This 16th-century Ottoman talismanic shirt (above) is covered in a variety of astonishingly intricate scripts, including Muhaqqaq, Naskh, Ghubar, Thuluth and square Kufic. Paper-thin, it would have conveyed a spiritual protection to the wearer far more powerful than any chainmail. This shirt, with its decoration, parallels a group of similar Ottoman shirts in the Topkapi Saray Museum, all dating from the 15th and 16th centuries, with the crescent moon and cypress trees so common in 16th-century Ottoman styles.
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Ottoman Talismanic shirt (jama) with extracts from the Qur’an and prayers. Turkey, 16th/17th century.
This is an unusual and finely executed Qur’an jama. The basic layout related to other jamas of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with a large number of panels and roundels containing Qur’anic quotations, pious phrases, prayers and talismanic numbers, but here their arrangement is unusually varied and inventive, with a number of distinctly Ottoman features such as the architectural references on the reverse of the jama with a large door flanked by Kufic cartouches on two sides and tilework above. What is also particularly noteworthy is the accomplished quality of the calligraphy, which is executed in a number of different scripts, and retains a confident aesthetic in even its most minute form. The amalgamation of all the decorative and calligraphic styles is a technique visible on other comparable talismanic shirts including the jama of Cem Sultan (TKS13/1404, see Roxburgh 2005, pp.300-1, no.257) and that of Mehmed II (TKS13/1408, published in Palace of Gold and Light, Treasures from the Topkapi, exhib. cat, Istanbul, 2000
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https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=4221901446384&set=o.280538935359556&type=1&theater
Ottoman Talismanic shirt (jama) with extracts from the Qur’an and prayers. Turkey, 16th/17th century.
This is an unusual and finely executed Qur’an jama. The basic layout related to other jamas of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with a large number of panels and roundels containing Qur’anic quotations, pious phrases, prayers and talismanic numbers, but here their arrangement is unusually varied and inventive, with a number of distinctly Ottoman features such as the architectural references on the reverse of the jama with a large door flanked by Kufic cartouches on two sides and tilework above. What is also particularly noteworthy is the accomplished quality of the calligraphy, which is executed in a number of different scripts, and retains a confident aesthetic in even its most minute form. The amalgamation of all the decorative and calligraphic styles is a technique visible on other comparable talismanic shirts including the jama of Cem Sultan (TKS13/1404, see Roxburgh 2005, pp.300-1, no.257) and that of Mehmed II (TKS13/1408, published in Palace of Gold and Light, Treasures from the Topkapi, exhib. cat, Istanbul, 2000
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