Download PDF | Maria Alessia Rossi, Alice Isabella Sullivan - Byzantium in Eastern European Visual Culture in the Late Middle Ages-Brill (2020).
321 Pages
Acknowledgments
This volume stems from two sessions organized at the 44th Byzantine Studies Conference (4–7 October 2018; San Antonio, Texas) and titled “North of Byzantium: Art and Architecture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Cultural Spheres, c.1300–c.1550 (I) and (II).” We are grateful to the audience members at the conference for the thoughtful comments, questions, and the lively discussion, and to the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture for sponsoring the sessions and for making possible this project from beginning to end. We have also received individual and joint support, as well as generous financial assistance for the research, writing, and revising stages of this volume from the following institutions and organizations: The Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University, a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art from the American Council of Learned Societies, generously supported by the Getty Foundation, as well as the VolkswagenStiftung and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In addition to the session speakers at the Byzantine Studies Conference, and in efforts to enrich the topics and issues under consideration, we invited other authors to contribute to this publication. We would like to thank all of the contributors for their enthusiasm toward this project, and for their hard work in bringing their individual essays to fruition. We also greatly appreciate the unfailing support from the staff and editors at Brill, and in particular Florin Curta and Dušan Zupka for accepting this volume for inclusion in the series East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450. A special thanks to the anonymous reviewer for the thorough comments and sound advice that helped improve the individual contributions and the volume as a whole. Finally, we are deeply indebted to our copyeditor, Joseph Hannan, for his invaluable assistance in helping us bring this project to completion and to our indexer, Sever J. Voicu, for his time and effort. This edited volume is the first publication to arise from our joint initiative— North of Byzantium (NoB)—through which we aim to explore the rich history, art, and culture of the northern frontiers of the Byzantine Empire in Eastern Europe between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. We are very grateful to all of the mentors, scholars, and friends who have greeted us with encouragement from the very beginning, and to the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture for believing in this project and supporting it with an initial three-year grant.
Introduction
Maria Alessia Rossi and Alice Isabella Sullivan
The recent global turn in medieval studies and art history has incited various conversations about the geographic and temporal parameters of the study of Western medieval and Byzantine art, architecture, and visual culture.1 In efforts to expand the study of Byzantine art in particular, this collection of essays challenges understanding of the artistic production of late medieval Eastern Europe by tackling aspects of the little-studied and at times neglected regions situated at the northern fringes of the Byzantine Empire. Parts of the Balkan Peninsula, the Carpathian Mountains, and areas of early modern Russia were in contact with the empire during the Palaiologan period (1259–1453), and took on prominent roles in the continuation and refashioning of Byzantine artistic and cultural models after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 (Fig. 0.1). At the heart of this volume is a more nuanced understanding of Byzantium in Eastern European visual culture during the late medieval period.
Although the “influence” of Byzantium in Eastern Europe has been addressed in scholarship, and in particular by two influential thinkers, Nicolae Iorga and Dimitri Obolensky, their respective cultural histories did not tackle the art, architecture, and visual culture of the Balkans and the Carpathians in a thorough and nuanced manner.2 At the core of their publications stood the idea that the fall of Constantinople did not put an end to Byzantium. Rather, from that point onward, Byzantium’s legacy, both directly and indirectly, played a key role in shaping the cultural, religious, and political life of regions in Eastern Europe. Iorga underscored the important relations between the Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia and parts of the former Empire, like Mount Athos, and focused his attention on the role of Byzantine ideology in the north-Danubian principalities during the post-Byzantine period (16th–18th centuries). His ideas inspired at least two generations of Romanian historians looking at, for example, the architecture and decoration of 16th-century churches in the principality of Moldavia. On the other hand, Obolensky’s “Byzantine Commonwealth”—spreading geographically from Constantinople to the Balkans, the Carpathians, and medieval Russia—was the space of the international community of Eastern Orthodox Christians under the superior influence, whether direct or indirect, of the Byzantine emperor, and stood in direct opposition to Western Europe.
This model emphasizes the political and ideological superiority of Byzantium, while relegating to a lesser status those regions under the “influence” of the “center.” In recent years, scholars have problematized the center-periphery dynamics outlined by Iorga and Obolensky, and in particular the concept of the “Byzantine Commonwealth” across Eastern Europe.3 On the one hand, Anthony Kaldellis has been highly critical of the concept from an “inner” perspective, arguing for the central role that Hellenism (classical tradition) played in the development of Byzantine culture up to the 14th century.4 On the other hand, for the regions north of the Carpathian Mountains, especially medieval Kievan Rus’, Christian Raffensperger has put forward a similarly constructed criticism about the concept of the “Byzantine Commonwealth.” He has argued for the development of medieval Rus’ at the crossroads of Byzantium and the West between the 10th and the 12th centuries.5 Instead of a “Byzantine Commonwealth,” Raffensperger proposes the concept of the “Byzantine ideal” in the context of which Byzantine models were appropriated in order to draw connections and forms of legitimacy with the Roman past.6 However, in the important contributions of these scholars, visual culture plays a small role, if any at all. Art historians ought to have a voice in these debates, as the art, architecture, and visual culture of Eastern Europe has much to offer.
The textual sources considered in dialogue with the material evidence in the form of secular and religious buildings, painted images, manuscripts, metalwork, and embroideries, as well as liturgical and paraliturgical performances, reveal more dynamic facets of cultural contact and relations with Byzantium among the regions of the Balkans, the Carpathians, and early modern Russia that developed under the spiritual power of Orthodoxy. Indeed, indepth examinations of the visual and material evidence, as revealed by the essays in this volume, problematize the concepts and arguments outlined by Iorga and Obolensky, which had held sway in scholarship for far too long, and enhance the scholarly contributions already made by Kaldellis, Raffensperger, and others.
The essays in this volume engage with issues of cultural contact and patronage, as well as the transformation and appropriation of Byzantine artistic, cultural, theological, and political forms alongside local traditions as evident in architecture, monumental painting cycles, icons, sculpture, textiles, written texts, and ceremonies. Specifically, in discussing the regions of Croatia, Republic of North Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Russia between the 14th and 16th centuries in their own right and in relation to developments especially in the Byzantine cultural sphere, this volume challenges earlier assumptions about their artistic production. The interconnected lands that constitute modern-day Eastern Europe have developed within and beyond the borders of Byzantium. For much of the medieval period, the Balkans, the Carpathians, and further north in Russia experienced shifting political borders, at times some under Byzantine rule. Although the north-Danubian principalities and early modern Russia were never part of the empire, they were certainly under its influence. Eastern Orthodoxy has had a profound impact on the development of artistic, religious, political, economic, and ideological facets in these territories that have for far too long remained marginal in scholarship. Often referred to as the “Slavic world,” Eastern Europe has long been relegated to the margins of scholarly inquiry and regarded to have little to offer.7 Inconsistencies in the definition of what constitutes Eastern Europe, as well as 20th-century politics, have contributed to the marginalization.8
These regions that once formed kingdoms and empires are now part of many different countries.9 History and politics have traced these lands, and communication and cooperation have been impossible at times, let alone comparative art historical analyses. For one thing, the Iron Curtain created actual and ideological barriers to the study of much of Eastern Europe, rendering relevant literature inaccessible and the study of actual objects and monuments impossible (Fig. 0.2). Much has changed since then, and much more remains to be done. The specificities of each region, and in modern times, politics and nationalistic approaches, have reinforced the tendency to treat them separately, preventing scholars from questioning whether the visual output could be considered as an expression of a shared history. The artistic production of Eastern Europe could also help us reveal larger connections between the Byzantine cultural sphere and regions beyond the empire’s margins, while challenging earlier assumptions about these lands, and the notion of “decline” generally associated with late Byzantine and post-Byzantine art, architecture, and visual culture.10 Moreover, instead of being places of “influence” from elsewhere, these territories reveal dynamic networks of contact and interchange that may allow scholars to paint richer pictures of the development of local artistic and cultural forms, the shared traditions of these Eastern European lands, and their indebtedness to Byzantine models.11 The art, architecture, and visual culture of these regions invite current and future generations of scholars to unravel their prismatic dimensions and chart the multitude of connections with Byzantium and still other traditions. Each of the ten essays in this volume focuses on how the heritage of Byzantium was continued, transformed, and deployed alongside local developments and other models, in order to shape notions of identity in the artistic and cultural traditions of Eastern European centers. The authors are all specialists whose research examines the innovative visual and cultural production of the Balkan Peninsula, the Carpathian Mountains, and early modern Russia. Their contributions examine key objects, monuments, texts, and rituals in efforts to make them better known among the scholarly community, but also in order to introduce new questions and approaches that could serve as models for future studies within different disciplines, ranging from archeology and material culture to art and architectural history.
In Chapter 1, Justin L. Willson examines Byzantine-Slavic relations by analyzing an early-14th-century fresco of Solomon’s Allegory of Wisdom from Bulgaria in light of Philotheos Kokkinos’s discourse on Wisdom. The essay argues in favor of the framework of the “commons” instead of “influence” with regard to cross-cultural contact between Byzantium and regions of the Balkans. Alexandra Vukovich, in Chapter 2, tackles the same complex issue by examining the image of Muscovy as the north of Byzantium in the 15th century. Through the exploration of the rite of investiture, she discusses the multilayered relationship among Byzantine models, the local landscape of power, and other cultural contacts, in this case with the Mongols. Particular emphasis is given to the performative part of the ceremony of investiture that allows for invented traditions, ancient objects, well-known rituals, and new idioms to come together in order to give shape to a new Muscovite image of power. For Vukovich, textual sources are the primary catalysts for the transfer and subsequent transformations of knowledge. This is a facet central to the study of Elias Petrou as well. Chapter 3 outlines the cultural and intellectual relationships that extended between the Serbian and Byzantine elites from the 13th to the 15th centuries. Two case studies illuminate Serbian patronage in Constantinople and the movement of people and objects from the Byzantine capital to regions of the Balkans.
The next chapters move deeper into the Serbian milieu to demonstrate the cultural connections and new visual forms, iconographies, and styles indebted to Byzantine and Western models that emerged in a local context. In Chapter 4, Marija Mihajlovic-Shipley addresses the sociopolitical issues, cultural interactions, and biconfessional circumstances in the Adriatic region during the 13th century by means of the icon of Sts. Peter and Paul in the Vatican Treasury. Mihajlovic-Shipley explores the possible reasons for a diplomatic gift from a Serbian queen to a Latin pope, placing the Serbian Kingdom at the crossroads between Eastern and Western Christendom during the second half of the 13th century. Chapter 5 focuses on the newly developed family ties between the Byzantine Empire and the Serbian Kingdom at the beginning of the 14th century by focusing on Christ’s miracle cycle in monumental decorations in the Serbian lands in contrast to Byzantine models. Maria Alessia Rossi discusses similarities and differences in image cycles of Christ’s miracles, showing how this iconography was transmitted, exchanged, and altered in a Serbian context in order to prove a shared Byzantine heritage as well as a need for innovation as a means to express a newly developing identity for the Serbian state. The dynamics of patronage and identity in 14th-century Serbia are also central to Chapter 6. Ida Sinkević reveals the multiple factors—geopolitical, social, artistic, and religious—that contributed to the unique combination of Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic forms in the building of the main church, or katholikon, of Dečani Monastery in particular, and in Serbian medieval ecclesiastical architecture in general.
Chapter 7 continues to explore the architectural history of the region and sheds new light on the connections between Serbia and Wallachia in the late Palaiologan and post-Byzantine periods. Jelena Bogdanović examines the long lives of Middle Byzantine triconch churches to the south and north of the Danube River, arguing for vibrant processes of architectural development in Serbia and Wallachia that ought not to be discussed separately and in isolation due to national divides, but rather in dialogue, in order to reveal facets of the interconnectedness of these territories and their shared Byzantine models. Moving further north and deeper into the multifaceted artistic production of the Carpathian Mountain regions, Alice Isabella Sullivan, in Chapter 8, examines the distinctive architecture and iconographic programs of the Moldavian monastic churches built in the century after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. These monuments express complex social and religious politics, as well as elucidate processes of image translations, the transfer of artistic ideas, and the particular dynamics of cultural contact in the principality of Moldavia, which developed at the crossroads of different traditions, and which took on a central role particuarly in the continuation and refashioning of Byzantine forms after 1453. In Chapter 9, Henry Schilb looks at the respective and distinct embroidery traditions of Wallachia and Moldavia, which developed along different avenues of cultural contact with the Slavic and Byzantine cultural spheres, and may reflect and illuminate aspects of the social, political, and even economic differences between these two northDanubian Romanian principalities. The final essay examines east-west relations across the Adriatic Sea. Chapter 10 presents another case study of the artistic contacts and patronage that extended across the Adriatic Sea during the 14th century. Danijel Ciković and Iva Jazbec Tomaić focus on an embroidered altar frontal made for the Krk Cathedral in Croatia by Paolo Veneziano, exploring its production against the tense political situation that unfolded between the Hungarian-Croatian King Louis I of Anjou and the Venetian Republic.
The individual chapters and the volume as a whole, foster crossdisciplinary dialogues and offer examples of how scholars and future researchers may begin to expand the temporal and geographic parameters of the study of medieval and Byzantine art, architecture, and visual culture to the little-studied yet visually and culturally rich spheres of Eastern Europe. The essays offer a selection of case studies questioning any rigid understanding of the complex and stratified cultural production of these regions during the late Middle Ages. The territories of Eastern Europe have been treated in scholarship within limited frameworks, or discussed within narrow geographic and chronological parameters, or excluded altogether from conversations. For example, certain studies continue to frame the artistic production of particular Eastern European centers with strong nationalistic undertones, dismissing the rich effects of cross-cultural contact on the development of local art, architecture, and visual culture. By allowing for an interdisciplinary discussion, Eastern European history, archaeology, art, and architecture can begin to be visualized in their entirety through a variety of case studies in dialogue with one another, as demonstrated by the fifty-seven volumes published so far by Brill in the series East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450.12 For the Balkans as a whole, Slobodan Ćurčić was the first to emphasize and research the common roots and parallel strands of cultural production, focusing on architecture.
In his massive volume Architecture in the Balkans from Diocletian to Süleyman the Magnificent, Ćurčić analyzed both secular and religious structures, and traced the architectural developments of particular regions in the Balkans over many generations, up to the middle of the 16th century.13 But while his noteworthy contribution treated the architectural history of the Balkan Peninsula as a whole, the architecture of the north Danubian principalities—much indebted to the artistic innovations of the Balkans and Byzantium—received little attention. The Danube River served as the main northern geographic divide for Ćurčić’s study, but the famed river was in fact a much more fluid and porous border during the medieval period.14 We now know that artists and masons trained in Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Athonite workshops worked at the Wallachian and Moldavian courts during the 15th century, for example. Considerations of the transfer of visual forms and ideas between the territories north and south of the Danube River would enrich our picture of the cultural contacts that extended in Eastern Europe during the later Middle Ages, and the central role played by Byzantium and Mount Athos in shaping local artistic styles.15 Bogdanović’s essay in this volume offers an exploration of the architectural production of Eastern Europe, by putting in conversation materials and visual traditions to the north and south of the Danube River that have been treated separately. Most recently, Robert Ousterhout’s volume Eastern Medieval Architecture: The Building Traditions of Byzantium and Neighboring Lands offers a different model, treating regional differences within larger traditions.16 With a broad geographic and chronological focus, Ousterhout’s book traces the developments in medieval architecture across the eastern Mediterranean from early Christian times and through the century after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, including also discussions of regional styles indebted to Byzantium in Croatia, Republic of North Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, the Romanian principalities north of the Danube River, and Russia. For regions of the Carpathian Mountains, and in particular the principalities of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania, a great deal of art historical work remains to be done. Although scholarship in Romanian has addressed the Byzantine heritage in the Carpathians, the studies tend to offer overarching pictures of the development of Romanian art relative to Byzantium and not in-depth examinations that could reveal the regional distinctions and specificities.17 By and large, Romanian historians and archaeologists have studied the art and architecture of the medieval principalities that form the modern-day country of Romania largely from specific, somewhat limiting viewpoints.
In scholarship in the languages of Western Europe, in particular English, art historians have begun to incorporate aspects of the late medieval artistic production of the Carpathian territories into their individual considerations of large issues centered on Byzantine visual culture.18 A recent exhibition at the Louvre Museum looked at Romanian Byzantine embroideries from the 15th to the 17th centuries: Broderies de tradition byzantine en Roumanie (April 18–July 29, 2019). Current work is also beginning to examine the medieval artistic production of the Carpathian regions through cultural connections, historically grounded methodologies, and more nuanced interpretative strategies, offering comprehensive models for future studies.19 Schilb’s essay brings to the forefront Wallachian embroidery, until now overshadowed by the Moldavian production. The chapter discusses the differences between the traditions of these two principalities that shared adjacent liminal conditions with the post-Byzantine sphere. Moving deeper into the east Carpathian territory, Sullivan’s essay examines how Moldavian art and architecture developed with respect to Byzantium and Western Gothic models adapted alongside local forms, underscoring the eclectic visual character of the artistic production of the post-1453 world. Indeed, the regions under scrutiny in this volume developed at the crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic traditions in the later medieval period, that is, between the 14th and the 16th centuries.20 Cultural contact and interchange resulted in local assimilations of selected elements from distinct traditions but especially from Byzantium, reshaping the cultural and artistic landscapes of the Balkans and the Carpathians. The essay by Ciković and Tomaić demonstrates this development with respect to liturgical embroideries produced in the Croatian cultural context. Moving further north, Vukovich looks at the transfer of Byzantine rituals and regalia at the Muscovite court, suggesting the transformation and invention of Byzantine artifacts and models alongside other examples for local aims and contexts.
Building on these dynamics of cultural exchange, the contributions by Mihajlovic-Shipley and Sinkević discuss the negotiations between Serbia and the West and the ways in which the former, through its visual and architectural output, sought to represent itself in the Mediterranean. To date, several important scholarly studies in English have brought to the fore the art historical and architectural specificities of medieval Serbia. The artistic production of Serbia has been treated, most recently, in a three-volume publication.21 The second volume, edited by Dragan Vojvodić and Danica Popović, explores the Byzantine heritage in Serbian art of the Middle Ages.22 The work of Ivana Jevtić, Ivan Drpić, Ida Sinkević, Ivan Stevović, and Jelena Erdeljan has also offered nuanced insights into the history, culture, and artistic production of this region in connection to the late Palaiologan monumental tradition, to the Orthodox architectural heritage, and to the significance of the choice of media in structuring sacred space.23 In addition to Sinkević and Mihajlovic-Shipley, Rossi builds upon this scholarship, examining issues of diplomacy, ruling ideology, and the meaning of distinctive local features in 14th-century Serbian artistic production. Rossi suggests an original reading of miracle cycles that speaks to a fluid, multicultural, and multifaceted relationship between Byzantium and Serbia, where the latter wants to partake in the Byzantine cultural sphere as well as showcase its independence. The contributions in this volume also tackle different ways to approach the concept of influence and transmission, which has often been tainted by the center-periphery dichotomy. Once one acknowledges that there is nothing inferior about the artistic output of less “central” regions, the next step is to question how indebted to Byzantine models, in this case, were the creativity and autonomy in developing visual vocabularies of these cultural centers, such as those of Eastern Europe. The essays of Willson and Petrou build upon this thinking and look at alternative ways to examine the issue: the former by discussing the contemporary presence in Byzantium and the Slavic world of shared works of art that are not necessarily traceable to one or the other tradition;24 the latter, by pinpointing actual cases of intellectual exchange in Constantinople and the Balkans that stand at the crossroads. Indeed, the medieval world was not static; people, goods, objects, and knowledge traveled across empires, contributing to the rich visual cultures so characteristic, in this case, of the regions of Eastern Europe.
What emerges from these contributions—read in sequence, or each on its own, or paired in various configurations—are issues of cultural contact, local translations, patronage, diplomacy, and ruling ideology, as well as modern politics and their effects on scholarship. But above all, the indebtedness of local specificity to artistic models adopted from elsewhere, and especially from Byzantium, takes center stage. The spiritual power of Byzantium left its mark across the Balkan Peninsula, the Carpathian Mountains, and areas of early modern Russia for many centuries, during and after the empire’s collapse. But in efforts to expand and nuance the artistic landscapes of Eastern Europe during the late medieval period, the culture and artistic production of individual centers must be considered individually and as part of a larger network, thus revealing the shared heritage of these lands that formed a cultural sphere extending beyond medieval, Byzantine, and modern borders. This volume considers aspects of how the heritage of Byzantium was deployed to shape notions of identity and visual rhetoric in Eastern European visual culture and in regions that developed at the crossroads of different traditions. It is our hope that this volume will encourage current and future students and researchers to explore the nuances of cultural contact and interchange and to further the research of the rich and varied art, architecture, and visual culture of Eastern Europe during the medieval period.25
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