Striking for its gleaming tones and stunning delicacy of line, the Seated Scribe is spectacular not only visually, but also in historiographic terms. The painting's original dimensions have been trimmed, and a later hand has taken care not only to embellish the image, but also to frame, mount, and, ultimately, historicize it. An added inscription in Persian records the image as the "work of Ibn Muezzin who was a famous painter among the Franks." Scholars have never doubted that a European or "Frankish" artist painted the Seated Scribe. The pressing issue of late has been who, precisely? Whether the Venetian Gentile Bellini, a renowned portraitist sent to Istanbul in 1479, or Costanzo da Ferrara, a court artist at Naples who also sojourned at the Porte, the specificity of detail in the Seated Scribe leaves little doubt that the artist drew from life.
Once the debate over attribution subsides, the more intriguing issue to raise is whether one can call the work a portrait. Might western pictorial realism have been the point of the exercise? A pronounced crease just above the youth's elbow suggests the image was initially handled as a loose-leaf, autonomous work of art before being mounted (and in this way preserved) in a sixteenth-century album. Like other western-style works Mehmed II commissioned or obtained during his sultanate, the Seated Scribe may have been used as a pedagogic tool for rising artists of the Ottoman royal workshop. A slightly later copy of the miniature (Freer Gallery of Art, Washington) certainly affirms its value for Ottoman and Persian artists as a pictorial model worthy of imitation. If the pictured youth is not a scribe but an artist, shown in the act of drawing while he himself is being drawn according to Western pictorial practices, the Seated Scribe taught by poignant example - it sits indeed at the nexus of Ottoman art and European traditions of representation.
Probably painted around 1479-1480 when Gentile Bellini was sent by the Venetian Republic to Constantinople to serve as a painter to Sultan Mehmet II (1432-1481).
Probably sent as a gift or trade to the Aqqoyunlu court in Tabriz (later became the Safavid capital) in the 15th century.
In the collection of Bahram Mirza (1518-1550), the youngest son of Shah Isma'il of the Persian Safavid court by 1544-45 when it was mounted into an album by Dust Muhammad, a Persian painter, calligrapher, and art historian.
The album was purchased by the Swedish collector, scholar and dealer Fredrik R. Martin (1868-1933) from a Turkish family in Istanbul around 1905.
