The Royal Academy’s Turks is not about Turks, which is novel. Certainly, the show is not about Turks in any indisputable or obedient way. I confronted this fact while standing in front of a gorgeous yellow bowl, decorated with nothing but its own perfect yellowness, which looked utterly Chinese to me. I examined the label — and found it to be utterly Chinese, a 16th-century Ming bowl made in the imperial yellow of the Chinese emperor. Pickier visitors than me can decide that Turks is not about Turks much earlier than this. It might happen in front of the many Persian miniatures involved in the display; or before the eerie Christian burial stones from Kyrgyzstan; or even while admiring the melancholy fragments of Buddhist wall painting saved from Chinese caves on the edge of the Gobi Desert, which are almost the first things you see.
When the Royal Academy announced that it was planning a Turkish show, I cannot have been alone in imagining that we were going to be treated to a display of Islamic wonders produced by the Ottomans. It was a delicious prospect. The Topkapi Museum, in Istanbul, is one of the greatest treasure troves of art on Allah’s earth. Anyone who has ever lost contact with their sense of awe, who has had it clogged up by the bland, fatty matter of western modernity — how can you feel proper awe in a world that has a McDonald’s in it? — should book an immediate Topkapi visit. It has emeralds the size of rugby balls and rubies as hefty as boxing gloves. There are harems and golden grottoes, tinkling fountains and heart-stoppingly luscious expanses of calligraphic tilework. In the clutches of the Ottoman Turks, a man can hear again the life-making roar of awe.
Yet this is not what the Royal Academy decided to expose us to initially, although, admittedly, it is what they finish us off with. Early in this show’s planning process, it was decided, I read, that a selection of the Topkapi’s greatest hits would have made for a predictable and inaccurate survey. The Turks were never just Ottomans and Muslims, you see. They were also Christians, Buddhists, Jews (yes, Jews); pagans, shamanists, nomadic animists; Seljuks, Artuqids, Timurids; and all the other embodiments encountered here. This survey begins in AD600 and continues for 1,000 years. In that time, the Turks were more things than a sultan could shake his dagger at.
Before we begin savouring in detail the results of this huge investigation of greater Turkdom, it is my duty, as an experienced art critic and seasoned cynic, to wonder why this show has elected to take such an unexpected turn. The Turkish prime minister supplies us with an answer when he pops up with a foreword to the catalogue, in which he turns briskly to Turkey’s hopes for entry into the European Union. Tony Blair sneaks in next to him with a few thoroughly emollient words of international support. Because this is a show that seeks to play a propaganda role in Turkey’s EU bid. That is why it has the air about it of a fully backed government effort, why it successfully contains so many fragile treasures that have never been seen outside Turkey before, and why it has been organised in such a hurry.
All this should neither surprise us nor distress us. Art has always been a diplomatic plaything in the hands of our governors. There is a portrait here of Mehmed II, the young Muslim sultan whose forces seized Constantinople from the Christians in 1453, painted by Gentile Bellini, who was sent to the Bosporus by the Venetian doge to flatter the conquering Ottomans in a naked display of diplomatic ingratiation. Titian, no less, painted Suleyman the Magnificent, in a lost portrait represented here by an exuberant copy that is 70% turban. All sorts of foreign goodies arrived in Ottoman Turkey on some diplomatic mission or other, and these have now been sent out again to perform the same role in different circumstances. Which is how a Ming bowl ended up in a Turkish show.
The situation gives the Turks an opportunity to present themselves in a manner of their own choosing. This is how they want to be viewed: not as aggressive and opulent Muslims involved in a 500-year jihad against the Christians, but as a complex ethnic mix with a millennium and a half of multidenominational cultural history behind them. To which I say: fair enough.
The Turks were nomads who emerged in eastern Asia in the 6th century, and their relentless progress westward is the rough narrative we follow. The journey begins with a couple of pointedly primitive objects hacked out of bulky Central Asian stone by wandering proto-Turks in the 7th century. One is a rock covered in runic writings, the other a figure of almost Cycladic simplicity, which stood above a grave. As a challenge to pretty much all of our pre- vailing notions of Turkishness, these two bulky, hacked-out, shamanistic slabs operate perfectly. Both of them throb with crude Stone Age power.
Surrounding these plangent stone lumps is a full-colour arrangement of big photographs of fine Turkish archi- tecture from across central Asia, with a matching map. It is all terribly general. But an exhibition that sets itself this sort of task — to cover 1,000 years of Turkish civilisation across several thousand miles of Asia, in all its many aspects — must always skip more than it shows. We glimpse Buddhist cave art. We glimpse Christian burial pebbles. But we only settle down for a proper look at anything when we reach the 11th-century Seljuks in Iran. Until now, the exhibition has been intriguing. Suddenly, it becomes intoxicating.
It was the precious carpets, hanging around the walls like fragments of ancient fresco, that delayed me most. The Seljuks were Muslims. Their art revealed in germinal form most of the stylistic impulses that the exhibition spends the rest of its length glorifying: the busy appetite for calligraphic quotation; the passion for rare and gorgeous materials; the fiercely inventive transformation of animals into symbols. Look at the way that the four lions form a complicated digital pattern, worthy of a high-pixel Game Boy, in a gorgeous 14th-century rug from Konya.
This recurring enjoyment of figuration could hardly be more obvious. On Koran stands, carpets, book covers and kaftans, from painted miniatures to intricate incense burners, the entire show is crowded with figures. Yet modern Islam has somehow managed to project the ridiculous opinion that painting figures — like music or dancing or sensuous colours or simple human joy — is somehow un-Islamic. How crazy. From start to finish, this unimpeachably traditional Islamic display celebrates the beauty of description. It is obviously not part of the show’s ambition to reveal why the blowing up of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban was a wickedly un-Islamic act of modern barbarism. But this profoundly sensuous experience makes that extra-clear.
As I said, the exhibition has set out deliberately, and even ponderously, to enlarge our image of Turkishness and to reveal far more about the history of these varied peoples than concentrating on Ottoman art would have achieved. It is an excellent boy-scout ambition. I salute it. But it doesn’t alter the fact that the display moves up several gears and explodes into a great and sensuous ripeness when the art of the Ottomans finally heaves into view.
I won’t waste too many words describing the optical pleasures to be had in the final half of this adventure. Most of the Koranic illumination is beyond sensible description. These are books written in the language of tiaras and necklaces: utterly exquisite calligraphic jewels. While our medieval art appears, well, medieval, the parallel achievements of Turkish creatives are bright, smart, clear-cut and astonishingly modern-looking. The show contains a fine array of kaftans, too, designed with crisp outlines and featuring bold clusters of simple circles and stylised tulips. As Ottoman art never had any short-term ambitions to fool your eye with trompe l’oeil effects or facile illusionism, it avoided all the visual giveaways that might immediately have dated it. I expected the ornamentation, but not the minimalism. There won’t be many occasions when you will confront as exciting an assortment of gorgeous things as this. It’s a spectacular return to form for the Royal Academy.
Turks is at the Royal Academy, W1, until April 12
