Antoine Ignace Melling

Antoine Ignace Melling (27 April 1763 – November 1831) was a painter, architect and voyager who is counted among the “Levantine Artists”.

At the age of 19, he went to Italy, Egypt, and finally Constantinople as a member of the Russian Ambassador's retinue and household with the aim of drawing pictures for various dignitaries.

In 1795 the princess commissioned Melling to design a labyrinth for her palace at Ortaköy in the style of the Danish ambassador Baron Hübsch's garden.

Melling Pasha's eighteen years as Imperial Architect gave him a privileged opportunity to observe the Ottoman Court.

The joys and inconveniences of that journey, which took him as far as the Hanseatic towns, are reported in a lively style, as are various aspects of Dutch life, the monuments and inhabitants of large cities, like Rotterdam and Amsterdam, and the "overwhelming appeal" of villages such as Broek in Waterland and the peaceful Sunday atmosphere of Zwolle.

Seventy-two fine aquatints, based on original sepia watercolours, were issued - together with text by Joseph Antoine Cervini - as Voyage Pittoresque dans les Pyrénées Françaises et les Départements Adjacents (Picturesque Travels in the French Pyrenees and the Adjacent Areas), Treuttel and Wurtz, Paris: 1826–30, (Bibliographie nationale Française, BnF, The French national Bibliography ISBN 2-911715-12-8).

Examples of hand-coloured aquatints from this work include: The Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk dedicates a whole chapter to Melling in his autobiographical memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City.

Melling is included in the Sabancı University Faculty of Arts & Social Science course: Major Works of Ottoman Culture, (HUM 203).

This course, "focuses on a selected few masterpieces of Ottoman artistic and literary production, picked on the basis of not only their high aesthetic qualities, but also their representativeness across different genres and historical periods".

The facsimile publishers also offered 25 copies of an edition of the unfolded image plates presented in a leather-bound case.