Download PDF | Cecily Hilsdale - Byzantine Art and Diplomacy in an Age of Decline-Cambridge University Press (2014).
415 Pages
The Late Byzantine period (1261–1453) is marked by a paradoxical discrepancy between economic weakness and cultural strength. The apparent enigma can be resolved by recognizing that later Byzantine diplomatic strategies, despite or because of diminishing political advantage, relied on an increasingly desirable cultural and artistic heritage.
This book reassesses the role of the visual arts in this era by examining the imperial image and the gift as reconceived in the final two centuries of the Byzantine Empire. In particular, it traces a series of luxury objects created specifically for diplomatic exchange with such courts as Genoa, Paris, andMoscow alongside key examples of imperial imagery and ritual.
By questioning how political decline reconfigured the visual culture of empire, Professor Hilsdale offers a more nuanced and dynamic account of medieval cultural exchange that considers the temporal dimensions of power and the changing fates of empires. cecily j. hilsdale is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University.
Her research concerns cultural exchange in the medieval Mediterranean, in particular the circulation of Byzantine luxury objects as diplomatic gifts, as well as the related dissemination of eastern styles, techniques, iconographies, and ideologies of imperium.
Acknowledgements This book offers a critical reappraisal of the visual arts in the final centuries of the Byzantine Empire. As such, it owes a great debt to the “Byzantium: Faith and Power” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2004 and the scholarly momentum that followed in its wake. It was this exhibition that prompted me to reframe my longstanding interests in art and diplomacy around the question of decline in the later Byzantine period. But the thinking that led to this reframing and to the refining of this book’s central thematics would not have been possible without the intellectual generosity, interest, and engagement that developed through sustained dialogue with a range of peers and mentors.
Though it is not possible to list all of those who have in some way influenced this project, special mention goes to Nell Andrew, Jennifer Ball, Charles Barber, Elena Boeck, Sarah Brooks, Annemarie Weyl Carr, Kristen Collins, Sally Cornelison, Anthony Cutler, Antony Eastmond, Helen Evans, Hannah Feldman, Megan Holmes, Anthony Kaldellis, Holger Klein, Aden Kumler, Christopher MacEvitt, Ruth Macrides, Kathleen Maxwell, Margaret Mullett, Bob Ousterhout, Maria Parani, Georgi Parpulov, Glenn Peers, Daniel Richter, Nancy Sev ˇ cenko, Alice-Mary Talbot, ˇ Allie Terry-Fritsch, Thelma Thomas, Galina Tirnanic, Alicia Walker, Warren Woodfin, and last but certainly not least Ann Marie Yasin, who has been a constant source of support and inspiration. A number of individuals read portions of this study in advance of its publication and offered generous comments.
Chapter 3 benefited from Jonathan Shea’s numismatic expertise, and Chapter 5 was vastly improved by Christian Raffensperger’s extensive knowledge of the Russian material. My longtime Chicago interlocutors Lucy Pick, Daisy Delogu, and Rebecca Zorach read much of the book as a series of works in progress. Their critical insights and encouragement were fundamental to the development of the project.
Portions of the final text were read by Anna Christidou and Tera Lee Hedrick, who also compiled the index. Jonathan Sachs and the anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press offered feedback on the complete manuscript. I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to all my readers for their insightful comments; needless to say, the faults that remain in the final text are entirely my own.
A number of institutions have supported this project and it is my pleasure to acknowledge and thank them formally here. My research has been supported by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, a Junior Fellowship from Northwestern University’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, an Individual Research Grant from Northwestern University, a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and most recently a book subvention from the Medieval Academy of America.
I would also like to thank Dumbarton Oaks for allowing me to include as Chapter 1 a slightly revised version of my article “The Imperial Image at the End of Exile: The Byzantine Embroidered Silk in Genoa and the Treaty of Nymphaion (1261),” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 64 (2010), 151–99 (C 2011, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Trustees for Harvard University). The final form of the book has also benefited from wonderful research assistants at McGill University, including Victoria Addonna, Jackson Davidow, and Alexandra Kelebay, who provided much-needed help with image permissions.
I would also like to extend my gratitude to the many collections that have offered permission to publish portions of their holdings and to thank the many individuals who have helped facilitate the process of acquiring those images, especially Kimberly Bowes. At Cambridge University Press, I would like to thank Michael Sharp for his early interest in and continued commitment to this project, as well as Elizabeth Hanlon for shepherding the manuscript so efficiently through to publication.
While work on this book progressed through a range of academic posts across the Midwest from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Lawrence, Kansas, to Northwestern University, it came to completion in Montreal at McGill University, where it benefited from the support and encouragement of my colleagues in the Art History and Communication Studies Department. In particular, I thank Angela Vanhaelen for her mentorship: she was instrumental in bringing me to McGill at precisely the right moment in my personal life and my academic career.
Although the book took on its final form at McGill, its roots reach back further than I would like to admit, to the myriad graduate seminars on Byzantine art at the University of Chicago offered by Robert S. Nelson, my doktorvaterwho, quite frankly, taught me most of what I know about Byzantium. Although this book bears only a loose connection to the dissertation I wrote under his direction, it was through his discipline, combined with the intellectually stimulating environment of the University of Chicago, that my practice was shaped and the foundation for my current trajectory was laid out firmly. I would like to acknowledge my other mentors there as well: the late Michael Camille for his gleeful excitement about all things medieval, Walter Kaegi for his comprehensive introduction to Byzantine historiography, Tom Cummins for his wicked wit and anthropological rigor, and, especially, Linda Seidel for serving as an inspiration in so many ways and for insisting that I never lose sight of the stakes of an argument.
At the University of Chicago I also benefited from an intellectually generous cohort of fellow Byzantinists, many of whom continue to serve as the most challenging and supportive of interlocutors. The late Angela Volan in particular deserves special mention: although her brilliance was cut tragically short, her memory lives on. Byzantine texts are fond of expressing gratitude through insufficiency. Seldom are words capable of capturing the magnitude of a sentiment; words fall short where gratitude is beyond measure. For gifts that should never be measured but hopefully reciprocated in some small way, I thank Jonathan Sachs most of all, and I eagerly await the new chapter in our lives that has begun with the little belette growing inside me as I type.
Introduction:
the imperial image as gift As Latin Crusaders gazed intently at the city of Constantinople for the first time in June 1203, Geoffroi de Villehardouin claimed that there was “no man so brave and daring that his flesh did not shudder at the sight.”1 Even docked at a distance from the illustrious Byzantine capital on the Bosphoros, rich palaces and tall churches could be seen beyond the city’s famed lofty walls and towers.
While Constantinople had held a privileged position in the medieval Mediterranean as the center of luxury, learning, and holy Christian relics since its foundation by Constantine the Great in the fourth century, the arrival and subsequent conquests of the Crusaders inaugurated a new era for the capital and the larger empire. After more than half a century of Latin occupation (1204–61), which included the massive exportation of the city’s most precious treasures, the Byzantines reclaimed Constantinople.
But the reconquest came at a great cost, and scholars have generally characterized the subsequent two centuries as a period of decline marked by political fragility and economic scarcity. In contrast to the awe of the European Crusaders, expressed in such visceral terms by Villehardouin, over a century later in the mid-fourteenth century, Byzantine historian Nikephoros Gregoras lamented the diminished circumstances of his once-celebrated capital.
After the coronation of Byzantine Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos in 1347, Gregoras observed that there was nothing left in the imperial treasury “but air and dust and, as they say, the atoms of Epicurus.”2 Nostalgic laments such as this have shaped not only contemporary perceptions but also most modern scholarly assessments of what has come to be known as the Late Byzantine or Palaiologan period, or the period between the Byzantine restoration of Constantinople in 1261 and the final conquest of the city by the Ottomans in 1453.
Nostalgia is a seductive sentiment. How can we not be moved by the fact that the Late Byzantine imperial crown worn by John VI at his coronation was inlaid with mere colored glass, the original gems having been pawned to the Republic of Venice earlier in the century?3 Notions of decline and twilight, however, overshadow a reality of more nuanced cultural relations during the Palaiologan period.
In the face of this economic and political adversity, classical education and intellectual life flourished. Indeed, even in lamenting the sad state of the treasury, Gregoras betrays his learned status and his ties to a long Hellenic heritage by describing bankruptcy (emptiness) in Epicurean terms. The visual arts thrived as well, as testified, for instance, by the celebrated mosaics and frescoes of Constantinople’s Church of the Chora and the myriad icons and precious portable objects brought together in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2004 exhibition “Byzantium: Faith and Power, 1261–1557.”4 The unsurpassed vibrancy of Byzantine art during this period has often been described, although somewhat problematically, as a “Palaiologan Renaissance,” and a spate of recent exhibitions have paid tribute to the artistic traditions of later Byzantium on a grand scale.5 In celebrating the visual culture of the final two centuries of Byzantium, an acknowledgment of the empire’s diminished political and economic standing serves only to highlight the very strengths of its artistic traditions. Despite poverty and political fragility, the arts of the era held together the larger Orthodox oikoumene.
This book proceeds from the claim that the arts thrived in the face of political and economic decline, but it further interrogates the particular mechanisms by which the visual arts defined later Byzantium. How and why were certain visual strategies adopted in the face of the decline felt so acutely by Gregoras and other intellectuals of the time? Furthermore, what sort of image did rulers of this impoverished empire cultivate and project to the wider medieval world? Which particular ideological associations to the past were visually cultivated and which were elided? Although scholars recognize the paradoxical discrepancy between economic weakness and cultural strength during this period, none of them has pursued an explanation for this phenomenon. One way to understand this apparent enigma, this book suggests, is to recognize that later Byzantine diplomatic strategies, despite or because of diminishing political advantage, relied on an increasingly desirable cultural and artistic heritage. In the later Byzantine period, power must, out of economic necessity, be constructed in non-monetary terms within the realm of culture. In an attempt to reassess the role of cultural production in an era most often described in terms of decline, this study focuses on the intersection of two central and related thematics – the imperial image and the gift – as they are reconceived in the final centuries of the Byzantine Empire. Through the analysis of art objects created specifically for diplomatic exchange alongside key examples of Palaiologan imperial imagery and ritual, this book traces the circulation of the image of the emperor – in such sumptuous materials as silk, bronze, gold, and vellum – at the end of the empire. Drawing on diverse visual and textual materials that have traditionally been eclipsed in favor of the earlier Byzantine period, this book interrogates the manner in which previous visual paradigms of sovereignty and generosity were adapted to suit diminished contemporary realities. It is therefore situated at the convergence of art, empire, and decline. In this way, this book expands discussions of cultural exchange and boundary crossings by prompting us to question how the concept of decline reconfigures categories of wealth and value, categories that lie at the core of cultural exchange. Pharmakon and apotropaion In an encomium for Michael VIII Palaiologos, court orator Manuel Holobolos expresses the power of the emperor’s image as a gift. According to Holobolos, at the negotiations of the Treaty of Nymphaion through which the Genoese joined forces with Michael Palaiologos with the aim of recovering Constantinople (1261), the Genoese requested an image of the emperor as a visible expression of protection and love for their city. The imperial image for the Genoese, Holobolos claims, would be a great remedy, a strong defense, an averter, a powerful parapet, a strong tower, and an adamantine wall.7 The word choices here are significant. Not only is the imperial image associated with key fortifications to protect a city (parapet, tower, wall), it is also described as a pharmakon (φάρμακον) and an apotropaion (ἀποτρόπαιον). The former, an ambiguous term, which can be translated in entirely opposite, almost contradictory ways, holds a privileged position in theoretical discussions of gift-giving,8 while the latter is suggestive of cult images and amulets. Holobolos thus ascribes to the imperial image an efficacy usually reserved for sacred icons in Byzantium.9 The Virgin’s icon was understood to be particularly efficacious. The Akathistos Hymn hails the Theotokos as the “impregnable wall of the kingdom . . . through whom trophies are raised up . . . [and] through whom enemies fall,” and her icon famously led battles and processions along Constantinople’s walls at key perilous moments.10 In the oration, however, Holobolos is describing the potency of the image of the emperor, not the Virgin, and this raises complicated issues of imperial allegiance and hierarchy. The imperial image in Byzantium constituted the fundamental visual manifestation of sovereignty, and it often commemorated imperial munificence. In the heart of the empire at Hagia Sophia, the celebrated suite of imperial mosaics on the easternmost wall of the south gallery conveys the broader ideology of imperial largesse through the representation of very specific acts of donation to the church (Figure 0.1). These panels present a double articulation of imperial gift-giving separated by roughly a century: Constantine IX Monomachos (r. 1042–55) and Zoe with Christ occupy the north side of the wall to the viewer’s left (Figure 0.2), and John II Komnenos (r. 1118–43) and Eirene with the Virgin and Child appear on the south side to the right (Figure 0.3).11 The Macedonian and Komnenian emperors hold sacks of money, their monetary offering for the church, and the empresses carry scrolls with inscriptions, signaling a recording of the donation.12 The emperor’s role as benefactor of the church is here made visually explicit, as imperial largesse funded the celebration of the liturgy in the Great Church. The mosaics themselves in turn constitute a gift to the church, one that memorializes such imperial munificence.13 The middle Byzantine mosaics of the upper gallery of Hagia Sophia encapsulate the manner in which the imperial office is inscribed through the ritual performance and visual commemoration of gift-giving. A key innovation in imperial imagery in the later Byzantine period testifies to the continued if not closer alignment of the imperial image with largesse. The emperor’s effigy was included on acts of donation themselves, chrysobulls, for the first time in the early Palaiologan period.14 A number of chrysobulls adorned with illuminated portraits survive from the Palaiologan period, three of which are associated with Andronikos II (r. 1282–1328), including one currently in the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens granting and extending the privileges of the metropolitan of Monembasia in 1301 (Figure 0.4).15 Composed of four vellum sheets, which joined together reach nearly 80 inches in length, the chrysobull concludes with the emperor’s signature in deep red ink and commences with a miniature of Andronikos offering to Christ a rolled white scroll meant to reference the chrysobull itself. The miniature thus depicts the emperor in the act of donating the very scroll that bears both the representation as well as the textual attestation of the gift itself. The imperial portrait on Palaiologan chrysobulls such as this solidifies the emperor’s gift in an almost legal manner, while simultaneously transforming the viewer into a witness to the transaction.
Innovations such as this highlight the alignment of the imperial image and the gift in later Byzantium. Not surprisingly, there is a rich corpus of visual material that relates to imperial gift exchange in its various permutations. Accordingly, this book treats the later Byzantine imperial image as a gift, and a series of objects that invoke gift-giving constitutes its archive. Not all the objects, however, are gifts per se. Chapter 3, for example, focuses on coinage, traditionally understood as the means of economic exchange in contradistinction to the gift. But in Byzantium, the emperor dispersed coins bearing his effigy in a ritualized performance much closer to giving than buying or selling. Moreover, in my reading of the radical innovations in numismatic iconography following the Byzantine restoration of Constantinople in 1261, coins constitute an image of thanksgiving in and of themselves linked to the lost bronze monumental representation of imperial giving, which is the subject of Chapter 2. The other chapters examine objects created as gifts and extended to such varied sites as Genoa, Paris, and Moscow: one explicitly associated with a diplomatic treaty, another offered at the conclusion of a failed diplomatic mission, and yet another following upon a marriage alliance. Despite variations, all the objects under investigation engage the action of giving, which is inflected with subtle though discernible calibrations of hierarchy. Furthermore, they all represent the emperor in relation to the action of giving. In this way, this book associates the image of the emperor with the matter of gift-giving. As elucidated by a substantial body of anthropological scholarship, gift-giving is neither free nor disinterested, but rather works in complex ways to establish and recalibrate contingent relations of power and hierarchy. For this reason, my attention to the imperial image as a gift provides a crucial optic for re-evaluating the reconfiguration of Byzantine sovereignty at a time of diminished political sway through one of its most important representations: the image of the emperor. Throughout the Byzantine Empire, the likeness of the emperor and imperial largesse consistently served as a centerpiece for diplomatic strategies. Rich source material from the middle Byzantine period exposes the protocols of Byzantine diplomacy. These primary sources have been culled by scholars to demonstrate the centrality of imperial largesse to the notion of Byzantine identity. Imperial sources adumbrate what kinds of gifts are appropriate for foreign ambassadors, both at court in Constantinople and abroad, and they emphasize the diplomatic rituals of reciprocity and display as fundamental to negotiations. The emperor, as the embodiment of empire, establishes and reinforces his superiority through extravagant demonstrations of largesse, and he solidifies alliances through such means. It is through the giving of gifts and the resulting enactment of allegiances that the very contours of the empire are drawn. But this model becomes problematic when seen through the lens of the later Byzantine period and its constricted visions of imperium. If hierarchy is implicit in imperial gifts from Constantinople, what happens when the distance between real and represented grandeur becomes so vast? In other words, if to give a gift – and an imperial image as a gift in particular – is to inscribe hierarchy and to position the recipient as indebted, how can a gift from a beleaguered empire in the throes of disintegration convey superiority? What are the precise mechanisms by which giving can still convey the greatness of its giver? These questions prompt a critical rethinking of our understanding of the period, not only of the role of Byzantium within other cultural formations but also of the relation of the visual arts to empire, ascendency, and decline. Another development of the Palaiologan period underscores the power of the emperor’s portrait to proclaim his suzerainty: the imperial image became codified as official insignia in court dress in the later Byzantine period.17 Pseudo-Kodinos explicitly describes a headdress that bears an imperial portrait as a skaranikon, 18 representations of which are attested in most media, both portable and monumental.19 Among the most notable examples is the fourteenth-century typikon for the convent of the Mother of God of Certain Hope in Constantinople, known as the Lincoln College Typikon, which includes a series of portraits of family members such as Theodore Synadenos wearing precisely this tall headdress adorned with the effigy of the emperor (Figure 0.5).20 It is also depicted on a group of anonymous courtiers in the fresco cycle of the Akathistos Hymn on the eastern wall of the narthex of the Katholikon of the Holy Trinity in Cozia, Valachia (Figure 0.6).21 Here a group of dignitaries wearing skaranika, which bear a bust-length outline of the emperor, stand behind the emperor himself, who gestures in reverence toward the icon of the Virgin at the center of the composition, which is mounted above an embroidered podea echoing an image of the emperor in prayer. Such an image, which takes as its inspiration the twenty-third strophe of the Akathistos, brings together two of Byzantium’s most potent images – that of the Virgin and of the emperor – and showcases each of them as worthy of veneration and emulation. The skaranikon served to visualize imperial and courtly authority in clearly legible sartorial terms: it glorified the imperial office by picturing the effigy of the emperor as the source, even the defining feature, of the elevated status of its wearer.22 The imperial image was conceptualized as a privilege to be worn as a symbol of allegiance, precedence, and rank. Only a privileged few were given the honor of wearing the emperor’s likeness. Although the emperor’s image as a codified sartorial component of the imperial court hierarchy originates in the Palaiologan period, the imperial image was deployed diplomatically much earlier. The emperor’s likeness proclaimed his suzerainty both within the empire and within the realm of foreign diplomacy.23 To offer an imperial image as a gift is to inscribe Byzantine hierarchy. It is to prescribe allegiance through an act of seeming generosity, and the logic of this contradiction relates to the hierarchical stakes of gift-giving more broadly. Historicizing imperial giving A contradiction lies at the heart of the term “gift.” The Oxford English Dictionary emphatically stresses the free and disinterested nature of a gift, but it is here understood as deeply imbued with agendas of hierarchy and reciprocity.24 A gift, in general usage and by definition, is something freely given; it is predicated on a lack of self-interest. Whether property, a thing, an experience, or even personhood itself, a gift is offered in exchange for nothing. Yet anthropologist Marcel Mauss in his Essai sur le don famously declared that there could be no free gift and that giving always involves self-interest to a certain degree.25 From a philological-linguistic perspective, Emile Benveniste has traced the ambivalent etymology of the gift in Indo- ´ European language, demonstrating that the languages of giving and taking are intimately related.26 Later Jacques Derrida called the free gift further into question, claiming that there could be no gift at all, let alone a free one: to give always already negates the giving.27 At its core, Mauss’s study of the gift represents a commitment to the principle of reciprocity. Cyclical rather than terminal, gifts, for Mauss, instill three obligations: to give, to receive, and to return. Anthropologists and social scientists have taken issue with the spiritual logic of this reciprocal model and in particular with the mechanism compelling reciprocation or the spirit of the thing given. For others, Mauss’s work serves as a springboard for related aspects of prestation28 such as debt, expenditure, and largesse. Maurice Godelier, for example, revisits Mauss in order to consider sacred objects that do not circulate, proposing that the logic of such gifts concerns the ungiveable, a proposal similar in many ways to Annette Weiner’s examination of inalienable possessions, which were meant to be guarded rather than extended as gifts.29 Complicating Mauss’s neat cyclicality, Pierre Bourdieu characterizes the gift as a profound articulation of risk by highlighting the associated elements of contingency and implied danger that result from the fundamental uncertainty of whether, what, or when a return or counter-gift will appear.30 He thus reads giving as merely an incomplete gesture, emphasizing that the cyclical nature of the exchange – the paths, logic, and effects of gifts – can only be appreciated fully in retrospect. Much of our understanding of medieval conceptions of gift exchange is due to the survival of the Book of Gifts and Rarities (Kitab al-Hadaya wa al-Tuhaf), an Arabic compilation of ceremonial court exchanges.31 The language of reciprocity is explicit in Arabic, which exhibits a finely tuned semantic range for expressing gifting. Two different words for “gift” are specified: one signifies a contract with no expectation of return and is used commonly for diplomatic gifts, while a second implies the obligation of a return gift from the recipient. The distinction, in other words, is between conditional and unconditional gifts.32 An often-cited anecdote from this medieval compilation explicates the competitive nature of gift-gifting crossculturally. The text reports the response to a gift sent by a Byzantine emperor to Caliph al-Ma’mun with the following instructions: “Send him a gift a hundred times greater than his, so that he realizes the glory of Islam and the grace that Allah bestowed on us through it.”33 This passage confirms the basic premise advanced by anthropologists that giving is fundamentally agonistic and that it triggers shifts in power and difference. Hierarchy, this passage suggests, is articulated through the transfer of sumptuous presents. Anthony Cutler has elucidated the dynamics of prestation in the context of this text alongside contemporary Byzantine sources in relation to anthropological theories. Evaluation or assessment, for example, is one point of similarity between the Arabic Book of Gifts and Rarities and the roughly contemporaneous Greek compilation of court ceremonial known as the Book of Ceremonies. 34 In the account of the imperial reception of Olga of Kiev in Constantinople, the Byzantine source emphasizes gift assessment: the text relates how the gift is brought first “to the magistros so that he knows what each gift [is worth], so that he will be able to recall to the emperor at the time of the exchange of gifts what he should return through his ambassadors.”35 Diplomatic gifting at the highest level of the imperial administration, this episode suggests, involved careful calculation. Although this Greek text lacks the explicitly agonistic aspect of prestation found in the Kitab al-Hadaya, it makes it abundantly clear that gift exchange was strategic and that giving ultimately concerned getting.
The strategic necessity of thinking about gifts in the diplomatic context is elucidated by a tenth-century Byzantine packing list that specifies luxury items to be brought on military expeditions for distribution to foreigners.36 According to the specifications of this prescriptive list, the imperial vestiarion’s load should include the imperial regalia, clothing, and items of imperial ceremonial (vessels, swords, perfumes, textiles, etc.), books (liturgical, strategic and prognostic manuals, and histories), and miscellaneous medical substances.37 In addition to these items, according to the text, both textiles and specie were to be included for distribution. Tailored and untailored cloths of varying degrees of quality and with an abundance of decorative features from stripes to eagles, imperial symbol, and hornets, all with precisely specified monetary values, were to be brought along to be dispatched to distinguished powerful foreigners.38 But the question of how such largesse should be distributed apparently required judiciousness. An anonymous sixth-century Byzantine treatise on strategy speaks of the importance of training envoys in the arena of diplomatic gift exchange. An ambassador sent on a mission bearing gifts must judge whether to extend all the gifts brought along, to retain the most valuable, or to hold back the gifts and official letters altogether and deliver only expressions of friendship.39 The text suggests that the middle ground – offering some of the gifts but not all of them – is the best option when dealing with a potential aggressor as it reduces hostility without enriching the enemy.40 A critical methodological point emerges from these sources. Generally gifts were extended strategically as part of negotiations for or celebrations of peace, a peace that often did not last the lifetime of the gift itself. To read gifts as evidence for friendly relations is therefore to miss the active role they played in establishing those very relations by their exchange; it is to miss their agency in the political sphere. A recognition of the strategically significant motivation of giving prompts us to see an element of desire in gifts. If giving is strategic, as contemporary sources make clear, gifts possess a measure of the optative, the linguistic register or grammatical mood of wish or desire. Objects extended as gifts, it is here suggested, cannot be read as evidence for social relations in a straightforward manner. A gift rarely illustrates political allegiance, but rather is often exchanged in an attempt to establish such allegiance. A liturgical vestment sent from Constantinople to Moscow in the early fifteenth century, for example, visually celebrates the intertwined sacro-imperial authority of the Byzantine capital (Figures 5.2–5.5). But my reading of the complicated program of this sumptuous vestment in Chapter 5 situates the motivation of its commission precisely in the loosening of imperial ties with Moscow. Likewise, as argued in Chapter 4, the deluxe manuscript sent to Paris at roughly the same time is motivated by failure rather than success (Figures 4.3–4.4). Its commissioning follows on the heels of the emperor’s protracted, and ultimately failed, mission to Western Europe in an attempt to secure aid for Constantinople. These gifts, in other words, were extended in the hope of strengthening ties and building support. Their entire organization was fundamentally strategic and contrived to underscore the Byzantine desire for future allegiance. There are further methodological implications for invoking analytic tools derived from the field of anthropology within the discipline of art history. In theorizing material gifts, anthropologists and social scientists have for the most part focused on tangible goods of a somewhat generic character, such as foodstuffs or kula shells. The formal particularities of individual objects generally lie outside their analysis and thus the contexts of exchange are privileged over the objects of exchange. On this point, art historians are positioned to offer a significant intervention. The tools of analysis particular to the discipline – stylistic, technical, iconographical, and other – allow for a thorough investigation of the specific material and formal properties of medieval gifts and prestation. It is one thing for textual scholars to recognize the power and hierarchy inherent in gift exchange, and quite another for art historians to elaborate precisely how such agendas are visually constructed by relying on texts, objects, images, and spatial environments. Nonetheless, anthropologists have taught us to recognize the importance of the ritual context in which gifts are exchanged as well as the social relations triggered by their exchange. An account of the visual dimensions of prestation therefore entails an examination of how the dynamics of obligation and reciprocity are visually encoded not only in objects and images but also in the spaces of their ceremonial performance, display, or concealment. Robin Cormack, for example, has considered the imperial palace of Constantinople as the ritual setting for the enactment of authority through gift-giving.41 In addition to environments of gift exchange, gifts themselves have been the subject of recent study, as scholars have begun to consider classes of gifts and patterns of exchange, as well as individual art objects created as gifts, with attention being paid both to their initial offering and to their reception and transformation over time.42
Moreover, recent scholarship has attended to the mobilization of gifts in the political, dynastic, and sacred spheres throughout the medieval world. As such scholarship makes clear, medieval gifts arbitrate diplomatic cross-cultural encounter, they mediate familial and dynastic relations, and they triangulate sacred transactions as votive offerings.43 In these diverse contexts, gifts negotiate rivalries and also serve as agents of union.
The conceptual framework of the gift as first elaborated in the field of anthropology thus opens up broad avenues of art historical study. While a single unified theory cannot adequately capture the complexity of individual objects and visualizations, understanding gift exchange as a powerful mediating agent in social and sacred dynamics is central to its productivity.
As inherently relational, the gift operates on an optative register as an active agent of social bond and fracture, and it obliges and orchestrates power relations among individuals and sacred economies. A recognition of the entangled agendas implicit in the diverse visual cultures of prestation allows us to see the objects of analysis not as mere passive reflections of social and sacred relations but as integral to the production of those relations.
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