Daytime spectacles in the sea before Aynalýkavak Palace
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93a |
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92b |
The most spectacular events of the festival were scheduled for the seventh day. In this scene, in which Levni shows us just a few parts of the huge fleet of vessels of every kind and description that gathered in the Golden Horn for this event, the artist makes use of compositional elements (the white sea wall of the palace and the performers’ tight ropes) to join the two frames and create a panoramic effect that is heightened by the sparse placement of the figures and vessels.
The sultan appears in the left frame (93a) seated on an enclosed balcony of the palace with two of his sons and a handful of attendants. A huge fully-rigged galleon appears foreshortened and anchored in the lower left corner. To its right are two boats with three oarsmen each. The one in the foreground contains a military band and the other carries a group of musicians and two dancers. In the right frame (92b), the grand vizier observes the proceedings from another galleon lying on anchor in the upper right corner. He is accompanied by Tevkii Mustafa Pasha and Chief Justice Seyyid Abdullah Efendi. (According to Vehbi, the other viziers were aboard the galleons as well.) Caiques and a small sailing vessel are set here and there. The second (counting from the grand vizier’s ship) of the two caiques whose bows are entering the frame at the right contains three figures dressed in European costume. These are probably members of a foreign mission. The visual "stars" of this scene however are the huge cables linking the masts of the galleon in the left image and the small sailing vessel in the right one and both to a tree on shore. On one set of cables, four dancers are performing on what look like round wooden trays. On the cables joining the two ships, a four-wheeled carriage with a veiled passenger dressed in woman’s garb is being pulled by a horse mounted by a coachman. At the far right, a tightrope walker holding two scimitars is walking along a cable connected to a vessel outside the frame.
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