Download PDF | (Oxford Studies in Byzantium) Galit Noga-Banai - The Trophies of the Martyrs_ An Art Historical Study of Early Christian Silver Reliquaries-Oxford University Press (2008).
257 Pages
acknowledgements
This book has grown out of and is an elaboration of my Ph.D. dissertation; thus it has been long in the making. It is now my pleasant duty to acknowledge my many debts of gratitude to those who inspired and supported me through the twofold growing process of a student choosing academia as a profession and of a piece of research turning into a book. In Jerusalem, with her joy and pride in the discipline, Bianca Ku¨hnel taught me how to observe and think as an art historian and to treat visual images as evidence of no lesser degree than textual sources.
From Bonn and later from Go¨lling, the work and advice of Josef Engemann has guided me through the multi-layer interpretation of early Christian art. In Rome, Hugo Brandenburg was extremely generous with his knowledge and time, teaching me by example to be humble and at the same time to feel fortunate in front of a work of art. Their erudition and wisdom guided me during the dissertation writing process and beyond. Over the years I have made several study trips thanks to the generosity of the Robert H. and Clarice Smith Foundation of the Department of the History of Art at the Hebrew University.
The Nathan Rotenshtreich Ph.D. grant, given by the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Israel Council for Higher Education, made the completeness of the dissertation possible. The Romolo Deotto Prize for a Ph.D. student from the Association of the Italian Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Milan, and the Amelia Valenti Vigevani Memorial Fund supported a visit to Ravenna and Grado. A study grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) gave me valuable work time in Bonn.
I used the first months of the Hans Jensen Minerva Post Doctoral Fellowship of the Minerva Foundation (Max-Planck Society), to write the final version of the book. I take this opportunity to thank the institutions, curators, and keepers who gave me access to their collections and provided me with the necessary photographs. I am grateful to the staff of the Vatican Museum, the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki, the Museum in Citta` de Castello, and Roberta Bressan in Grado.
The F. J. Do¨lger Institute in Bonn opened its doors in the early stages of my research. I owe a large debt of thanks to Gerhard Rexin who continued to answer my overseas bibliographical inquiries with unlimited patience and kindness. I am grateful to the Roman branch of the German Archaeological Institute where I was able to study for several periods. The staff of its Photo Archives were very helpful. Based in Jerusalem, most of my work was carried out at the Mount Scopus library of the Hebrew University where I enjoyed the generous help of Tamar Schibi. The final stages of the book were given form in Berlin.
I thank Arne Effenberger who invited me to carry on my work at the Bode Museum as well as Gudrun Bu¨hl who eased my way as a newcomer in the city and in the Stadtsbibliothek. I am deeply grateful for the hospitality of the library of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin and the support of its staff, especially Dana Ratmann. Teachers and colleagues at the Hebrew University have been very helpful in the research and preparation of this book.
I am especially grateful to Oded Irshai who was ready to share with me his knowledge of early Christian eschatology. I benefited a great deal from the assistance of Pnina Arad with the illustrative material. Special gratitude goes to Mira Frankel Reich who revised my English and gave shape to the manuscript in such a way that I was able to follow David Jacoby’s words of encouragement and submit it to Oxford University Press. Finally, I thank Cyril Mango for accepting the book for the Oxford Studies in Byzantium series, as well as the anonymous readers and the editors of the Press. Last but not least I thank those who put up with me most continuously.
All my friends are dear to me and two of them I treasure with all my heart, Rina Guth and Michal Mussachy. This book is dedicated to my dear family because without their support and love I would not have been able to accomplish anything, and everything would have been unworthy: my grandparents Ruth and Erich Josef Kahn who believed in me all the way but did not live to see this book, my wonderful parents, Michal and Isaac Noga, my sisters, Dorit and Efrat, my beloved husband Ronnie and our children, our two trophies, Yael and Itamar.
Introduction
Under the lighted altar, a royal slab of purplemarble covers the bones of holy men.Here God’s grace sets before you the power of the apostles by the great pledges contained in this meager dust. Here lie father Andrew, the gloriously famed Luke, and Nazarius, a martyr glorious for the blood he shed; here are Protasius and his peer Gervasius, whom God made known after long ages to His servant Ambrose. One simple casket (arcula) embraces here his holy band, and in its tiny bosom embraces names so great.1
In these words written at the start of the fifth century, Paulinus of Nola describes what and how he concealed under the altar of the church he constructed in Fundi. Paulinus identifies the saints whose relics he deposited, and states the name of one of the contributors to his holy collection, Ambrose of Milan. Even more important to this book, Paulinus provides textual evidence for the use of caskets as containers of relics, i.e. reliquaries, at the turn of the century. Judging from the distribution of the Milanese relics throughout Italy and as far as Rouen, Bordeaux, and Hippo, Paulinus was not the first nor the only one to deposit relics translated to him by Ambrose.2
Around 396 Victricius of Rouen endorsed Ambrose’s distributive undertaking, praising the martyrum tropaea he had received in a sermon composed to mark the occasion.3 The textual testimonies of the last quarter of the fourth century and the beginning of the fifth, coincide in dating with the earliest silver reliquaries decorated with figurative themes, the subject matter of this study. It is precisely the correlation between the textual and visual evidence of the initiation of the cult of saints, that has given rise to an odd historiographical situation: contrary to the textual sources recording the rise of the cult of saints, which have been the subject of valuable scholarly activity in different disciplines,4 the objects most intimately associated with the cult, the containers of the relics, have rarely been considered as sources reflecting their spatio-temporal environment.
They have usually been taken simply as material evidence for the evolution of the cult of saints and as sources for the study of iconographical developments. Even in a recent article, where the fragmented relics are lucidly associated with the late antique aesthetic of fragmentation in poetry and in the visual arts, sarcophagi rather than reliquaries are made the test case.5 Such lack of attention to the containers of relics may be partly due to the fact that these movable objects are mostly without secure date and provenance. It is safer to base one’s conclusions on monumental art or identified textual sources. A relevant example is Michael Roberts’ remarkable book on the Liber Peristephanon of Prudentius.
This collection of poems, written towards the end of the fourth century, is read by Roberts as a substantial source from which ‘the reader can understand something of what the cult of the martyrs meant to a Christian of late antiquity’.6 The present study hopes to show that the early silver caskets are first-hand visual testimonies allowing the viewer to deepen his or her understanding of the subject. The reader may discover local and eschatological components comparable to the hagiographical texts devoted to the martyrs, and only hinted at in contemporary written ecclesiastical sources. Minor art is usually a minor theme in the history of art.
Belonging as they do to this category, the silver reliquary caskets have been looked at mostly in exhibition catalogues, where they were given a general provenance and a wide time-span.7 In 1971 Helmut Buschhausen published a catalogue devoted to early Christian reliquaries: Die spa¨tro¨mischen Metallscrinia und fru¨hchristlichen Reliquiare, vol. 1: Catalogue, Wiener Byzantinische Studien, 11 (Vienna: Bo¨hlau) (hereafter Buschhausen). This is a corpus comprising groups of caskets, among them caskets decorated with pagan subjects, caskets displaying Christian figurative themes, caskets with non-figurative ornamentation, and also some caskets made of materials other than silver, such as ivory, wood, or marble.
On the face of it, such a compilation should have been an invaluable source for further research.8 Yet, in the event, things turned out differently. Buschhausen’s publication in effect blocked scholarly activity in the field for the next generation,9 with one exception, a monograph published by Verana Alborino on the reliquary from the church of S. Nazaro, Milan10 (Catalogue no. 1), so far the only extensive piece of research to deal with a figurative silver reliquary from the early Christian period.11 Alborino’s iconographical analyses and stylistic comparisons led her to Milan between 374 and 386, when relics of the apostles were translated to the church of S. Nazaro.12 Her dissertation opened the way to further investigations, encouraging the study of individual reliquaries or small groups.13
If we limit ourselves to the silver reliquaries decorated with Christian figurative themes, the relevant entries in Buschhausen shrink to a group of twelve. Adding four further caskets, two omitted in his catalogue and two discovered later,14 we know of sixteen silver caskets decorated with Christian figurative themes and dated between the fourth and seventh centuries. The caskets have survived in different states, several more or less complete, some fragmentary, and others restored; they are in various sizes and decorated with various themes.15
Three of them are marked with Byzantine control stamps and can be approximately dated.16 No comprehensive catalogue is envisaged here, but rather a study of a selected, representative group of figurative decorated silver caskets with Christian themes, from which conclusions may be drawn regarding other objects apparently made to be containers. Of the sixteen, four form the core of the present study, while others figure in the comparative discussion. The four are the casket from Nea Herakleia (Catalogue no. 2), the Capsella Brivio (Catalogue no. 7), the Capsella Africana (Catalogue no. 9) and the oval casket from Grado (Catalogue no. 11).
They may qualify as representatives of early Christian reliquaries for the following reasons: not only does each have a complete decoration programme, but each presents a complex of scenes or figurative motifs rather than a single image or a recurrent motif. Further, none of the four resembles any of the others in thematic content or in style, and thus may be taken to reflect different origins and dating. A point of departure combining similarities of material and supposed function together with dissimilarities in iconography and style, promises interesting and unrepetitive research, with the likelihood of broadening our picture of the medium and of building up a chronological sequence within the group of silver caskets prior to the dated Byzantine examples.
At this point it may be useful to make more explicit my presupposition concerning the caskets’ purpose. Affirming their function as reliquaries depends on whether or not the same message can be read throughout the decoration programmes, based on the argument of a correlation between function and decoration. In other words, the facts that most of the caskets were found in churches, and that the general scholarly opinion is that they were made to serve as reliquaries, are not taken for granted. The study will not necessarily exclude caskets found in other contexts as potential relic containers. Two reservations can reasonably be kept in view: first, not all sixteen silver caskets were made for the same purpose; second, there is a possibility that among the caskets there may be reused containers, not originally intended as reliquaries.17
In analysing the four chosen caskets I have kept the following aims in mind: first of all, to decipher the images and to understand what directed the choice of scenes and symbols, some of which are combined here for the first time to our knowledge. Second, to date the four objects as accurately as possible, even though—and because—the field of early Christian minor art objects lacks a variety of securely dated objects. Third, to consider the caskets’ iconographical and stylistic relations to monumental art of the same period, as this may give a good indication of the intentions of the decoration programmes and their place of origin.
Fourth, to discover what message or messages the caskets transmit through their decoration programmes. Only then, after achieving results from the art history point of view, will it be possible to see how this information fits into the historical, social and theological background of the period, i.e. the cult of relics. 17 For reused containers holding relics in churches during the Middle Ages, see A. Shalem, ‘From Royal But the reader should take into account that this is first and foremost a study of works of art. Since early western Christian portable art in general lacks objects that are securely dated and localized, I hope that, as a result of all the above, the four caskets will offer some guidance in the field of early Christian liturgical art.
In particular, determining the origin and date of silver vessels made in the western part of the empire is important, because, unlike the repertoire of silver objects in Byzantium, which includes a large number of vessels marked and dated by control stamps, the silver works produced in the west are not stamped and their chronology is not defined.18 The only securely dated group of minor works in the west is that of the consuls’ ivories of the fifth century, inscribed with the names of the consuls.19 However, these represent a special iconography of state and a formal style that are seldom relevant to works outside the field of imperial art.
In contrast, the iconography and style of the silver reliquary caskets may throw light on works of art in other media and other contexts. The earliest caskets discussed here, that from Nea Herakleia and the Capsella Brivio, are decorated mainly with biblical scenes rather than images of saints other than the apostles. The later caskets, the Capsella Africana and the one from Grado, represent local martyrs. This distinction is reflected in the division of the study into two main chapters. In a detailed investigation of the iconography the typology of each scene or symbol participating in the programme was examined in a search for close parallels, and every image is considered in relation to the other parts of the programme. Further, to obtain a wider and better understanding of the programme, each component is compared with other appearances of the same image in various decoration schemes, representing different contexts in both minor and monumental art.
However, although monumental art is important from the stylistic point of view, the stylistic comparisons are first carried out within the same medium. Moving from the narrower to the wider, the comparisons within the field of silverware go on to other caskets and to non-silver objects, and conclude with monumental art. Not all the caskets participate in every stage of comparison; much depends on the characteristics of the specific style. But all are compared with monumental art, which is the most complex and most essential comparison, since it is only possible to date the minor and movable against the monumental and the stable.20 Nevertheless, as is often the case in early Christian portable art, no single method provides answers regarding place of origin and date.
Visual imagery and style have to be considered together; very often one contributes the general direction and the other gives the possible conclusion. Chapter Three compares and combines the results of the study, discussing the application of common qualities to function, notwithstanding preliminary differences. Finally, the relationship between the visual language and the written sources—historical, theological, and liturgical—in the specific context of the cult of relics is briefly considered. This is followed by a short concluding chapter and a catalogue of the sixteen known Christian figurative silver caskets, arranged according to the chronology established in the present study and described with identifying details and bibliographical references. 20 Unless the portable art is inscribed with a name indicating date.
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