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Antoine Favray (born on September 8, 1706 in Bagnolet and died on February 9, 1798 in Malta), is a French painter, commander of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. He is known for his portraits of personalities of the Ottoman Empire, as well as paintings of Grand Masters in Malta. His parents are Claude Favray and Marie Millet his wife, he is sponsored by Antoine de Fontaine, concierge of the Duke of Quintin. This may help him in his career. We know nothing of his youth.
French ambassador Charles Gravier de Vergennes[1] in Ottoman dress, painted by Antoine de Favray, 1766, Pera Museum, Istanbul.Antoine Favray accompanies in Rome in 1738, as private pupil, Jean-Francois de Troy, who has just been appointed director of the Academy of France. In 1739, he became an official resident of the Academy as successor to Jean-Charles Frontier. He carried out various reproductive works such as The Fire of the Village of Raphael, a fresco about 10,60 m in width, which is exhibited in the gallery of Apollo du Louvre in Paris in 1741. It also makes copies of Masters such as Guerchin and Titian.
During his first stay in Malta, he painted several paintings depicting Maltese ladies and also commissions for churches and religious establishments on the island. The great master Manoel Pinto da Fonseca (1741-1773) made him realize his portrait where Favray succeeded in restoring the will of the great master to appear as a monarch more than a religious order. Favray obtains this result, thanks to the position of the grand master, who designates with his hand a closed crown, a sign of royalty, and by using in abundance the purple color.
He later made official portraits of his two successors, Francisco Ximenes de Texada (1773-1775) and Emmanuel de Rohan-Polduc (1775-1797). The first portrait focuses on the religious side of Ximenes, that of Rohan is very little “official”: he is in motion to ascend his throne, the pages behind him do not pay him attention and discuss among themselves. Through the window is the people of Malta, and an orange tree, which recalls that the oranges of Malta are appreciated by all the courts of Europe.
Favray accompanies the crew of the Ottoman Crown, returning to Constantinople. This ship was captured by the Maltese race, and bought by the King of France to offer it to the Sultan as a token of friendship. He arrives at Constantinople on January 19, 1762, is well received by Vergennes, ambassador of France, makes his portrait as well as that of his wife, painted many interior scenes, as well as landscapes. It seems to have been perfectly integrated with the French community.
In 1762 Antoine de Favray moved to Constantinople like several other European artist of his time did too, where he spent nine years. During his stay in Constantinople he was painting numerous genre scenes of the everyday life in Turkey under Louis XVI and he also depicted locals and foreign dignitaries. Two portraits are especially notable, one is of the French ambassador Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes [1][2] who was living in Constantinople between 1754 to 1768 and the second, that the painter painted two years later, of the ambassador’s wife. The painting depicts the native-born Annette Duvivier de Testa who became the ambassador’s wife. She had previously been married to Testa, a merchand and member of a prominent Genoese family who settled in Pera for several centuries. Favray portrayed both the ambassador and ambassador’s wife in a rich Turkish dress.
He remained eight years before returning to Malta, where he arrived on September 29, 1771.
[1] Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes (20 December 1717 – 13 February 1787) was a French statesman and diplomat. Born in Dijon, France, he was introduced to the profession of diplomacy by his uncle, M. de Chavigny, under whom he saw his first service at Lisbon. His successful conduct of French interests at the court of Trier in 1750 and the following years led to his being sent to Constantinople in 1755, first as minister plenipotentiary, then as ambassador.
[2] Having been appointed to various posts in Portugal and Spain, French diplomat Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes (1719- 1787) arrived in İstanbul in 1755 as minister plenipotentiary and was soon made full ambassador, a post he held until he was recalled to France in 1768. During his mission, the role of France in the Ottoman State’s trade with the west increased; just as France had intended, the same year Gravier left İstanbul, the Ottomans reentered war with the increasingly strengthening Imperial Russia. A French military officer of Hungarian origin in the retinue of Vergennes, Baron de Tott contributed towards the renewal of the Ottoman army. Partly due to his diplomatic achievements in Sweden after he left İstanbul, Comte de Vergennes was appointed as foreign minister during the reign of King Louis XVI.
He played an instrumental role in the American War of Independence with his policies in favor of the liberation process. Without seeking the king’s consent, Gravier had married Anette de Viviers[*] (1730 – 1798), the widow of a merchant from Pera, after he lived with her for several years and fathered two children out of wedlock. This marriage is cited among the reasons that prompted Gravier’s recall to France. Comte de Vergennes had taken French artist Antoine de Favray in his retinue upon the latter’s arrival in İstanbul in 1862; when he left İstanbul, he entrusted de Favray to the new French ambassador Saint Priest.
Before he arrived in İstanbul, de Favray, a Knight himself, was recognized for his portraits of the Grand Master and knights of the Order of St John in Malta, as well as his depictions of Maltese women. Hijacked to Malta by mutinying Christian slaves, the Kaptan Paşa galley was bought by France upon the advice of Vergennes, who kept his country’s relations with the Ottoman Empire in regard, and was returned to the Ottomans. De Favray arrived in İstanbul aboard this vessel, painted an İstanbul panorama to commemorate this event, as well as the ambassador’s audience with Sultan Osman III, and made portraits of Comte and Comtesse de Vergennes in Turkish attire, whom the ambassador married shortly before he left İstanbul.
The paintings stand out with the meticulous attention to detail in clothes and accessories. During the nine years he spent in İstanbul, de Favray first lived at the French Palace and later at the Russian Palace, executed portraits of individuals in the embassy circles, and painted genre scenes of Levantine women, as well as İstanbul panoramas from the hills of Pera. The countess has been depicted in a pose similar to that of her husband, Ambassador Charles Gravier, while sitting on a divan. The difference is that the Countess of Vergennes is looking directly towards the viewer. In both paintings the clothing and jewellery have been depicted in exquisite detail, the drawing has been rendered with great care and the artist has been very successful in reflecting the texture of materials like fur, cloth, pearls and gold.
[*] Anne Duvivier, comtesse de Vergennes (1730–1798), also known as Annette Duvivier or de Viviers, was the wife of the French statesman and diplomat Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Her first marriage was to Francesco Testa[**], a merchant and member of one of the oldest Latin families of Péra, but she was widowed at the age of 24. She then lived as Gravier's mistress for some time before the couple married without the consent of King Louis XV, for which he was later recalled. They went on to have two daughters.
[**] François (Francesco) TESTA, Négociant
Born about 1720 - Constantinople, Istanbul, TURQUIE
Deceased 15 June 1754 - Constantinople, Istanbul, TURQUIE, aged about 34 years old
Parents: Georgio Tomaso TESTA 1694-ca 1755; Marie Madeleine FONTON 1694-/1734
Spouses: Married 16 July 1752, Constantinople, Istanbul, TURQUIE, to Anne DUVIVIER 1730-1798 (Parents : Henri DUVIVIER 1699- & Marie BULO) Married 29 April 1726, Ste-Marie-Drapéris, Constantinople (Turquie), to Maria BULO with (witness : Francesco SPERCO /1730- )
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Constantinople| City of the World's Desire 1453-1924 by Philip Mansel
Chapter One: The Conqueror
Galata's merchant dynasties - the Testa, Draperis, Fornetti - were the longest established families in the city. Turks called them `sweet water Franks', in contrast to `salt water Franks' from Europe. A body of twelve counsellors, the Magnifica Communita di Pera, managed the churches of the Catholic community. Merchants met twice a day to discuss business in the equivalent of the Exchange in London, the loggia of the Palazzo del Commune, a Gothic building modelled on the Palazzo San Giorgio in Genoa. When the empire was at peace with Venice, the Bailo (bailiff) of Venice ran a law-court for civil cases concerning Venetian subjects (and other Europeans), whose decisions were enforced by the Ottoman authorities. He also organized a postal service which left twice a month, by land through the Balkans, to Cattaro on the Dalmatian coast, and then by sea to Venice. Letters between the two cities generally took about a month to arrive.
Galata was a centre for pleasure as well as business. Every Lent there was a carnival: `One would think one was in a town in Italy,' wrote Marcantonio Pignafetta. Alvise Gritti was one of the many western Europeans who made his fortune on the banks of the Bosphorus. Born in Constantinople, where his father served as Venetian Bailo, debarred by illegitimate birth from a career in Venice, he lived in state in Galata (whose Turkish name Beyoglu, `son of the Bey', is said to come from the fact that his father was a Doge of Venice). A diplomatic agent of the Grand Vizier, and dealer in jewels, he was said to live as a Turk among the Turks and as a Christian among the Christians.
In 1524, soon after his father became Doge in Venice, he gave a banquet in Constantinople for 300 guests, including Turks. They dined off deer, partridge and peacock. They were then entertained by women of Galata dancing with `such lascivious movements that they could make marbles melt', followed by a comedy, Psyche and Cupid, a tournament and a representation of the Portuguese occupation of Ceylon.
A Turkish writer of the seventeenth century said of Galata, `Who says Galata says taverns - may God forgive us!': the beer iced, in summer, by snow brought from mountains above Bursa. Magnificently dressed, wearing all their wealth in jewels, the women kept the reputation, into the twentieth century, of the ability di fare di un santo un diavolo.
The Genoese of Pera
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More specifically, the history of this community assumed historical continuity starting from 1267, when, passed under Genoese control following the treaty of the Nymphaeum (which excluded the Venetians from trade in the Black Sea), the suburb of Constantinople north of the Horn of 'Oro ended up representing for almost two centuries an enclave in the very heart of the Empire, in which the "Latin" population governed itself with its own statutes, even independently from the Genoese state. In June 1453, a few days after the capitulation of Constantinople (during which, unlike the motherland, they had remained neutral) the Genoese of Pera, accepting the personal protection of the Sultan, saw their privileges and freedom to profess worship confirmed. Catholic: thus the Magnificent Community of Pera was born, with its own deliberative bodies even if placed under the jurisdiction of an Ottoman voivode. The conventions were renewed several times until 1682, gradually extending to the other Europeans who settled in this cosmopolitan suburb, also characterized by the presence of Jewish, Greek, Armenian, Muslim communities, destined over time to become the seat of Western diplomatic representations.
The casaccia dei Peroti
It is difficult to say how long the use of Genoese was preserved, considering that the variegated Catholic community quickly recomposed and re-merged into a single group, whose members were then known in the West with the name of Levantini. It is true, however, that embassies and testimonies of travelers document, in the secc. XVII and XVIII, the survival of a specific "Genoese" component: in 1618 Pietro Della Valle, underlined how in Pera "infin'hora there are, of their relics, some families who, if well dressed and Greek customs, believe with all this, today the Latin rite of religion and the Italian language, together with Greek and Turkish, which almost everyone can speak ”. If one wonders, of course, what is meant here by "Italian language", the tendency towards Hellenization seems to have been confirmed a few years earlier (1610) by the Englishman George Sandys, who speaks of peroti dragomanni (interpreters) as " Greeke Genoeses »; but in 1667 the first Genoese ambassador to Istanbul received "most affectionate" manifestations of sympathy from the Peroti, who would have liked to ascribe him to their brotherhood, which retained the Genoese title of casaccia.
"L'or c'est le français, l'argent, l'italien, le bronze, c'est le grec"
The transition from Genoese to a prevalent use of Italian as a community language and in relations with the outside world was favored in any case by the need to have a code common to the entire Latin Catholic population and by the importance that Italian itself , thanks to the role of cultural mediation played by the Levantines, it was assumed in the framework of relations between the Ottoman Empire and the West until beyond the eighteenth century. Historically, the Peroti were therefore represented as generically "Italian-speaking", although in more recent times the Levantines ended up practicing mainly French in external relations, due to the increased international prestige of this language, and Greek in everyday usage, although they considered it an idiom with less prestige: hence the local saying "l'or c'est le français, l'argent, l'italien, le bronze, c'est le grec". Even in the nineteenth century, a century that will see the definitive consolidation of French as a language of social relations also within the community, Italian will continue to be practiced, thanks above all to the resumption of contacts with the Peninsula. In fact, already at the beginning of the century, with the opening of a Savoy consular office (1815), the old Levantines and the new immigrants from Italy began to perceive themselves as a single "national" group: an intense promotional activity was carried out in this sense by the consul Ludovico Sauli, of an ancient Genoese family, who did his utmost to recover the historical memory of the old Perota community. The foundation of the local Associazione Commerciale Artigiana di Pietà | Artisan Commercial Association of Pietà dates back to 1839, whose statute is still drawn up in Italian.
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