Download PDF | Images of the Byzantine World Visions, Messages and Meanings: Studies presented to Leslie Brubaker Edited By Angeliki Lymberopoulou, Routledge 2011.
274 Pages
Preface
Angeliki Lymberopoulou
The interpretation of Byzantine texts and artefacts has been a central aspect of the work of Leslie Brubaker throughout her career. It is only natural, therefore, that in a volume of essays, dedicated to her on her sixtieth birthday, a range of such interpretations is presented by authors who not only have been important to Leslie as colleagues, friends, and students, but have also benefited greatly from her research, publications and friendship. Its main themes are the identification of ‘visions’, ‘messages’, and ‘meanings’ in various facets of Byzantine culture and the possible differences in the perception of these visions, messages and meanings as seen by their original audience and by modern scholars.
The volume addresses the methodological question of how far interpretations should go - whether there is a tendency to read too much into too little or, vice versa, not enough attention is paid to apparent minutiae that may have been important in their historical context. As the successive essays span a wide chronological era, the book also presents an opportunity to assess the relative degrees of continuity and change in Byzantine visions, messages and meanings over time. Thus, as is highlighted in the concluding section written by Chris Wickham, the book discusses the validity of existing notions regarding the fluidity of Byzantine culture.
It clarifies when continuity was a matter of a rigid adherence to traditional values and when a manifestation of the ability to adapt old conventions to new citcumstances. More importantly it shows that, in some respects, Byzantine cultural history may have been less fragmented than is usually assumed. Similarly, by reflecting not just on new interpretations, but also on the process of interpreting itself, the papers combined in this volume demonstrate how research within Byzantine studies has evolved over the past 30 years from a set of narrowly defined individual disciplines into a broader exploration of interconnected cultural phenomena ~ a development in which Leslie Brubaker has been instrumental.
Editorial Policy
In rendering the Greek names and place-names mentioned in this volume the standard anglicized forms, where they exist, have been used (for example Constantine instead of Konstantinos). For the rest, following a trend that has been gaining acceptance recently, all names have been transcribed as literally as possible avoiding the various latinized versions (Komnenos instead of Comnenus, Nikephoros instead of Nicephorus). If someone was a Latinspeaker, then the ending -ushas been, appropriately, maintained (Theodosius, Euphrasius, Claudius). It goes without saying that in all publications cited in the footnotes the names have remained unchanged and appear as their authors intended.
Acknowledgements
This book is a labour of love by many people, who all worked hard and full of enthusiasm to materialize ~ a clear reflection of Leslie's popularity. Special thanks to Chris Wickham for his invaluable help with organizing this volume, forhis many and astute contributions and for his important advice throughout; cy for his meticulous and precise comments and for allowing (0 Kalliroe Linardou for providing Leslie's biography and publications; to Rebecca Day for compiling the index; and to Celia Barlow, Beatrice Beaup, Rembrandt Duits, Basilius J. Groen, Jonathan Harris, Dimitra Kotoula, Rose Mepham, Diana Newall, Tassos Papakostas, Julie Pardue, Lyn Rodley, Albert Stewart, Andrew Tinson, and Vasiliki Tsamakda for their constructive criticism, useful suggestions, support and help (practical and otherwise). Last, butby no means least [ would like to thankall the contributors for their commitment, precision, punctuality and understanding. Obviously all the shortfalls and mistakes in this volume are entirely my responsibility.
handles actually are. In other words, holding Projecta’s casket offers a very different reading of it from simply seeing it.
Touch was a pervasive, but perhaps secondary, sense in Byzantium. Almost every Byzantine text contains accounts of touching. The Gospels, perhaps the most important texts in Byzantine ideology, are full of stories of people who touched or were touched by Christ, culminating in Mary Magdalene who was told not to touch (John 20:17) and doubting Thomas who wanted to place his hand in Christ's wounds to be assured that Christ had risen (John 20; 24-9) Hagiography details a myriad of saints who performed miracles through touch, Saint Artemios, the patron saint of male genital injuries, would appear in visions to the afflicted and heal them through painfully squeezing, trampling or lancing their diseased testicles." Symeon the Stylite (c.389-459) was touched by Antonios to discover whether he was dead; Daniel the Stylite (409-93) was physically defrosted by his followers; Theodore of Sykeon (d. 613) averted a plague of locusts by holding three in his hand and praying over them until they died." Ascetic saints used touch in a variety of ways to mortify the flesh, through wearing fetters or hairshirts, or by standing on columns, for example. Touching is apparent in every possible human context, from tearing out tongues to kissing babies. Texts ~ manuscripts ~ were themselves tactile objects and touching them formed part of their performative role."? In is sixth-century account of the ambo of Hagia Sophia, Paul the Silentiary suggests that during the liturgy, the priest held the ‘golden book’ aloft whilst the crowds strove to touch it with their lips and hands, breaking around the ambo like the sea." A letter could not only be treasured for what it said but for its actual physical existence.'* If Byzantine readers used a pointer or their finger to trace words on the page, then the act of reading was itself tactile.
Asense of tactility does comes across in Byzantine writings about art, above all in mention of different qualities of materials, especially smoothness and roughness, weights and measures: the mention of floors of onyx ‘so smoothly polished’ that they were like water congealed to ice; of unpolished stones used for rough steps; of gilding with pure gold two fingers thick; of corrugated altar-covers; and of gold crosses, 80 pounds in weight and encrusted with jewels.* One thing that this tactility reveals is the monetary value of art. It also underlines that touching something serves to verify it in some way, as with the experience of handling Projecta’s casket, Sight does not tell us everything about the intrinsic qualities of an object. It cannot reveal its weight, for example, or its texture."* Touch does. So holding something might serve as a guarantee of quality or of quantity.
Although it is never explicitly stated in Byzantine writings, aesthetically Byzantine art invites touch. As I have argued elsewhere, entering, a building, was in part a tactile experience, with the movement from exterior to interior, warm to chill, the change of materials underfoot, the range of objects to make contact with.” The marble sheathing used in great churches offered a sense of coolness to any worshipper who might choose to touch it, and the very stones of a building could be used in tactile prayer, as with the column of Saint Gregory the Wonderworker in Hagia Sophia on which the faithful rubbed themselves. in search of healing."* The near-three-dimensionality of, for example, some Byzantine ivories or the metal icon of the Archangel Michael, surely offered their owners a tactile experience, unless we believe that they were enclosed in cabinets of curiosities to be kept out of the reach of idle hands.'’ When the appearances and functions of such objects are considered, touch is usually overlooked, but perhaps should be included in these contexts. The hardstone cups, such as the Chalice of the Patriarchs, that spring to life when raised to the light, had to be handled in the first instance.” How did the enamels and jewels that so often form a part of Byzantine decoration of these objects interact with physical hands on the object? Were they positioned in such a way 10 provide a grip for the fingers and a stimulus of touch? As with Projecta’s casket, one would need to handle such objects to see where the hands might best fit. Further, if this particular cup was used as a chalice in the liturgy, then touch would have been very much a part of any user’s experience of it, ahead, perhaps of sight, and so we should consider what it feels like.
It is a truism that the Byzantines engaged physically with works of art. Written sources contain many stories about people holding, kissing, hugging, biting, consuming works of art. Some physically carried icons with them wherever they went, either on their person or in their luggage2" Amulets and pilgrim tokens, or eulogia, were worn or carried by believers, their physical proximity on the body causing relief? The fourth-century pilgrim, Egeria, described chunks being taken out of relics of the True Cross via the teeth of the faithful; removing the fingers and toes of saints in this way was also a popular pilgrim activity” One very well-known story tells of a woman healed by Saints Cosmas and Damien after drinking part of a wall-painting of the saints, and clay eulogia were regularly consumed by believers seeking healing or protection. One of the most significant of all holy images, the Mandylion of Edessa, was formed not through painting but through touch, As an acheiropoietos image, an image not made with human hands, it was created through physical contact when Christ washed his face and, in drying it on a cloth, left the imprint of his features there. As the cloth came into contact with other objects, so the image continued to replicate itself. Paradoxically, bodily contact with images played a major role in Iconoclasm when images were physically destroyed, eyes gouged out, and figures covered up or mutilated in some way.
None of this should be surprising; it would be more remarkable if writers did not mention touch. In a way, touch has been overlooked because it is so banal and everyday a sensation; itis a part of the human condition to be tactile. However, societies have their own rules of touch and so in this context, the contexts of touching in Byzantium can tell us something of the social customs of that society: the socialization of touch; the tactile codes of communication and the rules of contact - what might be expressed as the difference between a handshake and a kiss, what it meant to kiss the feet of an emperor, the hands of a saint, the lips of an icon, how the bite of a dog and the bite of the believer on the True Cross were understood. Issues such as these relate to ideas of social decorum: who could touch whom, when, where and how?” What was touch for? Why and what did people touch? Which parts of an icon, for example, were touched? How did people touch different things? What did touch achieve? Conventions about tactile interaction (even something as ‘simple’ as gender differences) give information about social differentiation, about defining personhood and status. Standards of acceptable forms of touch change as concepts of proper forms of corporeal behaviour and social order change. There are different rules of decorum. The idea of biting the True Cross is shocking now, but this was a time when relics were treated roughly; they were regularly stolen, snatched, or torn asunder:
Images of touch can add to our knowledge of hierarchies and relationships between people in Byzantium. It is often assumed, for example, that hands are veiled when coming into contact with holy objects or figures. This is true, but only up to a point. In the sixth-century apse mosaic of the Eufrasian Basilica in Poreé (Fig. 1.1), for example, as the viewer moves out from the centre, the Virgin's hands are bare touching Christ, the angels flanking them extend one bare hand but the hands holding their sceptres are inside their robes.® Beyond them, Saint Maurus to the viewer's left and the saint to the right hold their crowns of martyrdom in veiled hands. On the left again, Bishop Eufrasius brings his church with veiled hands, but the Archdeacon Claudius, at the far left, holds a book in his bare hands, though his small son holds candles in veiled hands. To the right, the two anonymous saints carry their tokens, a book and a crown, in veiled hands. This one mosaic alerts us to the knowledge that whose hands were veiled when is more complicated than simply contact with the holy. Why in this image did Claudius’ hands remain unveiled? In similar vein, in the sixth-century apse mosaic of San Vitale in Ravenna (Fig. 1.2), one of the angels touches the shoulder of Saint Vitale with a bare hand, though his other hand is veiled. In Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo (Fig. 1.3), some of the male and female saints hold their crowns with veiled hands or ‘one veiled hand, others touch their crowns with bare flesh. Should we see the veiling as random and accidental at the artists’ whim? Does it depend on the saint? To answer these questions, a more detailed study of veiling, within a broader context of touch and its significance, is necessary.
As these examples also illustrate, touch can indicate social hierarchies: angels touch saints, not vice versa. Who Christ touches when may also be suggestive: Christ in his divinity never touches anyone, but in scenes of his life on earth, touching is far more prominent, both by Christ and of Christ.”
of the person depicted, is made apparent through touch. Kissing an icon is like kissing a portrait, coming into contact with the living presence of the person depicted. A sense of this is given by theological writings of the eighth century, from the period of controversy known to usas Iconoclasm, when the Byzantine world was divided over the place of religious images, most specifically icons, in religious worship." This dispute was a battle about the corporeal reality of Christ, made present through the representation of God in religious images: could a corporeal representation be made after the image of the incorporeal and divine God? How could a material image represent Christ?"
Although both sides framed the debate in terms of the visual, the material and the tactile also had parts to play. One of the points about the icon was that its materiality made the divine ible, and with that visibility came tactility. For the Byzantines, the material world and the spiritual world could be brought together ~ conjoined ~ through visible, tangible images, and the spiritual world was made tactile in an icon. This is a view very different from attitudes in the medieval West, where some theologians separated the material world from the spiritual realm.® In the period of Iconoclasm, we see the Byzantines bringing the two together. With icons, touch played a part in the justification of religious imagery, and touching an icon reinforced the more abstract theological belief of its nature in portraying the divine. Touch, as well as sight, made the holy person present through his or her icon. It was no wonder that holy images could respond in tactile ways to the believer or non-believer, by bleeding, exuding oil, even causing death.” Icons suggested that matter was not inanimate.
In this context of the animation of matter, relics also played an important role. Relics possessed something of the power of the saint. They were not dead and inanimate but rather were dynamic material presences, objects endowed with life and with agency.” Unlike looking at an object, touching it is two-way. Wearing an amulet, for example, kept the faithful in constant physical contact with the image it portrayed or the person it was once a part of; it or, more accurately, the holy figure, touched the wearer in return. At this point of physical contact, miracles could occur: an eulogia of Symeon Stylites the Younger (591-92) was crumbled to still the sea; in the Tuesday procession of the Hodegetria icon, according to Stephen of Novgorod, writing in the fourteenth century, the icon directed its blindfolded bearers through touch.* Touch was a means of possessing the relic and thus the holy. Questions about who might want to touch a relic, who could touch it, why would they touch it, when would they touch it, who controls the touch, what could its touch do for the toucher ~ the difference between access to the imperial collection of relics and the relics of a saint in his own public church — all these issues combine to build up a ‘social history’ of touching which, for Byzantium, remains unwritten.
Furthermore, relics are corporeal, sharing the paradox of icons: both displayed and verified God's corporeality, using materials to reveal the reality of the divine. With relics, Georgia Frank has discussed the equally paradoxical situation of the pilgrim who, in visiting holy men and holy women, travelled to experience a corporeal, tangible, divine human body.” Pilgrims were great touchers. Everything we read tells of them touching relics, gathering dirt, rubbing inscriptions. Touch, like sight, could cross the boundaries between the holy and the human and seems to have been a fundamental part of religious experience. But touch also had potential for destruction: in the hands of pilgrims, holy men could, literally, fall apart, as the fourth-century monk, Paphnoutios, discovered when he grasped the arm of a holy man and it disintegrated into dust.”
In considering touching the holy, | want to reflect, briefly, on attitudes towards that corporeal, divine human body of which relics were living proof. ‘The conventional view of Early Christian and Byzantine attitudes to the body tends to be that the Christian monastic tradition saw flesh as the metaphor for fallen man and the irrational rejection of God; and that the passionate body needed disciplining through diet, meditation and constraint." It was the Christian's duty to master the threat of the body. But, if touch is used as. a way of understanding attitudes to the physical in Byzantium, then, as Kallistos Ware has shown, this view needs nuancing or, perhaps, even reversing.” He suggests that, in Greek Christianity, what is apparent is not a rejection of the body but a tension or an ambivalence: in theory the body is fundamentally good, though in practice, it may be more problematic, Ascetic practices are almost always defined as mortifications of the flesh, punishing the body to make it holy, depriving it of sensation or offering it sensations of the more unpleasant kind, especially where touch is concerned. However, texts about asceticism, as Ware points out, actually present a more balanced view than this, suggesting that asceticism might be seen asa struggle for the body rather than against it. Many ascetic texts give the body an important sensory role. John Klimakos, writing in the seventh century, said of his body: ‘he is my helper and my enemy, my assistant and my opponent, a protector and a traitor’. ‘How can I hate him when my nature disposes me to love him? ... How can I escape from him when he is going to rise with me? This is a more ambivalent attitude to physicality than one that locates the body as enemy.
Ware has shown how human physicality was understood by early Christians in various ways which he explains as bids to resolve the tension between the Hebraic-biblical tradition of the holistic understanding of human person and the Platonic-Hellenistic tradition of soul/body dualism.“ Into this mix came the Fall of Man and the question of the distinction between the preand post-Fall body, the idea of the Word becoming flesh and the role played by the physical body of Christ, embodying salvation, and the belief in the resurrection of the body at the Second Coming ~ something inherently sinful could not rise again. In this context, the body, physicality and tactility became positives: the created body was a temple because it was potentially holy and was created by God. As Ware says, it is worth noting how often ascetics are rewarded by ‘things of the flesh’. The ascetic Onouphrios (c.400) suffered all sorts of bodily mortifications, but was rewarded by wonderful food from. God; Anthony's physical austerities did not reduce him to withered skin and bone but restored him to a more healthy and natural state; Symeon the Stylite, despite ‘stinking like a dog’, passed away in an odour of holiness.
In all of this, it is critical to be aware of how the Byzantines themselves rated touch and the senses. As is well-known, the Byzantines believed that sight was a tactile medium and that seeing was a tactile experience.” Rays from the eyes came out and embraced the object being regarded, bringing it back to the mind, imprinting its form on the memory. In this context, the words of the ninth-century Patriarch Photios, in his homily on the image of the Virgin in the apse of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, are frequently cited: ‘Having somehow through the outpouring and effluence of the optical rays touched and encompassed the object, [sight] too sends the essence of the thing seen on to the mind ... Has the mind seen? Has it grasped? Has it visualised? Then it has effortlessly transmitted the forms to the memory.’*
Photios’ statement suggests that for the Byzantines sight and touch worked very similarly, that they were in fact convergent or even conjoined senses, a philosophy of the workings of sight derived from the Classical philosopher Aristotle.” In Western thought, Aristotle is seen as placing sight and touch as the top and bottom ends of the scale of senses. However, his view of touch is more complicated than this implies. For Aristotle, touch may not have been the most noble sense but it does seem to have been the primary sense, the most necessary sense, without which no other sense was possible.“ Unlike the other senses, it does not belong toa single organ; indeed, does it have an organ: are skin and flesh the organs of touch or the media of touch? Is the heart the organ?" Rather, touch is a sense of communication, bringing distant objects into proximity. In the De Anima, it is clear that there is a distinction made between valid sensory pleasures and bestial or carnal appetites. As Aristotle notes, humans are the only sentient beings able to make this distinction for their sense of touch is far more developed than that of anything in the animal kingdom.” Touch, like sight, can be carnal; but like sight, it can also be profound. It can verify, it can communicate presence and empathy, it brings together body, world and flesh. Susan Stewart has suggested that for Aristotle, touch was the sense needed for being; the other four senses were necessary for well-being. In Aristotelian terms therefore, touch might be understood as the most profound of the senses. Aristotle also appears to say that sensible perception depends on touch, that is to say contact between the perceptible object and perception itself: the perceiving organ needs a means of being in touch with the object. For sight, hearing and smelling, this medium is air or ‘water. Sight, hearing and smell all work through touch (as, indeed, does taste). For Aristotle, it seems the case that we relate to the world through a single sense organ, the body, in which all the senses are united, Following Aristotle, it might be argued that the single sense organ is the organ of touch.
‘The Byzantines appear to have shared these views. The tenth-century Souda lexicon, a compilation of entries ranging from etymologies and grammatical forms, to accounts of people and places, discusses touch on several occasions." ‘The entry under aisthesis, senses, borrows considerably from the sixth-century philosopher, John Philoponos and from Aristotle.* It describes sight as clearer than hearing, hearing as clearer than smelling, and smelling as clearer than either touch or taste. But touch, it suggests, is not really a sense at all, but is present in relation to defining the properties of anything, and everything: the other senses all share qualities of tactility.
Touch mattered in Byzantium. Being present in relation to defining the properties of anything and everything, touch was all-embracing. Touch had meaning in Byzantium. What the Byzantines touched and how they touched it were everyday social conventions; the tactile body was itself an everyday object and, for the Byzantines, God was an everyday tangible reality, In this context, using the senses to deal with the incomprehensibility of God was perfectly sensible. It is we who struggle with the paradox within Byzantine art, that of the use of the material and sensual to achieve the spiritual, a placing of the living or dead body at the centre of religious experience, a use of the tactile to apprehend the divine, whilst attempting to transcend the body through the use of the senses. Edith Wyschogrod’s statement that “Touch is not a sense at all; it is in fact a metaphor for the impingement of the world as a whole upon subjectivity ... to touch is to comport oneself not in opposition to the given but in proximity with it’® is one that any Byzantine might have recognized.
subject of a heated debate among scholars. After Ejnar Dyggve discarded any literal interpretation of late antique depictions of architecture,‘ in the 1940s Richard Krautheimer addressed — and largely solved the major problems of architectural representation, pointing out the parallel between the inaccuracy inherent to an architectural copy or representation in painting or sculpture to its counterpart in medieval literary descriptions.* In these representations, the actual building seems broken into pieces, some of its elements carefully chosen before being regrouped in the final depiction. The ‘copy’ resulting from this process is quite different from the original, as it does not reproduce all the elements of the latter, their structural relationships or relative dimensions. However, the inaccuracy of the copy is counterbalanced by the reproduction of the content and significance of the building, which are the major concerns in the creation of a building's copy or depiction.* Some 20 years later, Paul Lamp! reached the same conclusion by schematizing the most common principles of medieval representation of buildings from the fourth to the twelfth century.” Noél Duval devoted much of his work to architectural representations, analysing a substantial amount of evidence and defining interpretative schemes largely concentrating on the depiction of basilicas.
Duval affirms that late antique depictions of buildings are ‘synthetic representations’: some are more schematic and others more elaborate, representing the original by combining internal and external elements in a sort of ‘flattened perspective’ (perspective aplanie)."° This leads Duval to develop a series of schemes that allow him to do the opposite process and reconstruct the ‘original building’ (or buildings) from the depiction." In the majority of cases, neither a standing ‘original building’ nor sufficient archaeological evidence exists to evaluate Duval’s rendering of the building and, in tum, his reconstruction. His theory is based on the conviction that late antique architectural representations are purely conventional.'? However, in the case of church models in the hands of their patrons, he admits both a realistic and a symbolic value, insofar as the model generally recalls the building without being an accurate and complete depiction.” In my opinion, these inaccurate models do contain very realistic elements and their symbolic character goes far beyond the simple issue of recalling the original.
As has already been pointed out, it would be difficult to identify the original church from the models discussed here, despite the reproduction of some distinctive features of the originals. In Poreé, the sort of crenellation supporting the upper roof in the Eufrasian model can be seen in the northern side of the original church, where a row of small corbels projects out of the wall to support the roof gutter.'* The original building probably bore two crosses rather than the three represented in the model. The curtain drawn to one side, which partially covers the entrance, also represents the one that was hung on the hangers still visible on the original doors." In Ecclesius’ model, the brick roof of San Vitale’s ambulatory" and its central bronze roof" are respectively represented with red and greenish cubes, while the original bronze cross, still preserved today, * is emphasized by a sort of golden lavish base. One therefore sees that, although some features reproduce original elements, both models offer idealized representations of the crosses.
The models were clearly intended to depict the real churches albeit in very general terms, and therefore do not allow for the reconstruction of the original as a whole. This has already been underlined for textual descriptions of buildings,” but it is important to underline it in this context for clarifying the scholarly debate on architectural representation. The rather generic character of the model might be due to the difficulty in reproducing a large building on a smaller scale. Yet the models do contain details that correspond to elements of the original buildings, and those details may have been selected among others to be depicted in the model precisely because they were intended to convey further messages.
In the Eufrasian model the disproportionate size of the entrance which covers the entire facade suggests its idealized meaning as a whole. Although this could just be due to the simplification of the fagade in a model that was meant to be seen from a distance, sources mention that the rebuilding of Poreé’s church was motivated by Eufrasius’ desire to provide the Christians of the city with a larger, more beautiful church as a display of faith" In this context, representing a huge entrance with the curtain drawn to one side in place of three doors and a small atrium ~ which are, from a modern perspective, the most interesting features of the church — was perhaps a way to emphasize the openness of the church for the congregation.
with a high evocative character: a bronze plaque of unknown origin (Fig. 2.3), as well as three large silver plates coming from hoards, the Kaiseraugst socalled ‘Meerstadtplatte’ (Fig. 2.4), the Cesena plate (Fig. 2.5), and the Sevso hunting dish.® Inalll these items the architectural depictions do not function as simple frames for the main decorative subjects but seem to play an important role as meaningful elements of the composition.
Much scholarship has been devoted to these metalwork objects, especially the plates.” The structural similarities between them have raised several hypotheses about a possible common origin, but ultimately these have been discarded by Mundell Mango's detailed and definitive study.” While their architectural representations have served in attempts to reconstruct ancient buildings,* we have seen in the previous paragraph that such attempts are hazardous at best. Furthermore some architectural representations, such as those depicted in these objects, may have been purely imaginary. Based on these images, it is in fact difficult to decipher the structural relationship between the various parts of the buildings. In the Meerstadtplatte, for instance, facades topped with pediments or domes are depicted near colonnades supporting, roofs, without forming coherent architectural structures.
The architectural representations have mostly been interpreted as country villas,” although some scholars have read the buildings of the Kaiseraugst plate and the two structures on the rim of the Cesena plate as cities.“’ On the Cesena plate, for instance, the buildings on the rim feature a large door and a walled enceinte. The pediment on the door seems to extend into a roof on the side above the wall. However, a number of other structures with pediments, roofs and even a dome are represented between the wall and the roof. On the Meerstadtplatte, the wall circuit has three openings and several buildings appear behind them. These depictions are essentially different, despite the display of some similarities such as surrounding walls with entrances topped with domes or pediments - elements that could be the main features of a city. However, late antique depictions of cities that adopt the point of view of an observer standing outside the walls, include great walls, towers, monumental entrances and, in most cases, buildings that could easily and clearly be allowing for more precise dating and understanding.” In this architectural context too, hunting and banquet scenes are the reflection of rich owners’ real practices; representations of villas in these mosaics probably represent the owner's estates.”
The combined appearance of hunting, architectural and banquet scenes ‘on mosaic decoration offers a reliable basis for interpreting the items under examination, which were all found out of context. The juxtaposition of hunting and architectural (as well as convivial) images suggests both a familiarity with these activities and the suitability of this iconography to decorate rich silverware and, in the case of the chair back, furniture.
The choice of the raw material (bronze, silver and gold) as well as that of the technique (niello and gilded silver or copper inlaid metalwork) indicates the peculiarity of the objects. Precious metals were valued not only for their monetary value but also for their shining effects: with the right lighting, they could create light plays enhancing the visual appearance of the place where they were kept. Although studies on late antique metalwork have shown that metalwork and especially silver is found in association to a broad social spectrum,” the rich decoration, large size and high quality of the items discussed here suggest wealthy owners. To borrow Leader-Newby’s observation, made in reference to the Sevso plate, the decoration of these plates shows ‘the idealized image of the owner and his lifestyle’.
The wooden chair to which the bronze plaque was originally nailed would have been an expensive piece of furniture, playing the double role of a seat and of an indicator of the owner’s means, good taste and perhaps status. Large dishes such as the ones discussed here were probably used for banquets or simply put on display in houses where, along with the décor and furniture, they would serve as ways for the house owner to display his wealth, elegance and culture to his guests. An inscription on the Sevso plate also reveals that they could also be transmitted through inheritance from generation to generation. Since the plates served both as objects to display to the guests and as heirlooms, their owners would have valued their iconography’s power to convey an image of their life as they wished it to be.
Given the simultaneous appearance of hunting and banquet themes on the domestic mosaics and metalware of rich households, representation of great country villas could recall real architecture and serve as a memory of the owner's properties and, in turn, wealth and might. When appearing on house objects and room decoration, such images were meant to reproduce the same impression of wealth given by the appearance of the villas in the countryside. Representations of country mansions, however, should not be considered as strictly accurate ‘photos’ of the estates, because they also bear a strong ideal and symbolic value. Villas represent a location, the country mansion, around which are taking place the activities from which the owner built his wealth (symbolized in the pastoral scenes) and in which he spends his free time (hunts and banquets). Great domestic architecture — real or imaginary — was considered as an icon and even imaginary villas could serve as representations of the household's elite status for future generations. Thus, these depictions of villas convey messages and work as a model for both the purchaser-patron, who saw them as a symbol of himself, and the beholder, who associates those images to the ‘real life’ of great estates’ owners.
In this paper, I have tried to demonstrate that the two categories of architectural representations analysed acted as ‘models’, idealized reproductions symbolizing their patrons and conveying the same meaning as the building represented. These images interacted with their context and, through this, conveyed messages going beyond their appearance as buildings. Beside the significance of buildings as cues for memories in late antique rhetoric” and the importance of domestic architecture and decoration as a tool for memory, depictions of buildings can serve as memories, both realistic and symbolic. Church models in apse programmes bear messages, involving the memory of the bishop and the character of the church itself as the founder's gift to God. The depiction of villas on metal objects points towards the acceptance in wealthy circles of the villa theme as a conceptual place, a symbol immortalizing the image of the owner's power and culture to guests as well as to posterity. Thus, while the meaning of late antique architectural depictions resides in the representation of the building as a model, the messages that these images convey ultimately concern the concept of memory. Far from being ‘tropes’ devoid of importance, building representations carry a broad spectrum of messages to their patron and the beholder and, when examined in their context, may be crucial elements for our understanding of late antique culture.
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