domed as well, although perhaps nowhere as prismatic as those built intentionally as mosques with their half, quarter, and eighth fragmented domes adjoining a central dome.
Better than Istanbul’s Greek domed churches-turned-mosques are other Greek and Roman era structures. The Valens Aqueduct running almost one kilometer and spanning the city’s Third and Fourth Hills is to the right of the Bayezid II Mosque, over Lorck’s head in the drawing. It is a long walk between the Hills but worth the effort in order to see how the two mosques that dominate each Hill, the Fatih and the Bayezid II, can be so similar despite having been built 250 years apart. As Lorck knew, such pile-ups of dome upon dome are not regional offshoots of any other style, but rather a style all their own.
A middle page from the 21 page wide panoramic view of Istanbul’s skyline, showing the artist Melchior Lorck at work
Bayezid II Mosque