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Türk Sanatı. Başlangıcından Günümüze kadar

  • The Viennese Ernst Diez lived in Turkey from 1943 to 1950. His textbook [i]Türk Sanatı[/i] (1946) stirred a debate on Turkish art and its relations to Byzantine and Armenian art.
  • Book
  • Türk Sanatı. Başlangıcından Günümüze kadar

    Word Count: 12

  • (Turkish Art. From the Beginning until Today)
  • 1946

  • Üniversite Matbaası Komandit Şti., Tünelbaşı (now Tünel Meydanı), Beyoğlu, Istanbul (publishing house).

  • Turkish
  • Istanbul (TR)

  • The Viennese Ernst Diez lived in Turkey from 1943 to 1950. His textbook Türk Sanatı (1946) stirred a debate on Turkish art and its relations to Byzantine and Armenian art.

    Word Count: 28

  • In 1943 the Viennese art historian Ernst Diez (1878–1961) arrived in the city on the Bosporus to establish an institute for art history at the University of Istanbul. Diez, who had joined the NSDAP in 1938 (Ellinger 2006, 38), did not leave Austria because of persecution. Instead, he came to Turkey for career reasons. Advantageous to his appointment to the first chair of art history at the University of Istanbul was Diez’s research focus on the history of Islamic art and his ties to the Viennese art historian Josef Strzygowski, who was the supervisor of Diez’s doctoral thesis.  Strzygowski was held in high repute in Turkey, as he was one of the few representatives of his generation who carried out research into non-European art (Mülayim 1989, 68).

    In Istanbul, Ernst Diez attempted to establish an institute with limited financial and technical resources. Initially, art history was housed in the building of the Academy of Fine Arts, where Diez taught on behalf of both Istanbul University and the Academy. He rented a room in architect Wilhelm Schütte's apartment, not far from his workplace.

    Diez was contractually obliged to write a textbook for his subject and made excursions to rural Turkey in search of forgotten historical buildings, which he recorded photographically. Turkey's entry into World War II in 1944 led to the internment of almost all Germans in the three Anatolian locations of Kırşehir, Yozgat and Nevşehir and Diez used his own internment in Kırşehir, which lasted for more than a year, to write his textbook. Back in Istanbul, Ernst Diez quickly resumed his teaching activities in early 1946 and completed work on his textbook Türk Sanatı. Başlangıcından Günümüze kadar [Turkish Art. From the Beginning until Today] within a few months. It was published in 1946 by the publishing house of the University of Istanbul, Üniversite Matbaası, which was located “Tünelbaşı“, close to what is now the entrance to the tünel subway in Beyoğlu opposite to which in the 1920s the editorial office of the Russian almanac Zarnitsy where Vladimir Kadulin worked as a caricaturist was located.

    In his textbook Diez committed himself to comparative art studies. The method developed by his teacher, the Viennese art historian Josef Strzygowski, explored the emergence of folk styles and influences through the study of individual buildings.

    In Türk Sanatı, Diez attempted to trace architectural motifs and decorative elements of Seljuk and Ottoman art back to their origins, following them across countries, peoples and centuries. This led him to conclude that the windows of the green mosque in Bursa, framed with muquarnas motifs, were derived from Armenian architecture. Similarly, he attributed the dome, the most important roof form in Turkish architecture, to Iranian architecture. He argued that it was the migration of peoples that was responsible  for the adoption of forms and styles.
    Diez attributed particular importance to Armenian culture, pointing to formative Armenian impacts on such religious buildings as the mausoleum towers around Lake Van in Anatolia. He also expressed a specific view on Ottoman mosques, claiming that they had been built by order of the sultan in competition with Ayasofya (Hagia Sophia). Only after Sinan had achieved the same spatial effects of Ayasofya in the Şehzade mosque was he able to set the standards for Islamic religious building.
    His attribution of Turkish art to Christian and non-Turkish cultural influences met with lively protests on an unprecedented scale. Articles by Turkish architects and historians appeared in the major daily newspapers of the republic, Ulus, Cumhuriyet and Vatan, as well as in the architecture magazine Mimarlık, which were devastatingly critical of Diez's work. The spokesmen of the campaign against Ernst Diez, the architect Sedat Çetintaş and the rector of the Topkapı museum, Tahsin Öz, called the textbook a slanderous “attack on Turkishness” (Çetintaş 1948, 21). They denounced the comparison between Hagia Sophia and the Ottoman mosque and criticised the relationship between Turkish and Armenian art articulated in the book. Öz writes: “If the main architectural works really do come from Armenian models, if Armenian masters were active, if the floor plans of the most important mosques and mausoleums can be traced back to churches, where is the Turkish architecture? So why does he call his book ‘Turkish Art’? And, if I may say so, where is the need for a chair in Turkish art history?” (Öz 1947)

    Diez tried to defend himself in the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet and in the journal Felsefe Arkivi. He argued on the basis of the “law of endosmosis”, the “cultural penetration” from which no “art province” is exempt: “No art historian will deny the high peculiarity of Seljuk architectural ornamentation, but it is particularly his task to investigate the origins and provenance of the individual architectural and ornamental forms.” (Diez 1947, 221) The dispute over
    Türk Sanatı ruined Diez's reputation (Nureddin 1949) and ultimately led to his dismissal. In 1950 he left Turkey and his fledgling institute, along with its 110 students.

    Although Diez spent only seven years in Turkey and polarised his contemporaries, his importance in the genesis of the study of art history was undoubtedly immense. His assistant Oktay Aslanapa became an important figure in Turkish art historical research in the second half of the 20th century. Aslanapa expanded the institute founded by Diez and was responsible for the management of the Turkish-Islamic branch for many years. The Turkish art historian shaped the institutional order of the subject at Istanbul University, which was to become a model for many other institutes in Turkey.
    Ernst Diez was honoured decades after leaving Istanbul by a number of memorial publications written by his Turkish students (Aslanapa 1963; Eyice 1997).

    Word Count: 938

  • Ernst Diez. Türk Sanatı. Başlangıcından Günümüze Kadar. Univ. Matbaası, 1946, p. 49.
  • Ernst Diez. Türk Sanatı. Başlangıcından Günümüze Kadar. Univ. Matbaası, 1946 (University of Hamburg, Library of the Asien-Afrika-Institut).
    Ernst Diez. Türk Sanatı. Başlangıcından Günümüze Kadar. Univ. Matbaası, 1946, pp. 42–43. Diez illustrated his book with photographs from his internment in Kırşehir (University of Hamburg, Library of the Asien-Afrika-Institut).
    Ernst Diez. Türk Sanatı. Başlangıcından Günümüze Kadar. Univ. Matbaası, 1946, pp. 48–49. Diez mentions Yeşil Cami (Green mosque) in Bursa and emphasises the impact of Armenian architecture (University of Hamburg, Library of the Asien-Afrika-Institut).
    Ernst Diez. Türk Sanatı. Başlangıcından Günümüze Kadar. Univ. Matbaası, 1946, pp. 84–85. Double page with Diez’s photograph of Melik Gazi Türbe in Kırşehir (University of Hamburg, Library of the Asien-Afrika-Institut).
    Ernst Diez. Türk Sanatı. Başlangıcından Günümüze Kadar, Istanbul: Univ. Matbaası, 1946, pp. 172–173. Double page with photographs of Şehzade and Yeni Valide mosques in Istanbul. (University of Hamburg, Library of the Asien-Afrika-Institut).
    Ernst Diez. Türk Sanatı. Başlangıcından Günümüze Kadar. Univ. Matbaası, 1946, pp. 176–177. Comparison between Ayasofya (Hagia Sophia) and Süleymaniye mosque. (University of Hamburg, Library of the Asien-Afrika-Institut).
    Ernst Diez, Turkey, around 1946 (Aslanapa 1993).
    Ernst Diez and Oktay Aslanapa (right beside him) on a student excursion to the Prince's Islands in Istanbul, 23 April 1950 (Estate of Oktay Aslanapa, Istanbul).

  • Aslanapa, Oktay, editor. Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte Asiens. In Memoriam Ernst Diez. Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakultesi Yayınları, 1963.

    Aslanapa, Oktay. Türkiye’de Avusturyalı Sanat Tarihçileri ve Sanatkârlar. Eren Yayıncılık, 1993.

    Çetintaş, Sedat. “Türk Sanatı’ kitabının çeşitli hataları.” Mimarlık, no. 2, 1948, pp. 20–21.

    Diez, Ernst. Türk Sanatı. Başlangıcından Günümüze Kadar. Universite Matbaası, 1946.

    Diez, Ernst. “Endosmosen.” Felsefe Arkivi, vol. 2, no. 1, 1947, pp. 221–238.

    Dogramaci, Burcu. “Kunstgeschichte in Istanbul. Die Begründung der Disziplin durch den Wiener Kunsthistoriker Ernst Diez.” Kunstgeschichte im „Dritten Reich“. Theorien, Methoden, Praktiken (Schriften zur modernen Kunsthistoriographie, 1), edited by Ruth Heftrig et al., Akademie, 2008, pp. 114–133.

    Dogramaci, Burcu. “Josef Strzygowski, Ernst Diez et la construction d’une histoire nationale de l’art turc.” Austriaca. Cahiers universitaires d’information sur l’Autriche, no. 74: Vienne, porta Orientis, edited by Dieter Hornig et al., Mont-Saint-Aignan Cedex, 2013, pp. 158–172.

    Ellinger, Ekkehard. Deutsche Orientalistik zur Zeit des Nationalsozialismus 1933–1945. Deux-Mondes-Verlag, 2006.

    Eyice, Semavi. “I.Ü. Edebiyat Fakültesi sanat tarihi kürsüsü’nün kurucusu Prof. Dr. Ernst Diez (1878–1961).” Sanat Tarihi Yıllığı, XIV: 50. Kuruluş Yıldönümü Özel Sayısı, 1997, pp. 3–15.

    Mülayim, Selçuk. “Sanat Tarihinin Attilası Josef Strzygowski.” Sanat Tarihi Araştirmaları Dergisi, no. 8, 1989, pp. 65–69.

    Nureddin, Vâla [Vâ-Nû]. “Gelelim yerli profesörlere.” Akşam (Istanbul), 8 April 1949, n.p.

    Öz, Tahsin. “Türk Sanatı kitabı dolayısıyle.”  Vatan (Istanbul), 22 January 1947, n.p.

    Word Count: 233

  • Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, Ernst Diez Papers.

    Word Count: 7

  • This entry is dedicated to the memory of Oktay Aslanalpa (1914–2013), who shared his knowledge of Ernst Diez with me and provided me with materials from his collection. My thanks go to Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, for giving me access to the Ernst Diez Papers.

    Word Count: 44

  • Burcu Dogramaci
  • Istanbul
  • No
  • Burcu Dogramaci. "Türk Sanatı. Başlangıcından Günümüze kadar." METROMOD Archive, 2021, https://archive.metromod.net/viewer.p/69/2949/object/5140-10990269, last modified: 20-06-2021.
  • Traugott Fuchs
    PhilologistRomanistPoetPainter
    Istanbul

    Traugott Fuchs was a multi-talented philologist, painter and poet who lived in Istanbul from 1934 until the end of his life in 1997.

    Word Count: 21

    Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and Wilhelm Schütte Apartment
    Residence
    Istanbul

    The exiled architects Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and Wilhelm Schütte lived from 1938 in an apartment in Kabataş, on the European side of Istanbul. The flat has been preserved in numerous photographs, allowing the interior design to be reconstructed. The view of the Bosporus from the balcony was spectacular.

    Word Count: 48

    Vladimir Kadulin
    PainterCaricaturist
    Istanbul

    When it comes to Russian émigré caricaturists in Istanbul, Vladimir Kadulin who worked under the pseudonym Nayadin for the almanac Zarnitsy is the first to come to mind.

    Word Count: 28