One of the Earliest Great Illustrated Accounts of the Ottoman Empire with 60 Full-Page Costume Woodcuts
Nicolay, Nicolas de. Les navigations, peregrinations et voyages, faicts en la Turquie. […]. Le tout distingué en quatre Liures. Avec soixante figures au naturel tant d’hommes, que de femmes selon la diversité des nations, leur port, maintien, habits, loyx, religion, & de façon de viure, tant en temps de paix comme de guerre. Antwerp, Guillaume Silvius, 1576.
One of the most influential Renaissance travel books on the Ottoman Empire and among the earliest great illustrated costume books of the Islamic world: Nicolas de Nicolay’s celebrated account of his 1551 voyage to Constantinople, illustrated with 60 full-page woodcuts depicting the peoples, costumes, professions, ceremonies, and social hierarchies of the Ottoman world with extraordinary richness and ethnographic detail.
The work became one of the defining visual sources through which Renaissance Europe imagined the Eastern Mediterranean and remained highly influential well into the nineteenth century, inspiring artists including Delacroix and Ingres.
Edition & Bibliographic Information
a8 b4 A-Z8; Aa8 Bb-Dd4 Ee6 = 12 leaves, 305 pages, 13 leaves of tables, with complex pagination incorporating 56 of the illustrations into the printed numbering. Printed with marginal commentary columns throughout.
Illustrated with 60 full-page costume woodcuts within elaborate arabesque borders, additional arabesque title border with printer’s device, five ornamental arabesque headpieces, and five large historiated initials, all in woodcut. Quarto (195 × 135 mm).
Eighteenth-century marbled calf binding over five gilt-ruled raised bands, gilt spine label, floral spine ornaments, blind fillets to covers, gilt board edges, and red-speckled edges. Binding lightly rubbed; endleaves slightly darkened at margins from adhesive; a few leaves lightly browned; one leaf with tiny marginal hole.
The present volume is the second edition, printed in Antwerp by Guillaume Silvius in 1576, though copies also appeared dated 1577 on the title page. The woodcuts are reduced copies of those from the rare first Lyon edition of 1567.
A Renaissance Journey into the Ottoman Empire
The French geographer Nicolas de Nicolay (1517–1583) accompanied the French ambassador Gabriel d’Aramon to Constantinople in 1551 as part of a diplomatic mission to the Ottoman court.
His account follows the sea route through Algiers, Malta, and Tripoli before arriving in Constantinople itself, but the true focus of the book lies in its detailed portrayal of the customs, religions, professions, and everyday lives of the peoples living under Ottoman rule.
Turks, Persians, Greeks, Jews, Arabs, Armenians, merchants, Janissaries, pilgrims returning from Mecca, noblewomen, dervishes, physicians, cooks, wrestlers, and slaves all appear within Nicolay’s vast ethnographic panorama.
Unlike many earlier travel narratives dominated by fantasy or hearsay, Nicolay sought to construct an observational portrait of Ottoman society grounded in direct experience. Yet the work remains unmistakably Renaissance in sensibility, balancing empirical curiosity with theatricality, exoticism, and visual spectacle.
The 60 Costume Woodcuts
The heart of the book is formed by the 60 full-page costume illustrations.
Though once attributed to Titian, the figures are now understood to derive from Nicolay’s own drawings, translated into woodcut by Louis Danet, and possibly also by Assuerus van Londerseel or Antoine van Leest.
The illustrations extend far beyond simple costume documentation. Each figure is individualized through posture, gesture, facial expression, and carefully observed details of daily life. The engravings function simultaneously as portraiture, ethnography, fashion study, and political theatre.
We encounter richly dressed Ottoman dignitaries, heavily armed Janissaries, Greek peasant women, ecstatic dervishes, Jewish physicians, Turkish cooks, nude wrestlers, and pilgrims returning from Mecca. The cumulative effect is that of an immense visual encyclopedia of Ottoman society during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent.
The elaborate arabesque borders further reinforce the book’s fascination with ornament, geometry, and the visual language of the Islamic world as perceived through a Renaissance European lens.
Renaissance Orientalism Before Orientalism
Nicolay’s book occupies a fascinating historical threshold.
Long before nineteenth-century Orientalism, the work already reveals Europe’s growing fascination with the Ottoman Empire as both geopolitical rival and source of aesthetic and cultural fascination. The book combines diplomatic observation, humanist scholarship, costume study, travel literature, and visual anthropology into a single ambitious publication.
Its influence spread rapidly through multiple editions and translations across Europe. By the nineteenth century, the images continued to shape artistic visions of the East for painters such as Delacroix and Ingres.
At the same time, the work preserves one of the most important visual records of sixteenth-century Ottoman social diversity produced by a Western observer.
Provenance
Early ownership name on title, later deliberately obscured. Late nineteenth-century owner’s annotation describing the work as:
“rare et cher.”
Literature
Adams N 254 (dated 1577); Atkinson 250; BM STC Dutch 160; Brunet IV, 67; Cioranesco 16530; Cockx-Indestege et al., no. 2201; Colas 2201; Ebert 14781; Funck 68; Göllner II, no. 1664; Graesse IV, 671; Hiler 656; Lipperheide Lb 2; Nagler, Monogrammisten I, 1459; cf. Nederlandsch Historisch Scheepvaart Museum 104 (other editions); Rahir 561.
For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 60:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume II
