The Illuminated Haysmawurk‘: Ottoman-Armenian Painting and Confessionalism in the Age of Print

Abstract

The seventeenth century witnessed Armenian communities in transition. Armenians caught in the throes of famine, climate change, and social unrest fled eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus as causalities of simultaneous geopolitical catastrophes—the Celali Rebellions and the Ottoman-Safavid Wars. Once resettled in Istanbul, large numbers of newly urbanized Armenians underwent a process of ‘Ottomanization,’ which directly impacted their institutions, cultural products, and communities. Ottoman-Armenian artists visually imagined themselves and their histories as part of a burgeoning, early-modern Armenian diaspora, one of several taking shape across the eastern hemisphere. This dissertation tells the story of Armenian Istanbul from three perspectives—history writing; migration and diaspora; and media and technology—to trace the effects of the early modern world on a medieval art form and aesthetic. It studies Ottoman-Armenian manuscript painting and print in seventeenth-century Istanbul, where artists—enmeshed in the fabric of the empire’s multiethnic, multifaith capital—continued to elaborate on a millennium-old tradition, inventing new, locally informed iconographies to contest and transgress their Ottoman subjecthood. Unlike any other genre, the illuminated synaxarion (Armenian haysmawurk‘) bore impressive decoration that physically reconstituted where and how Ottoman-Armenians were seen and expected to operate within the empire. Artists used the haysmawurk‘ as a site to develop a new iconography that localized and contemporized the establishment of the Armenian Church to seventeenth-century Istanbul, in turn validating Armenian religious autonomy within the empire. Over four chapters, I situate the haysmawurk‘ within the rich material culture of the early-modern Armenian church and highlight the seventeenth century as a prolific moment of artistic production for Armenians, a people united by a shared, diasporic condition. I use the haysmawurk‘ as an entry point for the discussion of history writing and illustration in the early modern period, and to address entrenched criticisms of late Armenian painting, in particular negative assessments of the “Constantinopolitan style” as being derivative of print. I reverse the direction assumed by these criticisms, instead discussing the codependence of both media on one another, which necessitates an interdisciplinary approach to studying the panorama of early modern Armenian art on the brink of modernism.