Ottoman miniature

Ottoman miniature or Turkish miniature was an art form in the Ottoman Empire, which can be linked to the Persian miniature tradition, as well as strong Chinese artistic influences. It was a part of the Ottoman book arts, together with illumination (tezhip), calligraphy (hat), marbling paper (ebru), and bookbinding (cilt). The words taswir or nakish were used to define the art of miniature painting in Ottoman Turkish. The studios the artists worked in were called Nakkashanes.

The miniatures were usually not signed, perhaps because of the rejection of individualism, but also because the works were not created entirely by one person; the head painter designed the composition of the scene, and his apprentices drew the contours (which were called tahrir) with black or colored ink and then painted the miniature without creating an illusion of third dimension. The head painter, and much more often the scribe of the text, were indeed named and depicted in some of the manuscripts. The understanding of perspective was different from that of the nearby European Renaissance painting tradition, and the scene depicted often included different time periods and spaces in one picture. The miniatures followed closely the context of the book they were included in, resembling more illustrations rather than standalone works of art.

The colors for the miniature were obtained by ground powder pigments mixed with egg-white and, later, with diluted gum arabic. The produced colors were vivid. Contrasting colors used side by side with warm colors further emphasized this quality. The most used colors in Ottoman miniatures were bright red, scarlet, green, and different shades of blue.

The worldview underlying the Ottoman miniature painting was also different from that of the European Renaissance tradition. The painters did not mainly aim to depict the human beings and other living or non-living beings realistically, although increasing realism is found from the later 16th century and onwards. Like Plato, Ottoman tradition tended to reject mimesis, because according to the worldview of Sufism (a mystical form of Islam widespread at the popular level in the Ottoman Empire), the appearance of worldly beings was not permanent and worth devoting effort to. The Ottoman artists hinted at an infinite and transcendent reality (that is Allah, according to the Sufism's pantheistic point of view) with their paintings, resulting in stylized and abstracted depictions.

...
Wikipedia