Ars: časopis Ústavu Dejín Umenia Slovenskej Akadémie Vied (1999)

The Leiden Sketchbook: towns along road from Vienna to Constantinople (1577-1585)

(Summary)

The article focuses on the analysis and interprétation
of the so-called Leiden Sketchbook. Town views, which
compose this drawn itinerary, are kept in Collections of
old prints and manuscripts of the Leiden University Li-
brary, in the Biblioteca Vossiana and has so far not been
published. The volume contains twenty six anonymous
sketches of towns, representing places in Central and South
Eastern Europe: Hainburg, Bratislava, Komárno, Eszter-
gorn, Visegrád and Nagymaros, Buda and Pest, Erdöd,
Vukovar, Bodin, Petrovaradin, Slankamen, Zemun, Bel-
grade, Nish, Pirot, Sophia, Plovdiv, Svilengrad, Edirne,
Hafsa, Babaeski, Lüleburgaz, Çorlu, Silivri, Büyük Çek-
mice and Kücük Çekmice. A look at the géographie loca-
tion of tire towns reveals, that they were the stopping places
on one of the most important roads of this region con-
necting Vienna with Constantinople.
The manuscript was first ascribed to Melchior Lorichs
(Lorck) and dated 1555-4560, with a necessary question-
mark The content analysis has proved, however, that it
must bave been produced about twenty years later. All
the important architectural monuments, which the author
portrayed in his sketches, were in place only between
1578-1585. The dating, the style, the handwriting, together
excluded the possibility of Lorichs’s authorship. Never-
theless, the sketchbook présents an interesting contribu-
tion to the western image of Ottoman towns. The style
suggests that drawings were produced by a person fami-
liär with techniques of drawing views of towns common
in the second half of the sixteenth Century, using two main
approaches to the urban landscape: bird’s-eye view and
panoramic view. The author of the Leiden Sketchbook
undertook the journey along the imperial road downstream
the Danube to Belgrade and then across the interior of the
Balkan peninsula. 1t was an exclusively official road used
by diplomatie missions, merchants and the army. As no
private person took it and no private written account was
produced of this track, also the author of the Leiden Sketch-
book was probably in some way attached to an official
group of travellers - an embassy or a messenger. The Leiden
Sketchbook represents a rather systematic présentation of
towns on the imperial road. The author included ail obli-
gatory stopping places, practically ail fortresses, large and
even small towns. Nevertheless he omitted many castles

and several other places, such as Illok, Smederevo, Ja-
godna or Tatar Pazardzik, some of which were considered
towns or boroughs in travelogues. Our knowledge of the
road is quite detailed thanks to considérable historical re-
search, which proved numerous travel descriptions as re-
liable sources of information. Following the historical
analyses of varions versions of itineraries, it was conclud-
ed, that the important places, where travellers stopped to
get permission to continue their journey and stayed offen
more than one night, were identical. The mentions of less
important places, which were just passed on the way, or
places, where travellers spent only one night are more
variable. In this aspect the Leiden Sketchbook is quite
unique. It is surprising that several towns in the interior of
the peninsula, so small and unimportant that they did not
hâve their own entries in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century dictionaries or topographie description, hâve their
own “portrait”. In large and famous collections of the pe-
riod produced either in Italy, Germany or the Low Coun-
tries, we would find towns of this region only occasional-
ly. Small Serbian towns and practically ail places in Rume-
lia and Thracia (today Bulgaria and Turkey) are missing,
with the exception of Edirne and Constantinople, which
were drawn in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The
technique of a town-view experienced an innovative peri-
od in the sixteenth Century. The Leiden Sketchbook corre-
sponds with the efforts to provide reliable information
about distant régions, to present an impressive interpréta-
tion of urban landscape. The author succeeded to create
drawing of small towns more or less true to the topogra-
phy. However, when he attempted to depict large, adminis-
trative centres, he produced rather impressionistic views.
From this aspect, the collection has to be treated as a
western interprétation of towns, and in the context of an
early development of “vedutti”.
The analysis of the Leiden Sketchbook contributes to
the study of the procedure of the “image” création of an
Ottoman town. In the society of central and western Eu-
rope the “image” of a town was created as an integral part
of the “image” of a Turk and of the whole Ottoman soci-
ety. These “images” or perceptions resulted from the ex-
périence of individuals who knew urban life in towns of
Early Modem Europe, and who confronted their Europe-

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