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THE LIVING ICON IN BYZANTIUM AND ITALY
The Living Icon in Byzantium and Italy is the first book to explore the emergence and function of a novel pictorial format in the Middle Ages, the vita icon, which displayed the magnified portrait of a saint framed by scenes from his or her life. While the East used the vita icon for depicting the most popular figures in the Orthodox calendar, the Latin West deployed it most vigorously in the service of Francis of Assisi. This book offers a compelling account of how this type of image embodied and challenged the prevailing structures of vision, representation, and sanctity in Byzantium and among the Franciscans in Italy between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Through the lens of this format, Paroma Chatterjee uncovers the complexities of the philosophical and theological issues that had long engaged both the medieval East and West, such as the fraught relations between words and images, relics and icons, a representation and its subject, and the very nature of holy presence.
Paroma Chatterjee is Assistant Professor, History of Art, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research has been supported by a Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellowship, a Samuel H. Kress Travel Fellowship, a Mellon dissertation writing fellowship, a Penn Humanities Forum post-doctoral fellowship, a post-doctoral fellowship at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, and a Millard Meiss Publication Grant. Her work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Art History, Word ¢& Image, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Oxford Art Journal, and RES: The Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the medievals, offering thanks for gifts received was de rigueur; for me, a medievalist who must by definition spend large amounts of time in that epoch, it is a distinct pleasure.
I owe a great deal - more than words can express - to Robert S. Nelson, whose rigor, generosity, and integrity have been fundamental to my development as a scholar. This book would have been inconceivable without his support at every step. Jas Elsner read numerous drafts and listened to my rambling thoughts with far more patience than he should have; his ready wit, warmth, and honesty transformed a discussion of even the driest of details into an exciting journey of discovery. Wu Hung opened up a world of new ideas with his insights into the ways that Byzantine image theories intersect with Chinese Buddhist perceptions. Iam deeply grateful to this intrepid trio of advisers and to the University of Chicago for having brought me to them.
I was fortunate to have received a Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellowship, a Samuel H. Kress Travel Fellowship, and a Penn Humanities Forum fellowship, all of which afforded me the time and resources to carry out the research for this book. In addition, the Edward L. Ryerson and Mellon fellowships awarded by the University of Chicago, along with a semester at the Scuola Normale Superiore at Pisa, and the generous research funds granted by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a grant from the Institute for the Arts and Humanities were invaluable in enabling me to conduct field research at sites in Turkey, Egypt, Greece, and Italy.
Among these, one of the most important sites is the Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai; a magical place, not least because of the hospitality of the monks and Bedouins who live there. I have had the honor of visiting the monastery twice, and of seeing at first hand some of the icons that this book discusses. I am indebted to Archbishop Damianos for having received me at the monastery, to Father Justin for his time and generosity in sharing his knowledge with me and for allowing me to reproduce some of the images in this book, to Father Daniel and Father Porphyrios for opening up the archives and giving me access to the icons I needed to look at, and to Father Neilos for his company. I also thank Badri, Mousa, Fteh, and Hosni for having uncovered details about local customs for my personal interest. Raid lent his motorcycle for a ride through the desert at a critical moment, for which I am grateful. And many thanks to the camels - surely some of the most patient and hardy animals to tread this planet.
I had the opportunity to present parts of my research at various forums over the years. I am grateful for the suggestions of the participants and audience at the symposium, “Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai,” held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2007. Iam also thankful for the comments I received for lectures given at the Department of Art History and the Center for Ancient Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; the Department of Art History at Temple University; the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Colloquium at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; the Triangle Medieval Studies Seminar held at Duke University; and the Medieval Guild at Columbia University.
The final revisions were done while I was a Fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. The intellectual vitality of the Academy was instrumental in ushering the book to completion. I thank David Freedberg for the myriad cultural possibilities he opened up as director of the Academy, and his insights into matters ranging from Art History to Neuroscience to the culinary delights and dangers of New York.
To my friends and colleagues I owe thanks for their good cheer and willingness to engage in vigorous - or subtle - debates with me about various things, nearly all of which (no matter how seemingly tangential) impinged on the progress of this book. They are: Glaire Anderson, Charles Barber, Ross Barrett, Fabio Barry, Elizabeth Bolman, Annemarie Weyl
Carr, Joyce Cheng, Michael Cole, Danielle Coriale, Anthony Cutler, Igor Demchenko, Emily Dolan, Pika Ghosh, Darryl J. Gless, Marilyn E. Heldman, Cecily Hilsdale, Damon Horowitz, Melissa Hyde, Sergey Ivanov, Anthony Kaldellis, Apostolos Karpozilos, Dirk Krausmiiller, Kristine Larison, Wei-Cheng Lin, Wei-ping Lin, Kathleen Lubey, Lia Markey, Robert Maxwell, Kristine Nielsen, Christina Normore, Maureen O’Brien, Julia Orell, Robert Ousterhout, Mary Pardo, Glenn Peers, Dawna Schuld, Eric Segal, Nancy P. Sevéenko, Marty Sheriff, Daniel Sherman, Fiona Somerset, Mary Sturgeon, Alice-Mary Talbot, John Tresch, Galina Tirnanic, Vessela Valiavitcharska-Marcum, Laura Veneskey, Alla Vronskaya, Lyneise Williams, and Ann Marie Yasin. In addition, I am indebted to Phil Sapirstein for having shown me, on a wonderful and sometimes hairraising drive through Turkey, the ancient and medieval marvels of that country. I had the pleasure of getting to know Aditya Behl in the last year of his life; his ebullient spirit is a deeply cherished memory.
I thank Beatrice Rehl for her energy and acuity in steering this book toward publication, and Anastasia Graf and Brian MacDonald for their untiring help with the nitty-gritties of the final product. I am also grateful for a Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant awarded by the College Art Association and to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the Department of the History of Art for providing the financial resources that enabled the manuscript and its icons literally to come to life.
To my parents, Pratip K. Chatterjee and Sunita Chatterjee, I am indebted in countless ways. Amala Pan cannot see this work, but her presence sustains me every day. My brother, Pinaki, has always pushed me toward better, more interesting worlds; I cannot imagine undertaking any project, least of all the authorship of a tome, without his constant support. To a certain person (who wishes to remain unnamed), I am thankful for pretty much everything in my life. And finally, to my little daughter, Preisha - who, in all honesty, did not really help with the writing of this book - I offer my deepest gratitude nonetheless, for everything, always.
INTRODUCTION: THE METAPHOR OF THE “LIVING ICON”
The late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries saw the emergence of a strikingly novel pictorial format in parts of the Byzantine Empire. Displaying the portrait of a saint surrounded on all four or fewer sides by scenes from his or her life, the so-called vita icon depicted some of the most popular figures in the Orthodox calendar, including Nicholas, George, and John the Baptist. The clarity and efficacy of the format evidently enabled its popularity; by the thirteenth century, it was being deployed to depict various holy figures in the Latin West as well. Of these western examples, the most concentrated and imaginative use of the vita image occurred in the realm of the Franciscans in the first half of the duecento, to honor their flamboyantly charismatic founder, Francis of Assisi.
This book investigates the conditions that enabled the emergence of the vita image in Byzantium and among the Franciscans, and its varied functions. It argues that the image type was a powerfully pungent expression of the ontological complexities intrinsic to the identity of the medieval saint, in both the Byzantine East and the Latin West (particularly in the case of Francis of Assisi, who shattered normative conceptions of saintly behavior by conforming only too perfectly to its ideals). The juxtaposition of a magnified portrait at the center of a panel flanked by smaller episodes both presented a satisfyingly synoptic view of the saint in question and distilled a stunning critique of the prevailing structures of vision, representation, and sanctity. The format engaged
with urgent theological and philosophical issues that had long vexed the medieval East and West, such as the similarities and differences between words and images, between relics and icons, between a representation and its subject, and the very nature of holy presence.
That these issues were not (perhaps never) satisfactorily resolved but remained the subject of fierce debates is evident from the fact that the vita image first emerged in Byzantium well after the end of Iconoclasm in 843 CE. By then, one might presume that the “problem”of the eikon (image) and its relationship to holy presence had already been dealt with. But an examination of the lives of saints in texts and images after Iconoclasm proves otherwise. As we shall see, the icon was the subject of continuous reflection among the Byzantines, and it is in the realm of hagiography that we find some of the most creative and challenging propositions regarding its creation, description, and reception. The saint, in other words, was the crucible on which concepts and practices concerning visual representation were tested. For the Franciscans, on the other hand, the hagiographic project itself was fraught with problems. Writers and painters commissioned to describe the life of Francis faced inordinate - even, arguably unprecedented - challenges, in having to describe the phenomenon of the stigmatization and its effects on a mortal human body. As this book shows, the vita format furnished the most effective pictorial expression to those challenges. The image type, then, was not merely an agent of spiritual instruction, or a didactic tool propounding the life of the saint depicted, or a useful pictorial accompaniment to the liturgical celebration of the holy one, although it undoubtedly performed all these roles. Along with them - and more importantly - the format proffered a pithily complex commentary on the possibilities and limits of visual mediation in the very definition of a saint.
This, for all the ubiquity of sacred persons and their images in the medieval era, was no simple task. For one, the markers signifying sainthood were remarkably tenuous.As Aviad Kleinberg remarks, “The medieval perception of sainthood was fluid. ... Medieval communities venerated simultaneously very different individuals ... indifferent to the logical contradictions such behavior entailed.”’ Apart from the sheer variety of saintly types (e.g., martyrs, virgins, confessors, and children), the very substance of sanctity was perceived as precariously unsta-
ble and labile in the period. Even while retaining a completely human form, the saint was also invested with divine grace. He or she was regarded. as a conduit between the human and divine realms, thus partaking of both. Moreover, as an imitator of Christ (whether in literal or nonliteral terms), the saint was perceived to be constantly engaged in a process of the representation of holiness; a representation whose benchmark was the figure of Christ. When hagiographers undertook to honor, proclaim, and describe the lives of the saints, they had to grapple with the inevitable tensions that resulted from presenting, on the one hand, a seemingly unified, coherent saintly identity and, on the other, a unique charisma that could not be explained but by the contingency of divine favor, and the continuous ontological transformations sustained by the holy one over a lifetime. Representations in words and images conferred a retrospective semblance of unity and cohesion on what was, in fact, an enterprise of the utmost contingency and chance, and manifested itself as such.
These points are borne out by a remarkably suggestive and well-known but rarely analyzed passage, which highlights the difficulties of capturing not just the saint in words and images but also the complexities of reception that underpin reading or looking at a saint’s life. With uncharacteristic ruefulness (and, one suspects, a certain disingenuousness), Basil of Caesarea wrote to Gregory of Nyssa, pondering over all that he should have done in order to be a worthy Christian. In the process, he
made the following analogy:
Kai zavtayot dornep ot Coypaqot, Stav a6 EikOv@v sikdvac ypPaMwot, TUKVO MPO TO TapadsEtywa AMOBAEMOVTEG, TOV EKELWET YAPAKTH|PA TPO TO EavT@®V omOvdaCovor pETtaOsivat rotéyvnua. ottm dei Kai TOV EOMOVOAKOTA EQVTOV THOL TOIG PEPEOL TIS APETis damepydoacBat, TEAELOV, OlOVEL TPO CyaApaTa tive KivobpLEVa Kai EumpaKta, TOdS Biovc TOV GyiMv anoPAézEt, Kai TO Exsiv@v Gyabdv oOikEiov TotEtoBat Sia HUUNoEws.
Thus, as painters, when they are painting from other pictures, look closely at the model, and do their best to transfer its characteristics to their own artfully wrought work, so too must he who is desirous of rendering himself perfect in all branches of excellence, keep his eyes turned to the lives of the saints as though to living and moving statues, and make their virtue his own by imitation.
The metaphor of the “living statue” was important to the Byzantines.”
Not only was Basil himself described as one;* we also find his exhortation
repeated in a ninth-century manuscript of the Sacra Parallela, a compilation of scriptural writings currently located in the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris.° The passage in the manuscript, on folio 328 verso, is accompanied by an image (Plate I). An artist sketches on a panel from an icon, which is presumably the image of a saint. The artist is engaged in copying the icon; the corner of the latter grazes the side of the panel in his hand, thus hinting at the genealogical link (here expressed as a tactile connection) between the model and its copy. Relic-like, the completed icon imparts its touch to the icon in progress and legitimizes it. The artist is carefully positioned outside the tactile chain. Even though he holds the panel and is cast in the role of the “artful” manufacturer, his activity is confined to transcribing the icon’s “characteristics.” This is emphasized by his staring eyes, trained in the direction of the completed image, even as his hand moves in the process of tracing its contours. This artist is a transmitter, not a creator. Although he is the largest figure in the ensemble, the importance that accrues to size is undermined by his position. Shown in a three-quarter view, he is subordinated to the frontal gaze of the icon, which confronts the viewer directly. This vignette with its encapsulation of some of the fundamental principles of Byzantine image theory - and its concomitant ambiguity about the relative importance of the artist - depicts a process analogous to the cultivation of Christian virtue and saintly emulation, as per Basil’s injunction. Artistic manufacture is likened to the inculcation of ethics.
Yet, being a good Christian is a somewhat more complicated procedure than the image would suggest. For one, it involves a different set of maneuvers on the part of the person “desirous of rendering himself perfect” from those enacted by the artist. The zealous Christian must look at the lives of the saints (presumably in their written and oral versions) as if they are statues. Indeed, the image right above that of our artist depicts a bearded figure pointing at the adjoining column of text. The inclusion of the artist below, with his hand and gaze pointing toward the completed icon, underscores the literal transition from the written to the pictorial to which Basil prompts us.
However, the church father adds a further layer of complexity to his analogy: the statues fashioned by the beholder (whether in his mind, in stone or metal, or in some other material) must be “living and moving.”
Where the artist is permitted the ease of operating within a single
medium (he “paints [pictures] from other pictures”), is endowed with the ability of artful manufacture, and is expressly posited as one who conveys a preexisting set of pictorial coordinates, the Christian must perform a more arduous set of tasks. He must switch between media and become, to a certain extent, a creator. He must transform a hagiographic text into an image, and the image into a mobile quantity invested with the full power of its moral significance. As if that were not complicated enough, the “image” referred to here could take on another, less literal dimension. As Stratis Papaioannou has shown, a “living statue” in Byzantium could allude not only to a beautifully carved and sculpted exterior, endowed with a similarly beauteous, or virtuous interior; it could also indicate a perfectly formed verbal discourse, in which style and content, beauty of expression and truthfulness of spirit, were harmoniously mingled.° In keeping with this formulation, then, our good Christian must be skilled at handling matter (be it words, paint, stones, or metals) and the nature, or spirit, of the saint in bringing about his “living statue.” Only when exterior and interior, style and content, are in perfect concord, can sucha being be said to have been wrought.
As if to hint at these (more difficult) transformations, one entire side of the icon in the Paris manuscript brushes against the text column, the image emanating from the letters, as it were - the pictorial taking shape from the verbal. But the transition of the image into a “living” entity is not pictured, or at least not directly. Broken down, Basil’s instructions are not as straightforward, and his analogy is not as seamless, as they appear to be at first glance. Small wonder, then, that the manuscript illustrates only the first part of the passage and not the second.
This book suggests that the vita image best expresses the metaphor of the “living icon” in all its glorious nuance, with its array of questions (implicit and explicit) regarding the textual and visual depiction and reception of a saint. Scholarly consensus regards the vita images as instruments of instruction or propaganda, ideal for communicating those episodes that made the saint in question a holy figure. This argument, however, does not account for the reasons or the effects behind putting an enlarged portrait together with small-scale narrative scenes, nor does it explain the peculiar details animating those scenes, such as repetition, distortion, and sometimes, the outright defacement of the
saint. This book examines the specific components of a handful of vita
images and offers an explanation as to why this format, over others, was deemed suitable to the various tasks at hand. And, as already suggested, the vita icon did indeed perform a set of highly important tasks. If the fifteenth century in Italy and Flanders is regarded as a period in which the pictorial possibilities of the frame, the icon, and narrative scenes were extended so as to combine the “vividness of the narrative ... with the portrait character and direct appeal of the traditional icon,” as Sixten Ringbom puts it,’ then the vita image in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries might be considered a decisive step in that direction, in light of its diffusion over Europe within that time and beyond. As we shall see, in some vita images the concept of the “traditional icon” is put to the test, as the depiction of the saint in the center of the panel hovers between a seemingly static, atemporal iconic formula and a narrative mode in which the depiction appears to allude to a specific moment in a temporal sequence.
The subject of time serves to remind us that the period under consideration in this book - from the eleventh up till the thirteenth century - is not merely dictated by the fact that that is when this particular image type gradually emerged and then flourished in the Byzantine East and among the Franciscans; these centuries are also marked by decisive intellectual developments (anxieties, even), which, I argue, directly impinged upon the creation of the vita image. The rest of this introduction presents the general background of those developments as a prelude to the specific
issues discussed in the chapters to follow.
The “Living Icon” and Its Problems
Byzantine thinkers in the eleventh century engaged in vigorous debates on the definition of the icon and modes of viewing it, as so persuasively shown by Charles Barber.® These debates found expression - indirectly but emphatically - in a range of textual and visual genres, among them the vita icon, until the ravaging of the empire in 1204 by the Fourth Crusade. The entire course of the thirteenth century, moreover, was significant for seeing some of the most innovative developments in saintly practice and imagery in Italy. In the first half of the duecento that peninsula witnessed an extraordinary (and, to some, even aberrant)
phenomenon: the rise of St. Francis of Assisi, the alter Christus, blessed
with the stigmata or the wounds of Christ. Several features of the emerging Franciscan literary and visual discourse intersect with the preoccupations of the Byzantines. In observing that “the servant of God is a kind of painting,” '° Francis performed a self-referential gesture and implicitly designated his own body as a representation, adorned by the then tremendously controversial fact of the stigmata. Hagiographers consistently referred to Francis in terms of a picture painted over with Christ’s wounds, or a sculpture into whose surface God had carved out the stigmata with heavenly instruments. Deemed a “living icon” in his own right, Francis was the most audaciously literal example of that metaphor; one whose very person was conceived of as an image signed, sealed, and drawn upon by the finger of God.'' The “living icon,” thus, was elaborated upon in texts and images in Byzantium (and somewhat in the medieval West), but attained its most spectacular expression in the person of a cloth merchant’s son hailing from Umbria. But how exactly was the concept of the “living icon” understood in Byzantium? And why did the Franciscans so insistently adopt its informing principles to describe their founder?
Modern scholarship furnishes some answers to these questions. Hans Belting, in his magisterial study Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, suggests that the “living icon” refers to the narrative and emotionally charged images of Christ’s Passion that arose in eleventhcentury Byzantium. Demonstrating the seeds of the naturalistic style, which was supposedly refined by the Italian Renaissance, these icons were regarded as sufficiently lifelike to engender fine-tuned emotional responses. '* As Anne Derbes and others have shown, the Franciscans, in particular, responded to these images and incorporated them into their repertoire.” Bissera V. Pentcheva, however, has nuanced Belting’s definition of the “living icon,” pointing out that the images in question are not, in fact, very naturalistic.'* Pentcheva directs us instead to the interest in Neoplatonism in eleventh-century Byzantium, and accounts of public and private miracles that manifest a decided interest in the element of change in an image. The “living icon,” according to Pentcheva, is better defined as one that was perceived to evince a concrete transformation in its form, hue, or medium. This transformation was ostensibly triggered by the action of the Holy Spirit; a literal “in-spiriting” of the icon, causing it to
be empsychos, or imbued with breath and life.
Both Belting and Pentcheva locate the conceptual core of the “living icon” in terms of its visual consequences in the Byzantine sphere. Stratis Papaioannou, on the other hand, has traced the metaphorical resonance of the expression in Byzantine literary genres. 'S His reading suggests that the phrase referred to an image, or a text, whose aesthetic or exterior qualities, apprehended by the senses, encompassed ineffable virtues that were less easily perceived, but which were nonetheless made manifest. A “living statue” was regarded as an object, the material appearance of which gradually enabled an apprehension of divine presence. The final product was one whose exterior and interior coexisted in perfect accord, and which had the power to move its viewers to cultivate similarly harmonious physical and spiritual selves.
Compelling as these interpretations are, I would suggest that there is yet another aspect to this rich metaphor, also rooted in Byzantium, that has not been explored. This aspect draws directly on the concept of the “living statue” as a potential site for the continuous generation of images and metaphors, and of the gradual manifestation of holy presence. My interpretation reverses the notion of the icon as a living or animated entity, designating instead a category of human beings endowed with the capacity to become an icon with all its powers and deficiencies. While this designation was sometimes applied to the Byzantine emperor, it is, I argue, particularly pertinent to our understanding of the Byzantine saint.
Gilbert Dagron has commented on the seemingly circular logic (the “vicious circle”) that linked icons and saints in Byzantine culture.'° More often than not the saint appeared to a venerator resembling precisely his or her depiction in an image of which the venerator had had prior experience. As Dagron points out, the icon authenticated the identity of the saint, rather than the saint authenticating his or her pictorial depiction. This trope is so widespread in Byzantium that it is regarded as amounting to a “recipe ... in handbooks on how to pam I contend, however, that the trope functioned in an immeasurably wider capacity, one in which it was transformed into a rigorous hermeneutic that went beyond the question of identity. Rather than merely authenticating the saint as Cosmas, or Damian, or whomever, the very likeness between the icon and the saint prompted the viewer to distinguish between image
and person. In other words, it is because the saint had the potential not only to resemble his or her icon but also to become a living version of it, investing its matter with his or her presence, that the differences between the two entities - person and icon - had to be carefully gauged by venerators and viewers.
But the distinction between image and holy subject was both infinitely important and tantalizingly difficult to grasp. It hinged upon the definition of “presence” or parousia (ousia meaning “substance” or “essence”), and the definition of “image” or eikon. In marking the difference between presence and representation in the ninth century, Patriarch Nikephoros observed, “Making the absent present by showing forth the similarity and memory of its shape, [the icon] maintains
»18 (
[with its archetype] a relation stretching over time Qc tapovta yap
KGL TOV GmOLYOMEVOV SIG TE THC EuUMEpEiag Kai VALS TH LopeEtic EULOAVICOVGA, CVHTAPEKTELVOLEVHV TO YPOVa Stace THV oxéoww). The word paronta, here meaning “presence,” ’” is contrasted with apoichomenon, which refers to that which is gone, departed, or perished.” Parousia literally brings that which is distant, or dead, to presence, and the present. The representation (eikon) and its subject, however, are clearly separate in Nikephoros’s formulation; they are brought into proximity by means of memory and likeness, but they are never identical. This demarcation led to a degree of confusion among clergy and laypeople alike. To give one example, Leo, a bishop of Chalcedon in the eleventh century, believed that the matter in which holy subjects were depicted was itself imbued with holiness, in stark contradiction of Nikephoros’s pronouncement, which emphasized a relation between the two emphatically not based on identity.*! Leo, however, perceived divine presence in the icon and its materials, as well as in the subject it depicted. Such distinctions reveal the contested nature of the definition of presence and representation, despite attempts at formulating (and regulating?) them.
The issue of presence, in particular, was further muddied by the fact that a saint was regarded as a representation of Christ and, therefore, as a sign. In an important article, Cynthia Hahn points out that “signs are marked by absence, a sign represents something absent, just as specifically, saints renew the meaning of the absent Christ. Nevertheless,
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because of the mystery of grace, an absence can be present.”*~ She goes
on to argue that “it is the genius of the hagiographic pictorial narrative of the later Middle Ages that it was in some sense able to supercede the alienation of the sign and recover this power of the presence of Christ while at the same time giving the sign a ‘face.”??
This book complicates the notion that the saint and his or her hagiography in text and image were always able to supersede their status as signs, and to capture presence (in all the contradictions evident in the understanding of that term). As we shall see, the saint often assumed a range of ontological identities during his or her lifetime and beyond, such as relics, visions, dreams, and shadows. Each of these states held a distinct valence - and a distinct measure of presence - for the Byzantines, as is evident from their commentaries on the status of dreams, the nature of apparitions, and the means of distinguishing between their “good” and “evil” manifestations (a point discussed in Chapter 1). The expression “living icon,” then, quite apart from its contextual meaning in various Byzantine texts, can be taken to encompass and reflect two essential facets of the scintillating ontology of the saint: first, his or her capacity to generate an array of diverse - sometimes overlapping and contiguous - states, such as dreams, visions, and relics, each of which was related mimetically to its holy subject, or prototype (prototypos in Greek); and, second, the differing degrees of presence that each of those states was perceived to embrace. The “living icon” was framed by the church fathers as a process occurring over such time as it took to cultivate virtue, and to match a handsome exterior to a correspondingly attractive interior. Similarly, I suggest that the different expressions of the saint (dreams, visions, etc.) were believed to manifest themselves over a period of time. The “living icon” thus came about as a consequence of this chain of states of being, of which it was one important element among several.
The awareness that holy presence was by no means an unvarying constant, and that it differed, both in its existence and in degrees in icons, relics, dreams, and visions, was sufficiently widespread. Accounts abound of venerators who recorded seeing the saint, or an icon of him or her, yield apparitions or the relics of the holy one, sometimes in rapid succession. The Life of St. Nikon, for instance, mentions an episode when a man praying in front of Nikon’s portrait was transported to the saint’s shrine where he experienced a healing miracle.** Interestingly, the epi-
sode distinguishes between Nikon’s portrait and Nikon’s shrine; it is the latter that enables a complete apprehension of the saint’s presence by bringing about the cure of the afflicted venerator. Thus, the efficacy, experience, and, perhaps, the measure, of holy presence differ at each stage of the episode, from the portrait to the space of the shrine. Chapter 1 investigates a series of such appearances in which the saint in question assumes (or has the potential to assume) a range of forms, each distinct from the other. As we shall see in Chapter 2, images also made these apparitions - and their inherent distinctions - evident in innovative ways. For instance, the twelfth-century templon beam depicting the posthumous miracles of St. Eustratios depicts the saint as a vision, an epiphany, and a relic, in juxtaposition. Although the iconography defining Eustratios remains the same in each depiction, its uniformity is a spur to the viewer to gauge the distinct statuses he assumes in each context in which he appears.
The example of Eustratios (and others) leads to yet another important corollary of the “living icon”; the beholder of the saint’s image (and visions, relics, and dreams) was not expected to remain a passive recipient. Ideally, he or she displayed a similar flexibility as the “living icon” in the viewing and intellectual apprehension of what he or she saw. Gregory of Nazianzos attributed such an active role to a viewer when he commented that upon gazing on the “animate law” and “painted panel of virtue” that was Basil of Caesarea, the audience could learn to regulate its own life.?° In the same vein, Michael Psellos commented in the eleventh century that “the ... images of the Father do not themselves move, yet force their viewer to move.””° The “living icon” provoked a certain motion from its viewer, which could be purely internal or otherwise. Where the “living icon” of the saint was concerned, its audience was expected to distinguish between the various states assumed. by the holy one. In addition, it invited a corresponding reciprocal gesture from the beholder; a mimetic reflex, whereby the latter, when confronted with a text describing the saint, either copied it or enabled its transition to a different medium, such as an image, and vice-versa. Not for nothing did medieval hagiographers often remark that they had purposely left their works unfinished, or that they had declined to include various miracles in their accounts that they could have added. These statements of glaring omission were invitations to the reader or listener to continue the narrative and, hopefully, to add his or her
own experiences of the saint’s charisma to it - in short, to sustain and extend the process of crafting the “living icon.” The practice of ekphrasis in particular, endemic to hagiographic production and consumption in the medieval era,”’ was a fitting response to a sacred narrative, striving as it did to conjure a vivid visual apprehension from a verbal delineation - a veritable “living icon,” as per the literal meaning embedded in St. Basil’s citation quoted at the beginning of this chapter.
If the “living icon” in Byzantium pointed to the ontological variations inherent to the saint, it was used in a similar capacity among the Franciscans as well; after all, Francis was just as capable of manifesting himself in visions and apparitions and as relics, as any of his holy counterparts in Byzantium or the Latin West. But at a fundamental level, the expression “living painting” occurs in Franciscan texts as a means of capturing the particular charisma of Francis’s stigmatized - and, therefore, immensely troublesome - body. Although self-proclaimed stigmatics existed before Francis, the fact ofa stigmatized saint accepted and endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church - and moreover, one whose stigmata required celebration and dissemination in texts and images - created tremendous problems for the Franciscans. The strategy they deployed to counter this crisis in representation (for crisis is indeed what it amounted to) was to resort to drawing parallels between the phenomenon of the stigmatization and artistic practices. Francis’s body was advanced as the surface of a painting, or a document, that had received the touch of the divine and was consequently transformed, just as an artist or a scribe touches and transforms the material at his disposal. The “living icon,” in this context, is an expression that attempts to communicate Francis’s miraculous physical self, its unique exteriority, even more than the holiness that resides within him (although the latter was just as difficult to transmit by means of word and image). This is an inversion of the Byzantine sense of the metaphor. But it still preserves the element of change or transformation, and of the potential inherence of the divine in the “icon” that the
medieval world would come to know as Francis of Assisi.
The Vita Image as a Metapicture
The vita image constitutes a robust intellectual link between Byzantium and Italy, bridged by the concept of the “living icon.” Along with the wellstudied images of the Virgin and Child,”* the format instantiates yet another, less studied example in which the rhetorical subtlety of the Byzantine icon is enlisted for a particular agenda when introduced in the Italian Peninsula. The format triggered a range of questions regarding representation and viewership that the Franciscans, no less than the Byzantines, were grappling with in the period under consideration.
To begin to understand the breadth of these questions, one must first recognize the vita images for the remarkable metapictures that they are. Although icons from the sixth century onward depict images within images, or “fictive icons” as Jeffrey Anderson terms them,”’ none displays the juxtaposition of such radical kinds of images on the same surface as the vita icon. In emphasizing the differences between the pictorial categories it consists of - the enlarged, hieratic portrait and the lively narrative scenes on a smaller scale - the format consciously refers to its own status as a set of depictions working in tandem across a single visual field. The combination of an icon with narrative scenes is provocative. The dialectic of center and frame echoes that of the relations between central, authoritative images and their marginal counterparts that we find in medieval manuscripts, church portals, and intimate objects.
The insertion of such a marginal frame, as Michael Camille has shown, always contains the potential for an embedded commentary or critique on representation.” Jas Elsner has explored the differences in late antiquity in the kinds of visuality engaged by confronting an iconic deity head on and in the viewer’s relations to naturalistic representations in which the viewer stands as a voyeur looking in, separated from the scene owing to its internal self-sufficiency.” The composition of the vita image engages precisely these sorts of issues. The direct, unmediated gaze of the portrait that confronts the viewer is diluted in the narratives, in relation to which the viewer is (often, but not always) positioned as an outsider looking in. The vita image, thus, conflates two different kinds of spectatorship, bringing to the fore its potential for the critical appraisal of different regimes of visuality and the salient structures of representation. If the portrait is posited as a stable, scrupulously defined, instantly identifiable entity at the center of the panel, then the narratives systematically take those assumptions apart. Moreover, by depicting the saint in multiple scenes in multiple avatars, the entire image type comments on the possibilities of vision and of visual representation to capture diverse
ontological states. Considered in this light, the nomenclature that modern scholarship has bestowed on these icons - vita - is as misleading as it is fitting. The term implies a relatively straightforward depiction of a person’s life - which is indeed what the image displays. But the fact that the “life” in question is that of a saint, and therefore rife with transformations and manipulations of vision at various stages, is completely discounted.
Here, it is also useful to consider W. J. T. Mitchell’s identification of various kinds of metapictures: the first, which repeats or “doubles” itself, such as those images in which a picture appears within its own, larger version; the second, in which an image is nested within a different image; and the third, which is an image not necessarily framed within another but which provokes reflections on images in general. (This last observation can be applied to any pictorial representation.)** The vita image embraces all three types to magnificent effect, thereby proving its inherent capacity for visual critique.
Take the icon of St. Catherine, currently located at the eponymous Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt (Plate II). The center of the panel depicts a resplendently bejeweled, full-length portrait of the saint, her imperial dress periodically punctuated with pearls, which break its dark monotony. Catherine’s eyes are averted to the right and her mouth is primly set. She clutches a double-barred cross in one folded, grasping hand and blesses the viewer with the other in an open, relaxed gesture. In the scenes surrounding Catherine, her portrait recurs in modified scales and postures. In two scenes on the left grid, for instance, the portrait is laid horizontally and stripped of its clothing. While the scene at the top shows Catherine being beaten, her blood forming a mesh of scarlet streaks across her body, the one at the bottom further truncates her figure. Only her haloed head appears, jutting out grotesquely from the wheel on which she is set. These images belong to the second category posited by Mitchell, in which an image (Catherine’s portrait) is nested within another set of images (the narrative scenes). The point at stake is the abrupt transformation of the canonical icon of Catherine to reduced, starkly different avatars, each of which seems to be a valid visual expression of the saint.
Two scenes on the right grid adhere, if a tad obliquely, to Mitchell’s first category of metapictures. In these, Catherine’s full-length figure, quite similar to the portrait at the center, is pushed to the edge of the panel. She stands at an angle, addressing the emperor and a crowd. The icon is repeated twice in succession, but in reduced scale. Because a larger figure always assumes greater importance in Byzantine icons, are we to read Catherine’s miniaturized form as lower in the hierarchy than its magnified counterpart at the center? And because a full, frontal figure was regarded as appropriate for the depiction of a holy being, are the martyrdom scenes, which necessarily fragment the icon, to be read as less important than the portrait? The assumptions underlying Byzantine imagery would subjugate the flanking scenes to the icon at the center, but this book refutes such a view, arguing instead that the vita icons reimagine established precepts precisely through the juxtaposition of a range of iconographic and ontological states.
If Mitchell’s categories of metapictures clarify the ways in which the vita images provoke reflections on representation in general, then the significance of the repeated icon of the saint is further elucidated by George Didi-Huberman’s meditations on visual signification.*° In his study on Fra Angelico, Didi-Huberman, drawing on the work of the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, ponders the “extent to which we have a tendency when contemplating a painting to forget the distinction between the present sign and the absent reality.”** Didi-Huberman refers here to a constellation of red marks in a painted meadow in a scene of the Noli Me Tangere that appear to signify flowers but which, at a closer look, betray their iconic status as simply blotches of red paint. The “present sign” is made up of the blotches and the “absent reality”the flowers they seem to be. This leads Didi-Huberman to coin the term “equivocal
»8S one that functions through a displacement of its
representation, iconic value. Interpreting the red blotches as Christ’s stigmata as much as they signify flowers, Didi-Huberman points to the “labile movement between signs of different semiotic status - icons, indexes, symbols” within a visual field and to the “associative thinking” that characterizes images, “a thinking that structures itself by shifting.”*°
These thoughts may be productively applied to the vita images as well. Take the famous panel painting of St. Francis by Bonaventura Berlinghieri, currently in the Church of S. Francesco in Pescia, Italy (Plate III). Made in 1235, this is the first vita image of the saint. Francis is portrayed at the center of the panel, the stigmata prominently dis-
played on his hands and feet. The scenes flanking him include episodes
from his life and posthumous miracles. Among these, we see two depictions of Francis during his lifetime, two scenes in which he appears as a vision, and two scenes in which his portrait is absent but where he is depicted nonetheless as a miracle-working relic, buried beneath the altar. Of the latter, at least one - the cure of the girl with the twisted neck at the bottom left - is emphatic about Francis’s remains being the cause of the cure; the girl is shown lying right next to the wooden case in which his body was kept soon after Francis’s death.
In each of these scenes, the iconic value of the figure of Francis remains the same; it signifies the alter Christus. However, the “present sign,” comprising the figure in the brown habit with the marks on its hands and feet, which appears in four of the scenes, should not obscure the “absent reality” - the different states that the figure assumes in each episode, notwithstanding the general uniformity of its representation. Just as the terra rossa so acutely observed by Didi-Huberman in the Noli Me Tangere fresco “can function on the whole surface of the work as the privileged operator of displacements and structures of meaning,” simultaneously signifying Mary Magdalene’s sin, Christ’s stigmata, spring
flowers, the Passion, and the Resurrection,*”
so too the tall, imposing portrait of Francis in the center of the Pescia panel is the index from which the movement between the states of human being, vision, and relic is effected on the flanks. The viewer is expected not only to see these separate stages in Francis’s life but also to appreciate the transformations and associations sustained by his saintly being in each of them and their calibration of holy presence. The eye roving from bottom to top and left to right across the image must be accompanied by a similarly shifting awareness of the flickering transitions in the sacred figure at different sites of the panel.
This quality of the vita format, I argue, made it a supple instrument for probing the relationships that structured visual representation and viewership in the late medieval period. One may well ask at this point why medieval viewers might have been required to think about such issues at all. What were the imperatives behind articulating and impressing the significance of the different ontological forms of the saint on their beholders? The answers to these questions, I suggest, lie in the fundamental importance of imagery to those very cultural practices that
engaged the saint in all his or her complexity - even in as (seemingly)
simple a process such as viewing, performed by a layman. Mary Carruthers has asserted the primary role of images in the development of memorial techniques in the Middle Ages.** In his studies on mystical devotions, Jeffrey Hamburger has indicated the use of images by mystics, often, paradoxically, to ascend to an imageless state.” Michelle Karnes has put forward a similarly vital function for the pictorial discourse in the exercise of the medieval imagination; she argues that meditative practice drew upon carefully honed faculties of visualization, which were constantly improved upon and which acted directly upon the meditant’s imaginative prowess.” My argument proposes that practices such as meditation, memorization, commemoration, description, and viewing - the last in its most basic sense - were believed to gain in depth and richness not only because of the images incorporated into them but also because of the viewer’s or meditant’s ability to recognize the kinds of images their eyes took in. The gradations between these images were made most evident in the viewer's cognitive and affective interaction with the saints. The body of Christ and its icons incited reflections on the conjunctions between the human sphere and the divine;*’ the Virgin and her icons provoked theories regarding the ways in which the divine could be circumscribed in a human medium; the Eucharist urged intellectuals and laymen alike to ponder “the relation of phenomenal appearances to an inner reality.”*° This book puts forward the medieval saint as an equally significant player in the arena of intellectual thought. He or she, apart from his or her individual powers, was a resilient tool to think with: a means of figuring out the intricate connections between signs and their referents, and the expression of the holy and its range of ontological states in matter such as wood, metal, and pigments. Indeed, the contemporary concerns of the Byzantines and the Franciscans included all these issues and were disclosed most cogently in the medium of the vita panels. For Byzantium, these concerns centered. on the reflections provoked by Iconoclasm (726-843 CE), which outlined the relations between the subject (or prototype) and its representation, holy presence and physical matter, word and image, and the relative merits of vision vis-a-vis the other senses.** These relationships were subjected to a rigorous reconceptualization by eleventh-century thinkers, thus laying the ground for a novel iconic format that would articulate
the issues at hand. Charles Barber has shown how intellectuals and
theologians such as Michael Psellos and Symeon the New Theologian were deeply engaged in rethinking the bonds between a prototype and its representations.” In one of his writings, Symeon the New Theologian invokes the “memory image” in conjunction with an icon to summon a vision of the prototype, thus arraying visual expressions informed by varying degrees of presence in order to invoke the “real thing.”*° Michael Psellos, on the other hand, proposes a close looking - a detailed formal analysis that absorbs the viewer - in order to detect the contours of the “un-representable” prototype within the icon. In fact, Psellos uses the term “living icon” as a means of bridging the gap between the image made by the artist’s hand, devoid of holy presence, and the holy subject, which no hand can adequately capture in any medium but which can, at certain moments, animate a manufactured image.” These are just two examples of the creative permutations on the icon-prototype relationship that were elaborated upon in the eleventh century, well after the foundations of that relationship had been pondered over in the ninth century, during Iconoclasm.
The concepts of representation and presence were debated in the medieval West with equal fervor. Thinkers from the Carolingian period up to the eleventh and twelfth centuries and beyond grappled with the relationships between form and matter, signs and referents, the extent to which man resembled God and the Eucharist resembled or contained the real presence of Christ, and the ways and means of visualizing the invisible.*° The emergence of the cathedral schools in the Gothic age with their emphasis on “charismatic pedagogy” further reinforced and concretized the issue of real presence by concentrating it in the person of the teacher. As C. Stephen Jaeger puts it, if the eleventh century cherished presence (“real, full, vital, embodied”) and not representation, then the twelfth century cultivated a nostalgia for that lost presence and tried to capture its “fading charisma” through art, or symbolic representation.*?
All these prior developments are reflected in the literature produced by the Franciscans. For them, the most pressing concern was the difficulty in depicting the perfect follower of Christ, whose imitative practice had revolutionized conceptions of the saintly body. Moreover, Francis guarded his most transcendent signs of sainthood - the stigmata - as a secret during his lifetime, thereby complicating a powerful strand of
medieval thought that posited imitation as didactic spectacle.”° Intextual accounts of the stigmatization (discussed in Chapter 3), there is a marked oscillation between the description of the stigmata as nails (clavi) and their qualification as wounds or marks (puncturas clavorum). Thus, the status of the stigmata as signifiers or the signified - as representations or real presence - is never clearly spelled out, signaling the difficulties that Francis’s biographers encountered in the depiction of the alter Christus. These difficulties are evident in the vita images of the saint produced after his death. Indeed, I argue that the vita format is harnessed by the Franciscans not only to depict Francis but also to communicate the problems that his unique brand of charisma posed for pictorial representation in general. An added complication was introduced by the papal statutes of the duecento, which insisted upon empirical evidence to define a holy person as a saint.”! Consequently, the notion of the “eyewitness” and the status of sensory knowledge were roped into the string of legal, theological, and representational conundrums that the depiction of the alter Christus entailed. The conflicting imperatives of representing Francis’s stigmata in text and image and simultaneously signaling their secret nature compelled the Franciscan Order in the duecento to formulate an idiosyncratic model of visuality and artistic
practice.
Organizational Tactics
Between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, therefore, a section of thinkers in Byzantium and Italy was immersed (though not necessarily concurrently) in reflections intersecting over holy presence, imitation, and representation. The vita image ties these reflections together. As a discursive format drawing on period theories of sacred presence, it enabled Byzantine and Franciscan thinkers to enunciate, and to a certain extent resolve, their respective concerns. Although a strong scholarly literature exists on the vibrant artistic interactions between Byzantium and Italy, the vita panel occupies a decidedly marginal position in if" The format is usually collapsed with other images implicated in the encounters between the two cultures; hence, its strength as a visual idiom is overlooked.
The Living Icon in Byzantium and Italy is the first book-length study of
the format. It contributes to two important spheres of medieval studies:
namely, pictorial hagiography and Byzantine-Italian interactions via the Franciscan Order. Henry Maguire and Cynthia Hahn have explored the iconographic and narrative strategies used to depict particular saintly types, such as the warrior saint, virgins, and bishops, and the ways in which hagiographic narratives encompass multiple meanings. °° Both Maguire and Hahn have shown, for Byzantium and the medieval West respectively, that the strategies of visual repetition and interpictorial relations in hagiographic imagery enabled the viewer not only to connect a particular saint to a larger body of holy beings but also to differentiate between a specific saintly personality and his or her counterparts, no matter how similar they might be. This study builds on the work of Maguire and Hahn by situating the practice of depicting a saint in text and image within the broader preoccupations of medieval representation and as a means of challenging some, if not all, its premises. As a result, the book explores the difficult ties between the image and the subject, word and image, and image and relic that the saint, specifically, negotiates. It also argues that the principle of repetition in pictorial hagiography, in combination with interpictoriality, enabled the viewer to detect the varying identities of the saint portrayed, not just in relation to other saintly personalities but also with regard to himself or herself over the course of a lifetime. Furthermore, this book expands on Nancy P. Sevéenko’s seminal article on the vita icons,’ their putative history, and iconographic insights by analyzing the rhetorical poetics of the format. Charles Barber’s and Bissera V. Pentcheva’s studies on medieval theories of visual presence also inform this exploration of the Byzantine vita icon.°°
In the realm of Franciscan studies, this book expands on the scholarship of Anne Derbes, Chiara Frugoni, and William R. Cook et al. Derbes has emphasized the creativity of Italian artists of the duecento, particularly of Franciscan art, vis-a-vis their appropriation of Byzantine visual models.°° The studies of Chiara Frugoni, William Cook, and others examine the rich iconographic details of the Franciscan vita panels, arguing for their propagandistic and didactic value in an era in which Francis, as a “new” saint, required widespread, careful publicity.°” This book, in contrast, underscores the innovative rhetorical strategies of alternate concealment and revelation framing Franciscan textual and
visual representation in the duecento. By shifting attention away from strictly iconographic correspondences between the panels and their supposed Byzantine (and, later, Franciscan) precursors, or Franciscan texts, the book argues that the format went beyond mere propaganda. Instead, it was deeply implicated in meditations on the nature of the image, the workings of vision, and the practices of imitation and representation, all of which were subjects of some urgency in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Most importantly, the book reveals the ways in which the icons refute the enduring assumption of naturalism and, thereby, of complete viewer access and immersion - that is a leitmotif of the scholarship on Franciscan imagery in general.
In thus bringing together Byzantium and medieval Italy, this book considers each region and its textual and visual facets. The first chapter (“The Saint in the Text”) explores episodes of the production and reception of saints’ icons in six hagiographic texts from tenth- and eleventh-century Byzantium. It contends that they reveal a sophisticated conceptual engagement with subjects already rehearsed two centuries ago, during and in the aftermath of Iconoclasm, and which remained matters of debate in the eleventh century. The thematic and semantic differences in each text, and the nuances of the visual vocabulary evident in terms such as morphe (form), emphereia (form or figure), and eikon (image), signify differing sets of bonds between the saint in question and his or her representation in the text. By drawing on Byzantine reading practices, the chapter posits that the reader of these hagiographies encounters and is urged to register - the differing degrees of holy presence that animate the narratives; indeed, a range of such encounters is often orchestrated within a single, extended episode. In the process, the hagiographies evince the inventive energy with which the figure of the saint - the “living icon” - was used to interrogate established models of visuality.
If the eleventh century witnesses a lively discourse on representation centered on the saint’s icon, then the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries in Byzantium are simultaneously more fraught and innovative. On the one hand, the number of hagiographic texts declines sharply; instead, the figure of the saint appears in letters and commentaries as a mode of critiquing the most vulnerable points in mimetic practice. On the other hand, there is a marked interest in exploring holy presence and absence in pictorial modes, such as on the enigmatic templon beam depicting the
miracles of St. Eustratios mentioned earlier. These interests are already
implicit in ilustrated manuscripts of saints’ lives from the latter half of the eleventh century but are given full expression in panel paintings from the twelfth. The second chapter (“The Saint in the Image”) discusses the deliberately reflexive dimensions of saints’ icons in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Byzantium, revealing the modes in which they invite a viewer to detect differing levels of holy presence in their composition. Although the means whereby the images communicate these differences necessarily diverge from the texts explored in Chapter 1, my argument suggests that the two still work together; both the texts and the images engage a shared set of problems, each within the parameters of its own medium. Examining a range of depictions from manuscripts to panel paintings, Chapter 2 closes with the detailed analysis of four vita icons. It contends that the format was conceived as an essay that delineated the bonds linking the separate, but often competing, categories of relics, icons, dreams, and apparitions to their prototypes.
The next two chapters explore significant episodes in a century in the life of the Franciscan Order. St. Francis’s stigmatization exerted a unique set of pressures on those charged with depicting the saint’s life. The third chapter (“Wrought by the Finger of God”) interprets Franciscan hagiographic practice of the duecento as one that incorporated two potentially discordant aims: the delineation of the literal dimensions of mimesis engaged by Francis; and adherence to the contemporary legal standards of sanctity enjoined by the papacy. As the bearer of the stigmata, Francis was endowed with a human body that was simultaneously the site of intersection and collision of a host of legal and literary challenges. The biographies produced by the Franciscan Order met the varied demands Francis’s body posed through a textual realism that paradoxically strove to undercut its own descriptive powers. This is evident even in that most rational and clear account of Francis’s life by Bonaventure - the Major Legend (Legenda Maior) which became the official hagiography of the alter Christus from the 1260s onward. By questioning the viability of representing a secret phenomenon such as the stigmatization, these texts imaginatively engage with the contested notions in the thirteenth century regarding visual attestation, witness, and depiction. A close reading, therefore, is essential in order to tease out the ways in which these texts depict Francis and also retreat from the
empirical stakes intrinsic to that enterprise.
One of the earliest surviving panel paintings of Francis is in the vita format, with motifs explicitly derived from its Byzantine counterparts. This panel was followed by a series of vita images of Francis in the duecento, which have been read primarily as didactic documents intended to spread the saint’s fame. As a corollary, scholarship has also emphasized their compositional clarity - a sign of the nascent classicism of the era that culminated in the ingenious spatial illusionism of the images by Giotto and Duccio at the end of the century.>® The fourth chapter (“Depicting Francis’s Secret”) performs a close reading of four Franciscan panels to show that their “clarity” is tempered to enable the beholder access at certain points while denying it at others. This is a decidedly different interpretation from that which scholarship has endorsed so far. The dominant reading of Franciscan imagery supposes the viewer’s seamless and immersive participation in it. This is due to a persistent scholarly tradition that attributes a powerful affective tenor to the goals informing the Franciscan agenda: the conversion of heretics, the inciting of compassion, and encouraging the laity to generate vivid narratives from the verbal and visual exemplars proffered by the friars.” Only recently have these features been modified. Sarah McNamet’s work, for instance, has questioned the unidimensional affective and participatory strain that scholars routinely read into Franciscan texts such as the Meditationes Vitae Christi.°° As far as the pictorial output commissioned by the Frati Minori is concerned, however, there is still a remarkable readiness to view it, even in its earliest manifestations, as deliberately naturalistic and foreshadowing the illusionistic virtuosity of the late duecento. I suggest instead that the “classical” lucidity of the Franciscan vita panels is construed as a mode of intermittent revelation; one that seeks to disrupt participation and to urge an awareness of the complex configuration of Francis’s image. Instead of allowing the viewer direct access to the saint and the events of his life, the vita panels truncate the viewing process, thus reflecting the varying degrees of visual and tactile access that Francis himself permitted the public during his lifetime. In the process, the panels reveal the Franciscan Order’s thoughtful restructuring of an (ostensibly) illusionistic mode to suit the exceptional representational
demands posed by its founder.
Broader Horizons
In examining these issues, this book attempts to revise some of the prevailing tenets on Byzantine image theory, saints, and cross-cultural relations in the medieval era. First, it argues that the major issues regarding representation and viewing remained contentious in Byzantium well after the Iconoclastic controversy had ended. The emphatic restoration of icons in 843 CE did not by any means resolve the nature of the image, the role of the artist, the functions of vision, or the possibilities of mediating holy presence via visual representation. There is a general readiness among Byzantine art historians to take the existence and the role of the icon for granted after its restoration, but this is not self-evident from the textual and visual corpus. If anything, I would argue that the acceptance of the icon as an integral part of Orthodoxy (re)opened - even multiplied the arenas of debate it had already provoked in the eighth and ninth centuries. The icon triumphed, but it brought in its wake a tangled web of concepts and practices that, even if sanctioned, did not prevent renewed reflection and disputes on them. If we accept the longue durée account of Iconoclasm as posited by Jas Elsner, with roots reaching back into the ancient world, we detect similar patterns of iconophilia alternating with iconophobia beyond the ninth century as well.°! By “iconophobia” I refer to a profound interrogation of the definition of an icon and attempts to control and regulate that still enigmatic and troubling object. These tendencies are evident in the writings of intellectuals, clergymen, and philosophers in the eleventh century. The fact that certain individuals subjected the icon to such ruminations reveals an unease - or, at the very least, a concern - with understanding and harnessing its potential as both an ontological and epistemological tool.°? Symeon the New Theologian, for instance, displays an intriguingly ambiguous attitude toward holy icons whereby - one might easily argue - they become utterly redundant once they have served their epistemological function as signposts to the divine. Leo of Chalcedon, on the other hand, collapses the ontological and epistemological dimensions, positing the icon as one that both contains and permits knowledge of holy presence.”
While these individual attitudes have been meticulously explored by Charles Barber,°* this book argues that it is in the genre of textual and visual hagiography that we detect the continuation of similar themes, often in astonishingly creative (and even convoluted) modes. The obligatory references to saints’ images in hagiographic texts are not perfunctory genuflections to the victory of the icon. Rather, if read carefully, each episode involving the manufacture and display of those objects reveals a wealth of conflicting attitudes toward imagery, image making, and viewing. In this respect, hagiography takes over from theology, presenting the same issues in the framework of fresh, provocative, often unpredictable narratives. This shift, and the attendant role of hagiography, is not to be underestimated. The popularity and accessibility of the genre, in both text and image, would have ensured that subjects which hitherto circulated primarily in elite aristocratic or monastic echelons were now diffused among the general public. The conversation, or discourse, on representation thus continued; indeed, it was deliberately unleashed into a broader sphere where the issues in question might arguably have been interpreted and practiced in diverse, perhaps even unorthodox, ways. Certainly, the hagiographic texts explored in the next chapter attest to such a diversity, and a willingness to reimagine the debates instigated during Iconoclasm in innovative modes, from unexpected angles. It is within the contours of this climate of a renewed questioning of the icon that the vita image takes its place. The notion of a hieratic visual culture hemmed in by a set of restrictive conditions (reinforced by the triumph of Orthodoxy in 843) is belied when we consider the truly radical possibilities inherent in hagiography and its reach.
Yet another assumption that this book attempts to revise lies in the nature of the artistic relations between the Byzantine East and the Latin West; in this case, Italy in the thirteenth century. A wealth of literature exists on the movement, replication, adaptation, and sometimes, the deliberate marginalization of Byzantine images in the West. The most influential studies have concentrated on icons of the Virgin and Christ’s Passion, both of which supposedly furnished the foundations enabling the transition from the maniera greca to the dolce stil nuovo.’ But while the forms and iconographies of the images in question have been well explored, their potential for a critique of issues of representation, is less, if at all, studied. Anne Derbes’s subtle reading of the transformation of Byzantine images of
Christ’s Passion by Italian artists attributes agency and intentionality to
the latter.°° While Derbes concentrates on the iconographic alterations effected by duecento artists, the reasons behind those changes must also have been driven by consideration of such larger philosophical questions as the pictorial negotiation of Christ’s human and divine natures - a burning topic for the medieval era, and one that explicitly demands a reconsideration of the relationship of the sacred to the material. In short, the raison @étre for the reworking of Byzantine imagery must have been informed, to a certain extent, by the debates on holy presence, its material manifestations, and its ramifications that had occupied the Latins for centuries no less than their Orthodox counterparts, and which were equally imbricated. in the realms of artistic production and reception. The engagement of the Franciscans with these issues is critical because of the implications of Francis’s particular form of imitative practice on visual culture and, importantly, because of the kinship between Franciscan principles and Byzantine theology.°” This kinship was evident in artistic enterprises; Amy Neff, for instance, has argued for the incorporation of Byzantine tenets of spirituality in the architectural and painted spaces of the Franciscan Order.°* Clearly, then, Byzantium furnished more than simply a store of images forms and iconographies - for the Italians to draw from. And equally important, the attraction of the images did not reside solely in their material value: their perceived antiquity, their provenance from or proximity to the Holy Land, or their status as booty.”
If Byzantine images were needed by the Italians to fulfill specific needs, then part of those needs must have been tied to the issues of representation that icons engaged in all their complexity, some of which were vitally relevant to the visual culture of the peninsula. This is evident in the ways in which the rich semiotic content of Byzantine icons of the Theotokos and Christ are transposed to a specifically Italian - Sienese, for instance political and poetic language.”° It is precisely because Francis of Assisi stretched the norms undergirding textual and visual representation to their limits that the Franciscan Order was forced to seek novel modes of navigating those norms. The Byzantine vita icon was a viable image type for the Order, not only because it enabled the display of the life of the alter Christus, or because it enfolded him into a venerated lineage of holy persons and images from the Byzantine East. It was also a format that allowed for the fullest expression of the radical physical nature of
Francis: the combination of a normative saintly body before the stigmatization, with one that flouted those norms with a vengeance after the event. It is this before-and-after phenomenon that the vita panels of Francis are so intent on capturing (as we shall see in Chapter 4), one that signaled a “before” and “after” for the very definition of sanctity with all its attendant - and deeply problematic - shifts in terms of vision, witness, ontology, and representation. The vita image thus signals a set of important concerns shared by the Byzantines and the Franciscans, which are tied to specific aspects of the visual discourses of those cultures.
Last but not least, this book attempts an intervention in the field of hagiography, and the broader assumptions underpinning medieval images of saints and their lives. The latter have by and large invited two interpretative models. One posits pictorial hagiography as a tool of spiritual instruction. The other is but a take on the same theme, positing an immediate ideological program for the images, such as social or political commentary pertaining to their historical moment. While hagiography in any medium undoubtedly performed these functions, the problem with the approaches is their assumption that images, specifically, were always transparent enough to project their agendas. “The Lives of saints are made to be both affective and effective,” in the words of Cynthia Hahn - “but little else.””! This claim aligns with the importance accorded to communication in medieval art, particularly in the domain of hagiographic imagery. Wolfgang Kemp notes that “in late antique and medieval art, communication is not so much communicated as taken as a theme: the viewer is meant to learn more about the possibilities of communication between God and human beings, and about the conditions that govern access to communicative situations.””’* The possibility that the images of saints might deliberately rein in their capacities of communication and revelation in order to proffer meditations on their own status as images as visual signs referring to prototypes who, by definition, were themselves regarded as signs of Christ’s grace and divinity - is largely discounted. Such interpretations, no matter how erudite, are still undergirded by the Gregorian dictum that “images are the books of the illiterate,” instructing the populace on the most salient points of the messages they seek to convey.”
This brings us back to Didi-Huberman’s work and his critique of an art-historical practice dominated by the “tradition of the didacticism of
images”; it is a didacticism, moreover, that often leads to a correspondin g
“simplism ...: it postulates that images are simplified, easily understood illustrations of texts that are less simple and less accessible to the 9974
‘people.’”’” The sheer popularity of hagiographic literature in the medieval period has, I believe, sometimes seduced art historians into following the path of Didi-Huberman’s “simplism,” taking the images at face value, matching them to an overriding context which is (according to the readings) more or less blatantly or covertly communicated on the surface of the picture, and more easily understood than its textual source. And yet surely an image, like a text, is bound to harbor ambiguities and a multiplicity of meanings. When St. Gregory declared images to be “books,” surely he was making an analogy (like his Byzantine counterpart, St. Basil) that is less apparent than it seems. Even as he suggested that images were more accessible to the illiterate, Gregory could not have been unaware of the import of “books”; after all, the medieval attitude to them was far from simple. Manuscripts, especially illustrated ones, were expensive objects not only demanding elaborate processes of production but also eliciting a range of reading and viewing practices. Thus, Gregory’s dictum, in likening images to books, might in fact support the notion of images - and images of saints - as artifacts with a similarly complex matrix of underlying structures and responses. The strategies whereby the notions of author and reader, mental ascesis and bodily performance, orality and textuality, and the center and margins are productively blurred (or fortified) have been explored in the arena of textual hagiography.” The fact that its pictorial version still awaits an equally thorough intervention only proves the dominance of the text in the academy, despite the much-vaunted “pictorial turn.”
The protagonists of this book reflect the potential of hagiographic images to interrogate the issues of production and viewership, repetition and defacement, word and image, and concealment and revelation. The vita icons, in particular, masterfully implicate the viewer in a rhythmic flow of forms that may or may not signify the holy being in each iteration. Through their bold juxtaposition of the center and the frame, the imposing, hieratic portrait of a saint and its miniaturized, mobilized version, these icons prompt a viewer to decipher the differing values and statuses accorded to each depiction of the holy one. As a result, they enjoin an acute consciousness of the flexibility of the bonds
believed to tie the image to its prototype, and the ability of an image to capture each of the distinct identities assumed by a saint over his or her lifetime and beyond. Just as St. Basil (in the letter quoted at the beginning of this chapter) advocated picking and choosing those qualities of the saints that the viewer or reader felt were missing in his own character, so too this book attempts to fill a gap in the study of hagiography by positing the saint as a dynamic mechanism of critique - a figure whose intrinsic ontological nuances made it a near-perfect instrument for the reformulation of representational concepts and practices at the cusp of the late medieval and early modern eras.
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