What They Said
“The word “definitive” is often loosely employed to characterize the principal monograph on an individual artist. In this case, the word is inadequate. Erik Fischer has literally delineated the life and career of Melchior Lorck and inscribed him into art history as a major observer – and participant – in Habsburg-
“In 1555, the Danish artist Melchior Lorck travelled to the Sublime Porte as part of the Habsburg Emperor’s embassy to the Sultan (the same expedition, as it happens, which brought back the tuilip); his brief was to report on the Turks. Lorck was an admirer of Dürer but with a stronger tendency to fancy and drollery, and he made terrific portraits of Suleyman the Magnificent, a vast, detailed magical “Prospect of Constantinople”, and dozens of detailed studies showing fantastic caparisons of camels, towering plumed headdresses of janissaries, and different social groups’ costumes. He has only remained so little known because, while the catalogue raissoné was being compiled, almost nothing of his work was published. Melchior Lorck, fully illustrated in four volumes with a fifth to come, has at last appeared, the splendid creation of Erik Fischer (with Ernst Jonas Bencard and Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen and Marco Iuliano), published by the Royal Library of Copenhagen…”
Marina Warner
in the Times Literary Supplement, November 27, 2009
“Beautifully presented and intelligently annotated, these volumes are a unique visual document for Istanbul and the Ottoman empire at the high point of its power in the middle of the sixteenth century. It is also a rare testimony to the technological and artistic talents of northern European artists and to the astute precision of their observation of the world, their own or that of others.”
Oleg Grabar
Professor emeritus
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton
“These impeccably produced volumes, a triumph of imaginative modern publishing down to the last detail, resurrect in its full splendour an undeservedly neglected masterpiece of patient 16th-
Robert Hillenbrand, F.B.A.
Professor Emeritus of Islamic Art
University of Edinburgh
“From panoramas to portraits, Melchior Lorck captured the sweep and swagger of Istanbul at its most imperious acme, in the final years of the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent. No other European artist of his era displayed such acuity of observation and such respect for his subjects.”
Julian Raby
Director of the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
Washington, D.C.
“The significance of Erik Fisher’s major new publication on the work of the idiosyncratic and widely-
Giulia Bartrum
Curator of German Prints and Drawings
Department of Prints and Drawings
The British Museum