The Art of Desire – An Ottoman Sex Manual and Its Context

In 2018, The David Collection acquired an unusual Ottoman manuscript: The Gift of the Kings. It is a manual that describes and guides the reader through various aspects and dimensions of human sexuality. We only know of four different copies of The Gift of the Kings worldwide, and this particular manuscript is the most ambitious of the four, completed in 1817 after at least eighteen years of work.

Over the past four years, three scholars of ottoman history and art history,  Selim S. Kuru, Irvin Cemil Schick and Tülay Artan, have translated and analysed the manuscript. In conjunction with the publication of their research, The David Collection now presents an exhibition on this remarkable work and the visual and literary traditions to which it belongs.

The manuscript’s 85 illuminated paintings make it an exceptional work of art. These paintings represent a pinnacle of late Ottoman visual culture, distinguished by their remarkably well-preserved colours, technical virtuosity, and richness of detail. Many depict sexually explicit scenes, often with a humorous dimension. They may have functioned, at least in part, as pornographic material, but today they also serve as unique testimonies to contemporary fashion, interiors, everyday life, and the emergence of a globalised world. The exhibition takes selected paintings as its point of departure and explores their artistic, historical, and cultural context.

Commissioned by an unknown patron, the manuscript is a compilation of texts drawn from older Turkish, Persian, and Arabic sources. Its material can be traced back to an Arabic sex manual from the thirteenth century. Through centuries of copying and adaptation it was expanded with fictional stories, poems, and anecdotes, several of which are also known from One Thousand and One Nights. The result is a substantial work that combines erotic literature, scholarship, and storytelling.

As the manuscript is currently undergoing conservation and will later be rebound, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to experience its extensive pictorial material displayed as a unified artistic whole. A unique chance to explore a private visual culture from a time before the world went viral.