Wood panelling

This wood panel, dating back to the 1780s, comes from the reception room (qa‘a) of an anonymous house in Damascus. It is decorated with five cartouches on a background of flowers and foliage, surrounded by a border of flowers. Two cartouches have landscapes with architectural elements, while bowls of fruit are represented on the other three.

This panel reflects the "Ottoman Baroque", a new trend that replaced the traditional decorating techniques and forms from the end of the seventeenth century. This style was in itself influenced by the European models at the end of the 1720s, which was manifested by the introduction of landscape scenes. It was only around the end of the century that this new fashion reached Syria to end up in all the houses of the period.

The use of painted wood panels as wall coverings in the houses of the well-to-do spread to all the cities of the Ottoman Empire, from the Balkans up to Palestine and Egypt. However, it was in Syria that this production peaked. In the seventeenth century, painted wood panels acquired a slight relief with the application of a coating of gypsum and glue before the scenes were painted, or thin coats of lacquer over the latter. This technique, which gives the paint volume and the origin of which is uncertain, was also used on the ceiling beams. The oldest wood wall panels known come from a house in Alep (1600-03)[1]. They are currently at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin.

Fruit bowls were very popular throughout the Ottoman Empire, especially from the era of Sultan Ahmad III (r. 1703-1730), known as lale devri (the tulip period), and of which the best example is in the Yamiş odasi (fruit room) of Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. It was around the 1770s that most of the wood wall panels produced in Damascus were decorated with landscapes similar to those found in Istanbul, such as representations of the Bosphore, palaces, gardens, mosques and green hills. However, a difference between the two cities is manifested in the style, size and positioning of these painting. In Damascus, the drawings are small and placed between the floral decorations, while in Istanbul, they are positioned in the upper parts of the panels. The latter reflect a more European-style naturalist representation. These landscapes are rarely identifiable, with a few exceptions: holy cities of Arabia, the Dome of the Rock, or the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It was only in the nineteenth century that representations of known cities such as Istanbul or Paris became in style. These landscapes, devoid of any human or animal figures, find parallels under the awnings of the Gate of Felicity of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. They are not without evoking the mosaic landscapes of the Umayyad mosque of Damascus (eighteenth century) and of the tomb of Baybars (thirteenth century) in the same city.

[1] Berlin, Museum für islamische Kunst, I 2862.