Easily the most important monument in Istanbul is one that few visitors look at. Located today in the Hippodrome is an ancient bronze column missing its head. This is, in fact, the monument erected by the Greek states to commemorate the victory over the Persians at Plataea, and moved here later. It is extraordinary that it still exists. Originally it had a golden disk at the top, supported by three serpent headed brackets, but the latter were broken off during the Ottoman period.
However there is a drawing of the column before this happened, in a portrait of the procession of the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent.
The drawing forms part of a series of woodcuts made by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, who arrived in Istanbul with his wife in 1533, and was originally published in Antwerp. The complete set forms a massive panorama of the city. This section is on the extreme right.
There are various copies online, but this one is screen-grabbed from that at the Princely Collections of Lichtenstein, online here. Another at lower resolution is at the British Museum here. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has all ten blocks online here.
I’m not sure where I downloaded this one from, but it shows the context of our screen grab:
The set of woodcuts is placed within a frame of caryatids by the publisher. The circle of columns to the right once stood on top of the sphendone, which supports the end of the hippodrome even today.
H/t from Twitter here.
A quick postscript: another account, Barış Yaralı, did some interesting AI-colourisation on the image. As AI always does, it distorts: somehow losing the serpent column and much else in the process, but bringing up the figures quite nicely. Note the soldier staring at the artist.
