Orientalist approaches in painting and architectural reality: Cairo

As a genre in Western painting, paintings dealing with the East continued to exist until the beginning of the 20th century. In this process, in Cairo, which is one of the most important cities of the Islamic world with its cultural heritage, the buildings built in different periods and showing different design features have turned into a representation tool as the decoration of the fantastic scenes of the West or the subject of the painting itself. By the middle of the 20th century, the city had a large visual corpus created by European artists. While thousands of years of tangible cultural elements of the Islamic world are transferred to the canvases, a selection of architectural elements that mostly repeat each other is presented. On the one hand, in the 19th century in Cairo, the social structure, art environment, urban settlements and traditional architectural style changed within the framework of the modernization paradigm; on the other hand, the representations carried to the canvases were limited to the structures in certain regions and streets. In the 20th century, with the Western-created representation of the non-European in art, politics and literature beginning to be discussed, orientalist approaches in painting were associated with concepts such as domination and the other. While the way of representation and the reality of the world surrounded by images are discussed in the paintings that can be read as a product of the 19th century political world, pictorial spaces are evaluated outside of these created images and continue to function as visual documents/records in architecture and art history studies. It does not seem possible to say that the Orientalist always creates imaginations that are far from reality, marginalizing or, with a more optimistic approach, with romantic feelings and fascination with the East. Some of the paintings create a foresight about the architectural setup, design features and condition of the historical artifacts in Cairo dating back to about two hundred years ago, thus gaining evidence value. On the other hand, it is understood that while the architectural elements in the paintings are moved to the two-dimensional plane, they can intertwine with the imagination of the painter, and the structures lose their document/data quality by being cut off from their reality. Ultimately, it can be determined that the created architectural image overshadows the actual state of the building. In the study, the buildings seen in the pictures are evaluated based on the architectural history of Cairo, which was shaped in the Tulunid, Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman periods and extending to the 19th century. The visual document quality of architectural images in the city is questioned by discussing the relationship of the structures observed in the pictures about Cairo with the imagination and reality in the pictorial space.