Portraits of Empires

"The wealth of precise and new historical information in this study is truly impressive. Radway manages to concretize these albums for us, providing invaluable archival and historical information that helps us fully understand them."—Emine Fetvaci, author of The Album of the World Emperor: Cross-Cultural Collecting and the Art of Album Making in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul

"With the Alba amicorum from the German house in Constantinople, Robyn Radway has discovered a treasure trove of historical material that offers stunning insights into not only the symbolic world of the Ottoman empire and its material culture of book making, but also the networking practices of German travellers. An incredibly rich book filled to the brim with marvellous illustrations."—Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin.

"Robyn Dora Radway's  book is an important contribution to the cultural history of Early Modern Europe. Brimming with erudtion, copiously illustrated, and engagingly written, it illuminates multiple aspects of a hitherto obscure but significant site, the Central European residence in Ottoman Istabul.  Assembling a wide range of both visual and textual material, it demonstrates a wide range of inter- and intra-imperial interchanges that existed but have been overshadowed by histories of conflict and antagonisms."—Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Frederick Marquand Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University