Download PDF | Anthony Cutler, Arietta Papaconstantinou - The Material and the Ideal_ Essays in Medieval Art and Archaeology in Honour of Jean-Michel Spieser -Brill,2007.
303 Pages
THE MATERIAL AND THE IDEAL: AN INTRODUCTION
ANTHONY CUTLER
Noch eine Festschrift? Encore de Mélanges? Yet another collection of essays by many scholars in honour of one of their kind? The response to the scepticism implied in the question will, of course, depend on the respondent. If you ask the reader—most likely someone who has turned to a particular paper for information on a particular topic—you will hear, we trust, an endorsment of its utility. If you ask one of the individual authors—probably someone who, in the midst of producing his or her own book, has felt the need to thank the honorand for stimulus previously recerved—you will hear similar assent. But if you ask the destinataire, you will almost surely be met with denial: like Ammianus Marcellinus’ Cato on the subject of statues, Jean-Michel Spieser would reply “I would rather that good men should wonder why I did not deserve one rather than that they should mutter, ‘why was he given one?” (XIV. 6, 8)
Spieser’s modesty is even better known than the extraordinary range of topics in late antique and Byzantine art and archaeology on which he has written. Yet it is the latter that we celebrate in this book, written by his pupils, colleagues and friends whose own diverse topics express and, we hope, expand upon his areas of interest. Before turning to those, it may be useful for one of the book’s editors to comment on Spieser’s own achievement. Impossible, for the reason just stated, to encompass, I prefer to look in the main at one of his papers on the late antique city,! written a mere six years ago, that reflects his own work, that of others in the field, and the developments that both have undergone. Ever mindful of their mutual impact (and thus implicitly recalling a dictum of Susan Sontag’s),? he pointed first to the problem involved in the term polis that the ancients and we ourselves use for the phenomenon in question: “In a time of fundamental change,” he observed, “it is in the nature of language to preserve for a more or less long period of time the same word to describe a changing world, or to lose the lmk between a word and the reality to which it referred and use it for something new; likewise, different words are used for the same object or the same word for different objects.” The reason for this dialectic between continuity and difference is that “those responsible for [the] innovations were not always aware of them; traditional historiography told the story with the traditional frame of the city, without suspecting that ‘life had changed.””!
So widely established now is the notion of urbanism that it is easy to forget that the concept was unfamiliar until Paul Lemerle, Spieser’s teacher, used it with respect to Philippi, followed forty years later by Spieser who applied it to Thessaloniki® and, even earlier, to Greek cities generally.’ Until that time “archaeologists were more aware of, and more interested in, the history of isolated buildings than in the evolution of their context, the city that surrounded them; and, as regards a building, more interested in chronology in itself rather than in explaining its evolution.”® Like Spieser, historians of art and architecture employ this “Darwinian” term,’ a word that in fact the Victorian scientist used rarely, preferring the phrase “descent with variation.” Given the diverse experiences of late antique towns and objects, this term may actually be more appropriate. Of this understanding there is now a hint in Spieser: “The decay of one or a few cities does not automatically mean the decay of cities in general, nor does the continuing life and preservation of important monuments in others mean that nothing has changed.”
Peculiar to that which he calls “the mutated society of Late Antiquity,” and of his insights into this set of phenomena, is Spieser’s apprehension of the transformative part played by Christianity. “Churches,” for example, “can even be seen as a new kind of monumental building, adding to the traditional types and not as a substitute for them.”!! Responsible for this innovation were bishops who “claimed for themselves the role of evergetes, traditionally in the hands of those [local aristocrats] who [had] held power in the cities.”!? And, supporting his conclusion that “the system was held together by material conditions, ...but also—the other side of the same coin—by a set of human relationships, by human considerations of what the world was or should be,” he adduces the role of charity in a new economy that displayed “preoccupation with one’s own salvation.” Here he could have mentioned the way this model set an example not only for the donor’s Christian peers but also for Islamic institutions such as zakat (alms giving) and the wagf (endowed foundation). But the principle involved is the same: religious faith “became an aspect of social behaviour,” a synergy unknown in the classical world.
It is no surprise that the inter-relationship of personal and collective action would finally affect ritual and artistic performance. “New places invert[ed] the characteristics of the older one[s]: cemeteries became places to assemble; gold and the lavishly decorated internal space of the church, where man faces his God represented in the vault of the apse, took the place of the open space, sub divo, of antiquity. In a structural parallel, the man who is preoccupied with his soul, who scrutinizes his self, takes the place of the man whose body was inscribed in the word.”'* More is involved here than the recognition of analogies between architecture, ideology and socio-economic organization. Each is symptomatic, indeed constitutive of the others, even when the first two aspects are considered “superstructures” conceived and constructed on the basis of the last. My use, not Spieser’s, of the Marxist term, clumsy as it is, serves to remind us that his initial concern has always been with the fabric, the matena prima of an object—be it a poor a city—that allowed the creation of its shape, of the way it functioned, and of its affect.
In this light, the meaning of the present book’s main title should now be clear. In a variety of ways all its contributors examine the tension, and thereby help to span the gap, between, first, the materiality of objects and the circumstances into which they were inserted, and, second, between the significance of this nexus and that which we impute to it today. Beat Brenk considers the changing role of the apse as it was transformed from a space inhabited by statuary in Roman imperial cult chambers into a precinct lined with mosaic or fresco in early churches. In so doing, he offers a more nuanced picture than the customarily observed antithesis between antique three-dimensionality and Christian two-dimensional decoration. Going beyond the vexed concept of ekphrasis, Arietta Papaconstantinou shows how much important information about the conditions and constraints affecting church building—and especially lost structures—can be won from close study of late antique texts. Widening this focus, Etleva Nallbani surveys the implications of recent archaeological investigation in the western Balkans, excavations in which she has participated, for demographic movements, patterns of human occupation and mortuary practice between the fifth and seventh centuries. Returning us to Constantinople, and particularly to imperial and aristocratic foundations, Brigitte Pitarakis studies the migration of forms used on things made for personal embellishment to the monumental adornment of vaults, cornices and capitals. These applications are more than a matter of aesthetics; they are demonstrated by the material evidence for tools originally used, for example, in the boring of gems and metalwork, and still apparent in the fragments of St. Polyeuktos. Implicitly wielding Occam’s razor, she suggests that local techniques, especially openwork and incrustation, were at least as responsible as Sasanian “influence” in re-shaping Byzantine mural decoration in the time of Justinian I.
The talents of the goldsmith were employed in the production of diplomatic gifts offered on such occasions as the arrival of delegations from the amirs of ‘Tarsos and Amida, from Umayyad Cordoba, and that led by Olga of Kiev herself in the middle of the tenth century. More or less detailed reports on the receptions of these visitors are offered by the Byzantine Book of Ceremonies and continue to excite scholarly controversy. Here, Jeffrey Featherstone offers the first complete English translation of this record, a version that should expand its audience, and a contribution not the least value of which are his anno-tations on technical terminology and the fact that they are based on a newly discovered manuscript of text.
Even more recently there has come to light a probably contemporary ivory plaque depicting the death of Ignatius of Antioch, one of only three pieces in this medium to display a scene of martyrdom. ‘Tiny and in ruinous condition, in the reading of Nancy Sevéenko and the author of this Introduction, even while its material characteristics suggest a work of the late tenth century, it seems to demand a eucharistic interpretation based on the most famous legend associated with this sainted early Christian bishop. Much later but still best explicated in liturgical terms!® are the murals of Lesnovo, the mausoleum of the Serbian despotes, Jovan Oliver. Ivana Jevti¢ carefully unpacks the compound of ancient and medieval, classical and folkloric imagery that surrounds the kosmokrator in the narthex of this church. Given that the space was used for funerary ceremonies and commemorations, once again we have a demonstration of the bearing of a programme of wall painting on its immediate setting.
If the relation between sacred decoration and its physical content was deliberate and unequivocal, much more diverse were the resonances of household vessels. In the first of three papers that touch upon early interests of Spieser’s, Sharon Gerstel draws out the multivalency of the ceramic pot, the humble utensil which despite, and sometimes because of, its very simplicity and familiarity served in both literature and art purposes that ranged from a marker of social status to a rich and diverse body of metaphor. Tropologies of this sort were one way in which the power of Byzantine artefacts could exceed their initially intended functions; their “biographies” are another. Maria Parani assembles a telling sample of archaeological and textual (especially legal) references to objects afier their creation, witnesses that utter the means whereby we can listen to their echoes in the lives of their possessors. Reverting to the level of manufacture, Véronique Francois assesses the problem posed by the apparent continuity of ceramic production from Greek Nicaea to Ottoman Iznik. She looks beyond the raw materials (clay, firewood, water) necessary to the making of the town’s well-known white and polychrome wares to its geography and history between the tenth and the thirteenth century and, in this light, argues that the painted faience prepared for the sultan and privileged classes of Istanbul in the second half of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century do not represent an unbroken sequence with the Byzantine era.
Francois’ awareness of a world spatially and chronologically beyond that treated in most of the papers in this book is also the first to consider the topic known to bibliographers as the “Wechselwirkung der byzantinischen Kunst.”!” Almost by definition a motley group, its amorphous character is dictated by the fact that its constituents normally conceive of it as a realm shaped by the impact of a “centre” on its “periphery.” By contrast, much is to be said for looking at the world apres et outre Byzance on its own terms as societies that took those things that were useful to them and turned them to their own purposes. These (for Byzantinists) inconvenient gestures of independence always existed and were in full spate in the first decades of the twelfth century, the period to which Elisabeth Yota attributes a little known Gospelbook in the Biblioteca Laurenziana (Conv. Soppr. gr. 160). Its evangelist portraits and Deésis miniature present fairly conventional types, but its Pentecost and Descent from the Cross display iconographies uncommon in Middle Byzantine art. Furthermore, the integrated scenes of the Marys at the Tomb and Christ’s appearance to them find slightly later counterparts in Syriac, Copto-Arabic and Armenian manuscripts, and precedents in pre-Iconoclastic Syria and Palestine, the region to which Yota assigns the book, an attribution supported by its palaeography. Not content merely to localize this set of idiosyncrasies, she demonstrates the role that the choice and disposition of its miniatures play in the theological scheme of the book as a whole.
Attention paid to the concerns of the cultures that exploited a representation as much as to its “source” is likewise the hermeneutic strategy of Jannic Durand as he investigates a version of the Saimte Face painted on leather and kept until 1970 (when it was stolen) in the abbey of St.-Pierre de Corbie. For all its superficial similarity to the Mandylion, what is interesting about the piece is its place in a long-lived series of images of the Veronica generated in Rome and after the Jubilee Year of 1300. Not the least intriguing aspect of Durand’s exposition is historiographical: the thrall that relics supposedly from Constantinople exerted on scholars down to the time of Count Paul Riant in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and still longer in French popular devotion.
The fascination, not to say the obsession, with exuviae from Byzantium did not end with Riant’s critical investigations. As Jean Wirth shows in the concluding essay in our volume the story properly extends to the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century when senior academics propagated the idea of a series of Eastern “influences” on Western medieval art that to this day remains in some circles a shibboleth of scholarship. Germinating a seed planted by Spieser,!® Wirth scrutinizes and largely rejects the thesis that icons served as the principal intermediaries whereby ancient forms (as against iconography) were transmitted to French Gothic carving. In comparison with the direct study of nature and surviving vestiges of the antique, he suggests, Byzantine art probably had a retardatory effect on sculptors in the Ile-de-France; in any case until about 1200 things Byzantine would have been regarded as exotic rather than paradigmatic.
Radical as this critique may seem, it beautifully enacts at least the second half of an injunction issued nearly 40 years ago by a great art historical theorist and practitioner: Unless he is an annalist or a chronicler, the historian communicates a pattern which was invisible to his subjects when they lived it, and unknown to his contemporaries before he detected it.!9 George Kubler’s observation was recently echoed by Jean-Michel Spieser, albeit in more limited form. It cannot be rehearsed too many times.
No Introduction would be complete without a list of acknowledgements. We are obliged, first, to Paul Magdalino who welcomed this book into this series, The Medieval Mediterranean, and to each of the contributors who tried to meet the (repeatedly postponed) deadlines that we hoped to impose. To Marcella Mulder, who heroically undertook to edit the result, our warmest thanks. Finally, on a personal note, my gratitude to Kimberly Ivancovich, my research assistant, without whom the book would never have come to pass; and especially to Arietta Papaconstantinou for being such a gracious co-editor.
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