The Book of Felicity

Commissioned by Sultan Murad III, who ruled the empire from 1574 to 1595, its text was translated from Arabic and all its miniatures were apparently directed by the famous master Nakkaş Osman, who undoubtedly painted the opening series of images related to the signs of the zodiac.

In the latter half of the 16th century, the domains of the Ottoman Empire stretched from Budapest to Baghdad, and Oman and Tunisia to Mecca and Medina, encompassing such great cities as Damascus, Alexandria and Cairo.

Murad, a grandson of Süleyman the Magnificent, was a learned, sybarite sultan, a foremost patron of the arts and responsible to a considerable degree for the great development of Turkish-Ottoman painting in the 16th and early 17th centuries, deemed to be its most fertile period.

The illustrations accompanying these descriptions include paintings of how human circumstances change according to the conjunction of the stars, several tables of physiognomical matches, several more about the correct interpretation of dreams and an enigmatic divination treatise for predicting one's future.

In 2007, the Spanish publishing house M. Moleiro Editor released the first and only facsimile edition of the Book of Felicity: a limited edition of 987 copies, with a companion volume of studies by Miguel Ángel de Bunes Ibarra (CSIC), Evrim Türkçelik (CSIC), Günsel Renda (professor of Ottoman art, Koç University) and Stefano Carboni (Metropolitan Museum of Art).