Careers behind the art

This lesson asks you to describe pathways and careers related to visual arts and the education they require. The museum offers two historical crafts, the architect and the calligrapher, taken from encyclopaedia entries; today's careers and their requirements come from your class. ¹

From each record, list the knowledge and skills it names, and note where the record is silent. A record that names no training is an answer too.

Pick one of the two and name a present-day career close to it. Set out the skills, the education and the training it asks, and compare them with the historical path.

The record on the architect keeps an order from Sinan's time: no one should build without the chief architect's knowledge. It came after buildings put up by men who had come to Istanbul from Rumeli and elsewhere fell or burned. These men worked "with a yard-stick in hand" without knowing carpentry or masonry ². From the sixteenth century an architect, a journeyman or a master working outside the palace office needed a licence from the chief architect attesting his competence ². A calligrapher's licence worked differently. It was written by his teacher, who named himself and gave the pupil leave to set his signature beneath his writing ³.

Plans survive late. Ottoman architects drew plans before building, but none of the roughly thirty plans attributed to Ottoman architects that survive is older than the eighteenth century, and most of the plans in the Topkapı archive were drawn later for repairs ². The entry says that statements show Sinan made plans and surveys ². Dâyezâde Mustafa Efendi reports that Sinan made a three-dimensional drawing of the Selim mosque at Edirne and presented it to the sultan ².

A calligrapher's licence came from his teacher, and an architect's from the chief architect. Who is better placed to say that a craftsman is ready to work alone, his own teacher or the head of the whole trade, and what is the strongest objection to your answer?

• The architect: the palace office, the licence and the chief architect's order.
• The calligrapher: how a pupil was licensed.
• Sinan: the chief court architect in whose time the order was issued.

Read the records on the architect and the calligrapher. Draw a path for one career, from the first lesson to the first independent work, using only what the record says.