Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione

In Genoa, Italy, a port city that traded regularly with the Ottoman Empire, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione may have encountered Turkish or North African merchants, but his series Small Studies of Heads depicts imagined types rather than likenesses of real people. The lavish headdresses, caricatured expressions, and gender ambiguity of many of these figures play into contemporary stereotypes that defined non-Europeancultures by their differences from Western European society. This is further emphasized by Castiglione's decision to sign his works' "Genovese," marking his Italian identity in opposition to the "foreignness" of his subjects.