The Rhetorical Index in the Portraits of Mehmed II. Some Episodes between Words and Images, from the West Shore of the Mediterranean, in Images in the Borderlands: The Mediterranean between Christian and Muslim Worlds in the Early Modern Period, ed. by Ivana Čapeta Rakić and Giuseppe Capriotti, MEMEW 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), pp. 197–222

Warburgian Scholars taught us to look at Renaissance images in a three-dimensional way. In other words, viewing them as symptoms of the era in which they were conceived and as bearers of cultural information that goes beyond the two-dimensional limits of the surface they occupy and the forms they depict. The thought of a given era imbues the form with a degree of complexity that is directly proportional to the ability of the inventor of the iconographic programme, whether or not he is the artist, to become a receiver of the knowledge circulating in his time. I am referring in this essay to a rhetorical index, which will be as high as the sum of the meanings and references stratified in the image to which this exponent refers. But it will be a ‘relative’ index, since its understanding is in turn proportional to the observer’s capacity to decode it. It is precisely on the changing perception of the iconography of certain ‘heads’ between victors and vanquished in the hostilities between the two shores of the Mediterranean between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that I will write below. On the one hand, I will focus on that of Mehmed II the Conqueror, that is, how the image of his portrait was altered along with his increasingly bad reputation on the western shore of the same sea; on the other hand, I will discuss how the image of the heads of the eight hundred citizens of Otranto, raised by the sabres of the infidels in 1480, contributed to the amplification of anti-Ottoman propaganda over a long period of time.