Download PDF | Myrto Hatzaki - Beauty and the Male Body in Byzantium_ Perceptions and Representations in Art and Text-Palgrave Macmillan (2009).pdf
263 Pages
Acknowledgements
No book is an island, and in the writing of the present I am indebted, both directly and indirectly, to a number of people. First and foremost, to Robin Cormack under whose expert guidance and benevolent supervision I undertook the study of beautiful male bodies in Byzantium as a PhD thesis at the Courtauld Institute of Art. This project would have never come this far without his direction, support, encouragement, vast knowledge and unique ability to offer criticism without ever sounding dismissive; I will be grateful to him for ever. I owe a great deal to Liz James for reading, commenting and offering invaluable suggestions at key stages of the book’s development. I cannot thank her enough for all her help without which this book would not have been the same. Sincere thanks also to Margaret Mullett for her insightful suggestions and comments – and for introducing me to Bohemond, though the eyes of Anna Komnene, in a lecture at the Courtauld, in my MA year. The financial support of the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) through a three-year studentship was instrumental in allowing me to complete my PhD at the Courtauld. With regard to the present publication, my wholehearted thanks go particularly to the A.G. Leventis Foundation and the National Bank of Greece who kindly contributed towards the cost of the colour illustrations.
Their generosity has allowed for the beautiful Byzantine bodies presented here to appear in all their colourful splendour and I know that these painted figures, and the artists who produced them, would have been eternally grateful; as indeed am I. A number of Ephorates of Byzantine Antiquities in Greece very kindly granted me photographic permissions and reproduction rights: I am genuinely thankful to the 1st EBA Athens, 5th EBA Sparta, 7th EBA Larissa, 9th EBA Thessaloniki, 16th EBA Kastoria, 19th EBA Trikala, 24th EBA Lamia, 28th EBA Rethymnon, as well as to the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens and the Photographic Archive of the Benaki Museum. I am profoundly grateful to His Eminence Archbishop Damianos of St Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, for kindly granting me the rights of reproduction for a number of Sinai icons and deeply indebted to the managing director of the Holy Monastery Mr. Nikolaos Vadis for all his help. A warm word of thanks also goes to the Monastery of the Transfiguration at Meteora, the Monastery of St Neophytos in Paphos, Cyprus, and the Monastery of St Ierotheos in Megara.
I am also grateful to the staff of the Warburg Library, the Gennadius Library and the Library of the British School in Athens for all their kind assistance. Moreover, I am indebted to my editor, Michael Strang, who believed in this project from the start; to Tony Eastmond, who unveiled exciting aspects of Byzantium even at the Warwick days in Ravenna, Charles Barber, Dion Smythe, Elizabeth Jeffreys, Maria Vassilaki as well as Julian Gardner, Richard Morris and Evita Arapoglou. A special thank you goes to George Kakavas for all his help and support. I would also like to thank friends from the Courtauld for the endless deliberations on things Byzantine and Diana Newall, Brad Letwin and Vassiliki Dimitropoulou for friendly comments and discussions. A final word of thanks to the nameless nuns in monasteries around Greece, who, in the spirit of tradition, welcomed an exhausted art historian in from the scorching Greek sun, and offered her their kindness and hospitality.
Introduction
To be really mediaeval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes. Oscar Wilde, ‘A few maxims for the instruction of the over educated’, Saturday Review, November 1894.1 In recent years, scholarship has looked into the notion of Byzantine bodies enough to unquestionably challenge Wilde’s humorous maxim; whether, male, female or ‘other’, the body in Byzantium is increasingly finding its voice in Byzantine studies. Questions of ‘desire and denial’ have opened the field for investigations into sensuality and the senses in Byzantium, addressing the body’s responses to the sensual world.2 Notions of sexual difference, insights, for instance, into gender constructions or the different types of masculinity existent in the Byzantine world have illustrated complexities in the Byzantine perception of gendered bodies.3 Where Gombrich once saw only the ‘solemn mosaics of Ravenna’, scholarship today perceives not only noisy children, but also eroticism and display.4 As Byzantine bodies take centre stage, a (hitherto unspoken) question is begging to be asked: what about physical beauty in Byzantium? As we redress the imbalance between the ascetic body and the sensual body in the Byzantine world, the image of physical beauty and the Byzantine views, stereotypes, beliefs and attitudes surrounding the beautiful body emerge as grounds for discussion.
That art historical thinking since the 1990s, in what has been termed ‘a turn against the anti-aestheticism of modernism’, has striven to allow beauty back into deliberations on art and theory, suggests perhaps that beauty is increasingly appearing as a question in the general debate, re-entering the discourse on the visual arts.5 To the question ‘how relevant is beauty to the study of Byzantium’, the answer is multifold. That concern over beauty in general was a crucial part of Byzantine responses to their world has been noted, for instance, in the case of the complex, highly charged cult objects that are the Byzantine icons, acknowledged by scholarship to have functioned not only as religious artefacts but also as ‘objects of beauty’.6 Recent research has noted that even Byzantine inscriptions, masterfully executed in relief upon church walls, may have been conceived to serve as much an ornamental as a didactic role.7 In this book, the discussion looks not to the abstract notion of ‘Byzantine aesthetics’, but to beauty as an attribute of the physical body. What can we know about physical beauty as experienced in real life by the proverbial man (or woman) in the street, as depicted in imagery or as described in Byzantine writing? A glance at Byzantine imagery from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries reveals a world in which the emaciated asceticism of Byzantine holy monks is only one part of the story; beautifully painted figures of saints such as St Victor from the church Panagia Olymbiotissa, in Elasson, or St Nestor from the church of St Nicholas Orphanos in Thessaloniki are an equally potent presence (Figures 1 and 2). Byzantine churches are populated by angels painted as comely youths, with their chiselled features, large, almond-shaped eyes and curly locks, like the angels from the churches of St Vlassios in Veroia, or St Nicholas of Kasnitzi in Kastoria ( Figures 3 and 4). Byzantine icons equally depict figures like the breathtaking St George from the monastery of St Catherine’s, Sinai (Figure 5).
Imagery, in visual media from wall paintings and mosaics to manuscript illustrations and enamels, and writing, in literary genres from historiography and poetry to saint’s Lives or the Byzantine romances, in fact, paint an image of Byzantium as a world in which physical beauty was of prime importance. Its significance for the Byzantines, it seems, was matched only by its perceived complexity, which reveals physical beauty as a curious and ambiguous notion; to be seen as beautiful in Byzantium was to be in possession of a quality with complex social repercussions hovering between notions of goodness and evil, masculinity and effeminacy, life and death. A less than straightforward quality with an undeniable dark side, physical beauty in Byzantium reveals itself to have only constant: the (surprising) reverence in which it was held by Byzantine men and women in all strands of life. Contrary to the worlds of Wilde, in fact, it seems that the Byzantines not only had bodies, but that they were obsessed by the beauty of those bodies in ways that we, from our twenty-first century standpoint, may only begin to imagine, despite our own culture’s fascination with ‘beautiful bodies’. This book is about how the Byzantines saw beauty as a quality of the human body. It attempts to explore how they defined, perceived and addressed physical beauty within the context of their own world. It aims to investigate what physical beauty was and what it was perceived to do; as well as to decipher the curious dynamics of beauty in general and of male beauty in particular. A hitherto unexplored aspect of Byzantium, physical beauty is first discussed in terms of its ‘definitions’ and perceptions, then examined thematically to allow insights into the different facets of this broad subject: notions of beauty and ugliness as visual manifestations of good and evil, notions of beauty and power, the play between beauty and emotion in the discourse not only of the living but also of the tormented and dying body.
At parts, the discussion necessitates treating male and female beauty in juxtaposition, both in order to explore the fundamental attitudes about the beautiful body that lie beyond gender distinctions, and in order to investigate whether and how gender distinctions affected attitudes towards physical beauty, towards what constituted comeliness or how it affected both the bearers and world around them. The greater emphasis on male beauty in this discussion reflects the considerable attention devoted to it as a prized attribute in diverse genres of Byzantine writing, which overall betray a Byzantine concern with the beauty of men: with its allure, significance and perils. The focus on male beauty thus addresses the tensions inherent in the Byzantine perception of the beautiful male body and the ways in which physical beauty was both seen as a valued attribute of manly bodies and simultaneously believed to relate ambiguously to the notion of masculinity, of what it meant to be male in Byzantium. In the context of the male-dominated Byzantine world, it aims to unravel how beauty related to the perception of male gender, to its attributes and expressions. Addressing the beautiful body in Byzantium, whether described in a text or painted in an image, inevitably involves addressing the extent to which we can hope to see ‘through the eyes of others’.8 Can we know what the Byzantines meant or thought of when they described the beautiful hero of a romance? In looking at Byzantine imagery, can we prevent ourselves from imprinting our own tastes, views and quality judgements on what we see?
Can we distinguish between a painted image of a beautiful youth and a beautiful painting of a youth? Looking at what we do have, what the Byzantines left behind in terms of visual images and written texts, we cannot but recognize the gap that separates ‘us’ from ‘them’; but at the same time acknowledge that a painted image or an elegant set of verses were created within a specific context, they are thus both formative and informative of the milieu in which they were produced. They both were shaped by the world around them and in turn conditioned its views and attitudes; they reflect and are reflected in structures of thought and belief. The question is ‘what art and text, taken together might reveal about (. . .) the world-view of a particular culture’ and in this case, what the juxtaposition of the visual and the verbal may suggest of Byzantine beliefs and attitudes surrounding the beautiful body.9 The written and visual sources through which this discussion attempts to envisage the Byzantine world view focus on the time span from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, consciously encompassing a period described by scholarship as a ‘time of change’ in Byzantine society.10 Though it is perhaps more appropriate to acknowledge Byzantium as ‘a continually developing and adapting culture’, the time frame chosen for this book nonetheless looks into aspects of ‘change’ such as the growing militarization of Byzantine society starting in the eleventh century and the (temporary) breakdown of the Byzantine state after the Crusader conquest of Constantinople in 1204, with its considerable implications for the Byzantine self- image.11
The emergence of a ‘cult’ of military masculinity in the mid-eleventh century, the re-found interest in the figure of the Byzantine angel towards the end of that century, the rehabilitation of the figure of Eros, the increasing contact between Byzantium and the West during the reign of the Komnenian dynasty, the novel fascination with the body of the dead Christ in the twelfth century and the creation of new, emotive, iconographical types in Byzantine imagery, all feature in this discussion, creating a complex and simultaneously evocative backdrop for an investigation of Byzantine attitudes on the beautiful body. Symptomatic of living in ‘interesting times’ these apparent innovations are then examined in contrast of later developments in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Thinking in terms of ‘change’ in the Byzantine perception of what beauty is and what it is perceived to do throughout this time span builds a twofold picture: on the one hand, there seems to be little change in fundamental attitudes on how beauty was perceived, identified and defined; the ideal of what constituted the beautiful body appears not to change between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries. On the other hand, Byzantine imagery and writing reveal subtle nuances, developments and variations in attitudes towards beauty (whether in real life or in pictorial representations) across this time span of four centuries, which help refine the broader picture. The discussion starts with an investigation into the Ideal of Beauty as it emerges through Byzantine writing, looking at both Byzantine historiography and literature, that is, writing that proposes to evoke ‘reality’ and historical truth set against the world of fiction and the imagination. Diverse genres of Byzantine writing are intentionally juxtaposed throughout the book to include a variety of written sources from epistolography and eulogistic verses composed for the Byzantine court, to Byzantine romances, saints’ Lives and liturgical texts. The aim of this juxtaposition is to allow an image of Byzantine attitudes that is not genre specific to emerge through the writing, and to permit a reading of physical beauty through a variety of different perspectives, such as that of the theologian writing a religious discourse, and that of an emperor’s daughter composing history. Can similar attitudes be traced in their writing?
The parallel between pen-portraits in texts and painted portraits in visual imagery and its insights into Byzantine attitudes leads on to a discussion of beauty’s association with notions of good and evil. Beauty’s moral connotations are juxtaposed to those of the classical world as the classical concept of kalokagathia (of being ‘both beautiful and good’), linking moral character to physical appearance, is addressed in a Byzantine context. The handsome heroes and ugly villains that cross their paths in Byzantine writing, and the image of the executioner in Byzantine art pose questions on their own right: was beauty per se seen as a benign or evil quality? The Byzantine recognition of beauty’s power, noted in the realm of love as much as in that of politics, leads on to an investigation of beauty’s role in Byzantine society in the context of the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. Beauty was often discussed in association with notions of power; whether political, social or sexual. The relationship between beauty and power is examined with regard to the Byzantine imperial image as this appears in writing and the visual arts, and the way in which the imperial body was perceived and represented.
The question of beauty’s potency in Byzantium is studied further, illustrated through a study of beauty in a context where it may be least expected: could beauty coexist with physical pain and the horror of death? The broken bodies of Byzantine martyrs and, most importantly, the potent image of the dead body of Christ are examined in the context of imagery and writing, looking into how beauty could be represented and manipulated to serve a set agenda. Physical beauty is looked into in relation to notions of masculinity and liminality, through an examination of the curious beauty of angels and eunuchs. Theoretically bodiless and sexless, angels nonetheless appeared as gendered beings in the Byzantine collective imagination. The parallel between angels and eunuchs in Byzantine writing brings the question of their liminal masculinity and the beauty befitting it, into the forefront of the discussion, also addressing the notion of ‘youth’ and its relation to beauty. Finally, military masculinity is addressed, looking into the image of the beautiful soldier in which the tensions between beauty, masculinity and effeminacy become particularly prominent.
In the midst of alluring displays of military splendor the Byzantine fascination with the image of the handsome soldier reached new heights starting in the eleventh century. Set against it, is the thorny question of the soldier’s adornment that highlights the strained balance between manly beauty and unmanly effeminacy. Was beauty a threat to (military) masculinity? The quest for the beautiful body in Byzantium through the evidence of imagery and writing reveals a Byzantine concern with physical beauty that can have implications on the way we view the Byzantine world. By casting new light on an aspect of Byzantine life that has been largely ignored in accounts of Byzantium, this investigation aims to further tip the balance between spirituality and physicality, soul and body in our perceptions of Byzantium restoring beauty, as a quality highly valued among the Byzantines themselves, to its proper place: the foreground of attention.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق