Download PDF | Rico Franses - Donor Portraits in Byzantine Art The Vicissitudes of Contact between Human and Divine, Cambridge University Press 2018.
264 Pages
Donor Portraits in Byzantine Art
This book explores the range of images in Byzantine art known as donor portraits. It concentrates on the distinctive, supplicatory contact shown between ordinary, mortal figures and their holy, supernatural interlocutors. The topic is approached from a range of perspectives, including art history, theology, structuralist and poststructuralist anthropological theory, and contemporary symbol and metaphor theory. Rico Franses argues that the term “donor portraits” is inappropriate for the category of images to which it conventionally refers and proposes an alternative title: contact portraits. He contends that the most important feature of the scenes consists in the active role that they play within the belief systems of the supplicants. They are best conceived of not simply as passive expressions of stable, preexisting ideas and concepts, but as dynamic proponents in a fraught, constantly shifting landscape. The book is important for all scholars and students of Byzantine art and religion.
Rico franses is Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History, American University of Beirut, and Director of the University Art Galleries and Collections.
Introduction:
Methodologies for the Study of Donor Portraits In Byzantium and lands under Byzantine influence, those who had constructed, repaired, decorated or redecorated a church, or commissioned a manuscript or an icon, often had themselves represented in or on that object, together with the holy figure to whom the commission was dedicated.1 In many of these images, the patron presents the holy figure with a model of a church building or a manuscript; thus Theodore Metochites in the Kariye Camii (Church of the Chora) in Istanbul offers his church to Christ (1316–21, Fig. 0.1).2 Similarly, Leo, in the frontispiece to his famous Bible, offers his book However, it is not always the case that patrons make an offering of this sort; often, they are simply shown in a gesture of reverence toward the holy figure. Sometimes such figures will appear standing with hands raised in prayer, as do Constantine and Maria Akropolites in the lower left and right corners of the revetment of a Hodeghetria icon in the State Tret’iakov Gallery in Moscow (late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, Fig. 0.3).4 Often, too, these giftless figures bow in proskynesis – for example, the monk Manuel, now barely visible at the base and slightly to the right of the Virgin’s throne, in the apse fresco of the Church of the Panhagia Mavriotissa in Kastoria in Greece (thirteenth century, Fig. 0.4).5 As the inscriptions that accompany many of these images make clear, the lay figures in the scenes always have one thing in mind above all else: salvation on Judgment Day. The inscription of Leo is overt in this respect: “I ... present as a profession of faith to God and to the Mother who gave birth and Theotokos only this Bible ... in remission for my sins.” 6 Many other inscriptions express the same idea in the more laconic forms of deesis tou doulou sou: “this is the request (or petition, or entreaty) of your servant,” and Kyrie boethie doulou sou: “Lord help thy servant.” These images are well known within the Byzantine corpus, yet they have not been the subject of intensive examination. This is no doubt largely because they seem, at first sight, to be entirely transparent. We understand what the supplicant wants (salvation), and how it can be obtained (by giving a gift or by entreaty). However, this study seeks to demonstrate that almost all of the ways in which the images seem to make sense to us are, at best, misleading, and that other, more complex, issues are always afoot. The book presents an argument for a new understanding of the images themselves. These scenes are unusual in the Byzantine repertoire in that they show an interaction between contemporary figures, real characters living their lives at the time that the scenes were executed, and the hallowed spiritual figures so familiar to us from the rest of Byzantine art. If, to use a modern analogy, we think of the painted surface as a screen on which the images are projected, then donor portraits appear as though the audience has clambered into the picture, to engage with the holy figures in the scene.7 It is this interrelationship between contemporary, lay supplicants and holy figures, as represented in the pictures, that forms the primary thematic focus of this book .
The significance of this interaction, and the uniqueness of the images, can be gauged in several different respects. Unlike, say, icons of holy figures, donor portraits are not dogmatic, loaded with theological content and proclaiming eternal truths. Yet neither are they like the narrative scenes that we find elsewhere in Byzantine art, as for example, representations of Christ’s life, purporting in some measure to retell a historical event as sanctioned by scripture or long tradition. They are perhaps best described as economic, in the sense that they deal with the contingencies of the way in which specific lay individuals interact with the world of the spirit. They thus pose one of the fundamental questions of religion, which concerns not just theology as a description of the spiritual world, but of how theology plays out at the level of the single human individual. These scenes speak not in the third person, as do narrative or dogmatic ones, but in the first person. They imagine an encounter from the viewpoint of the person within the picture, and it is this perspective that we will be pursuing .
The book poses one key question of the portraits: what do they mean? However, this question itself is subdivided into two additional, overlapping questions: what do they mean, in the conventional sense of the word “meaning”; and, further, what do they do? In reference to the first of these, as mentioned above, the scenes are much more complex than they initially appear to be, and our investigations will reveal several new features in this respect. In addition to this question of meaning, however, the book argues that the images themselves force on us a further distinction, which concerns the issue of the particularly active role that they play. Whatever questions art history typically poses of the pictures that are the subjects of its inquiry – for example, history, development, influence, iconography, relations to society and religion – one aspect that was, until recently, not much studied is the way in which pictures might be active, performative agents. Perhaps the most straightforward illustration of this idea may be found in the Gregorian dictum of pictures as books for the illiterate. From the point of view of iconography (which is one of the standard art-historical ways of thinking about meaning), a picture of the Anastasis, for example, refers to a sequence of events that happened after Christ’s death. A detailed analysis of different representations of the scene might demonstrate different conceptions of those events, and might, for example, bring out different aspects of the relationships of the component figures to each other; this would form a good part of the meaning of the scenes in question.8 In addition to this, however, and unrelated to it, would be their function in instructing the faithful about what happened – “unrelated” here in the sense that all of the features of meaning are taken to be properties of the images themselves, as though inhering within them, irrespective of whether they are being used for instruction or not. It is no doubt true of all images that they are active beyond what has conventionally been considered meaning, and this in ways that are much more complex than simple instruction. However, within the world of religious imagery, the active role is particularly prominent. There has not been much discussion of this distinction between meaning and doing in relation to Byzantine art; however, it is fair to say that in recent times a shift has occurred in scholarship away from the former and toward the latter, often in the form of viewer response. As an example of this, we may take Charles Barber’s work on icons, where he investigates what an icon does, in terms of what effects it produces for the viewer; it is a “directed absence” that “maintains [the] desire” of the beholder.9 In other words, the images are also functional, have real consequences in the world. Even within this universe of activating images, however, the argument is made in this book that donor portraits are unusual in the degree to which they are dynamic and operational. They play complex roles within the much larger economy of overall religious belief systems. The stress here is thus on the productive, functional role of these images, conceived of not as passive bearers of meaning, but as active proponents within a larger field of endeavor. As we will discover, however, what the image means (in the conventional sense of the word) is an essential component in how it goes about doing what it does. The book thus studies the images from both angles. The first is the attempt to understand what they mean in that conventional sense; here we might say that the images are the end-point of the mode of inquiry. The second, however, reverses the model, and investigates what effects the images have; here the images stand at the beginning of the mode of inquiry. Both are essential in attempting to arrive at an understanding of the portraits, and the book makes the argument for expanding the sense of the meaning of the images beyond the conventional passive sense, to include this active function as well. Indeed, this active role, in several different contexts, must be highlighted as the most distinctive feature of the images, and the most important component of their meaning. In relation to the conventional sense of the meaning of the images, the aspect of contact between human and divine to which this book is dedicated has received very little attention.10 Primarily, it has been the lay figures themselves who have been the main focus of attention, considered from two different perspectives. One of these, following a dominant model of art history over the last several decades, has investigated the figures in relation to their status within society. The portraits have thus been studied for their witness to social evolution and changing patterns of patronage.11 Yet it is also the case that the lay figures have been the focus of attention in another sense as well – not in their function as representatives of a social group, but simply as individuals. In the scholarship on these images, there is an endless fascination with the person of the lay figure. The reason for this is not difficult to divine. In the first place, as portraits, they represent the individuals who inhabit history, single people emerging from the otherwise faceless wash of time. Everywhere, portraits personalize history, giving us a sense of privileged access to individuals, and apparently linking us back to the past with immediacy. Correspondingly, the standard practice when dealing with these images has been to attempt to augment this sense of individuality by identifying the supplicants, and to correlate the scene with as many other facts as are known about their lives. The inevitable pull of a portrait is always toward the historical identity of the person, and scholarship yields to this attraction as well. This fascination is so great that examinations of these images often entirely ignore the fact that they show the presence of both lay and holy figures, and simply treat them as though they were single, individual portraits. These scenes thus come to be subsumed under the broader category of “The Portrait” in general, and examined in that capacity alone, rather than in their specificity as representations of an interaction between a set of characters. It is a striking fact that although there is no single study devoted to these images themselves, the studies that do exist on the portrait consist largely of examples drawn from their ranks. In addition to this, however, there is another, more subtle, reason for the focus on the individual persona of the supplicant at the cost of any serious consideration of what is at stake in the relationship between lay and divine. It lies in the already-mentioned apparent transparency of the scenes themselves, where no complex problems of interpretation present themselves. The scenes thus appear entirely clear and comprehensible, the mechanisms in play within them barely requiring any comment. Further, within this apparent transparency, everything, once again, leads inexorably back to the supplicant; the images seem to be so assertively “about” the lay figure, about his or her motivations and desires. The meaning of the image thus seems to coalesce around the supplicant, and he or she appears to hold the key to its not-very-deep secrets, and to be the main bearer of signification in the scene. Any investigation of the picture is therefore inevitably drawn to a more profound excavation of the person’s individual circumstances and intentions. The more that can be learned about who that person was, the more we believe the image to have been elucidated. Although it is of course true that behind every commission lies the story of an individual life lived, one of the aims of this study is to put into abeyance our certainties about meaning. One of the key questions posed is how meaning comes to be located in an image in the first place, and Chapter 2 investigates in detail this concentration on the person of the donor. The argument is made there that, although the exact role of the patron is highly complex, the most important factors determining meanings lie elsewhere, and the focus on the patron is misleading. As an illustration of this point, we might regard the personal explanation of the images, the one that looks at individual circumstances, as a response to the question “Why is this particular supplicant asking for help? What has he or she done that assistance is needed?” But, as we will argue, there are other essential questions to be posed of the scenes. The first should be, “Help from what? What is the impending disaster?” And the second should be,“How can help be delivered, and what form might it take? What effect would it have?” Although the answers to these questions might seem self-evident – the answer to the first is “judgment,” and to the second it is “forgiveness” – upon examination, the issues turn out to be anything but simple. And the nature of the answers in turn affects how we, or, more pertinently, supplicants themselves, understand the images. Thus, to give but one small example, a request for help “means” something quite different if it is addressed to a merciful God than if it is addressed to a vengeful one. What the scene means, therefore, will be different according to the nature of the specific scenario with which supplicants consider themselves to be engaging. What is more, that scenario is determined not by the supplicant, but by much broader, preexisting cultural and religious frameworks within which the supplicant is enmeshed. In this respect, it may be seen that the question of meaning transcends the individual, and the current study focuses instead on those broader frameworks that are the essential determinants of the scenes. Once we escape the trap of the personal and start thinking of the larger issues that render meaning to these scenes, two principal areas emerge. The most important one, overarching all the others, is the broad, yet also very specific, religious context that sets up the parameters with which the portraits engage. Here, the single most influential factor is the Byzantine conception of the afterlife. In the first place, the afterlife is the place and time at which the supplication embodied in the portrait is aimed, in that it is there that the success or failure of that supplication will be played out. Even more than this, however, the afterlife is where the nexus of interlocking points formed around the ideas of salvation, sin, and sin remission, all elements of crucial importance to the dynamics (and hence the meaning) of the portraits, are given their fullest expression. It is in connection with the afterlife that we will discover the largest number of variants that inflect our understanding of the scenes. In addition to these issues, which are strictly religious, a further key field underpins the main group of portraits we will be studying: those where a church or book is given to the holy figure. In that a gift is given and a request is made in connection with that gift, the interaction looks very much like what the discipline of anthropology knows as social exchange, or gift exchange. Although in this context, the exchange is playing out in the religious field, anthropology stresses that the phenomenon is, first and foremost, a social activity, governed by strict rules and codes. Once again, as is the case with the afterlife, where a large-scale, preexisting apparatus is already in place, the meaning of the interaction that we see in the portraits is predetermined by these broad social structures into which the supplicant inserts himself or herself. A further field of operations that also undergirds the images is one that is again religious, and it is situated on an even deeper level. Beneath the tales of the afterlife and the processes of exchange, both of which, in a sense, constitute a narrative, lies an initial, primary event that is almost pre-narrative in character, and which goes to the heart of the scenes: the simple juxtaposition of mortal and spiritual figures, the bringing together of the two distinct worlds to which each belongs. This subject is one that already lies at the heart of religious imagery in general (not to mention religion itself), and was the subject of sophisticated inquiry within Byzantium. These considerations, too, underlie the scenes, and affect the ways in which they are to be understood. As soon as one begins an examination of these broader areas, however, a number of problems arise. Everywhere the supplicant turns within these preexisting fields that must be negotiated, he or she is caught in a maelstrom of assertions, imperatives, claims and counterclaims, arguments and counterarguments, all pulling in different directions. What might otherwise be considered background context, it so happens, is neither mere background nor context. It is a fraught, charged zone within which the supplicant is trying to chart a course that is inevitably uncertain and unsteady. And, to make matters even more complicated, as we shall see in Chapter 2 in relation to the afterlife, in certain circumstances the individual is called on not only to choose between competing claims, but to adhere equally to two positions that are, in fact, in contradiction with each other. The question of contradictory structures of belief at large within society and culture is the subject of the book Outline of a Theory of Practice by Pierre Bourdieu.12 Bourdieu stresses in his work that contradictions such as these are an integral element of the systems of culture. They are productive, strategic devices that are part and parcel of culture itself. This study follows Bourdieu in regarding these contradictions not as limiting features that compromise and impede the functioning of society and culture, but rather as enabling factors that generate new, and no less viable, cultural formations and dispositions.
The way in which belief systems are constituted and sustained by certain self-opposing features within them thus forms a sub-theme of this book. Once we recognize the overall field within which the portraits are situated not as monolithic and stable, but as inherently criss-crossed with clashing concepts that strain against each other, the question of how to understand the images themselves changes. The argument will be made that they themselves participate in the strategic maneuverings that make up the culture to which they belong. As we will see, they play a crucial role within this world of shifting contentions, navigating between them, and, in certain key circumstances, intervening to resolve the most thorny of contradictions. This status of the images as role-playing agents returns us to the distinction drawn earlier between meaning and doing. Here we see that the investigation of meaning itself, once viewed as something produced within a clamoring, jostling field, compels us to turn our attention to the “doing” aspect of the images too. As noted earlier, the portraits are not simply passive carriers of fixed, preordained meaning within a stable field, but are active, functional components within a contested field. In this respect, they intervene as dynamic, productive elements within belief systems, generating new conceptual configurations, modes of thinking, and structures of belief. In outline, then, this book is structured as follows.
Chapter 1 consists of a broad survey of the category of images generally known as donor portraits. It does not aim to provide a comprehensive listing of all such images, but rather serves as an introduction to, and critical assessment of, the field. In the first instance, it examines the history and development of these scenes, and the history of scholarship on the subject. Further, the field itself consists of a large, heterogeneous group of images that is ill-defined at the margins, and some preliminary classificatory work is therefore necessary. Using detailed visual analysis, the chapter proposes certain core characteristics of the scenes. Once these are applied to the field at large, however, certain surprising results emerge. The first is that the nomenclature of donor portraits itself is inappropriate for the images conventionally covered by the term. An alternative title for the category – contact portraits – is proposed. Key subgroups of the category, defined by the already mentioned distinction between those scenes that show a patron bearing a gift and those that do not, are also identified. The book primarily studies the group of images showing a donation, although it does deal with the other group as well.
The second surprise is that many images that have informally been considered to form part of the category of donor portraits, or are frequently investigated along with them, should not be included within the category. Several other genres exist showing lay figures together with holy figures, but not all of these qualify as contact portraits. A careful examination of all these scenes allows us to refine our understanding of the essential elements of all the genres. Beginning the inquiry into the meaning (in the passive sense of the term, as outlined above) of the contact portraits, Chapter 2 engages broadly with questions of the individual agency of the supplicant in relation to that meaning. As many modern debates have shown, the issue of the determination of meaning is anything but simple, and this chapter reconsiders the question in the context of Byzantine art historiography. The chapter lays out an argument as to why the pull toward the supplicant as fulcrum of meaning should be resisted. However, rather than simply dismissing the supplicant, it also attempts to understand exactly what his or her role is in the overall constitution of the meaning of the image. The chapter examines its subject through the lens provided by one specific image, the “Emperor in Proskynesis” mosaic in the Church of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (see Fig. 2.1).
The image has evoked enormous academic interest over a long period of time, and a large body of scholarship exists around it. A detailed analysis of that scholarship allows us to pose some fundamental questions in relation to meaning itself. These include, “Through what procedures has meaning conventionally come to be ascribed to the image?” and “What kinds of explanations and discourses have traditionally counted as meaning?” The chapter goes on to propose alternate mechanisms for this process of “coming to meaning,” thus laying the conceptual foundation for our further explorations of the subject in the rest of the book. The chapter also reconsiders the image itself in the light of the issues discussed, and proposes some alternative routes for its interpretation. Subsequent chapters differ in their methodology from Chapter 2 in that they move away from the case-study model of examining principally one image. These chapters, rather, turn their attention to the key factors that, in line with the alternate processes and kinds of meaning mentioned above, constitute the structural underpinnings of the scenes. As such, they focus on the common features of the category of donor portraits, as deduced and defined through detailed visual analysis in Chapter 1. In this respect, the conclusions reached apply to all the images, and are not limited to any single individual scenes. The afterlife, examined in Chapter 3, without doubt constitutes the topic closest to the hearts of the supplicants.
The chapter begins by analyzing several of the discourses surrounding the afterlife. It discovers that the field that constitutes this time-period is divided into two conflicting conceptions of what supplicants will find there, one harsh and punitive, the other benign and merciful. Contact portraits are then considered in terms of their relation to each of these conflicting sides, and the chapter demonstrates that this relationship to the conflict in the afterlife is the key element that determines almost every aspect of the meaning of the scenes. This issue of the relationship of the images to that conflict thus forms a key theme of the book, and is pursued in all of the following chapters as well. Further, it is in connection with the discourses around the afterlife that some of the most flagrant tensions and contradictions mentioned above are to be found. The chapter excavates the core structures that are involved in these issues, and investigates the way in which they mark supplicants as they prepare and execute their petitions.
It is in this chapter as well that, as we pursue the question of meaning, traditionally construed in its passive sense, so we are inexorably led to the active role that the images play within broader structures of belief. This active role quickly dwarfs those conventional questions of meaning, and comes to be the dominant issue pursued, again, in all the following chapters. Chapter 4 examines the topic of exchange. Utilizing primarily structuralist and poststructuralist theories of gift exchange drawn from the field of social anthropology, the chapter looks at the particular exchange that is articulated by these images. In recent years, the subject of the gift in relation to Byzantine art has received ever-increasing attention, within which a major strand may be distinguished consisting of the work of Cormack, Cutler, Walker, and Hillsdale. The primary focus of these studies has been gift exchange within diplomatic settings, and all the above authors have made profitable use of the major theorists of social exchange theory.13
The current case, however, is rather more complicated. In the first place, the theories as originally articulated deal with exchange and reciprocity between humans alone, as is the case with the diplomatic gifts just mentioned. However, almost no mention is made within those theories of the most salient feature of our portraits, which is the exchange between humans and God. The argument will be made, however, that this latter form of exchange is entirely different from that which occurs solely between humans. Moreover, as we will see, Byzantine Orthodoxy imposes specific, highly delimited restrictions on the way in which exchange between humans and God plays out. Thus, although social exchange theory will be crucial for us in our understanding of the scenes, there is also considerable work to be done in order to establish exactly how the interchange represented within them operates.
The chapter also further argues that the specific mode of the interaction that is uncovered in our investigation also plays an essential role in resolving some of the contradictions encountered earlier in relation to the afterlife. If Chapter 4 looks in general at exchange between humans and God, in the fifth and final chapter we turn to a more literal question raised by the images themselves. One of the truly remarkable aspects of the portraits is that they show the barrier between human and divine being breached, a contact being established across the worlds of natural and supernatural. It is this topic of the interaction between these realms that will occupy us here.
A question that arises in relation to this feature is how this contact that transgresses the barrier between the worlds was understood. Was it believed to be literally true? Was it taken in some sense as being symbolic? This question of the reality or otherwise of the contact between worlds is in certain respects always the key issue both of any supernatural system of belief and its accompanying representational practices, but it is brought into particularly sharp focus in donor portraits. The very action of the gift is one calculated to pierce that barrier between the worlds.
The two options mentioned above, of the literally true or the symbolic, however, are the conventional responses to a question of this sort, and they necessarily limit the possible avenues of exploration that might be undertaken in relation to the issues at hand. As this chapter will demonstrate, neither option does justice to the complex set of beliefs that cluster around images of this type. Rather, a more profitable route to pursue, the chapter suggests, is to invert the question and to see the images as providing the groundwork upon which a system of beliefs is erected.
The issue then becomes what beliefs, in relation to the question of the interaction between the worlds, are generated by the scenes. In this way we come to understand the crucial role that such images play in the ongoing constitution of specific structures of religious belief, and we see once again that the dominant feature of the portraits is their active role. Finally, the Postscript returns to the issue first raised in Chapter 1 concerning the iconographic distinctions between those scenes that show a donation and those that do not, reconsidering them in the light of the discussions undertaken throughout the book. The focus here is on the very different ways in which each of those iconographies envisages the contact between human and divine. Each carries a distinctive view on the nature of that meeting, on what kind of event it will be, and what is and is not required from the supplicant in order for it to succeed.
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