Wooden jigsaw puzzle #53 Mosque, 2020
Alberto Pasini, 1872
570pieces
61 whimsies
Here's what we can learn from the description of the painting on the website of the Metropolitan Museum:
Pasini here depicts the Yeni Valide Mosque at Eminonu, Istanbul, an Ottoman structure completed in the early eighteenth century. Four women of the Imperial Household enter the mosque by a gateway that Pasini appropriated from another, much later, monument. It was painted two decades after Pasini befriended the artist Théodore Chassériau after arriving in Paris in 1851. When Chassériau was unable to accompany a diplomatic mission to Persia in 1855, Pasini went instead; it was the first of his numerous visits to the East.
This picture made me associate with a number of heroes of old books, legends and poems of the Muslim East and its history. Among the whims of this puzzle, I have characters from Turkey, Arabia, Iran and Central Asia.
Alexey Morozov, 2020