Sketch of a Man in Profile

This highly worked picture shows us a man depicted in profile. He is seen interacting with a scene that extends beyond the boundaries of the paper's composition, the pen strokes intricately portraying the man's face, rendering a detailed, textured complexion. He points his left hand out to something in the distance, with a look of almost alarm.

The artist Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609-64) did a series of oriental head studies.

The exotic headgear that he wears and this type of oriental head studies, had its principal source was of course Rembrandt, who etched many similar heads during the 1630s.

In the seventeenth-century Western European imagination, the turbaned figure represented the epitome of alterity: the Ottoman Turk. Ottoman costume itself became a primary area of interest, and there were even entire costume books devoted specifically to the Ottomans. These costume books contained images of stereotypical garb, often copied from other earlier costume books, though they could be presented as first-hand observation.

Artistic depictions of Ottomans proliferated in Italy, as well as in Northern Europe, and over the course of the sixteenth century, the figure of the Ottoman Turk became a mythologized, exaggerated synonym of a kind of Antichrist, particularly during the years of active warfare between East and West