Download PDF | (Sense, Matter, and Medium, 9) Evan Freeman (editor), Roland Betancourt (editor) - Byzantine Materiality-De Gruyter (2024).
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Acknowledgments
This Byzantine Materiality volume is the culmination of a larger project of the same title that was organized by Evan Freeman through the Institute of Sacred Arts at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Yonkers, New York. It began with the gathering of a select group of international scholars for an academic workshop on 14–16 September 2018, which was followed by a larger, public academic conference held 8–11 May 2019. We are indebted to the scholars who participated in these events and now present their research in this volume.
These events could not have taken place without the support and encouragement of Peter Bouteneff, Director of the Institute of Sacred Arts, and Richard Schneider, another founder of the Institute who also served on the conference advisory committee and who passed away on 11 November 2022, to whom we are deeply grateful. Thanks to Charlie Barber, Vasileios Marinis, and Laura Veneskey, who also served on the conference advisory committee. Additionally, we wish to thank the faculty, staff, and students of Saint Vladimir’s Seminary, and all those who supported and participated in the Byzantine Materiality workshop and conference, especially Fr. John Behr, Elizabeth Bouteneff, Nat Fasciani, Fr. Chad Hatfield, Robyn Hatrak, Georgios Kokonas, Zach Mandell, Melanie Ringa, Fr. Aaron Rutz, Yuri Shcherbakov, and Alex Tudorie. Special thanks those who supported the publication of this volume, especially the series editors of Sense, Matter, and Medium: New Approaches to Medieval Material and Literary Culture: Fiona Griffiths, Beatrice Kitzinger, and Kathryn Starkey.
Thanks also to Dominika Herbst, Eva Locher, Elisabeth Kempf, Kowsalya Perumal, and the production team at De Gruyter, as well as Robin Surratt, our copyeditor, Shannon Steiner, our indexer, and Nastasya Kosygina, who helped with proofreading. Finally, we wish to thank the Henry Luce Foundation, whose generous financial support made the Byzantine Materiality workshop, conference, and volume possible.
Preface
This book’s constituent essays were occasioned by Byzantine Materiality, a major international conference held 8–11 May 2019 at and under the auspices of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary and its Institute of Sacred Arts. Several features distinguish it from other conference volumes or the mere proceedings of a scholarly symposium. For one, the essays here have had more than one airing. They first began to be honed at a workshop in September 2018 to elicit substantive comments and critiques that could then be incorporated into the presentations. In addition, Evan Freeman, together with Richard Schneider, took extraordinary care in identifying and cultivating the conference participants. Those selected represent two notable diversities, one being disciplinary. It is unusual in the art history world to gather specialists from various media and even more so to also include authorities on philosophy and neuroscience.
The other diversity—scholars who bring their own faith and religious experience to bear on their work and those who do not—is even rarer. The commitment to bridge scholarship from diverse starting points is an intentional and ongoing feature of the work of the Institute of Sacred Arts. The workshop, conference, and publication were sponsored by the first of two consecutive three-year grants from the Henry Luce Foundation. This initial stage was dedicated to the exploration of material spirituality through a number of activities and publications. Several underlying principles make such an exploration especially interesting, if not inevitable, on the part of an Orthodox Christian institution. Looking at the long history of Orthodox Christianity, one finds a faith that celebrates not only the Incarnation of the Son of God but the very principles of incarnation and material embodiment. This is evident in its robust artistic culture across Byzantine and Slavic contexts that unstintingly exults in the material expression of creativity in the service of divine worship. Orthodox liturgy is a nexus of artistic creativity spanning diverse media, giving them a coherence of purpose. Of course, all art is inevitably expressed in and through the material from which it is constructed or emanates, especially if one appreciates the materiality not only of the tactile and the visual but also of sound and word. Although the worlds of religion and philosophy sometimes seem to privilege spiritual reality over the material, it is only through an embodiment of it that humans can experience and engage with the spiritual. The above principles, together with the vibrant discipline of materiality studies, led inexorably to the subject of the 2019 conference. That gathering’s life, quality, and enduring effect through this volume are due to the thoughtfulness and skill of its organizers and especially to Evan Freeman. I am pleased beyond words to commend this book to its readers and eagerly await the creative work that it will surely continue to engender. Peter Bouteneff Kulik Professor of Sacred Arts Director, Institute of Sacred Arts St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary
Introduction
A blood-red bolt shoots through a Byzantine cameo preserved in the collection of Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC (Fig. I.1).1 Dating to the twelfth century, the cameo was carved from hematite, or bloodstone. Its relief carving depicts the Virgin Hagiosoritissa, a bust-length icon of the Virgin Mary with both hands raised in a gesture of prayer, gazing to the upper right, where the hand of God reaches down to bestow a blessing. Greek characters identify Mary as the Mother of God, their stiff, block forms apparently a result of the stone’s hardness and resistance to the carver’s tools. Despite the prominent presence of image and text, the stone substrate does not recede like the plaster beneath mosaics or the gessoed board of a panel icon. Rather, the stone’s red streaks and flecks press to the foreground, competing with image and text for the viewer’s attention.
This is no accident. Rather, the artisan who created the cameo purposely and skillfully aligned the Virgin’s upward gaze and gesture of supplication with the directionality of the red streaks, capitalizing on the stone’s natural markings to emphasize the icon’s diagonal composition and to convey the efficacy of the Virgin’s prayer. These red markings hover between form and abstraction, participating in the cameo’s pictorial space while also subverting it.2 As a result, both the image of the Virgin and the stone’s natural, material properties remain simultaneously in view and equally important to the work’s signifying power. This cameo exemplifies the “overt materiality” that Herbert Kessler has argued is a key characteristic of medieval art: “The materials do not vanish from sight through the mimicking of the perception of other things; to the contrary, their very physicality asserts the essential artifice of the image or object.” 3 The overt materiality of the Dumbarton Oaks cameo also points to its probable historical function. In late antiquity, hematite was associated with blood and was even believed to cure excessive menstruation and blood diseases,4 which Gary Vikan discusses in this volume. Thus, the hematite selected for the cameo was no arbitrary surface or recipient for the image any more than the resulting amulet was merely a work of art or bodily adornment. The cameo’s material substrate was as important as the image it bore, and the resulting amulet, though small in scale, was a thing of power, visually invoking the Virgin’s intercession while also marshaling the healing properties of hematite. It served not only as an icon representing the Virgin, toward which a viewer could gaze and direct prayers, but also as an active, performative object intended to protect and heal its owner by virtue of the type of stone from which it was made.5 Given the cameo’s role to protect and heal both spiritually as well as physically, one can assume that it was not viewed passively, as though an object on display in a museum, but that its owner had a physical relationship to it, caressing, kissing, and wearing it.6 The cameo’s significance emerges from these entanglements of raw matter, artistic interventions in image and inscription, and embodied engagements by a Byzantine user. The Dumbarton Oaks cameo challenges one to consider such concepts as form, matter, image, and medium, and how they related to one another in the premodern world. For Aristotle, every object was a composite of matter (ὕλη) and form (μορφή), understood, respectively, as the material substrate and that which gives it shape.7 These terms remained foundational through the late antique and medieval periods, their meanings and implications continuing to be teased out, as Charles Barber and other contributors to this volume demonstrate. Image, or “icon” (εἰκών), which refers to a likeness or representation, was another ancient concept, but it took on new significance among Christians, particularly in the eighth and ninth centuries, during the Byzantine Iconoclastic Controversy over religious images. Meanwhile, the modern discipline of art history, which originated during the Italian Renaissance and through which Byzantine objects like the Dumbarton Oaks cameo have frequently been interpreted, long privileged form and image as the chief bearers of an artwork’s or object’s significance. Through analysis of form and iconography, the history of art has often been told as a series of changing styles reflecting the spirit of an age or as the transmission of conventional imagery that communicates symbolic meanings.8 Within this framework, matter tends to be portrayed as a passive recipient of form. The conventional use of the term medium to refer to artistic materials and techniques is also telling. Originating as a Latin word denoting a middle space, it suggests the route by which an image or meaning is conveyed from one human subject to another, a means to an end. As Annemarie Weyl Carr and Roland Betancourt discuss in their chapters in this volume, the Byzantines sometimes took a similar position, such as at the synod convened by Emperor Alexios I Komnenos in Constantinople in 1095 that defined an icon as an image alone, as opposed to its material substrate or as an object itself. The Dumbarton Oaks cameo belies these hierarchies and neat dichotomies, showing the hematite not to be a passive recipient or mere conveyor of image or meaning, but rather to be meaningful and powerful in its own right, its visual qualities preceding and even participating in the formation of the image. To the extent that the cameo’s diagonal composition was a response to the directionality of the stone’s red flecks, and the icon’s blocky letters a product of the sculptor’s struggle against the stone’s hardness, the cameo also challenges established assumptions about the primacy of human or artistic interventions in the creation of such objects. The cameo suggests that the stone itself exerted agency alongside the human actor in the object’s production. For art historian Michael Ann Holly, the term materiality conjures the very interplay and agency of matter, form, and image, which one can observe in the hematite cameo: Materiality is more than a medium. A medium is that which carries a visual message, and together – structure and image – they result in the thickness, the sensuous materiality of a work of art, a thing among other things. Yet, in its physical vibrancy, its affect and effect, this special thing possesses a certain kind of agency.9 In recent years, such issues of materiality have increasingly occupied scholarship on the art and material culture of Byzantium and the broader late antique and medieval worlds.10 Correspondingly, scholars have explored how embodied, multisensory experiences of Byzantine users can shed further light on materials, objects, and artworks.11
As several contributors in this volume acknowledge, though, “materiality” remains a somewhat imprecise term, both because of its disparate origins as well as its varied aims and applications across a number of fields.12 Often, it functions as a synonym for “new materialism” or what has been referred to as a wider “material turn” in the humanities and social sciences.13 Bill Brown has described materiality as a heu ristic foil to a world becoming ever more “virtual” since the digital revolution that began in the 1990s, when personal computers became increasingly prevalent and the public gained widespread access to the internet.14 Materiality is also widely understood as a corrective to the so-called linguistic, cultural, poststructuralist, or postmodern turn, which has long emphasized the importance of language and culture not merely in describing the world, but also in preceding and even constituting it. This approach has had an enduring influence on humanities and social sciences since the 1970s. In Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Karen Barad, a prominent thinker associated with new materialism, asks, “How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter? Why are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity, while matter is figured as passive and immutable or at best inherits a potential for change derivatively from language and culture?” 15 This is not to say that materiality represents a focus on materials alone or an eclipse of textual or other cultural sources; rather, the term as used throughout this book seeks to overcome such dichotomies or binaries as culture and nature. As Caroline Bynum rightly notes, “Objects are hardly objective, neither the statue revered as living by the fourteenth-century peasant, nor the table polished by a nineteenth-century housewife, exists before the viewer as raw material from the past . . . . [W]e tend to understand that they are significant and why they are significant from texts.” 16 Drawing on both objects and textual evidence, the chapters of this volume are united by a shared exploration of the entanglements of materials, forms, and images in Byzantine art and material culture; the meanings, values, effects, and agencies that result from these entanglements; and the ways that Byzantine thinkers and users, as inheritors of the GrecoRoman tradition, conceptualized matter and form.
Byzantine Materiality
In the introduction to Materiality, the anthropologist Daniel Miller observes a ubiquitous paradox: most of the world’s largest religions question the ultimate reality of the material world as such, and instead, posit a greater, spiritual reality.17 At the same time, material culture plays a central role in communicating this spiritualizing view that treats matter with ambivalence. This tension between spirituality and its paradoxical representation in material culture may be virtually universal, but it is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Byzantium – heir to Greco-Roman legacies in philosophy and artistic production, and an important player for more than a millennium in the medieval Mediterranean as well as the broader medieval world. Tension between spirit and matter arose, not least of all, because of the Byzantines’ notable introspection on materiality, exemplified by the protracted debate over images and relics during the Iconoclastic Controversy, primarily in Constantinople, from the 700s to 843. It was widely accepted that Jesus Christ was the Son and “image of the invisible God” (εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτου) – who had come from heaven and was incarnate as a human being – and that Christian worshippers could physically encounter him through the bread and wine of the Eucharist, understood to be the very body and blood of Christ.18 What became a matter of earnest disagreement in the eighth and ninth centuries was whether artists could, or should, represent this incarnate God and the saints in artistic media, such as a paint, mosaic tesserae, and so on. The two opposing parties – the anti-image iconoclasts and the pro-image iconodules or iconophiles – agreed on God’s transcendence and invisibility, but for the iconoclasts, this meant that it was impossible to represent Christ in images because his divinity lay beyond the created, material world of images. The iconoclastic council held in Hieria in 754 condemned artistic depictions of Christ as well as the saints as a debasement: “It is not right for Christians who have received the hope of the resurrection to adopt the customs of the demon-worshipping gentiles, and to insult with mean and dead matter the saints who will be resplendent with glory so great and of such a kind.” 19 For the defenders of icons, however, the Son of God’s presence and activity in the physical world offered a crucial precedent and theological justification for icons and other material manifestations of holiness, such as relics. Rather than viewing matter and representation as a debasement of the holy, Christ’s incarnation sanctified and elevated matter. The eighth-century church father John of Damascus (d. 749) defended not only icons, but all physical matter as a site of divine activity on behalf of humanity: Of old, God the incorporeal and formless was never depicted, but now that God has been seen in the flesh and has associated with humankind, I depict what I have seen of God. I do not venerate matter, I venerate the fashioner of matter, who became matter for my sake and accepted to dwell in matter and through matter worked my salvation, and I will not cease from reverencing matter, through which my salvation was worked.20 For John of Damascus, the material world was created by God, inhabited by the Son of God, and the site of God’s salvation of humankind. As a result, it was “filled with divine energy and grace” (ὡς θείας ἐνεργείας καὶ χάριστος ἔμπλεων).21 John of Damascus viewed matter – and consequently, icons – favorably, because he understood it as a recipient of divine energy, but countless other episodes from Byzantine history reflect a more distributed view of agency. In essence, the latter blur the distinction between active divine or human subjects on the one hand, and passive matter or objects on the other. For example, Theodore the Studite (d. 826), another iconophile, recounts how at the baptism of an infant, an icon of the martyr Demetrios stood in as the godfather, a role typically fulfilled by a human, not by a work of art.22 In other accounts, which seem to reflect what Glenn Peers has described as an almost animistic view of the world, Byzantine icons change their appearance, communicate with Byzantine viewers, and work miracles.23 A well known passage from Michael Psellos’s Chronographia, probably written before 1063, describes an icon owned by Empress Zoe Porphyrogenita (r. 1042). The passage begins by attributing agency to Zoe in the fashioning of the image – that is, a human subject acting on passive matter – but the tables quickly turn as Psellos describes how the icon becomes a powerful agent in its own right: [Zoe] had made for herself an image of Jesus, fashioning it with as much accuracy as she could (if such a thing were possible). The little figure, embellished with bright metal, appeared to be almost living. By changes of color it answered questions put to it, and by its various tints foretold coming events. Anyway, Zoe made several prophecies with regard to the future from a study of this image. So, when she had met with some good fortune, or when some trouble had befallen her, she would at once consult her image, in the one case to acknowledge her gratitude, in the other to beg its favor. I myself have often seen her, in moments of great distress, clasp the sacred object in her hands, contemplate it, talk to it as though it were indeed alive, and address it with one sweet term of endearment after another. Then at other times I have seen her lying on the ground, her tears bathing the earth, while she beat her breasts over and over again, tearing at them with her hands. If she saw the image turn pale, she would go away crestfallen, but if it took on a fiery red color, its halo lustrous with a beautiful radiant light, she would lose no time in telling the emperor and prophesying what the future was to bring.24 While it is possible that Psellos intended his readers to understand the actions of the miraculous icon as a product of divine intervention, his text presents the object itself as an actor – “as though it were indeed alive” – capable of changing its own appearance, communicating with the empress, and potentially influencing the emperor and even the trajectory of the empire. Such accounts from Byzantine history involving the agency of artworks and other objects resonate with recent theories by thinkers across several disciplines, including Alfred Gell, Bill Brown, and Bruno Latour.25 More recently, new materialist thinkers, among them Jane Bennett, have proposed an understanding of matter as “vibrant” or “vital.” As Bennett explains, “By ‘vitality’ I mean the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.” 26 Such emerging perspectives, which challenge anthropocentric assumptions about human subjects as the primary agents in the world and matter as a passive recipient of human action, offer fruitful theoretical frameworks for thinking about objects and accounts of non-human actors in the Byzantine and broader medieval world. In the account of Zoe’s miraculous icon, Psellos points not only to the agency of icons and other sacred objects in Byzantium, but also to their potential for visual dynamism. In particular, he associates movement and visual change with supernatural interventions in miraculous icons.27 As recent scholarship has shown, visual dynamism was also an important product of the materiality of icons and other Byzantine objects, impacting the way viewers experienced and understood them. Rico Franses and Bissera Pentcheva have explored how Byzantine artists juxtaposed a variety of materials to produce objects highly responsive to light and other variable environmental conditions to manifest divine presence for viewers.28 The figures in icons and the gold ground that often surround them responded very differently to sunlight and flickering candlelight – a phenomenon Franses calls the “reflection-absorption binary” – yielding visual effects quite distinct from the flat, evenly lit photographic reproductions populating modern art history textbooks and their narratives on style.29 According to Franses, the gold ground in icons did not illustrate, but through its reflective potential, helped actualize Christian understandings of divinity as light.30 While the term icon has become virtually synonymous with panel paintings today, it was much more capacious in the premodern era, referring to images in a variety of media and contexts, as evident in the words of the iconodule Second Council of Nicaea, held in 787: We therefore decree with all care and precision that venerable and holy images, made in colors, or mosaics or other fitting materials, in the same way as the figure of the honorable and life giving cross, are to be dedicated in the holy churches of God, on sacred vessels and vestments, on walls and panels, in houses and in the streets – [namely] the image of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, or our immaculate Lady the holy Theotokos, and of the honorable angels and all the holy and sacred men.31 For the Byzantines, “icon” applied to any image of a holy figure; it could be made of virtually any material and could serve a variety of functions in many different contexts. In addition to the text from the Second Council of Nicaea, countless other primary sources – including epigrams, church and monastery inventories, and private wills, as well as ekphrases of churches and other buildings – all point to the importance of materials in generating value and meaning, expressing devotion, and manifesting spirituality and political power in Byzantium.32 In the modern imagination, icons have become synonymous with Eastern Orthodoxy and Byzantium. But the icon’s place in Byzantine history and culture should not be overemphasized. Byzantium’s best-known monument, Justinian’s church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, was virtually aniconic when constructed, during the period 532–537 (Fig. I.2). While the Byzantines added mosaic icons and imperial portraits to the church in the centuries following Iconoclasm, the soaring architectural forms of Constantinople’s Great Church were originally decorated with polychromatic marble revetment, opus sectile, and shimmering gold mosaics displaying crosses and nonfigural ornamental motifs, demonstrating the important roles that materials could play independent of images in Byzantine material culture. Byzantine rhetorical descriptions exalt both the architectural forms and the lavish materials of Hagia Sophia and other ecclesiastical structures. For observers like the sixth-century writer Paul the Silentiary, discussed by Harry Prance in this volume, the various colorful stones that adorned Hagia Sophia evoked the natural world while also demonstrating the breadth and might of the empire in the stones’ far-flung points of origin.33 As Ittai Weinryb notes, “Material offers a tangible presence that engages the spectator with regard to its actual or imagined place of origin. Thus, material always suggests a type of alterity triggered by its temporal and geographical disjunctions.” 34 Byzantine writers even described buildings like Hagia Sophia, originally lacking artistic representations of figures, as acting on viewers, compelling their gaze around the space, thus providing another example of the agency of non-human matter in Byzantium.35 For example, in the sixth century, Prokopios of Caesarea wrote the following about the architectural forms of Hagia Sophia: All of these elements, marvelously fitted together in mid-air, suspended from one another and reposing only on the parts adjacent to them, produce a unified and most remarkable harmony in the work, and yet do not allow the spectators to rest their gaze upon any one of them for a length of time, but each detail readily draws and attracts the eye to itself. Thus the vision constantly shifts round, and the beholders are quite unable to select any particular element which they might admire more than all the others. No matter how much they concentrate their attention on this side and that, and examine everything with contracted eyebrows, they are unable to understand the craftsmanship and always depart from there amazed by the perplexing spectacle. So much, then, for this.36 Within the dramatic ritual that unfolded in such spaces, portable objects, too, displayed an overt materiality that acted on humans without figural representation. Paul the Silentiary describes how the movement of a golden Gospel book through Hagia Sophia aroused desire and embodied responses from Byzantine worshippers: “Here the priest who brings the good tidings passes along on his return from the ambo, holding aloft the golden book; and while the crowd strives in honor of the immaculate God to touch the sacred book with their lips and hands, the countless waves of the surging people break around.” 37 In Paul the Silentiary’s account, the unfolding ritual inverts expectations about human subjects and inanimate objects, as the “golden book” moves through Hagia Sophia with divine presence, compelling crowds of worshippers – transformed into a force of nature – to break as the waves of the sea around it. The Divine Liturgy climaxed with the celebration of the Eucharist – a direct encounter with the divine in the otherwise mundane materials of bread and wine, made sacred by various ritual interventions, including the stamping of bread, the veiling and unveiling of sacred vessels, the burning of incense, the prayers of the clergy, and the addition of hot water to the chalice to evoke the warm blood of the living Christ. These examples are emblematic of the overt, sensuous materiality of Byzantine art and culture now emerging as an important subject of inquiry in its own right.
Contributions to the Present Volume Building on recent scholarship on materials, visual dynamism, and agency in medieval art, the present volume seeks to advance the study of Byzantine materiality by offering new insights into the semantic range of Byzantine materials, the ways that matter was imbued with meaning and conveyed meaning, and the ability of materials and objects to act on human subjects in a variety of contexts over approximately eleven centuries of Byzantine history and into the post Byzantine era. Thematically united around the theme of materiality, the chapters in this volume examine a range of material things, including icons and other artworks, architectural spaces, jewelry and other everday objects, as well as religious objects and substances, such as pilgrim tokens, relics, and bread and wine of the Eucharist. The chapters are generally arranged chronologically – beginning with antiquity and the early Byzantine era, progressing through the middle Byzantine period, and concluding with late Byzantine and post-Byzantine eras – in order to set contemporary objects and texts in dialogue with one another. Readers of the book’s whole arc will see both trends and changes across this span of time, along with artistic ideas that are highly dependent on their specific contexts.38 Several threads weave throughout the book; these include the complex and often contradictory relationship between image and medium, the agency of artworks and other material objects in ritual and everyday life, the role of materiality in conjuring a sense of presence and facilitating encounters with the divine, and the ways that theologians and philosophers conceptualized materiality in verbal form. Drawing on both material culture and textual sources, the chapters in this volume offer a panoply of case studies in which the close reading of individual examples carries much broader consequences for our understanding of materiality’s central place in Eastern Roman thought and practice. In chapter 1, Alicia Walker examines materials and meanings in the everyday sphere while also establishing an important counterpoint to discussions of sacred materiality in later chapters. Walker focuses on the concept of charis (χάρις, grace), which conveyed a sense of physical attractiveness and persuasion in the GrecoRoman world and was associated with luminous metals, such as gold and silver. Walker asserts that early Byzantine women employed precious metals, images, and inscriptions on jewelry and other personal objects to evoke the profane, Greco-Roman notions of charis, which persisted and coexisted alongside newer Christian meanings of the concept in early Byzantium. This chapter illustrates how an abstract concept, such as charis, could take material form in the everyday lives of Byzantine users who adorned themselves with precious objects of gold and silver.39 In chapter 2 Sean Leatherbury examines the paradoxical use of delicate materials, such as gold and glass, to enliven surfaces in Greco-Roman and Byzantine floor mosaics. While the Byzantines commonly used gold and glass in wall mosaics, these delicate materials were exceptional in floor mosaics, which tended to be constructed of more durable materials, such as stone. As a result, the presence of gold and glass in floors has often been overlooked by modern scholarship. Leatherbury’s research advances current knowledge on the uses and effects of gold and glass in late antique and medieval spaces, demonstrating that they were employed in floors to depict certain iconographic subjects, to highlight inscriptions, and to animate the surface of floors with glitter and shimmer. As Leatherbury notes, at issue is not only materials used in creating Byzantine floors, but also a “sensuous materiality” resulting from the materials, text, and images selected.40 Katherine Taronas, in chapter 3, focuses on the transformation and reception of sacred materials in Byzantium, examining how the process of forming made otherwise amorphous substances, such as dust and bread dough, circumscribable and intelligible for Byzantine users. Taronas focuses on the example of stamping Eucharistic bread with texts and images – a practice that begin in the early Byzantine period and endured to the end of empire – as a means of rendering the “potentially holy” bread dough spiritually effective as sacred matter. Reciprocally, Taronas explores how, once raw matter was transformed into sacred matter, it in turn transformed its Byzantine users in such contexts as the Divine Liturgy. Complementing Taronas’s contribution on forming sacred matter, in chapter 4 Gary Vikan takes an autoethnographic approach in examining the agency of Byzantine objects, including stamped pilgrim dirt. He adopts the themes of contagion and mimesis to explain the power of contact relics and depictions of saints, whom users sought to imitate. Vikan considers the idea that Byzantine artists who painted icons were “intuitive neuroscientists,” citing the Sinai Pantokrator as an example of brain lateralization, and calling to mind Bill Brown’s assertion that “the process of thinking has a materiality of its own.” 41 Drawing on his long, distinguished career as a museum curator and director, and retaining a writing style that evokes his own spoken cadence and presence, Vikan reflects on the modern challenges of displaying Byzantine icons in a way that conveys their historical sense of power and presence, illustrating how environmental factors such as light and sound impact an icon’s presence and agency. In chapter 5, Harry Prance probes Byzantine ekphrases, or rhetorical descriptions, demonstrating the importance of materials and processes of production for generating value in Byzantine churches and smaller luxury vessels preserved in the church of San Marco in Venice. These vessels mirrored the churches where they were used, their enamel icons a miniaturized version of middle Byzantine mosaic programs, and their stonework an echo of the marble revetment lauded by Byzantine orators. Prance argues that these portable objects and their larger architectural homes were valued for more than their constituent parts because of their collection and synthesis of rare materials, which demanded considerable effort to mine or harvest, transport, trade, and produce. This chapter demonstrates that such processes were an integral aspect of the materiality of objects and buildings in the Byzantine world. Continuing the theme of transformation introduced by Taronas, in chapter 6 I analyze some of the same objects discussed by Prance, focusing on middle Byzantine Eucharistic vessels made of red stone and of transparent glass. Such vessels mediated views of the Eucharistic wine for worshippers during the celebration of the Divine Liturgy through their material mimicry and transparency, their materiality participating in the ritual process of veiling, unveiling, revealing, and consecrating the Eucharistic bread and wine. In the face of contemporary Eucharistic controversies that challenged the sacred status of the Eucharist, these vessels combined materials with inscriptions to affirm visually that the vessels contained the very body and blood of Christ. Such vessels illustrate how materials worked with words and images to shape Byzantine experiences of ritual and perceptions of the divine. Anthony Cutler further develops the theme of materiality and presence in chapter 7, focusing on the medium of ivory, an increasingly unknown material in today’s world, which the Byzantines prized for luxury imperial icons. Cutler examines how the artistic strategies employed by artisans, the scale and sculptural qualities of ivory icons, and the haptic engagement of users actualized the corporal presence of the supernatural and imperial subjects in ivory icons. While Byzantine theologians were careful to distinguish between the icon and the person represented, attributing to icons only partial presence rather than the full presence of the Eucharist, surviving ivory objects suggest that the reality of Byzantine engagement with icons may not have been so neatly defined. The strategies of the ivory craftsmen and the embodied engagement of elite users who held, kissed, and gazed at ivory icons, reveal how these objects actualized the holy person and made them physically present for Byzantine viewers. While most of the scholars in this volume focus on artworks and other objects, Charles Barber, in chapter 8, offers a complementary approach by exploring how Byzantine philosophers conceptualized materiality and the ability to apprehend it. Barber takes up the writings of Georgios Pachymeres (1242–1310), a teacher at the Patriarchal School of the Great Church who drew on ancient and late antique thinkers, including Aristotle, Plato, Simplicius, and Pseudo-Dionysius. Barber’s close analysis of Pachymeres’ writings offers insight into how the Byzantines understood the concept of “matter,” the relationship between “matter” and “form,” and how these aspects of an object can be understood. In this philosophical tradition, all things result from the combination of matter and form, with form serving as the substrate. Matter cannot be known directly, but only by analogy, or according to Plato’s Timaeus, “by a certain bastard reasoning” – a phrase that late antique and Byzantine thinkers, such as Pachymeres, adopted – in relation to what it has potential to become with form. From this perspective Byzantine artworks may be understood as composite objects in which form shapes matter into something apprehensible. In chapter 9, Roland Betancourt probes Byzantine understandings of materiality by bringing together the range of sacred materials introduced in previous chapters, interrogating eleventh-century sources on icons, the Eucharist, and relics, and examining questions of matter and presence. Icons ostensibly differed from the Eucharist and relics, inasmuch as the former are artistic representation and the latter are the holy bodies of Christ and the saints themselves. Byzantine thinkers commonly employed language of graphe (γραφή, writing, painting) and typos (τύπος, imprint) to characterize how icons were produced. Despite the categorical differences between icons on the one hand and the Eucharist and relics on the other, Betancourt notes that Byzantine writers nevertheless apply some of the same terms and concepts of representation to the Eucharist and relics as well, sometimes even seeming to downplay the unique status of relics to defend icons in the face of critics. Further enriching this volume’s exploration of icons and bridging Byzantium and the post-Byzantine legacy in chapter 10, Annemarie Weyl Carr considers the materiality of the veiled icon of the Eleousa tou Kykkou, or Kykkotissa, whose wood panel has been attributed to supernatural origins. Carr highlights the importance of understanding such icons as more than just images, but also as material objects whose identity can be as much a product of their geographical location – in this case, the Kykkos monastery on the island of Cyprus – as of the subject they represent. Carr shows how, perhaps ironically, an icon can endure as an important cult object even when its image is no longer accessible to viewers, here in part because of the icon’s presentation in an elaborate, candlelit iconostasis. The icon’s enduring importance can likely also be attributed to its presentation in an iconostasis, regular rituals of veneration, and even the veil that obscures the image. Like Betancourt, Carr also grapples with the distinctions between icons and relics, and ultimately argues against the icon being subsumed into the category of relic, asserting that it was the image, rather than the material, that defined the category of icons in Byzantium. While the Eastern Roman Empire no longer exists as a political entity, its material vestiges remain, dazzling and beckoning to reveal Byzantium in new ways even today. The modern popularity of the icon and its glimmering gold ground – illustrated by the numerous blockbuster museum exhibitions of Byzantine art in recent decades – attests to the allure of Byzantium’s sensuous materiality. This volume seeks to demonstrate some of the ways that materiality can serve as a lens for fruitfully exploring and better understanding such material vestiges of Byzantine culture, posing questions and setting terms vital to the wider study of the medieval world. In these chapters, matter emerges as more than just medium, becoming a powerful actor alongside human and non-human agents, and reshaping contemporary perspectives on the Eastern Roman Empire.
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