Page 13 - ISLAM Rock n Roll

During the 17th and 18th centuries Europe became obsessed with tulips. In the Netherlands, tulips became fashionable and an expensive traded com- modity, especially amongst class-conscious merchants and cra smen. The high demand on tulip bulbs led to massive speculation on the tulip exchange in what later became known as the ‘tulipmania’. Speculation raised the prices of bulbs dramatically during the 1630s before a sudden collapse that led to the nancial ruin of many Dutch merchants.
In the 17th century, the Ottomans created manuals on the cultivation and care of tulips and detailed
lists and description of the varieties they developed. By the early 18th century, during the reign of the Sultan Mahmut iii (r. 1703–1730), tulip cultivation and representation in the arts came to de ne a pe- riod of Ottoman westernization known as the Tulip period (lale devri) when the elite looked to the courts of Europe and cultivated a new attitude and social sensibilities focused on celebrating life.
Watercolour image of tulip Semper Augustus (shown above) from the Great Tulip Book, 1640, Holland. The Dutch adored variegated tulips and their rarity made them highly desirable and costly. A virus transmitted via aphids, a fact unknown in the 17th century, caused the variegation.
Ceramic under-glazed tile (centre) depicting a tulip made in Diyarbakir (south- eastern Turkey) in the second half of the 16th century.
Double portrait by the Dutch painter Michiel Janszoon van Mierevelt (d. 1641) of a wealthy couple. The husband may have commissioned
this picture a er his wife’s death. The visual clues
to their story are in the blooming variegated tulip emerging from the tulip bulb symbolising a short life, and the empty shells lying on the table which symbolise a life departed.
tulips