Sinan’s Autobiographies: Five Sixteenth-Century Texts

The sixteenth-century Ottoman architect Sinan is today universally recognized as the defining figure in the development of the classical Ottoman style. In addition to his vast oeuvre, he left five remarkable autobiographical accounts, the Adsız Risale, the Risāletü’l-Miʿmāriyye, Tuḥfetü’l-Miʿmārīn, Teẕkiretü’l-Ebniye and Teẕkiretü’l-Bünyān, that provide details of his life and works. Based on information dictated by Sinan to his poet-painter friend Mustafa Saʿi Çelebi shortly before his death, these accounts exist in multiple manuscript versions in libraries in Istanbul, Ankara, and Cairo.
The present volume contains critical editions of all five texts along with transcriptions, annotated translations, and facsimiles of the most important variant versions; and an introductory essay that analyzes the various surviving manuscripts, reconstructs their histories, and establishes the relationships between them; and a preface that considers the sources, themes, and broader implications of the five autobiographies.

Howard Crane is Professor of Near Eastern Art and Archaeology in the Department of History of Art at the Ohio State University.
Esra Akın holds a doctorate (2007) in History of Art from Ohio State University. She is the author of Mustafa Âli’s Epic Deeds of Artists. A Critical Edition of the Earliest Ottoman Text about the Calligraphers and Painters of the Islamic World (Brill, 2011).
Gülru Necipoğlu is the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University.