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
Livesor 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 wasand 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’ Livesand 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 seseen
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.
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