Antoine Ignace Melling
French painter (1763-1831)
Antoine Ignace Melling (27 April 1763 – November 1831) was a painter, architect and voyager who is counted among the “Levantine Artists”. He is famous for his vedute of Constantinople, a town where he lived for 18 years. He was imperial architect to Sultan Selim III and Hatice Sultan and later landscape painter to the Empress Josephine of France. His most influential work is published as Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople et des rives du Bosphore.
Melling's two given names are often written in hyphenated form as Antoine-Ignace.
Biography
Melling was born Anton Ignaz Melling in Karlsruhe, Baden, in 1763. After the death of his sculptor father, he lived with his painter uncle, Joseph Melling, in Strassbourg (Alsace). As a young man he visited his older brother, and studied Architecture and Mathematics at Klagenfurt. 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. He was introduced to princess Hatice Sultan, sister and confidant of the Ottoman Sultan Selim III.
At Hatice Sultan's suggestion, Melling was employed as Imperial Architect by Selim III. 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.
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This entry incorporates text from “Antoine Ignace Melling” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.