Download PDF | (East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450) Petr Balcárek - Byzantium in the Czech Lands (4th-16th Centuries)_ Historical and Art Historical Perspectives-Brill (2022).
530 Pages
Preface
The present work places the Czech lands and Byzantium side-by-side and is, therefore, the first attempt of its kind to follow the often complicated artistic and historical relations involved in the contributions of Byzantine art and its impact on the art of the Czech lands. Until recently, the Byzantine Empire and its effects have been viewed as something pejorative. Besides certain cultural and political prejudices that are detailed below, this was mostly the result of Czech and Slovak political disapproval of empires as such.
This book is in part based on my dissertation entitled Ceské zemé a Byzanc. Problematika byzantského uméleckohistorického vlivu [The Czech lands and Byzantium: The Influence of Byzantium in Art and History] presented at Palacky University in Olomouc and published in Czech in 2009. The English version is not a mere translation of this dissertation. It also introduces the readers to several other topics concerning Bohemian-Byzantine relations. Over a decade has passed since the publication of the Czech edition, which means that the English book has had to be updated with more recent Czech scholarship and some of the foreign studies and catalogues on Byzantine relations in the territories of the Czech lands and Slovakia. Several of the chapters have been supplemented or rewritten in full.
In the period between the publication of the Czech book and the final preparations of the English version of this project, I have continued my study of the artistic relations between Byzantium and the Czech lands, the results of which I have presented and/or published while regularly elaborating and expanding my research. The outcome consists of studies on the nature of the relations between the Czech lands and Byzantium, either from the artistic or from the historiographical point of view. One such study concerns the relatively unknown interwar regional art historian Florian Zapletal (1884-1969),! who followed on the work of the controversial Josef Strzygovski (1862-1941) of the previous generation, and to whom I have devoted several works, especially on his stance toward the Czech lands.” Other studies include papers presented, for example, at the Twenty-First International Congress of Byzantine Studies in London? and in Pregov (Slovakia).+ I have published several studies on the artistic relations between the Czech lands and Byzantium in the journal Byzantinoslavica,® and in the Slovak periodical set up after Alexander Avenarius’s death — Byzantinoslovaca.®
Among others, in these contributions I have dealt with some of the older palaeographical opinions on the encolpion from Sady,’ also expressing support for the claims put forth by Dusan Tfesttk (1933-2007) and Zdenék Klanica (1938-2014) on the interpretation of the finding of the Great Moravian captorgas, miniature codices.® I was able to achieve these results thanks to a threemonth fellowship at the WF. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem.
In my studies on the minor arts of the Great Moravian period, I was able to confirm the earlier opinions of Jan Dekan (1919-2007) and Klement Benda (1935-1988) about the provincial Byzantine effects on art in Great Moravia, and I was furthermore also able to provide more detail concerning several findings such as the encolpion from Velka Maéa. I drew on literary sources such as the iconophile polemics of Constantine the Philosopher (St. Cyril) recorded in the text Vita Constantini. I then presented and published my results at the Fifteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies in Oxford in 2007.9 I also touched on several topics associated with the Christian Great Moravian mission of Cyril and Methodius, focusing on objects,!° the cultural character," and the overall spirit of the times.
I summarized topics from the post-Great Moravian period concerning findings of Byzantine items and dealing with critical perspectives on these sources, published in the Slovak periodical Ars.
In my various partial studies, I have also remembered to touch on a classical topic of Bohemian-Byzantine relations: Luxembourg art in the studies on the crown of Saint Wenceslas, following up on studies by Ivo Hlobil (1942-2021) and Karel Otavsky (1938—), where I also emphasised the Byzantine character of the upper cross on this crown (originally an encolpion) with its relic of the Holy Cross.“ Within the scope of Luxembourg art, I also concentrated on the iconography and symbolism of the hexagonal nimbus in the fresco in the cloister of Prague’s Emmaus, ‘Na Slovanech’ Monastery, placing it in a broader context.
My interests also focussed on medieval objects originating from Czech collections of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, for example the oliphants and textiles from Cim 2 in the collections of Prague Castle. From an iconographic perspective, uncovering the Byzantine roots of the motif on fol. 23v,!6 I discussed the manuscript of Czech origin Ms 36-1950 in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK. My study was based on an earlier interest in similar iconographic topics in the manuscripts Codex Ostroviensis and Liber Viaticus.!” The spread of Byzantine culture, in this case of iconographic motifs, was also carried out by the Roman Catholic mendicant orders with relations to Jerusalem. [also studied missionary methods at the end of the Middle Ages when discussing examples of the Roman Catholic Church’s missions.!® Together with Rudolf Chadraba, I broached the topic of the relation between image and text, and the intertwining of both Latin and Byzantine artistic traditions in a local context.!9 I have also dedicated several studies to pectoral crosses and encolpia.?°
I addressed post-Byzantine heritage questions in my works on the areas of Central and Eastern Europe.”! I shared partial results of my research in aseries of lectures at academic institutes in the Czech Republic (such as the Institute of Slavonic Studies at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, and the Institute for Byzantine and Eastern Christian Studies in Olomouc), Slovakia, Israel, Poland, and Romania. The work presented was conceived as an introductory contribution to a synthetic evaluation of the cultural relations between the Czech lands and Byzantium.
I am aware that the material in this book is often unequally proportioned, as I have spent more time dealing with certain cases, while others are only mentioned in passing. Due to the vagueness of the terms “Byzantine art” or “Greek product’, I have made an effort to use more accurate descriptions such as “work from Constantinople” or “provincial work” since I am convinced that the terms “Latin” or “Byzantine” fail to describe properly parallel, equal, or antagonistic ideas. I have anglicised some of the names (e.g. Toannos’ is ‘John’). When referring to the period of the Middle Ages, I use the term ‘Bohemian’ to mean the lands of the Bohemian Crown, while the term ‘Czech’ refers to the current territories of the Czech Republic and part of Slovakia.
Acknowledgements
When carrying out interdisciplinary research on the relation between Byzantium and the Czech lands, any single person is sure to reach their limits. I am happy, therefore, to acknowledge how indebted I am to the many people who have contributed to the writing of this book, which would otherwise not have been completed successfully. I am particularly grateful to the supervisor of my doctoral thesis from Charles University in Prague, Jan Bouzek (1935-2020), also to my mentor from the Faculty of Orthodox Theology in Presov, Slovakia, Alexander Avenarius (1942-2004), as well as to my mentor from the Department of Art History at the Faculty of Arts, Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic, Rudolf Chadraba (1922-2011). I would also like to acknowledge the contribution brought by other members of the Department of Art History at the Faculty of Arts, Palacky University in Olomouc who have supported my research, namely Pavol Cerny, Ivo Hlobil, and Ladislav Daniel. I am especially indebted to archaeologists Josef Blaha and Eduard Droberjar for providing valuable information in the fields of Slavonic and Germanic archaeology respectively. I have greatly benefited from my numerous conversations on topics regarding the tradition of Sts. Cyril and Methodius with now Director Emeritus of the Slavonic Institute of the Czech Academy of Arts in Prague, Vladimir Vaviinek, and with the late scholar of Greek culture and language Riizena Dostalova. My OTEP Fellowship at Balliol College in Oxford, UK, was a considerable asset when studying the topic of, and later writing this book, as were the lectures I attended there offered by experts such as Sebastian Brock, Nicholas Gendle, Metropolitan Kallisos Ware, Basil Osborne, Dimitri Obolensky, and Stephen Runciman. I also greatly benefited from the time I spent as a fellow at the WF. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, including the meetings with professors of Jerusalem University and the Israel Exploration Society. I express my gratitude to many other colleagues who it would be impossible to list here in full.
As English is not my mother tongue, this text has had to be polished by several people, namely George Woodman O.B.E., Timothy Jones, Vaclav Balaéek’s company “Ceské preklady”, Naomi Collyer, Thomas Prentis, and Alice Isabella Sullivan. I would like to express the greatest thanks to my wife Manuela Eugenia Gheorghe for her linguistic advice and her unconditional support, both of which have helped me achieve this final form of the text.
Marcella Mulder, Irini Argirouli, Alessandra Giliberto, and Peter Buschman at Brill, as well as the editors of this series, Florin Curta and Dusan Zupka, have been encouraging collaborators throughout the book’s editorial preparation.
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