Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby

The focus of this paper is a vast (6.5 × 2.58 metres) seventeenth century panorama of Constantinople that is an elaborate piece of anti-Ottoman propaganda designed by the Franciscan friar Niccolò Guidalotto da Mondavio [Fig. 3.1].1 Guidalotto also prepared a large manuscript, held in the Vatican Library, which details the panorama’s meaning and the motivation behind its creation [Fig. 3.2].2 The iconography, complex and varied, is explained in Guidalotto’s manuscript, which presumably acted as a plan for the drawing. The panorama depicts Constantinople as seen from Galata, throwing new light on both the city and the relationships between the rival Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire.3