Careers behind the art

This lesson asks you to identify secondary and postsecondary pathways and careers related to visual arts. The museum offers two crafts of the Islamic past, the architect and the calligrapher, and what the records say of how people trained. Present-day programmes and careers come from your class. ¹

For each career, write down what the record says about learning and training. Note where the record says nothing, and do not fill the gap from memory.

Find a present-day school programme or job that is close to one of these crafts. Say what is similar and what is different.

In the Ottoman state, the palace office of architects was a school. Able young men were chosen from the Janissaries, from the palace's artists or from outside. They learned theory and practice in a master-apprentice relationship ². After the Imperial Land Engineering School was founded in 1795, its graduates began to qualify as architects, and it was decided that the chief architect should be chosen from among them ². The calligrapher's craft also gained a school: in 1914 the School of Calligraphers was opened to revive the art, and Hasan Riza Efendi was appointed teacher of naskh and thuluth there ^{3 4}.

Architect, mason and carpenter were not one trade. The record says that in Ottoman usage the building trade included masons, carpenters, stonecutters and other workers, and that the word bennâ usually named builders of walls. Architects were described as men learned in geometry, because their work needed knowledge of building technique, land measurement and proportion ⁵.

The titles that survive do not settle who did what. Titles such as bennâ, neccâr, mühendis and mimar are recorded against the names of craftsmen, but they do not show at which stage of the work their holder took part, and not everyone who held them was an architect ⁵. The entry does not describe the calligrapher's part in a building; it notes that the names of masters are read in building inscriptions ⁵. For calligraphers, the record says the two entries read for it name no guild, so it writes nothing about one ^{3 6}.

The palace office trained young men beside a master, and after 1795 graduates of a school qualified as architects. Which is the better way to train a builder, learning beside a master or learning in a school, and what is the strongest argument against your choice?

• The architect: the palace office, its pay and its licences.
• The calligrapher: training, licence and the places where calligraphers taught.
• Hasan Riza Efendi: the teacher named at the School of Calligraphers in 1914.

Read the records on the architect and the calligrapher. Draw a path that a young person could follow into one of these careers, using only what the record states.