Download PDF | Lara Frentrop - The Art of Dining in Medieval Byzantium (Studies in Byzantine Cultural History)-Routledge (2023).
189 Pages
The Art of Dining in Medieval Byzantium
Thousands of intact ceramic bowls and plates as well as fragments made in the medieval Byzantine empire survive to this day. Decorated with figural and non-figural imagery applied in a variety of techniques and adorned with colourful paints and glazes, the vessels can tell us much about those who owned them and those who looked at them. In addition to innumerable ceramic vessels, a handful of precious metal bowls and plates survive from the period. Together, these objects make up the art of dining in medieval Byzantium. This art of dining was effervescent, at turns irreverent and deadly serious, visually stunning and fun. It is suggestive of ways in which those viewing the objects used a quotidian and biologically necessary (f)act – that of eating – to reflect on their lives and deaths, their aspirations and their realities.
This book examines the ceramic and metal vessels in terms of the information offered on the foods eaten, the foods desired and their status; the spectacle of the banquet; the relationship between word and image in medieval Byzantium; the dangers of taste; the emergence of new moral and social ideals; and the use of dining as a tool in constructing and enforcing hierarchy. This book is of appeal to scholarly and non-scholarly audiences interested in the art and material culture of the medieval period and in the social history of food and eating.
Lara Frentrop completed her PhD at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and has since held lecturing and research roles at The Courtauld Institute and Heidelberg University, Germany. Her research explores how the interactive experience – from physical to rhetorical – of the material culture and architecture of medieval Byzantium created meaning and identity. Her work focuses on themes including communication and relationships, both human and divine; rhetoric; performativity; sin and salvation; and body and space.
Introduction
A twelfth-century silver-gilt bowl discovered near the town of Berezov in Russia in 1967 and now in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg is intricately decorated with incised and relief images. The vessel is small, measuring less than twelve centimetres high and twenty centimetres wide. It has a bulbous body that is worked from two sheets of metal joined at its lip. In its decoration, the vessel brings together different colours and textures of metal – silver, silver-gilt and niello and raised and incised – and a broad range of subject matter, only gradually revealed through using, handling and moving the vessel. The silver-gilt exterior is worked in tiers of small, tightly stacked medallions with an arched shape (fig. 2.3). The medallions show entertainers and birds, felines and hybrids and flowers worked in repoussé. Details are articulated in punched dots and incised lines.
The little fields containing individual figures are topped by a rim that depicts animals circling the vessel in pursuit of one another, alternating with trees that anchor the scene in a landscape. The interior of the vessel is made up of a smooth sheet of silver that at the vessel’s bottom bears an incised gilded image of St George on horseback.1 On the vessel’s exterior, the top row of medallions is the only one to show human figures. It represents musicians seated on the floor cross-legged and playing the drum, flute, tambourine and string instruments. The musicians are interspersed with acrobats and somersaulting tumblers and striding male figures, probably representing dancers. Together, they depict the entertainments enjoyed in the Byzantine cultural sphere and beyond, whether in private or public and religious or secular settings.2 The figures surround two medallions that show cupbearers.
The first is standing upright, his body turned slightly to his left and holding a cup in his hand; the second, who is turned to his right, is in the process of pouring a drink from a full-bodied vessel. The two cupbearers flank a medallion showing a seated half-length figure (fig. 4.2) that through its representation is marked out as different from the entertainers and attendants surrounding it, and as central to the scene depicted in the top row of medallions. While the performers and cupbearers are shown in full length, as physically active and turned slightly away from the viewer, the central figure is depicted in a half-length format, in a comparatively static pose and facing the viewer frontally – although this figure, too, is avoiding eye contact with the viewer. The seated figure is firstly a female and secondly dressed in Byzantine imperial garments, contrasting with both the gender and the dress of those surrounding her.
This signals differences in both status and behaviour. Most importantly, the figure is a participant at a banquet. This is indicated by the table in front of her on which are resting a small goblet and two round objects, possibly bread or plates, and the two cupbearers flanking her. The image hints that the object on which it is depicted played an important role at the dinner table of its owner, both in terms of its display as a work of art and its functional purpose as a drinking vessel. The vessel from Berezov, a bowl or cup decorated with a multitude of images, is part of the art of dining.3 The medieval Byzantine art of dining is a treasure trove of information about the lives, dreams and fears of its audience. It is the material culture of banqueting, the objects that were used during a meal – rather than depictions of communal meals, which express dogmatic truths and iconographic formulae rather than reality – that enables us to take a seat at the middle Byzantine dinner table.4 It was part of the ‘everyday life’ of individuals living across the Byzantine empire in its geographical and socio-economic breadth, offering access to a part of their existence that – at least in comparison to religious life in the empire – remains relatively unstudied.5 And yet, it has received little attention, its analysis restricted by disciplinary and material boundaries.
There are thousands of intact ceramic bowls and plates as well as fragments of vessels made in the Byzantine empire, uncovered during archaeological excavations in modern-day Greece and Turkey and in shipwrecks across the Mediterranean and now held in collections across the world. Decorated with figural and non-figural imagery applied in a variety of techniques and adorned with colourful paints and glazes, the vessels can tell us much about those who owned them and those who looked at them. They offer information on the foods eaten, the foods desired and their status; the spectacle of the banquet; the relationship between word and image in medieval Byzantium; the dangers of taste; the emergence of new moral and social ideals; and the use of dining as a tool in constructing and enforcing hierarchy.
In addition to innumerable ceramic vessels, a handful of precious metal bowls and plates made of silver and silver-gilt and discovered in remote regions of Eurasia, such as the vessel from Berezov, survive from the medieval period.6 These are of an uncertain and often disputed place of manufacture, though where they were made is less relevant here. What is of interest is their imagery, which spans from scenes of entertainment and dining to depictions of fight and triumph and even scenes of otherworldly punishments. The images depicted on the precious metal objects bear strong similarities to the themes found on glazed ceramic vessels. They are interconnected with rhetorical and visual trends occurring in the Byzantine empire at the time of the making of the metal vessels – the eleventh and twelfth centuries – suggesting that this is where they could and would have been viewed and understood. The ceramic and silver vessels make up the art of dining, which was effervescent, at turns irreverent and deadly serious, visually stunning and fun.
It is suggestive of ways in which those living in the medieval Byzantine empire used a quotidian and biologically necessary (f)act – that of eating – to reflect on their lives and deaths, their aspirations and their realities. The artworks can offer up valuable information about their specific context of use, that of the Byzantine dining table, and the important role that its art played at all social levels in constructing and displaying fluid messages about economic, social and cultural identity. The artworks’ role at the table also raises the question of the ways in which practices of dining, including visual, material and intellectual cultures, participated in wider cultural developments. The ceramic and precious metal objects viewed at the table articulate related social and cultural concepts at the heart of this book: an interest in food and its conspicuous display; the theatre of the banquet; the use of the visual forms of rhetorical tropes to create layered and fluid meaning; warnings against sensory overindulgence and the new ideals of manliness and triumph that emerged during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. To understand the social, cultural and intellectual context of communal eating in medieval Byzantium,
I shall explore the role of food consumption and its material culture and the relationship between the two. Food, from the staples of the Byzantine to complex and unusual dishes, held meaning, encoded in its presentation and its preparation. This was displayed and enhanced through vessels of tableware, their material, their shape and their decoration. The pursuit of novelty and artifice in the presentation of culinary creations at the dining table and changes in ceramic consumption hold important clues to the changing perception of food during the middle Byzantine period and the role of tableware and the dining context in constructing and articulating social and cultural identity. Where and how food was consumed, the food itself, and the images viewed on tableware but also on walls and in other media reveal new facets of communal life and dining in medieval Byzantium.
The bowls, plates and chafing dishes studied here were made between the eleventh and early thirteenth century. This is a particularly interesting period to look at as it witnessed the most pronounced changes in the shape and decoration of ceramic vessels especially. These changes indicate that the role and perception of these objects transformed during this period, spurred on by new aesthetic and culinary tastes. From the eleventh century onwards, a marked increase took place in the production and consumption of glazed ceramics, indicating that the use of ceramic tableware became more common. It also suggests that greater interest was taken by both potters and consumers in the decoration of the vessels and in the display of food contained in them. It is however worth noting that even glazed ceramics, the arguably more ‘democratic’ medium of dining, did not reach all parts and audiences of the empire. This is suggested by both the number of glazed vessels in relation to unglazed ones, which continued to dominate archaeological finds especially in rural contexts, and by archaeological excavations in and surveys of smaller settlements in the countryside. But for surprisingly large swathes of the Byzantine population across an unprecedented socio-economic spectrum, these centuries mark the period when ‘the art of dining’ took off and took on an increasingly important role in the context of the communal meal. It was not only the images on the objects that were invested with meaning – the shape, the colour and the texture of the tableware in many cases were carefully designed to heighten the meaning of the imagery. The majority of the ceramic vessels I examine displays figural imagery; the decoration on the precious metal vessels is exclusively figural.7
What does the imagery and the material of the art of dining mean, if anything at all? How does the significance of the images impact on their surroundings, and how do the surroundings of the images shift their interpretation in turn? What is the connection between material and meaning? And how are the objects used to structure and even subvert social relationships, hierarchy and identity? These are some of the key questions that I shall address to show that Byzantine meals, and the art present during them, were anything but boring. The study of the art of dining has been limited for a range of reasons, some practical, others methodological. Food and eating it in medieval Byzantium are a substantial and growing area of study. More often than not, it is the practicalities of food and eating, rather than visual culture, that receive most attention. The focus tends to be on historical, anthropological and archaeological material that can explain how certain foodstuffs were grown, transported and exchanged, on eating implements and on food morality.8 Individual chapters, articles and essays have been dedicated to the visual culture of dining and to a handful of objects associated with the dinner table.9 Some existing works are methodologically problematic: they accept the idea that Byzantine images can be read as accurate depictions of real life. Because of the nature of these publications, dedicated to a single object or theme, they shine a spotlight on specific aspects of the art of dining. This however fails to illuminate just how much of a multivalent, nuanced and rich genre this really is. Taking a broader material and historical approach allows to uncover how it changed over the course of a few centuries in response to new tastes and ideas, and just how enmeshed the dining table was with other areas of Byzantine life.
The images on display and as such used at the dining table played a crucial role in the creation and display of status, relationships and identity. They incorporated practices such as the contemplation of death and the Last Things, which played an important role in communal and individual worship, and contributed to forming trends also present in other genres and spaces such as rhetoric and the imperial court. The art of dining does not exist in a vacuum but instead as part of a network – of objects and images, of conversations, of social interactions and spaces. The different materials of surviving tableware pose their own sets of challenges. Though it is painting with a broad brush and the field is ever changing, it is not incorrect to say that archaeologists have tended to ignore Byzantine pottery because it is the stuff in the way while digging down to the more ‘interesting’ material (as evidenced by the lacunae in the recording of the find spots and stratigraphy of the medieval objects in some excavations, particularly those of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). In the same vein, art historians can be dismissive of Byzantine ceramic tableware because of the poor state of preservation of some objects and the crude nature of the manufacture of others – in short, because it is not ‘art’.10 For the pottery tableware, the sheer quantity in which it survives is daunting. The selection of what to publish, in catalogues of individual collections or thematically structured exhibitions, and of what to show to the public is in itself a judgement of value both artistic and material, with certain contingents of the material deemed just not worth the effort.
Those that do make the cut are rarely if ever approached in terms of what they, as the art present at the dining table of individuals living in the Byzantine empire, can tell us about this aspect of Byzantine art and life and its impact beyond the banquet. The bowls and plates made of silver and silver-gilt are far less numerous than their ceramic counterparts. Their origin is disputed, their access through museums and publications difficult as a result of display, history and language.11 Studying them together with contemporary Byzantine ceramic tableware reveals the similarities between the two materials, their shared iconography and themes pointing towards the same concerns and interests. Re-contextualising these objects at the banqueting table, as part of the art of dining, allows to treat them as works with agency and an active role and thereby to uncover their significance more fully. In some ways, the meaning of the images on the art of dining seems obvious and even literal. If a ceramic bowl shows a fish, then surely said bowl was used to serve fish at table? But while the images on some objects can seem simple, both in their significance and their appearance, they are not. Nor are they merely one-to-one illustrations of their contents and their surroundings. Instead, they are an eloquent if not loquacious form of commentary on anything and everything from the food to the guests. They even point out their own thing-ness, for example through paint dripping down the edge of a chafing dish, mimicking the dripping of the sauce contained inside the vessel.
The images are in vivid conversation with developments occurring in other areas of Byzantine life including but not limited to culinary and aesthetic tastes and the desire for novelty. They respond to the popularity of rhetorical games and add their own ludic contribution to the dinner table. The images display their own take on the entertainments of the banquet and reveal the delight taken by their audiences in the pursuit of sensory pleasure. They participate in the emergence of new ideals of behaviour and offer visual rebukes for those who do not meet the bar. The objects and their decoration are rich in subtext and operate within a network of intertextuality. The meaning of images varied depending on who saw them, who they were and what they knew, and on whether they were viewed individually or in combination with other scenes. The imagery on ceramic vessels often centres on a single decorative element such as a figure playing an instrument, a lone animal or an individual squaring off against a dragon-serpent. While these images and the objects they are depicted on carry meaning on their own, this could have been modified, combined and re-combined ad infinitum as part of a dinner set.
A hare with a siren is not the same as the hare with a hunter; a dancer with a musician is not the same as a dancer with a military man. By changing the selection of vessels on display during a meal, those picking the tableware had the choice of making fun of their guests, scaring them or flattering them – provided the combination of vessels was not haphazard. In addition to a first attempt at interpretation by the host, another round of creating meaning would have taken place each time an individual guest looked at the objects, bringing their own sets of experience and agency. As a result, the meaning of each object is nuanced and continuously shifting. Over a relatively constrained time period, from the eleventh to the first half of the thirteenth century, the objects of tableware – the art of dining – display images that are shared across materials, geographies and socio-economic spheres. Some iconographic themes that I shall discuss such as animals and fighting men form the most frequently occurring subjects on tableware made and used in a wide range of places, from central Greece to Asia Minor. The shared themes are important for two crucial, interconnected reasons. First, they indicate that cultural developments predominantly associated with the imperial sphere and the capital of Constantinople in fact took place much more widely and across the social spectrum.12
The imagery on ceramic tableware in particular highlights the central role played by the middling and lower classes in the formation and dispersion of cultural trends including visual, discursive and social. Second, new themes such as that of the heroic, fighting man appear around the same time on works in both clay and metal. This undermines the perceived hierarchy of materials, where it is held that innovation occurs in the more ‘expensive’ medium and then arrives at the cheaper end in a trickle-down effect.13 The ceramic art of dining was not a passive participant in and recipient of wider developments but instead an active agent in their shaping and diffusion. It seems that cultural, visual and artistic trends in the Byzantine empire were a lot more ‘democratic’ than has previously been assumed, with ceramics the key to unlocking a unique, and redefining perspective on Byzantine life and culture. Nonetheless, ceramics are everyday objects, in the sense that they are involved in the consumption of food – though this does not mean that they were ‘banal’, ‘cheap’ or ‘without value’. Making ceramics was difficult and technically challenging, and firing the vessels was expensive. Byzantine ceramicists were technologically innovative and appropriated techniques and motifs from other cultures, including Italy, China and the Islamic World, as the developing and changing roster of ceramic wares during the Middle Ages reveals.14 Nor does the relative inexpensiveness of pottery in relation to precious metal equate to the fact that only the lower and middle classes bought and displayed decorated ceramic tableware, or that ceramics were considered as without value. The wide breadth of ceramic products in terms of quality and style should be understood as an indicator of its social and economic fluidity and its competitiveness in the market of tablewares.
Most of imported lead-glazed Incised Sgraffito and Champlevé wares excavated at Sagalassos in southwestern Turkey were found to have repair holes – a practice previously attested in other middle Byzantine ceramic assemblages.15 It seems that repairing broken glazed pottery with lead thread was a common practice during the period; the repair, in turn, indicates that a vessel was valued by its owner. The technological ambition demonstrated by ceramic tableware, the visual appeal of its colours and glazes and its continued appreciation by its owners makes it plausible that ceramic vessels were used and displayed in homes alongside and as part of an elite dinner service. Documentary and literary sources attest that these could also include precious metal and tinned vessels, and in the imperial palace rock crystal and gem-encrusted plates and vessels. Near irrespective of budget, whether rich, poor or somewhere in the middle, a buyer would have found a decorated vessel to suit his or her taste and needs. This means that the art of dining and especially the ceramics viewed at the dinner table are perhaps the medium that can give us an insight into the broadest cross-section of Byzantine society, from the poor and rural to the wealthy, powerful and urban. The material and the manufacture of the art of dining was invested with significance in and of itself. The shining lustre of the glazes used in the making of pottery and the gleam of gold and silver caught the eye of those around them and communicated wealth and sophistication. It spoke of jockeying for position within social groups and the role of material culture in this process. The makers of the objects exploited the technological tools at their availability to create different colours, shapes and textures to heighten the visual impact made by the vessels. Often, the appearance of the material of a vessel was manipulated to support its primary purpose – the applied relief figures on chafing dishes, crowding the exterior of the vessels, evoke the hustle and bustle of the performances accompanying a banquet and even produce comedic effects through surprise and laughter. Gold and silver tableware was considered especially suitable to carry images of military triumph and imperial power and was the preferred medium for scaring opponents into submission. On glazed ceramics, the presence of figural imagery satisfied a new appetite for aesthetic novelty at the dinner table and the increasing and deliberate care taken in the display of food. The placing of decoration in hard-to-see places prompted their users to handle and move them and thereby furthered the interactive and communicative nature of the banquet as well as the drama of viewing the objects.
Material culture played a central role in constructing and enhancing the meaning of the components of the banquet. One of the most frequently occurring iconographies on tableware made of both clay and metal depicts animals, either on their own or in groups. Plates and bowls show birds, wild game, felines and fish, which correspond to some of the most commonly consumed foodstuffs at the Byzantine table. The staples of the Byzantine diet were relatively simple, with grains, legumes and vegetables playing a central role. The eleventh and twelfth centuries were a period during which the Byzantines’ attitudes towards food and foodstuffs underwent significant changes, with evidence pointing towards a ‘greater desire for sumptuous meals and a greater availability of different foodstuffs’ in the twelfth century.16 Elaborate and composite dishes were considered as the most desirable and carried a complex symbolism. The taste for these dishes is signalled by medieval Byzantine tableware, which in addition to the rota of hares, lions and birds displays combinations of rarer and even mythical creatures, including hybrids and monsters. These are allegorical representations of the novel culinary creations that brought together earth, sky and sea and were designed to stun and astonish those eating them and those looking at them. One of the most important purposes of the vessels used at the Byzantine dinner table was to attract the eyes of diners and to produce sensations of awe.
This was achieved first through the visual and physical qualities of the objects and second through the way they were brought to the table. The glaze and paint covering the vessels of ceramic tableware were exactly the point, practically and aesthetically. The glazing of pottery fulfilled a practical purpose, sealing the surface of a vessel to enable it to hold liquids. But it was the aesthetic qualities of glazed pottery that cemented its desirability, with the visual properties of the techniques used in glazed pottery exploited and explored by both the makers and users of ceramic tableware to create the theatre of dining. Viewers were invited to decipher the imagery, with its meaning accentuated, altered and subverted through the placement of colour and glaze. The glistening and shining qualities of gold and silver tableware encrusted with gems and pearls were deliberately deployed in banqueting contexts to produce sensations of awe through visual splendour. The reflective properties of the materials used for tableware, emphasising colour and decoration, were a determining factor in the use and display of both metal and ceramic tableware. The way in which food was presented to guests at banquets was heavily orchestrated and stage-managed – certainly at the imperial court but also in other contexts. The medieval Byzantine dining table was a locus for suspense, animation and delight. The theatrical, spectacular nature of the banquet was heightened through the entertainments that surrounded the diners.
These ranged from musicians, dancers and acrobats, as I will discuss, to language and words in the shape of rhetoric and communication. Together, these aspects of the middle Byzantine banquet stimulated the senses of their participants – from food and taste, to the hearing and seeing of images, movement, music and language. The presence of these performers on ceramic and metal tableware reveals that eating, music and dance were closely interconnected in the creation of the splendour and surprise of the banquet in houses across a broad social spectrum, as the material and cost spectrum of the objects suggests. The performance of music during the theatre of the banquet allowed participants to engage in a ‘higher’ form of sensory perception, perhaps to offset the (over)indulgence of taste, smell and touch that could accompany a meal. In images and descriptions of leisure, the presence of musicians appears to be closely tied to performances by acrobats and dancers. The presence of dancers could fulfil a range of functions, from salubrious entertainment to moral edification and triumphal messaging. One of the most important roles of both the dancers depicted on tableware and the dance that accompanied a banquet was to stimulate the senses of those present. Acrobats provided light-hearted entertainment, with mimes and jesters the focus of orchestrated humour within the Byzantine court and wealthy households. However, the function of acrobats at feasts was not restricted to comedy and laughter but also encompassed the display of superiority. Together, the material and visual properties of tableware, its images and the entertainments surrounding the objects played an important role in constructing the theatre of the dining table, designed to divert and impress guests. At the banquet, words were seen but also imagined. They were involved in the word play, the rhetoric and the communication essential to not only communal meals but also to medieval Byzantine society more generally. The often multivalent and eclectically combined images on medieval Byzantine tableware confront the viewer with a problem: how should the complex and often ambiguous imagery of the bowls and plates be interpreted?
Is a single, coherent meaning intended by their decoration, or is the latter a jumble of meaningless scenery? The clue to their interpretation can be found in contemporary rhetorical strategies and performances. Riddles and ‘double-tonguedness’ prominently featured in twelfth-century rhetorical performances and works and even in material culture.17 Studying visual and rhetorical displays together can illuminate not only the interpretation of individual artworks but also the broader relationship in medieval Byzantium between rhetoric and the visual arts. The Byzantine banquet appears to be one of the settings outside of the religious context where sensory indulgence was actively pursued and even indulged. The engagement in and display of the activities of the banquet, from food to entertainment and tableware, acted as social markers that denoted sophistication and good taste. Good taste however could easily turn into bad taste – to maintain social norms and to ensure the salvation of one’s soul, it was crucial to not let indulgence turn into overindulgence, as I will move on to examine. It was enjoyment of food that posed a risk to an individual’s moral and physical well-being: the sense of taste was not only a vehicle for enjoyment but also for damnation. In addition to revealing whether an individual was of a good or bad character, food consumption in itself could constitute a sin. Decorated objects of tableware vividly illustrated what happened to those that perpetrated a sin, whether related to the table or not. They show beasts and monsters munching on (or disgorging) human body parts, with this imagery recalling contemporary depictions of the Last Judgement.18 The offences associated with food and eating ranged in type and gravity, from punishable offences in monastic refectories to overindulgence and, worst of all, gluttony. Gluttony as the excessive consumption of food and drink is intimately tied to the sense of taste and the lack of restraint in exploring the sensory delights offered by it. Eating, the sense of taste and the sin caused by its (over)indulgence are shown on contemporary works of art, including objects of tableware, to be the cause for the Fall of Adam and Eve, with the images designed to act as deterrents from similar behaviour. By representing scenes of vivid physical pain and punishment that were fluid in their specificity, the tableware used in the medieval Byzantine world encouraged reflections on mortality and on one’s own behaviour, admonishing the viewer to stay on the path of moral virtue.
To avoid damnation, the art of dining offered its participants a number of recourses. In addition to the consideration of death while at the table, the art of dining encouraged its viewers to imitate the role models depicted on vessels and their behaviour. Images of men wearing armour and engaged in valiant battles on ceramic tableware reveal that these objects played a crucial role in the formation of a new male ideal that emerged during the Komnenian period – that of the heroic, manly man. The ‘manliness’ of these figures was intimately tied up in their activities, which provided opportunities for the demonstration of bravery and honour. They are shown hunting both game and dragons, alluding to contemporary thought that conceived of the hunt as a preparation for warfare. The presence of such imagery on ceramic vessels suggests that while hunting for leisure and glory may have been out of financial reach to much of the objects’ audiences, the activity of the hunt appealed to a wider range of social circles than often assumed. Representations of these kinds of men are one of the most frequently occurring iconographies on plates and bowls, highlighting the immense popularity enjoyed by this theme across a wide geographical and socio-economic range.
The images emphasise military might and courage in the face of evil, a topos that appears prominently in popular literature but at the same time becomes associated closely with the emperor. Images of powerful fighters and successful hunters played an integral role in displays of power and triumph, so crucial to the identity of the upper classes, that took place in banqueting contexts. Nuanced and subtly encoded messages were constructed through pointed iconographies found on precious metal vessels that depicted specific historic and fictional events. They included the victorious campaigns of emperors, with the decorated tableware tactically deployed to further the humiliation of those they had vanquished. The material properties of the art of dining including the weight and colour of precious metal were used to further communicate the might of an object’s owner in combination with the way in which the artwork was presented to its viewers and users.
Another subject used to communicate power and might was that of Alexander the Great, a triumphal ruler associated through visual and textual culture with the figure of the emperor. Alexander the Great is shown on a silver-gilt vessel, accompanied by scenes of leisure and pleasure. Re-contextualising depictions of pleasure, which accompany the images of triumphal rulers on metal tableware in particular, through contemporary discourse and art reveals that they held an alternative meaning that encoded specific nuances of power and triumph. This fluidity of meaning was central to the art of dining, with interpretations constructed and re-constructed discursively with each new and individual beholder.
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