Download PDF | The Dragon in Medieval East Christian and Islamic Art (Islamic History and Civilization) -BRILL (2011).
405 Pages
FOREWORD
This book is part of a much longer and comprehensive study on which Dr Kuehn has been labouring for over a decade and whose aim is to trace the iconography of the composite mythical creature known as the serpent-dragon from the mists of antiquity to the later middle ages. Her geographical focus in the study as a whole is principally Western and Central Asia but she remains continually alert to the manifestations of her theme in neighbouring cultures to the east (including India and China) and the west.
The continuity of this arresting image across vast gulfs of space and time in the most diverse cultures of the Old World from the Atlantic to the Pacific is quite startling. That continuity in itself constitutes a major challenge to anyone seeking to tell a connected story that extends across continents, cultures and millennia.The volume of scholarship on the art of Western and Central Asia has grown exponentially in the last couple of generations.In the field of Islamic art alone, it is clearly no longer a reasonable ambition to produce a companion volume to Creswell’s magisterial Bibliography of the Architecture, Arts and Crafts of Islam to 1st Jan. 1960; such a work would need to be several times the size and weight of that huge tome in order to cover what has been produced in the last fifty years. But as the volume of scholarship expands, so, by a seemingly ineluctable law, does its scope contract.
More and more people write about less and less.The dangers of over-specialisation and tunnel vision loom large.Artificial boundaries, whether chronological, geographical, cultural or confessional, are set and then ferociously policed.Scholarship operates in watertight compartments, to the detriment of that open-mindedness, that cross-fertilisation of disciplines and, more generally, the linking of disparate bodies of information that have traditionally been regarded as the litmus text of creative thinking in academe. Iconographical studies are especially vulnerable to this shift from the macroscopic to the microscopic mode. Images readily adapt to changes in use, in faith and context, not to mention changes in location or scale, but they do tend to guard their core meanings most tenaciously.Nevertheless, an altered context, especially if it involves a transfer from one faith to another – such as Isis suckling Harpocrates, often regarded as an immediate model for the Christian image of the Virgin and Child – can trigger unexpected accretions and adaptations of meaning.Thus there can develop over the centuries a pool of ideas associated with a given image, and it requires expert judgment and erudition to make the right choices from that pool in any particular case.
The body of evidence and allusion that accumulates in this way becomes increasingly difficult to control and to understand. Such, then, are some of the difficulties confronting an extensive iconographical study of the kind that Dr Kuehn has produced.To overcome those difficulties calls for a special kind of scholar, one that was much more commonly encountered several generations ago. Happily Dr Kuehn fits that bill, and has the sheer erudition, the wideranging sympathies, the creative imagination and the indefatigable intellectual curiosity to match. Methodically and passionately she follows the leads of her research wherever they take her, crossing numerous disciplinary boundaries en route. The result is a many-textured study of remarkable boldness and finesse that, firmly grounded in the thought-worlds of Bronze Age Central Asia and the Hellenistic empire, explores the full flowering of the serpent-dragon motif in medieval East Christian and Islamic art, most especially in Anatolia.The range of reference is extensive – from the mythic origins of the theme to such detailed aspects as the dragon tamer, combat scenes, the significance of knotting, and the serpent-dragon as an element of personal adornment.
We learn of its interaction with other animals and how it functioned as an emblem of war and of the hunt, as a guardian of treasure and as an avatar of chthonic powers; and its sinister side helps to explain its appearance in Christian contexts in association with such saints as George and Theodore.Yet it also had multiple royal and heroic associations, as shown for example by the dracontine throne with its apotropaic role.Small wonder that this fabulous creature developed an apocalyptic significance and figured largely in the Islamic sciences – whether in star lore or toxicology, magic or cosmology. These various excurses reveal a manylayered thought world shared by Arabs, Persians and Turks as by Byzantine, Armenian, Syriac and Georgian Christians.
The serpent-dragon appears on mausolea and gravestones, on mosques and madrasas, on monasteries and churches, on bastions and caravansarais, on city gates and palace frescoes, on pottery galore, on coins and figured silks, on mirrors and belt buckles.Usually it carries a symbolic charge, for example as an amulet or talisman, but it is also at home in narrative contexts. Altogether this is pioneering original work, and it demonstrates an enviable capacity to move from one culture to another – classical, Christian, Zoroastrian, Islamic – in a remarkably sure-footed way. It is packed with cogent arguments and unexpected insights.Dr Kuehn is a born explorer and has a natural affinity for cross-cultural work.She disdains the quick fix and is ready to do whatever is required to prove her point.Her list of authorities is startling in its length and completeness. But those authorities are merely a means to an end – the tale’s the thing, and it casts a potent spell. Robert Hillenbrand University of Edinburgh
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق