“Appropriately, this Venetian picture of an Ottoman collected by an Englishman was increasingly suited to the interests of an interconnected, late-twentieth-century world.”
—From Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II: Lives and Afterlives of an Iconic Image
In 1479 Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II—renowned for his 1453 conquest of Constantinople (Istanbul)—asked Venetian officials to send him a skilled painter. Artist Gentile Bellini spent two years in the Ottoman capital, resulting in a famous portrait with a colorful history, as art historian Elizabeth Rodini’s detailed study recounts. After Mehmed II’s death, the painting returned to Venice, disappearing until1865 when Sir Henry Austen Layard, one-time British ambassador, spy and archeologist, bought it on a dark Venetian canal. Through Layard’s bequest, the painting slipped past German World War I submarines, reaching London in 1916, as the Ottoman Empire itself was headed for defeat. Heavily damaged and restored, the painting is on loan in the Victoria & Albert Museum, but in modern-day Turkey, it appears on stamps, advertising and school textbooks—an afterlife that neither Bellini nor the Sultan could have foreseen when they met more than 500 years before.