Good Hats

As part of my never-ending search for visual reference material, I came upon Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce, by Count Marie Gabriel Florent Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier, published in 1782, or maybe 1822, or maybe both (it's a multi-volume work). It's not perfectly clear to me who is responsible for the illustrations, which I'm guessing weren't executed by The Count. My French is not great, and I couldn't find the answers in any of the obvious spots.

It's chock full of wonderful imagery—very "picturesque," as the title says—and will come in very handy for DD4.

I originally found the books at Heidelberg University's online library repository. Since then, I discovered there's also a version available at archive.org, which is a lot easier to download from, including a ZIP file full of TIFFs, scanned at a very reasonably high resolution. (Careful - it's 5GB.) (EDIT: link removed, because it wasn't the volume I was expecting.)

Also very good: Edward Dodwell's Views in Greece, from 1821.

These are images created by Western Europeans travelling in what—to them—would have been the "Exotic East" or the "Exotic Orient." It was the end of the 18th century, they didn't have Panoramio, Lonely Planet guides, or even photographic technology. So it's wise to approach these resources with the knowledge that the illustrators and writers will be coming from that angle, perhaps pumping up the "exoticism" or romanticism of this alien-seeming culture. "Ruins" feature heavily. Around this time, some Western scholars were pitching ancient Greek aesthetics as the ideal for beauty, so remnants of that lost, idealized civilization became fashionable, and we end up with a lot of these illustrated travelogues in French, German, and English. When considering these sources, I do my level best to try to decode the original artist's biases, in hopes that I can see the image for what it might actually represent. It helps to have easy access to internet-based global photo searches, of course, as a point of comparison.

Got a line on any good 18th- or 19th- century Greek / Ottoman / Western European resources for visual reference, especially when it comes to costuming? Let me know in the comments.