Fulcrum of Turkish art for grandeur and beauty, Istanbul concentrates in its territory masterpieces spanning over four centuries of Ottoman domination. The events of the extraordinary Turkish art start after the year 1000, when a group of populations originating from Central Asia, under the guidance of the rulers of the Seljuk dynasty, spread from the extreme eastern borders to the heart of Anatolia, subtracting territories from the Byzantium empire. Settled permanently, the Seljuks gave birth to an original art that assumed the use of stone from the conquered regions and used it to build austere interiors and, in the facades and portals, bent it to create an incomparable decorative richness, full of shamanic echoes of the tradition of the steppes and the Islamic passion for calligraphy and geometric motifs. With the transition to the Ottoman Turks and the conquest of Constantinople, the artistic reference point becomes the Mediterranean, and Byzantine architecture offers a model for Ottoman architecture. In the sixteenth century, once the multiethnic and multicultural empire was consolidated under the government and patronage of Suleiman, the great season of Sinan began: a genius of a magnitude comparable to Michelangelo (they were about contemporaries), he manages to create a rigorous architectural language, capable of absorbing both the Mediterranean tradition and the Asian culture. The Suleiman mosque in Istanbul, the Selim mosque in Edirne and all the other mosques of the most important cities of the empire, are in fact Mediterranean and universal masterpieces. Even the decorative art of those centuries expresses a desire for beauty, a passion for color, rigor and a search for elegance: from books to miniatures, from fabrics to carpets and ceramics. Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then, the Ottomans reworked European influences and Art Nouveau marked the art of Istanbul, managing to blend Western and Eastern echoes in a precious balance.