The Last Festival Book, and the painter who signed his own name.
For two centuries the nakkaşhane kept its painters anonymous. Then, in the spring of 1720, Levni opened the folio with a tulip and a small confession in the margin.
I spent three damp afternoons last November in the manuscript reading-room of the Topkapı Palace Library, waiting for the conservator to bring out the Sūrname-i Vehbi. When she finally laid it on the felt, the gold ground caught the overhead lamp and threw a yellow halo onto her sleeve — a small, slightly absurd reminder that the pigment in front of me had been ground from real metal in 1720, and that the painter, a man known to history as Levni, had worked sitting almost exactly where I was sitting.
A signature in the marginalia
Levni was the last master of the court atelier, and the festival book he illustrated for Sultan Ahmed III is the last great one ever made there. By any honest accounting the nakkaşhane had been quietly dying for thirty years — fewer commissions, smaller crews, cheaper lapis. What is strange about the Sūrname-i Vehbi is not that it is a swan song; almost every long art tradition gets one. What is strange is that Levni knew it was a swan song, and decided, somewhere around folio 137, to break the oldest rule in the workshop and write his own name in the gilt margin in a hand so small it took the conservators of the 1960s a magnifying glass to find it.