Download PDF | Henry Maguire - Nectar and Illusion_ Nature in Byzantine Art and Literature (Onassis Series in Hellenic Culture)-Oxford University Press (2012).
219 Pages
PREFACE
This book and its associated lectures have been sponsored by the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation (USA) and by Oxford University Press in their series “Onassis Lectures in Hellenic Culture.” I am very grateful to both institutions and in particular to Maria Sereti at the foundation and to Stefan Vranka and Sarah Pirovitz at Oxford for their assistance and advice. I would also like to express my thanks to colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University, where I gave a series of prepublication lectures and seminars, especially to Renata Holod, Ann Kuttner, Robert Ousterhout, and Brian Rose in Philadelphia and to Bissera Pentcheva in Palo Alto.
At both institutions I received warm hospitality, in addition to informed criticism, that has been invaluable in shaping the chapters that follow. In addition, much of the second chapter was initially included as a lecture in the seminar on “Définitions philosophiques et définitions rhétoriques de la rhétorique” at the Centre Léon Robin in Paris. I am very grateful to the director, Dr. Barbara Cassin, for the opportunity to present this material before a receptive and discriminating audience. I am thankful to many individuals for assistance in the increasingly difficult task of finding photographs for publication, especially to Genevra Kornbluth, Ioannis Spatharakis, and David Wright.
Gunder Varinlioglu at Dumbarton Oaks and Joanne Bloom at the Fine Arts Library of Harvard responded to repeated requests. At Johns Hopkins University I have been indebted to Ann Woodward and to Jessica Bailey for their continuing assistance in the Visual Resources Collection. The material presented here is the product of over forty years of research, reflection, and interactions with friends and colleagues. It is impossible to make a complete list of people to acknowledge for their advice and kindnesses, for there are too many. Nevertheless, I would like to express my appreciation here to Nancy Ševcˇenko, because she also has a special interest in the theme of nature in Byzantine art and because she generously encouraged me to proceed with this project when I was faltering. I would also like to thank Joachim WolschkeBulmahn, formerly director of studies in landscape architecture at Dumbarton Oaks, with whom I organized a colloquium on the topic of Byzantine Garden Culture in 1996 (Littlewood, Maguire, and Wolschke-Bulmahn, 2002). Also at Dumbarton Oaks, Alexander Kazhdan guided me to many relevant texts, including the remarkable encomium of St. Patapios by Andrew of Crete.
More recently, I am indebted to the hospitality of Charalambos and Demetra Bakirtzis, who enabled me to revisit the painted churches of Cyprus. Finally, as ever, I am deeply grateful to Eunice Dauterman Maguire, with whom I have discussed the material in this book so often over the years. Without her this study could never have been written.
Introduction
In the early Renaissance, the Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini portrayed the Virgin and child in front of a deep red curtain being drawn open to reveal a distant landscape, where we can see bare wintry trees, green hills, a town, and far-off snow-capped mountains (plate I). This drawing back of the curtain behind the sacred icon to reveal a study of the terrestrial world around us exemplifies the close attention paid by Renaissance artists to natural phenomena and their incorporation of the diversity of earthly creation into religious painting. In the art of medieval Byzantine churches, however, the drapes remained closed, with only occasional chinks opening here and there to show views of observed nature.
This was certainly not because the Byzantines were oblivious to the charms of creation—far from it—but their delight was always mingled with distrust. Byzantine attitudes toward the wealth of terrestrial nature were complex and ambivalent. On one hand, in their literature, and more rarely in their art, the Byzantines celebrated nature as a reflection of the glory of its Creator; on the other hand, they viewed the bounty of the natural world as fleeting and corruptible and suspected it as a distraction from spiritual reality and the permanent rewards of their faith. The chapters that follow explore the consequences of the contradictory Byzantine reception of nature, in both the verbal and the visual arts.
This book is intended to be neither an encyclopedia of Byzantine depictions of the terrestrial world nor a study of the practical engagement of the Byzantines with nature through agriculture, hunting, fishing, medicine, and the like. It also does not engage with such modern interests as evolution, genetics, biodiversity, and ecology. Although concerns over food supply have been constant throughout human history and are certainly reflected in Byzantine art, especially in its early period, our topic is not environmental history as such. 1 Rather, the book aims to study the changing Byzantine attitudes toward the place of terrestrial nature in Christian art and literature.
It will attempt to account for the relative weight given to nature-derived and anthropomorphic images in Byzantine art of different times and contexts and to show how the Byzantines embraced or distanced nature through the manner of its representation, whether verbal or visual. In the early Byzantine period, from the fourth to the seventh centuries, Christian homilists sought to appropriate the wonders of creation for their faith by composing commentaries on the Hexaemeron , which glorified the first six days ( hexaemera ) of creation. At the same time, the decoration of Christian churches also celebrated the created world through a diverse imagery of personifications and depictions of animals and plants, which were portrayed throughout the buildings, on floors, walls, ceilings, vaults, and furnishings.
To some extent, these motifs were simple expressions of the power of God—an attempt to counter paganism by inscribing all of nature under a Christian worldview. But in addition, the nature-derived subjects often were seen as symbols of spiritual concepts, especially when such interpretations, as in the case of the vine or the lamb, had precedents in scripture. Because, with a few notable exceptions, these nature motifs did not last on the walls of early Christian churches but are preserved only in mosaics on their floors, they tend to be overlooked or even discounted by modern observers, and their importance is underestimated. 2 After iconoclasm, from the tenth century onward, nature-derived images played a much smaller role in the decoration of Byzantine churches, as is witnessed by the replacement of figured tessellated pavements with more abstract compositions in opus sectile. Partly as a result of these changes, anthropomorphic images, or icons, acquired a much more prominent role in the visual appearance of posticonoclastic churches.
The contrast between preiconoclastic and posticonoclastic church decoration can be exemplified by two buildings, San Vitale in Ravenna, dating to the sixth century, and the Panagia tou Arakos at Lagoudera on Cyprus, dating to the twelfth century. Apart from some limited restorations, the sanctuary of San Vitale preserves its mosaics intact ( figure Intro-1 ). One of the most striking features of these mosaics is the sacred figures embedded in a rich framework of nature-derived motifs, which cover the walls, arches, and vault. In the apse we find Christ enthroned on the cosmic globe in a paradisal landscape containing variegated flowers watered by the four streams of Paradise.
On either side there are peacocks, with tails furled. A composition of crossed cornucopias, evocative of terrestrial bounty, decorates the arch that encircles the apse. On the great arch that forms the entrance to the sanctuary, we find dolphins with linked tails framing the portraits of Christ and his saints. Fruiting vines inhabited by birds flank the windows and the openings to the galleries. Richest of all is the vault, which displays the Lamb of God at the center, surrounded by a whole spectrum of birds and beasts, against a backdrop of different fruits, flowers, and scrolling plants ( figure Intro-2 ). Among the flowers we can recognize roses and lilies and among the fruits pears and apples. Among the birds we can identify a white dove, a green parrot, an owl, a cock, a quail, a swallow, a duck, and a wader with a snake caught in its beak.
The beasts include a hare in flight, a running antelope, a fawn, a white ram, a billy goat, panthers running and springing, and possibly a lion. At each of the four corners of the vault, a splendid peacock unfurls its tail, its shimmering feathers reflecting the variety of divine creation. 3 The medieval church at Lagoudera could not present a greater contrast. Here, also, the painted decoration is well preserved, but, with the exception of the postmedieval choir screen, the profusion of plants and animals has virtually disappeared (plate II). Instead, we are presented with an austere gallery of sacred portraits. The center of the vault is occupied not by the symbol of the Lamb but by a severe image of Christ the all-ruler, who is surrounded by his court of angels. The windows are flanked not by fruiting vines but by portraits of the prophets as sources of spiritual illumination.
On the lower walls and vaults of the church we find portraits of the Evangelists and other saints, together with scenes from the New Testament. Apart from the Nativity, there are no animals to be seen anywhere in the paintings of the church, and plant ornament is deployed extremely sparingly. 4 A sparse decoration of trefoil-shaped leaves appears in a few limited areas of the frescoes, 5 but otherwise the rich evocation of nature that we found in San Vitale is lacking. In the twelfth-century church we are removed from the terrestrial world and placed in a program that is almost entirely anthropomorphic.
The watershed that divided Byzantine attitudes toward nature was the iconoclastic period of the eighth and ninth centuries, when the place of images in Christian worship came under intense scrutiny. 6 The attacks of the iconoclasts forced the proponents of the sacred portrait icons to focus on the pagan and magical connotations of nature-derived imagery, with the result that portrayals of nature personifications and animals became increasingly problematic, even, or indeed especially, for those who accepted images of Christ and his saints. An important factor in the Byzantine view of the terrestrial world was the connection drawn by the Byzantines between the charms of nature and the allure of rhetoric.
The Byzantines both admired rhetoric as a means of bringing grace and harmony to their speech and condemned it as an agent of deceit and trickery. Yet the Byzantines’ ambivalence concerning rhetoric also applied to nature, which was abundant and delightful but also illusory compared with eternal truths. Rhetoric and nature came together in the ancient rhetorical technique of ekphraseis, a vivid description involving the close observation of terrestrial phenomena, which frequently graced the compositions of church writers, both before and after iconoclasm. 7 In addition, the hymns and sermons of the Byzantine church embraced a rich store of nature-derived metaphors, especially in praise of the Virgin, which, like the ekphraseis, continued to flourish after iconoclasm. In posticonoclastic art, however, the visualization of the nature-derived imagery that ekphraseis and metaphor provided was limited to certain contexts.
The visual arts had less freedom than the spoken word. This was only to be expected in a society that placed the legitimacy of the visual image in Christian worship under a high degree of scrutiny. The abstraction of motifs from nature in Byzantine art raises a complex set of questions. Especially in monumental art, portrayals of animals and plants tended to become less naturalistic after iconoclasm, and there was less concern to differentiate individual species. This was not simply due to a general tendency to abstraction and schematization in medieval art, because the lack of definition was selective. Portraits of saints, for example, could be highly differentiated, even as the motifs from nature became less so. Moreover, naturalism in the portrayal of flora and fauna was greater in certain contexts, such as in the pages of manuscripts or in high-status ivory carvings.
The relative decline of nature-derived symbolism in medieval Byzantine art gave a greater potential value to symbols that were inorganic, especially the framing of sacred figures with various kinds of buildings or with gold grounds. While a gold ground is a familiar symbol of the sacred, the use of architectural settings to convey spiritual values has received much less attention. 8 The increased importance of architectural symbolism is an important part of the transformation that took place in Byzantine art after iconoclasm. The first chapter of the book explores the role of the iconoclastic controversy as a divide between the early Byzantine and the medieval Byzantine periods. During the iconoclastic crisis, both the supporters and the opponents of images of Christ and the saints accused the other side of “worshipping the creature rather than the Creator.”
This secondary debate—the debate over the portrayal of living things other than human beings—has attracted little attention from scholars compared with the dispute over the sacred icons. Nevertheless, it was a debate that had a profound effect on the subsequent decoration of Byzantine churches, and, like the debate over icons proper, its roots reached back into the early Byzantine period. The second chapter is devoted to the abiding Byzantine ambivalence between the acceptance and denial of the techniques of rhetoric, especially insofar as they were applied to the glorification of the earthly world. The preiconoclastic sermons and commentaries devoted to the Hexaemeron , that sung the praises of nature, frequently incorporated self-contained ekphraseis of particularly noteworthy elements of creation, such as the River Nile or the peacock. But conversely, in other contexts, early Byzantine writers could criticize the world of nature as transient and evanescent. The conflicting views of nature continued in posticonoclastic texts.
On one hand, nature was seen as corruptible and false, but another, more positive view was that nature had been redeemed and sanctified through the incarnation of Christ. This concept gave an avenue for elaborate ekphraseis of nature to survive in the literature of the Byzantine church. After iconoclasm, Byzantine artists occasionally echoed these literary descriptions in their portrayals of nature, but they also found ways to reprove the earth-bound rhetoric of ekphraseis and to put it in its place. In both their writing and their art, Byzantines of the Middle Ages relegated nature to a subordinate position, even while they were still prepared to deploy their eloquence in acknowledgment of its charms.
The third chapter discusses the repetition of nature-derived metaphors in Byzantine art, with a focus on images that evoked the Virgin. These metaphors were reiterated in sermons and hymns until the end of Byzantium. Many of the same images also accompanied the Virgin in her portrayals in Byzantine art, but much less frequently than they appeared in literature, and not during all periods. There was a disjunction between constantly repeated verbal and written metaphors on one hand and sporadically appearing visual imagery on the other. The same disjunction applied to representations of paradise, the depictions of which lay between metaphor and reality. The most striking examples of artistic poverty in the face of the luxuriant nature-derived metaphors of the texts come in the painted cycles of the Akathistos , the early Byzantine hymn in honor of the Virgin that was frequently illustrated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Here, the richness of the animal and even the horticultural imagery in the poem was largely ignored. For the most part, the illustrations of the Akathistos are rigorously anthropomorphic, with very little attention paid to the nature-derived allusions of the poem. The only metaphors illustrated in the Akathistos cycles are inorganic, such as the “lamp full of light.” On the other hand, the Akathistos paintings can be contrasted with other contemporary cycles of scenes depicting the Virgin, such as the mosaics portraying her infancy in the Kariye Camii (the church of the Chora Monastery) in Istanbul, which are richly framed by plants and animals. The fourth chapter, on nature and abstraction, looks at some of the changes in Byzantine art described in the preceding chapters through a different lens, that of aesthetics.
In particular, it considers the question of the extent to which the unfigured opus sectile floors of medieval Byzantine churches and palaces were read by the Byzantines as abstract depictions of the earth and its rivers. Such pavements were frequently described by Byzantine writers as the earth or as colorful flowering meadows, and their marbles were compared to rivers or to seas. Were such descriptions merely conventional metaphors, or did they convey a more fundamental association of the floor with terrestrial creation? And if so, can the abstraction of the images be interpreted as disengagement—that is, as a visual defense against their use in idolatry? There was an ideological opposition between two tropes frequently expressed by Byzantine writers: first that sacred figures were distinguished by a spotless pallor; and second that nature was characterized by a variety of colors, as might be seen in plants or in the polychromatic stones of a pavement.
The final chapter discusses the role of representations of architecture in Byzantine art. The reduction in nature-derived imagery in Byzantine churches after iconoclasm, and its replacement by a more strictly anthropomorphic gallery of sacred figures, gave a new prominence to the architectural backgrounds that framed the holy portraits. In many contexts, depictions of architecture came to substitute for the old portrayals of animals and plants as conveyors of Christian meaning. Architecture was not merely an inert backdrop to sacred iconography, but it acquired a symbolic charge in place of the motifs from nature, assuming a greater significance in posticonoclastic Byzantine art as an expression of spiritual values.
The decline of nature symbolism and the rise of architectural symbolism were closely linked. In their attitudes toward nature and its depiction, the Byzantines of the Middle Ages were in constant dialogue with neighboring cultures of Western Europe and Islam. They reacted against the mosques, which excluded all portrayals of the human figure, allowing only images of plants. And they reacted against Western churches, which eventually allowed the curtain to be drawn, revealing the terrestrial world in all of its variety. Byzantine art remained in a state of creative tension between the spiritual, represented by the sacred portraits, and the earthly, represented by the world of nature.
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