Turks in the Church: Calvinist and Muslim Ways of Seeing
Turbaned figures appear frequently in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, most often in scenes depicting markets, town squares, and the Stock Exchange. As merchants, traders, and diplomats, they had a sanctioned place within these public spaces. But why did Dutch artists depict turbaned figures in paintings of Calvinist church interiors? What place did the Muslim Turk have in these religious spaces, which had been purged of sacred imagery during and long after the iconoclast riots of the late sixteenth-century? This paper examines how Reformation debates about the status of the visual image created points of similarity between Calvinists and Muslims, while being attentive to the distinctions that were made to offset these parallels.