Download PDF | Sources for Byzantine Art History_3_The Visual Culture of Later Byzantium (c.1081-c.1350) (Cambridge, 2022)
1681 Pages
Sources for Byzantine Art History
Volume 3: The Visual Culture of Later Byzantium (c.1081-c.1350)
In this book the beauty and meaning of Byzantine art and its aesthetics are for the first time made accessible through the original sources. More than 150 medieval texts are translated from nine medieval languages into English, with commentaries from over seventy leading scholars. These include theories of art, discussions of patronage and understandings of iconography, practical recipes for artistic supplies, expressions of devotion, and descriptions of cities. The volume reveals the cultural plurality and the interconnectivity of Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean from the late eleventh to the mid fourteenth centuries. Part I uncovers salient aspects of Byzantine artistic production and its aesthetic reception, while Part II turns a spotlight on particular ways of expressing admiration and of interpreting the visual.
FOTEINI SPINGOU is a Research Associate in Byzantine Intellectual/Cultural History at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of a forthcoming monograph on twelfth-century Byzantine poetry and has written numerous articles on collections, cultural memory, reciprocity and patronage, manuscripts, and mathematics in Medieval Europe.
Contributors
Alexander Alexakis is Professor of Byzantine Literature in the Department of Philology, University of Ioannina. He is the coeditor of the Byzantine Greek series of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. Recent publications include The Greek Life of St. Leo Bishop of Catania (BHG 981b) (Brussels, 2011) and Weddings, Funerals, and Imperial Regrets: The Life of Patriarch Euthymios (Athens, 2018; in Greek).
Luisa Andriollo is a Gerda Henkel Stiftung research fellow at Bamberg University. She studied Byzantine History at Sorbonne University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. Her monograph, Constantinople et les provinces dAsie Mineure, IX-XI siécle (Leuven, 2017), was awarded the Diehl medal by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres.
Dimiter Angelov is Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine History at Harvard University. His many publications include Imperial Ideology and Political Thought in Byzantium, 1204-1330 (Cambridge, 2007) and The Byzantine Hellene: The Life of Emperor Theodore Laskaris and Byzantium in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 2019).
Scott Ashley is a lecturer in Medieval History at Newcastle University. He has published on a variety of topics, including the Vikings and Byzantium in world history, Anglo-Saxon England, and Carolingian astronomy. He is currently researching the histories of climate and environment in the Viking Age.
Charles Barber teaches at Princeton University. He has published extensively on the history of ideas about the icon. Notable books include Contesting the Logic of Painting: Art and Understanding in EleventhCentury Byzantium (Leiden, 2007) and Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton, 2002). His current research is on Renaissance Crete.
Marina Bazzani focuses her research at Oxford University largely on Byzantine poetry, both occasional and religious. She is particularly interested in the way Byzantine poets use literary allusions and rhetorical tools to create a multilayered text. Recently she has begun to investigate translations of Greek texts, such as the Hexaemeron by George of Pisidia, into classical Armenian.
Ludovic Bender (PhD, Fribourg University) is an independent researcher who specializes in Byzantine art and archaeology. His particular interests lie in the synergy between natural and cultural landscapes, the formation of cave and cliff-side hermitages and monasteries, and the cultural implications of Byzantine inscriptions. He is a major contributor to the database Artefacts and Raw Materials in Byzantine Archival Documents (www.unifr.ch/go/
typika).
Emmanuel Bourbouhakis is Associate Professor of Classics and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Not Composed in a Chance Manner: The Epitaphios for Manuel I Komnenos by Eustathios of Thessalonike (Uppsala, 2017), as well as articles on medieval Greek literature and a forthcoming book about Byzantine letter-writing.
Thomas A. Carlson is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History at Oklahoma State University. He is the author of Christianity in FifteenthCentury Iraq (Cambridge, 2018) and is developing HIMME: Historical Index of the Medieval Middle East (www.medievalmideast.org/), an online reference tool for Middle Eastern history across linguistic boundaries.
Annemarie Weyl Carr is Professor Emerita at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and has published on Byzantine and post-Byzantine painting; on art and issues of cultural interchange in the eastern Mediterranean Levant, above all on Cyprus; and on women artists in the Middle Ages.
Reinhart Ceulemans teaches Greek and Byzantine literature at KU Leuven and studies biblical exegesis in Byzantium. His next major publications are an edition of new Hexaplaric readings of Ecclesiastes and an edited volume on Receptions of the Bible in Byzantium (with Barbara Crostini, Uppsala, 2021).
Konstantinos Chryssogelos teaches early modern Greek literature (twelfth-eighteenth centuries) at the Hellenic Open University. He has published articles on Byzantine literature, the reception of Byzantium in modern Greece, and Greek cinema. His latest book is a critical edition of Constantine Manasses’ Hodoiporikon (Athens, 2017).
Eric Cullhed is Associate Professor of Greek at Uppsala University and Pro Futura Scientia XHI Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. His research focuses on the aesthetic values of Greek archaic culture, and on the Homeric epics and their reception. Together with S. Douglas Olson, he is editing Eustathios of Thessalonike’s Commentary on the Odyssey (Leiden 2020- ).
Kristoffel Demoen is Professor of Ancient and Medieval Greek Literature at Ghent University. His research interests are related to the transmission, transformation, and adaptation of the ancient literary and cultural tradition, especially in Late Antiquity and Byzantium. He is the director of the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams (www.dbbe.ugent.be).
Greti Dinkova-Bruun is a fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto. A noted manuscript scholar, she has published widely, but is best known for her numerous editions of medieval poetic texts. She is editor in chief of the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum and general editor of the Journal of Medieval Latin.
Ivan Drpic is Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in the art, architecture, and material culture of Byzantium and its Slavic neighbors in Southeastern Europe. His book Epigram, Art, and Devotion in Later Byzantium (Cambridge, 2016) was winner of the 2017 Runciman Prize and the 2019 Karen Gould Prize.
Mircea Dulus (PhD, Central European University) is a researcher at the Institute for South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy and a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest (ICUB). His scholarly interests include homiletics, scriptural exegesis, religious polemics, and the reception of classical heritage in Byzantium. He is currently preparing a monograph on the Homilies of Philagathos of Cerami.
Michael Featherstone (diplomas from Harvard and habilitation in Fribourg) is a researcher of the CNRS at the EHESS in Paris. His work includes editions of tractates by the patriarch Nikephoros I (ninth century) and historical texts produced in the circle of Constantine VII (tenth century), as well as studies on the Great Palace of Constantinople.
Ekaterine Gedevanishvili is a researcher at the George Chubinashvili National Research Centre for Georgian Art History and Heritage Preservation. Her interests are the cult of the holy warriors and text and image studies. Recent distinctions include a fellowship at the Max Planck Institute (Florence) and the award of a Caroline Adams essay prize.
Michael Griinbart (PhD, University of Vienna) is Professor of Byzantine Studies at Minster. His main areas of research are Byzantine cultural history, history, and epistolography. He conducts projects at the cluster of excellence (“Religion and politics”) and at the Collaborative Research Centre 1150 “Cultures of decision-making” (both at Minster). His main publications are Das byzantinische Reich (Darmstadt, 2014), Inszenierung und Reprdsentation der byzantinischen Aristokratie (Leiden, 2015), and Epistularum Graecarum Initia (Hildesheim, 2019).
Matthew W. Herrington (MA, Harvard University, 2008) is an independent scholar who pursued graduate studies in medieval and early modern Ukrainian and Russian literatures at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University from 2004 to 2009. A practicing attorney in Atlanta, Georgia, he maintains an active interest in early Slavic and Byzantine studies.
Martin Hinterberger teaches Byzantine Literature at the University
of Cyprus. His major research interests are emotions in Byzantine literature and society (particularly envy, jealousy, arrogance, and shame), metaphraseis, Byzantine hagiographical literature, autobiography, and the history of medieval Greek, especially as a literary language (ed., The Language of Byzantine Learned Literature, Turnhout, 2014).
Brad Hostetler is Assistant Professor of Art History at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. His research focuses on the relationship between texts and images in Byzantium. He has held fellowships at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Elizabeth Jeffreys is Emerita Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, and Fellow Emerita of Exeter College, Oxford. She has published widely on many aspects of Byzantine literature; her books include editions of the epic Digenis Akritis (Cambridge, 1998), the romance The War of Troy (Athens, 1998), and the letters of the monk Iakovos (Turnhout, 2009).
Michael Jeffreys was successively Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Sir Nicholas Laurantus Professor of Modern Greek in Sydney University from 1976 to 2000. His books include Popular Literature in Late Byzantium (London, 1983), Studies in John Malalas (Melbourne, 1990), Monachi Iacobi Epistulae (Turnhout, 2009), and The Letters of Psellos: Editorial Networks and Historical Realities (Oxford, 2017).
David Jenkins is Librarian for Classics, Hellenic Studies, and Linguistics at Princeton University. He maintains the databases of Modern Language Translations of Byzantine Sources and Digitized Greek Manuscripts and has published on Byzantine intellectual history with a particular interest in the life and work of Michael Psellos.
Jeremy Johns is the director of the Khalili Research Centre, Professor
of Art and Archaeology of the Islamic Mediterranean at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford, and Fellow of Wolfson College. He is an expert in the relations between Muslim and Christian societies in the medieval Mediterranean as manifested in material and visual culture.
Sophia Kalopissi-Verti is Professor Emerita of Byzantine Archaeology at the University of Athens. She has codirected excavations of early Christian sites on Kos island and in south Sinai. She has authored several publications on Byzantine monumental painting, patronage, painters, church inscriptions, and the interrelations between Byzantium and the Latin West.
John Lansdowne (PhD, Princeton University, 2019) is an art historian of the Middle Ages in Europe and the Mediterranean basin. His research has been supported by the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, the Bibliotheca Hertziana, the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome, and the Mellon Fellowship in Byzantine Studies at Bogazici University in Istanbul. He is currently a Berenson Fellow at Villa I Tatti (Florence).
Nathan Leidholm (PhD, University of Chicago, 2016) is Assistant Professor in the Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas Program at Bilkent University. His publications include the monograph Elite Byzantine Kinship, ca. 950-1204: Blood, Reputation, and the Genos (York, 2019).
Florin Leonte is Assistant Professor at Palacky University of Olomouc where he teaches Greek language and literature. His research interests focus on middle and late Byzantine rhetoric. His first monograph is titled Imperial Visions of Late Byzantium: Manuel II Palaiologos and Rhetoric in Purple (Edinburgh, 2020).
Paul Magdalino studied at Oxford, and has held teaching appointments at the University of St. Andrews (1977-2009) and Koc University, Istanbul (2006-2014). He has worked extensively on the urban history of Constantinople, and on Byzantine descriptions of buildings, both before and after 1081. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2002.
Lisa Mahoney is Associate Professor at DePaul University. She edited France and the Holy Land (with Daniel Weiss, Baltimore, 2004) and has published in journals such as Gesta and collections such as The Crusades and Visual Culture with support from the NEH and the Mellon and Kress Foundations.
} George P. Majeska taught Russian and Byzantine history at the University of Maryland. His published articles often focus on the Orthodox Church as a transmitter of culture. Most relevant to the current volume is his collection of late medieval pilgrim tales, Russian Travelers to Constantinople in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Washington, D.C., 1984).
Divna Manolova (PhD, Central European University, 2014, and Marie Sktodowska-Curie/POLONEZ 1 fellow, 2016-2018) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Medieval Literature (University of York and University of Southern Denmark). She is working on a monograph on spatiality, aesthetics, and wonder in Byzantine cosmologies.
Christina Maranci is Dadian Oztemel Chair of Armenian Art at Tufts University. She authored Vigilant Powers: Three Churches of Early Medieval Armenia (Turnhout, 2015), winner of the Sona Aronian Prize (National Association for Armenian Studies and Research) and the Karen Gould Prize, and The Art of Armenia (Oxford, 2018).
Przemystaw Marciniak is Research Professor in Byzantine Literature at
the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. His research interests include Byzantine performativity and the reception of Byzantine culture, humor, and animal studies. He has held fellowship and teaching positions in Berlin, Belfast, Paris, Princeton, and Uppsala, and has been awarded the Friedrich Willhelm Bessel-Forschungspreis (Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung). He is currently working on a book on animals in Byzantium.
Vasileios Marinis is Associate Professor of Christian Art and Architecture at Yale University. He has published on a variety of topics, including early Christian tunics, medieval tombs, the interaction of architecture and ritual in the churches of Constantinople, and visions of the Last Judgment. His latest book is Death and the Afterlife in Byzantium (Cambridge, 2017).
Maria Mavroudi is Professor of Byzantine History and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the reception of Islamic learning within Byzantine literary culture, and of Byzantine (as opposed to ancient Greek) learning in medieval Arabic literary culture. Her work was recognized with a MacArthur fellowship.
Renaat Meesters is a postdoctoral collaborator at Ghent University and the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium). His research focuses on Byzantine book epigrams on John Klimax. The core of his PhD thesis, the editio princeps of a twelfth-century cycle of epigrams on Klimax (481 vv.), is published in A. Rhoby and N. Zagklas, Middle and Late Byzantine Poetry (Turnhout, 2018).
Charis Messis teaches at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His research interests are Byzantine history and literature, especially the history of gender, along with other social and anthropological aspects of the Byzantine world. He is author and coeditor of several books and articles on these topics.
Lee Mordechai is a social and political historian, and a faculty member of the History Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His current project examines subaltern groups such as women, foreigners, eunuchs, and religious minorities in the Eastern Roman Empire over the long eleventh century.
M. Michele Mulchahey holds the Leonard E. Boyle Chair in Manuscript Studies at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, where she is also director of the institute’s diploma program in Manuscript Studies. Her research focuses on the medieval Dominican order and its schools; her book “First the bow is bent in study ...": Dominican Education Before 1350 (Toronto, 1998) has become a touchstone in the field.
Ingela Nilsson is Professor of Greek and Byzantine Studies at Uppsala University. She is coeditor of Reading the Late Byzantine Romance: A Handbook (Cambridge, 2019) and author of the monograph Writer and Patron in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: The Authorial Voice of Constantine Manasses (Cambridge, 2021).
Alex J. Novikoff is the author of The Medieval Culture of Disputation: Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance (Philadelphia, 2013) and The TwelfthCentury Renaissance: A Reader (Toronto, 2017). He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a recipient of the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, and a concert violinist. Cecilia Palombo (PhD in Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University) is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University. She studies the political and social history of the pre-Ottoman Middle East and its documentary cultures.
Maria Parani (DPhil., 2000) teaches Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art and Archaeology at the University of Cyprus. Her research interests comprise daily life in Byzantium and the exploration of alternative sources for the study of Byzantine material culture to supplement archaeological data, especially written texts and artistic representations.
Daphne Penna (PhD, 2012) is Assistant Professor in Legal History at the University of Groningen. She has published a comparative legal study
on Byzantium and the Italians (Groningen, 2012). Her writings focus on Byzantine law and especially on its influence on the European legal tradition.
Ioannis Polemis is a Full Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Athens. An Oxford graduate, he previously taught at the University of Thrace. He has published numerous monographs, among which are a study on the works of Theophanes of Nicaea and critical editions of works by Michael Psellos, Theodore Metochites, and Theodore Dexios.
Andreas Rhoby is a researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Deputy Head of the Division of Byzantine Research, and Privatdozent at the Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, University of Vienna. He works at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Medieval Research, where he is deputy head of the Division of Byzantine Research. In addition, he is Privatdozent at Vienna University. He has published extensively
on Byzantine poetry and epigraphy (such as four volumes of Byzantine inscriptional epigrams, 2009-2018).
Rachele Ricceri (PhD, Rome and Ghent, on Gregory of Nazianzos’ poetry) has been working at Ghent University, where she is currently the content manager of the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams as well as
a postdoctoral researcher on a project concerned with the reception of the Psalms in Byzantine poetry.
Alexander Riehle is Assistant Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. His research focuses on late Byzantine rhetoric and letterwriting. He is the editor of A Companion to Byzantine Epistolography (Leiden, 2020) and is currently preparing an edition and translation of the letter-collections of Nikephoros Choumnos.
Efthymios Rizos (DPhil., University of Istanbul and Oxford University)
is an archaeologist and historian interested in Late Antique urbanism, art, and hagiography. He is the editor of New Cities in Late Antiquity (Turnhout, 2017) and coauthor of the Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database (http:// csla.history.ox.ac.uk/). He teaches Byzantine History at the Open University of Cyprus and serves as an archaeologist for the Archaeological Service of Greece.
Robert Romanchuk is Pribic Family Associate Professor of Slavic at Florida State University. He is the author of the monograph Byzantine Hermeneutics and Pedagogy in the Russian North (Toronto, 2007) and of numerous shorter studies. He is preparing a critical edition of Digenis Akritis in its Old Slavonic translation (Cambridge, forthcoming).
Linda Safran is an associate fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, and author of The Medieval Salento: Art and Identity in Southern Italy (Philadelphia, 2014); she has edited or coedited books on early Christian, Byzantine, medieval, and Islamic art. With two coauthors, she has recently completed a textbook on medieval art and architecture.
Sarah Simmons completed her masters and doctoral exams in Medieval Art History at Florida State University. Her research interests include the interplay between liturgy and church decorative schemes in the Byzantine Empire and its surrounding neighbors. Her doctoral work focused on the princely representation of power in Kyivan Rus’, specifically in the fresco program of Saint Sophia in Kyiv.
Irena Spadijer is Full Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Belgrade. As author and coauthor she has published Radoslav’ Gospel (Belgrade, 2001), St. Peter of Korisha in Old Serbian Literature (Belgrade, 2014), and Inscriptiones historicae in picturis muralibus: Saeculorum XIIXII; Serbian Manuscripts in the Czech Republic (Belgrade, 2015). She is an elected member of the Accademia Ambrosiana (Milan) and a member of the Serbian Committee for Byzantine Studies.
Foteini Spingou (DPhil., Oxford, 2013) is a research fellow in Byzantine Intellectual/Cultural History at the University of Edinburgh.
Shannon Steiner is Visiting Assistant Professor of Global Medieval Art
at Binghamton University and is a practicing goldsmith. Her research focuses on Byzantine cloisonné enamel and histories of artistic practice. She has held fellowships from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Dumbarton Oak, and the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture.
Kirsty Stewart (DPhil., Oxford, 2017, a thesis entitled “Nature and Narratives: Landscapes, Plants and Animals in Palaiologan Vernacular Literature”) is interested in medieval understandings of the natural environment. She has published extensively on the connections between nature, gender, and religion in Byzantium.
Alice-Mary Talbot is Director Emerita of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks and former editor of the Byzantine Greek series of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. Her scholarly interests include hagiography, monasticism, women’s studies, and the patronage of art and architecture. Her most recent book is Varieties of Monastic Experience in Byzantium, 800-1453 (Notre Dame, Ind., 2019).
Ilias Taxidis is Associate Professor of Medieval Greek Philology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He specializes in Byzantine historiography, rhetoric, epistolography, and epigrammatic poetry. His monograph Les épigrammes de Maxime Planude (Berlin, 2017) was recognized by the Academy of Athens as the best study in the history of Greek Literature for 2017.
Christopher Timm is the Chief Curator at Maine Maritime Museum.
Maria Tomadaki (PhD, Thessaloniki, 2014) is a postdoctoral researcher in Byzantine studies at Ghent University. She specializes in Byzantine poetry and textual criticism. Her edition of John Geometres’ iambic poems is to be published by CCSG. She is currently collaborating with the DBBE and is preparing the editio princeps of John Geometres’ encomium to Gregory of Nazianzos.
Ida Toth is University Research Lecturer and Fellow at Oxford University. She convenes graduate courses in Medieval Latin, Byzantine Greek, and Byzantine Epigraphy. She has published on medieval reading practices, imaginative literature, and epigraphic culture. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies (SPBS) and a coordinator of the International Commission for Byzantine Epigraphy (AIEB).
Theocharis Tsampouras (PhD in Byzantine archaeology, Thessaloniki, 2013) studied Archaeology (2002) and History (2004) at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He was appointed Research Fellow at Princeton University in 2014-2015 and has since worked as an adjunct lecturer at Greek universities. He is currently employed as an archaeologist for the Greek Ministry of Culture.
Baukje van den Berg is Assistant Professor of Byzantine Studies at the Central European University (Vienna). Her main research interests are Byzantine scholarship, Byzantine education, and the reception of ancient literature in Byzantium. She is currently preparing a monograph on the Commentary on the Iliad by Eustathios of Thessalonike.
Peter Van Deun is Full Professor of Byzantine Studies, Leuven University, president of the Belgian Association of Byzantine Studies, and editor in chief of the Series Graeca of the Corpus Christianorum and of Byzantion. His research is on Byzantine anthological literature, critical text editions of Greek Patristic and Byzantine authors, Maximus Confessor, Metrophanes Smyrnaeus, Nilus Doxapatrés, and Marcus Monachus.
Alicia Walker is Full Professor of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College. Her primary fields of research include cross-cultural artistic interaction
in the medieval world and gender issues in the art and material culture
of Byzantium. Her first monograph, The Emperor and the World: Exotic Elements and the Imaging of Byzantine Imperial Power, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012. She is a member of the editorial board of The Medieval Globe and has served as an officer of the United States National Committee of Byzantine Studies.
Katarzyna Warcaba is Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. Her research interests focus on the reception of Antiquity in Byzantine literature; she has published a book on Theodore Prodromos’ Katomyomachia (Katowice, 2018) and a translation (together with Przemyslaw Marciniak and Janek Kucharski) of all Theodore Prodromos satirical writings. She has held fellowships in Dumbarton Oaks, Berlin, and Rome.
Nikos Zagklas is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Vienna University. He has published on Theodore Prodromos and Byzantine poetry (especially of the twelfth century).
His recent publications include Middle and Late Byzantine Poetry: Texts and Contexts (ed. with A. Rhoby, Turnhout, 2018) and A Companion to Byzantine Poetry (ed. with W. Hérandner and A. Rhoby, Leiden, 2019).
Series Editor’s Note
CHARLES BARBER
This volume of translations of texts pertinent to an understanding of art and aesthetics in Later Byzantium is the first in a planned series of four volumes. These will provide readers with an introduction to the variety and wealth of Medieval Byzantine and Early Modern Orthodox perceptions of both art and natural beauty. The first of these volumes will include materials from the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, and will encompass and reach beyond the debates on the validity of the Christian images that dominated that period. The second volume will address writings from the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, arguably the apogee of Medieval Byzantium. The third volume is this one, which focuses upon works from the later eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and early fourteenth centuries. The fourth volume considers the legacy of Byzantium that survived the political demise of that Empire and so gathers together texts from the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. This corpus will introduce its readers to the Byzantium that both continues and differs from Antiquity, showing how the classical tradition continues to develop in a self-conscious and complex manner throughout this era.
This volume is an exemplar of the goals set out for this series: the presentation of documents in original languages alongside their translations; the gathering together of a wide range of textual genres; discussion of these texts as literature, as well as resources for recovering perceptions of works of art; an expansion of the materials readily available for both scholars and students. All of the credit for achieving these goals must go to the editor, Foteini Spingou, who has brought together the translations that can give us a new understanding of both the art and aesthetics of Later Byzantium. The international network of scholars she has developed embodies the generosity and collaboration that can encourage the field of Byzantine Studies to continue to thrive in the future. Further volumes in this series will build upon both this spirit and this model.
Acknowledgments
This volume would have never been completed without the hard work and generosity of both colleagues and institutions. The book represents the extremely dynamic field of Byzantine Studies, and the work was shaped and re-shaped according to the feedback of contributors, content reviewers, and contribution reviewers. This volume could not have been completed without the arduous support of all the contributors who worked with remarkable enthusiasm and diligence. The editor of the volume and all the contributors are deeply grateful to the anonymous reviewers for carefully reading the chapters and offering their generous comments. A very big thanks is owed to Floris Bernard, Efthymia Braounou-Pietsch, Averil Cameron, Andrea Capra, J. H. Chayes, Edward Coghill, Niels Gaul, Cecily Hilsdale, Vicky Hioureas, Jas Elsner, Peter Frankopan, Ine Jacobs, Liz James, Elizabeth and Michael Jeffreys, David Jenkins, Joel Kalvesmaki, Dimitris Kralis, Nicholas de Lange, Sean Leatherbury, Marina Loukaki, Henry Maguire, Athanasios Markopoulos, Michael Maas, the late Judith McKenzie, Lars Boje Mortensen, Margaret Mullett, Ekaterina Nechaeva, Andras Némmeth, Robert Nelson, Robert Ousterhout, Maria Pantalia, Stratis Papaioannou, Aglae Pizzone, Vivien Prigent, Alberto Rigolio, Daria Roesch, Ortal-Paz Saar, Nancy P. Sevéenko, Jack Tannous, Joanna Wienberg, and Miranda Williams, whose help, comments, and support allowed the volume to constantly move forward and come to completion. The initial project was made possible through a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Art and Archaeology of Princeton University (2014/15). My research was also supported by a Mellon foundation fellowship at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto (2015/16), and a one-month research award at the Dumbarton Oaks Library and Collection (June 2016). I am also grateful to all the support of the Ecole Francaise d’Athénes (Athens) and the Bodleian Library (Oxford) provided to me. Also, I owe a big thanks to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Florence), the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the National Library of Greece (Athens), the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg, the Real Biblioteca in the Escorial, and the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek (Vienna), who made available to the contributors and myself reproductions from manuscripts. I am also grateful to the Ephorate of Antiquities of Imathia (Greece), the monastery of Vatopedi in Mount Athos, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, the Dum-barton Oaks Museum and Collection in Washington D.C., the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, and the Museum Correr in Venice, which gave permission for the reproduction of images in their collections. I should also like to acknowledge my gratitude to Dumbarton Oaks for the help offered in the reproduction of original texts and translations. I am also grateful to Liverpool University Press for granting permission to reproduce excerpts from the translations by Elizabeth Jeffreys of Komnenian Romances.
Finally, my special thanks should go to my dearest friend Ivan Drpi¢ and my didaskaloi Marc Lauxtermann and Charles Barber for all their support at a personal and scholarly level while editing this volume. The publication of the volume would never have been possible without the meticulous, laborious, and patient help and guidance of the Cambridge University Press team, and in particular that of Hal Churchman, Barbara Docherty, Michael Sharp, and Sarah Starkey.
Introduction
FOTEINI SPINGOU
This volume presents 182 written testimonies attesting to an aesthetic culture that can only be partially reconstructed. They demonstrate how word and image could be yoked together to overcome their inherited limitations as communication media, evoking the one through the other, without attempting to represent or replace one another. Both participate in an oral culture framed by rhetorical tropes that permits each medium, at times, to become saturated by the other. In particular, it is the texts that evoke works of art that reveal perceptions and responses to these paintings, buildings, and so on, that can lead us to begin to understand the art of this period better and in more appropriate terms. Yet, texts have now also become “monuments” in their own right, aesthetic objects that reveal glimpses of a pre-modern past.
The reader of this volume will not find texts that offer the often illusory promise that they will allow us to recover the “reality” of Byzantine material culture. Rather, the focus is upon texts that elaborate contemplations of the appearances of objects, bodies, and scenes and that offer far more than a narrow description of these things. The reader is invited to explore the intersections between two artistic languages (the visual and the textual) that raise a common set of questions concerning the relation between creator and audience, aesthetics and materials, emotional impact and rational symbolism, influence and mimesis, as well as the nature of the medium, of emulation, of interpretation, of originality, and of narrative.
The chronological span covered by this volume may strike as being unusual, as the limits suggested (c.1081-c.1350) do not correspond to most modern narratives of Byzantine history. Usually the events of 1204 (the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders) and/ or 1261 (the return of the Byzantines to the city) are chosen to mark the end of “Middle” Byzantium, and the year 1453 (the sack of Constantinople by the Ottomans) that of “late” Byzantium. This is a chronology drawn from a narrative based in political history. Given that this volume is focused upon aspects of cultural and intellectual history, an area that is not necessarily strongly affected by political events, we have decided to work with a different and, we hope, more apt chronological framework. In what follows, it is suggested that textual and visual cultures between c.1081 and c.1350 present a common set of cultural characteristics that reflects the tastes of a living community of intellectuals that continued to steer the dominant culture of this era. It is argued that the arrival of the Komnenian family into power in 1081 shaped the conditions for intellectual life in the centuries to come, lasting until these conditions were dismantled following the ascension of Andronikos III to the imperial throne in 1328. While the dates used here to mark “later Byzantium” have inevitably been borrowed from the political history of Byzantium, they should be considered an approximate boundary for the cultural and intellectual interests of this volume. Cultural changes do not happen overnight. As will be discussed below, the second half of the reign of Alexios I is perhaps most relevant to the cultural phenomena described in the volume, while the group of intellectuals surrounding Andronikos III was only truly affected by political events some years after his coming to power, that is in the 1350s. Hence, the dates that mark the chronological boundaries of this volume should not be read as rigid demarcations, but rather as porous indicators of the boundaries of a period defined by a common and consistent intellectual horizon.
Cultural Trends in Later Byzantium
Any periodization, while necessary to grasp the shape of the human past, is inevitably accidental, haphazard, circumstantial, and arbitrary. It is argued here that the literary and visual culture of “Later Byzantium” bears a certain consistency. This consistency leads to a periodization supported by the material itself, as there are a number of “signature” literary modes that become most prominent between 1081 and 1350. “Signature” does not presuppose originality or period particularity. Some of these modes existed before 1081, and others remained current after 1350. Nonetheless, these signatures appear to operate simultaneously and to develop in parallel throughout the era covered by this volume. In what follows, we will try to describe this culture and in so doing provide a context to assist the reader’s understanding of the perceptions set out in the texts translated in this volume. As such we will focus upon the textuality of the writings that define their world for us.
In the domain of sophisticated written production, identified as logoi by the Byzantines, the epigram was the most distinguished genre of this period. The epigrammatic mode had been rediscovered and redefined, first in Palestine and then in Constantinople, at the beginning of the ninth century after a hiatus of two centuries.’ In later Byzantium, there was an epigram for every occasion and new opportunities for using epigrams were explored: dedicatory epigrams celebrate a donation; the amplification of epigrams on works of art indicate a reading of the object for the viewer;” book epigrams adorn and reveal the secrets of books;? in the first half of the period in question, metrical inscriptions indicate the owners of seals and metrical prefaces (introductions) were performed before the reading of a homily or an hagiographical text in a church.‘ The prevalence of epigrams in this period has been aptly branded as an “epigrammatic trend.”
The sizeable production of epigrams also reveals a preference for “lettered” and “private” devotion at this period. Verse dedications were meant to work concomitantly with the materiality of an artwork, expressing their donors’ wishes in the form of a text in verse attached to a material gift.© Metaphors and parallels drawn from the Scriptures, references to patristic literature (and more rarely to Hellenic paideia), the use of unique words and stock images display the education of the donor and his/her familiarity with the literary trends of the period. At the same time, vocabulary drawn from public and easily recognizable forms of texts, such as liturgical hymns, could be mixed with personal and highly emotional prayers to create a private experience for the donor, the owner, and the viewer of an object.
In fact, poetry is the form of expression that bloomed the most in later Byzantium. An eloquent example of this vigorous poetic production is the invention of a totally new form of ceremonial poetry under the Komnenians, that of deme-hymns.” Wolfram Hérandner defines the formal characteristics of the genre as the decapentasyllable verse,* with a division into strophes and the partial use of an alphabetical acrostich.? Michael Jeffreys associated this poetic form with the invention of a new type of ceremony under the Komnenoi, that of the prokypsis,'’° thanks to a close examination of repetitive vocabulary and mottos in these hymns.” The trends that facilitated the invention of the deme-hymns are also apparent in the numerous examples of public poetry written to celebrate events related to transitional moments in the course of a human life (wedding, birth, and death).”
A strong preference for highly rhetorical forms of texts, such as ekphraseis and ethopoiiai is also apparent in this period. The production of such texts develops from a robust theoretical tradition from the time of the Second Sophistic and Late Antiquity. Ekphraseis are not “descriptions” of works of art, intended to render the physical characteristics of things, persons and landscapes in words; instead, they reveal rhetorical responses to an appearance or a mental image.” Ethopoiiai also come from a highly theorized tradition, that flourished at the same time as that related to the rhetorical form of ekphrasis. In contrast to ekphrasis, which has some relation to reality, by definition, ethopoiiai are bound to a fictive episode and they seek to express what a certain person would have said on a particular occasion.“ Given these distinctions, both ekphraseis and ethopoiiai are highly expressive literary texts purporting to put in words the emotional response of the narrator to a particular situation.
From the beginning of this era (and slightly earlier), there is a demonstrable and creative relation with what can be called “the classics.” Ancient genres such as novels/romances and dialogues re-emerge as autonomous entities. Both exemplify a preference for highly rhetorical texts with a long tradition, features of which existed in previous eras in different textual forms, such as hagiographical tales or homilies, but in later Byzantium they stand alone and become highly reminiscent of texts dating to the Second Sophistic.*
The terms “novel” and “romance” are nearly synonymous; modern scholarship, however, has established that the term “novel” refers to fictional narratives of essentially love stories from the twelfth century, while the term “romance” refers to similar ones from the fourteenth century. The former drew from ancient examples, such as Achilles Tatius, Heliodorus, Longus, and Chariton; while the latter demonstrated an additional influence from Western and Eastern sources."
The revival of dialogue in this period has only recently begun to be explored.” The dialogic form in later Byzantium mainly echoes the playfulness of Lucian and, less often, the robust argumentation of the Platonic dialogues." The form was in wide use in Late Antiquity,” but disappeared after the seventh century, only to return after the mid eleventh century (although the accurate dating of such texts is particularly precarious, with a number of pseudepigraphs having infiltrated the corpus). Dialogues, which present themselves as re-enactments, share the highly emotive tone of ekphraseis and ethopoiiai and also the complex narrative form of the romances and novels.
Changes in monastic patronage also gave rise to certain types of text. The late tenth-century institution of charistike was deemed problematic under the Komnenoi and fell out of fashion (but not entirely out of use).”? Indeed, a wave of lay patronage for monasteries led to the foundation and re-foundation of monasteries by prominent members of society.” Such monasteries were independent (autodespota) and were regulated by a typikon, their foundation document. A typikon offers rules regarding worship and the structure of the monastic community in general, and, often, detailed inventory lists that describe the movable and immovable property of the monastery.” In later Byzantium, typika were often combined with founder's testaments, which tend to contain a certain amount of autobiographical components.
The Jogoi - the Byzantine term for what we currently roughly call literature - introduced above are marked by modes of creative communication (not just systems of communication), and as such their expressions contain distinctive aesthetic features. Among the most relevant for understanding the development of “later Byzantine culture,” we can single out the following:
(a) There is a preference for the appreciation of physicality and of earthly beauty. In texts, this preference finds expression in the flourishing role played by ekphraseis and in the direct references to material and visual aspects of objects in epigrams. None of the above textual forms attempts to describe an object in full detail, but rather aims to give an account of its effect upon the viewer. Admiration for bodily beauty was also incorporated in different kinds of writing, especially novels and romances.”
(b) The vivid expression of intense emotions can be identified. In logoi, one observes the prominence in the production of self-standing ethopoiiai and the ethopoietic elements often embedded in narratives. Texts in this form aimed to highlight the character and ethos of a figure.
(c) A taste for fictional and vivid, nearly theatrical, narratives is also evident. A number of modes of literary expression re-emerged in this period after a silence of more than six centuries. The primary characteristic of these rejuvenated modes is narrative complexity, which is evident in novels, romances, and dialogues.
(d) Great attention is also paid to the patron's self. Dedicatory epigrams mention the one responsible for the creation of an object. That “maker” is usually to be identified with the one who has paid for the object, rather the actual artist or craftsman. Also, patrons’ portraits remain particularly prominent in this period.** As discussed above, the appearance of monastic typika combined with the founder's testament and the creation of impressive funerary monuments are related to the emphasis on the role of the monastic patron in Later Byzantium.
(e) A willingness to experiment can also be noted. The appearance of a number of novel textual modes that have been highlighted above is telling of this trend, which is particularly prominent in the twelfth century,” and it remains current in the late thirteenth century when we find a number of texts that are difficult to place in a category that matches traditional literary modes.” A further aspect of experimentation is the introduction of vernacular language in the writing of literary texts. As recent studies have highlighted, “vernacular” in Byzantine Greek does not necessarily mean popular and has only a vague correspondence to the concurrent appearance of romance languages in medieval Western Europe. Instead, the term indicates a number of novel linguistic features that enter the language of educated officials and the literati, creating a mixed literary language that includes forms and vocabulary from the spoken language and the koine.” This “vernacular” literary language appeared under the Komnenoi, but flourished in the fourteenth century.
(f) There is also a loyalty to a playful expression of an aesthetic Hellenism. Stratis Papaioannou has noted that “the association of ‘Hellenism’ with paganism had lost [its] urgency [in Early Medieval Byzantium],” resulting in “sustained interest in classical and classicizing texts after the eighth century.’ Furthermore, as Averil Cameron suggests, references to Hellenic culture in the eleventh century (and remaining relevant for the entire period in question) became the “sociolect for the educated elite?” Textual sources, such as epigrams on works of art, suggest that there was no lack of objects in the later period with a subject matter inspired from beyond Christianity.*°
While many of these aesthetic qualities can be found to a lesser or greater degree in earlier and later eras, it is their combination and prominence that characterizes “later Byzantium.” Furthermore, the manifestations of these aesthetic features are not static throughout the period defined by this volume. Cultural change at this time is neither transcendental nor a product of sudden violent shifts in a culture. Rather, it is built upon the selection of a different path or a different trait from within the framework of this cultural horizon.” This selection is manifested in a variety of cultural products that rose to prominence or were newly developed in these years.
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