Sumptuous in format and timely, given recent attention to European-Ottoman exchanges, the four volumes considered here benefit from Erik Fischer’s lifelong engagement with Melchior Lorck (also Lorichs), the scholarship of Ernst Jonas Bencard and Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen, and a contribution by Marco Iuliano. Volume 1 consists of a complete survey of the artist’s oeuvre in the form of thumbnail images, a biographical essay, and documents. The second and third volumes consist of a facsimile of The Turkish Publication, published posthumously in 1626, and a catalogue raisonné, with woodcuts, engravings, drawings, and paintings generated from the artist’s sojourn in Istanbul (1555–59), which are also reproduced in the survey just mentioned. A fine reproduction of the Constantinople Prospect in volume 4 unfolds to simulate the drawing as it once appeared when the twenty-one leaves were joined together. This is accompanied by descriptions of the leaves and the German, Latin, and Italian inscriptions, along with an essay by Iuliano that situates the drawing in the context of European city views. A fifth volume, soon to be published, will address work Lorck completed or planned, such as the map of the Elbe River for the city of Hamburg, and his costume studies, which are not directly related to his Ottoman projects.

Access to the materials published in the volumes, and Fischer’s research—some of which was available only in Danish and German—will add to what has been a surge in interest in the artist. Since the publication of Karl Wulzinger’s study of the Constantinople Prospect in Leipzig in 1932, and the three volumes of drawings from the Statens Museum for Kunst, Danske Tegninger: fra Melchior Lorck til Fyenboerne, published in Copenhagen in 1945, the literature has been dominated by Fischer, who has studied the artist since the 1950s. The volumes benefit from this expertise, as did Fischer’s exhibition, A View of a Foreign Culture: Melchior Lorck in Turkey 1555–1559, at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen in 2008. Lorck’s renown was advanced earlier with the display of part of the Constantinople Prospect in the exhibition Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2004. The entire prospect was published in 1999 in a stunning facsimile accompanied with commentary by Stéphane Yerasimos, Cyril Mango, and Ahmet Ertug that assesses, in part, the accuracy of the view (Melchior Lorichs’ Panorama of Istanbul, 1559, Bern: Ertug & Kocabıyık, 1999). The facsimile generated the recent study by Nigel Westbrook, Kenneth Rainsbury Dark, and Rene van Meeuwen that uses digital technology to reassess Wulzinger’s account of how the prospect was made and to argue for the artist’s objectivity (“Constructing Melchior Lorichs’s Panorama of Constantinople,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 69, no. 1 (March 2010): 62–87). Unfortunately the authors did not have access to the Melchior Lorck volumes.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the stunning production values—the large scale of the volumes and the quality of the reproductions—that might at first glance seem out of step with Lorck’s success during his life, which was tempered by a variety of hurdles. Lorck was always on the move, and the authors endeavor to trace his whereabouts and connections made during his “bumpy road through life” (vol. 1, 138). Born in 1526 or 1527 in Flensburg, then in Denmark, he received a scholarship for travel to study art from the Danish King, Christian III, who evidently sought service by a “Danish Netherlander” (vol. 1, 74); however, Lorck reneged on the obligation of the bursary that he return to Denmark. Fraught relations also characterized his years in Istanbul, beginning with his having been ordered by the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand I, to accompany the ambassador Augier Ghiselin de Busbecq to the city. The latter never refers to the artist, in spite of extensive correspondence about the embassy, prompting speculation by Barnaby Rogerson of rivalry between the two men (“A Double Perspective and a Lost Rivalry: Ogier de Busbecq and Melchior Lorck in Istanbul,” in Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East, Gerald MacLean, ed., Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave, 2005, 88–95). Lorck complained about the arduous experience in his autobiography, written as a letter to the King of Denmark, then Frederick II, in 1563, which was published in a slender volume, True and Exact Portrait of Sultan Süleyman, the Turkish Emperor (Antwerp, 1574; vol. 1, 66). Although brief, the letter recounts the hardship and dangers of the embassy, whose members were quarantined without visitors by the Grand Vizier Rüstern Pasha in quarters “infested,” in Mango’s words, “with snakes, weasels, lizards and scorpions” (Mango et al., 4). Lorck identifies the site of the embassy’s incarceration in the prospect with an inscription: “Residence of the ambassador of the [Holy] Roman Emperor in which I too, M.L., was kept prisoner” (vol. 1, 14).

Lorck’s publication projects also met with difficulties. A few engravings were printed upon his return to Vienna, including two well-known portraits of the Sultan Süleyman and Busbecq, and a poem, “Ein liedt vom Türcken vnd Antichrist” (1568), that conveys the tensions Lorck perceived between East and West. He also moved forward with production on the woodblocks for The Turkish Publication, but completion was thwarted by a shortage of paper and printing presses, prompting a letter to the Danish King in 1575 in an effort to solicit funds (vol. 1, 129). Most of Lorck’s woodcuts were printed decades after he died, even though he worked with the printers Christoph Plantin and Sigmund Feyerabend who published imagery on Turkish themes. Nor was his prospect of Constantinople printed, perhaps because its vast scale—11.5 meters in length—was too ambitious. Although displayed in the library in Leiden in the early seventeenth century, the prospect was later rolled up in a loft and neglected until it was found in the nineteenth century in a state of disrepair (vol. 4, 7). His enterprises disrupted by the need for funds, and continually moving on to new positions, Lorck seems to have returned finally in 1580 to the service of the Danish King whose portrait he engraved in 1582 (vol. 1, 132). He may also have painted the full-length portrait of the King in Frederiksborg Castle in 1581 (135).

Noteworthy is the authors’ recognition, as stated in the preface, of the complicated relation to the Ottoman Empire that Lorck’s oeuvre reveals. Although surprisingly little is known about his sojourn in Istanbul, or what he was expected to do during the four and a half years he spent there, Fischer and his collaborators construct a vivid and detailed picture of the artist’s work. Through documents, two volumes of drawings, dated from 1556 to 1559, mostly of costumes and architecture, and the woodcuts from The Turkish Publication, an image of Lorck emerges as an artist with an investment in the visual culture of the Ottoman world, and with a keen eye for its aesthetic possibilities. One striking example is the first plate in the catalogue raisonné: Eleven Religious Standards and Two Metal Objects, dated 1565 (vol. 3, 27). Arranged in a row—as if a phalanx—at the picture plane, the diverse shapes of the standards at the top of the sheet are set into contrast with each other, their vertical arrangement animated by the swagger of various fabrics that jostle from the necks of the artifacts. Similar attention to the drama of Ottoman costume and architecture may have solicited the attention of Cassiano del Pozzo who collected Lorck’s prints in the seventeenth century for his paper museum.

The goal of the five volumes is to make available the entire archive of an artist whose oeuvre has not been sufficiently visible (vol. 1, 8). Accordingly, the authors emphasize the art-historical, over the historical, focus of their study. Significantly, however, their efforts to reconstruct Lorck’s movements, which is not easy given his peripatetic life and oscillating relations with patrons, provide a vivid picture of the entangled political networks, diplomatic exchanges, and historical events that characterize the period. In spite of the difficulties of mapping out his life, then, these volumes demonstrate that Lorck’s life and work advance an understanding of the complex ways in which artistic practices, travel, and geopolitics overlapped in early modern Europe.

The combination of breadth and depth of scholarship extends the value of the volumes beyond that of conventional monographs by providing images and resources for cross-cultural and transnational studies, and for histories of print, architecture, urbanism, and costume. For Fischer, Lorck is “respectful and conscientious,” his images didactic and neutral when contrasted with the stereotypes depicted by his contemporaries (vol. 1, 7). However one interprets the prints and drawings—as objective, as archeological, or as critical of Ottoman culture—the five volumes open up possibilities for research, possibilities for attending to how images and exchanges in the early modern world impinge upon the present.