A Double Perspective and a Lost Rivalry: Ogier de Busbecq and Melchior Lorck in Istanbul

Abstract

The double perspective offered up by a pairing of artist and writer can leave a transfixing legacy. Take Restoration London as an example. It is almost impossible to visualise the city without viewing it through the engravings of Wenceslaus Hollar and the diaries of Samuel Pepys. As Hollar depicts London Bridge decorated with the decapitated heads of traitors, it also comes alive as the place where the naval secretary Pepys took his brief pleasure with prostitutes. Similarly, eighteenth-century Venice is forever caught by the accidental double-act of Canaletto and Casanova, rural nineteenth-century Russia by that of Ilya Repin and Leo Tolstoy, while arguably the befogged nineteenth-century London conjured up by both Turner and Charles Dickens still dominates our perception of that city.