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Byzance et le monde extérieur

 | 
Michel Balard
, 
Élisabeth Malamut
, 
Jean-Michel Spieser
, 
et al.

Byzance entre Occident chrétien et monde musulman. Les données artistiques

Byzantine Art vs Western Medieval Art

Robert S. Nelson

Texte intégral

  • 1 Manuel d'iconographie chrétienne, Paris 1845, p. ix: “L'artiste grec est asservi aux traditions com (...)
  • 2 L. Brehier, L'art byzantin, Paris 1924, p. 1. More generally on responses to Byzantium and its art, (...)
  • 3 Lord Lindsay, Sketches of the History of Christian Art, 1, London 1847, p. 61.
  • 4 E. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, New York 1991, p. 50.
    Byzance et le monde extérieur, Pari (...)
  • 5 A. Barr, Russian Icons, New York 1931; R. Lynes, Good Old Modern: The Museum of Modern Art, New Yor (...)

1The relationship of the art of Byzantium with Western Europe has been a topic of scholarly inquiry since the mid-nineteenth century. The early scholarship, written by Western Europeans looking East, has several features in common. Byzantine art is understood to be early in date, different or foreign, and thus primitive. Because Byzantine art is assumed to be unchanging, it could provide important evidence, it was thought, about the origins of Christian art. As the Romantic antiquarian Adolphe Didron put it in his Manuel d’iconographie chretienne of 1845, “The Greek artist is enslaved to traditions as the animal to its instinct. He makes a figure as a swallow its nest or a bee its hive.”1 This book, the publication of the so-called Painter’s Manuel, remained the most influential treatment of Byzantine art until the later nineteenth century, and as late as 1924, Louis Brehier felt the need to refute it.2 In England, Lord Lindsay’s Sketches of the History of Christian Art of 1847 was also innovative in its attention to Byzantine art, and its assessment was similar. For Lindsay, Byzantium initially enjoyed the lead in artistic matters and guarded the heritage of antiquity “like a precious deposit, till the Romano-Teutonic race, the predestined heirs of ancient civilisation, should be grown to manhood, and ready to relieve them of their trust.”3 Writing many years later and from a different philosophical position, Erwin Panofsky noted that “Byzantine art [...] managed, for all the disorganization of the whole, nevertheless to preserve the individual components of antique perspectival space, and so to hold them in readiness for the Western Renaissance.”4 What rehabilitated Byzantine art in the late nineteenth century from this servile status, ironically, was its supposed primitiveness, a concomitant belief in the purity of its forms and the sense that it resembled modern art. The Byzantine thus became the ancestor of another type of Western art, now post-Impressionism, and the favored medieval art for the modernist avant-garde from Gustave Klimt and Roger Fry to Henri Matisse. The first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Alfred Barr, Jr., had studied Byzantine and Russian art and even proposed that MOMA should collect it as a formative influence on modern painting.5

  • 6 E. Müntz, Les artistes byzantins dans l'Europe latine du ve au xvie siècle, Revue de l'art chrétien (...)

2Concurrent with this discourse, specialists argued on behalf of Byzantine art and for its positive impact on Western medieval art from an article by Eugene Müntz in Revue de l’art chretien of 1893 and to Otto Demus’s influential book, Byzantine Art and the West of 1970.6 A sufficient number of studies on “Die Byzantinische Frage” were published to warrant a separate category in the annual bibliographies of the Byzantinische Zeitschrift since 1900. Faced with this long history and not able to write a book on the topic, one solution would be to revert to the case study and thus to focus on the significant example that illuminates the general phenomenon. That strategy has much to recommend it, because it permits a deeper analysis and will be found in the later part of this paper. But the larger questions still demand attention. How should the general relationship between Byzantine and Western Medieval art be understood? Why over a period of a thousand years of art production and collecting was the West interested in the East, but not vice-versa? How might we explain the systematic resistance to translation and exchange on the part of the Byzantines? Why, in general, did art and artists or signs and their makers travel? How were meanings exchanged and why? And how might we understand scholarship on Byzantine art and the West as implicated in the very process of making meaning that motivated the Western Middle Ages?

  • 7 D. Buckton, “All that glisters...”. Byzantine Enamel on Copper, ƟYMIAMA στη µνήµη της ασκαρίνας Mπ(...)
  • 8 L. Brubaker, The Introduction of Painted Initials in Byzantium, Speculum 45, 1991, p. 22-46.
  • 9 R. G. Ousterhout, The Architecture of the Kariye Camii in Istanbul, Washington 1987, p. 107.
  • 10 There are two opposing views in this regard. A. Grabar sees such compositions as Western inspired: (...)
  • 11 R. S. Nelson, The Iconography of Preface and Miniature in the Byzantine Gospel Book, New York 1980, (...)
  • 12 Especially the author sharpening his pen: H. Buchthal, Toward a History of Palaeologan Illumination (...)
  • 13 M. D. Taylor, A Historiated Tree of Jesse, DOP 34-35, 1980-1981, p. 125-176.
  • 14 R. Krautheimer, S. Ćurčić, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 4th ed., New York 1986, p. 4 (...)
  • 15 The importation of Western fabrics was criticized by Byzantine writers: A. E. Laiou-Thomadakis, The (...)

3Because the instances of Western artistic elements being taken up in Byzantium are relatively small in number they may be easily enumerated. Some are technical, as in the case of the adoption of techniques of enamel work that may have originated in the West.7 Others pertain to useful innovations in communications, e.g. initials in manuscripts,8 bell towers before churches,9 formal artistic features, such as annular narratives,10 and particular iconographic motifs, such as the pairing of evangelist symbols,11 peculiar gestures of evangelists,12 or a particular type of Tree of Jesse that appears in the Balkans from the late Middle Ages.13 But the basic point here is that none of these appropriations are fundamental or constitutive of the nature of mature Byzantine art, and many are the products of periods of cultural disruption, such as the economic decline of the early Middle Ages and Iconoclastic period or the Latin Conquest in the thirteenth century. Aristocrats in the late period might live in palaces whose designs were Western in origin14 and dress in garments made of Western fabrics,15 but in the core areas of Byzantine painting, that is, the principal religious scenes or holy images and imperial art, there was little or no borrowing from the West throughout the history of Byzantine art.

  • 16 Sutton Hoo: M. Carver, Sutton Hoo: Burial Ground of Kings?, Philadelphia 1998, p. 181.
  • 17 E.g. a textile in Auxerre: The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era A.D. (...)
  • 18 H. Bloch, Monte Cassino in the Middle Ages, I, Cambridge, Mass. 1986, p. 40-71.
  • 19 A. Cutler, A Byzantine Triptych in Medieval Germany and its Modern Recovery, Gesta 37, 1998, p. 3-1 (...)
  • 20 R. S. Nelson, A Byzantine Painter in Trecento Genoa: The Last Judgment at San Lorenzo, The Art Bull (...)
  • 21 The magisterial study of the former is O. Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice, Chicago 1984. (...)
  • 22 On the latter see now the excellent exhibition catalogue, Le trésor de la Sainte-Chapelle, ed. J. D (...)
  • 23 H. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, Chicago 1994.

4In Western Europe, the opposite situation prevailed. There the materials and techniques of Byzantine art, enamel, ivory, fresco, and mosaic, were long regarded as prestigious, so that silver from Byzantium is found in burials in England16 and silks were used to wrap relics in France.17 For the same reason, the abbot of Monte Cassino sent to Constantinople for craftsmen,18 an Ottonian bishop reused a Byzantine ivory triptych in a sensitive and iconographically appropriate manner,19 a Byzantine artist was commissioned to paint a Last Judgment group over the main entrance of the cathedral of Genoa,20 and whole ateliers from Byzantium produced religious mosaics in Venice, Florence, and Sicily.21 Furthermore, Byzantium’s well-developed iconography of power was appreciated and appropriated by monarchs intent on establishing a similar centralized rule from Carolingian and Ottonian Germany and Norman Sicily to the Paris of Saint Louis. But finally, Byzantium was most important as a source of holy objects, mainly relics, such as those that occasioned the building of the Sainte Chapelle,22 but also sacred images, whose lives in the West, Hans Belting has traced.23 In Western Europe, images and relics did not lead isolated existences but were incorporated into artistic ensembles and social rites important to their new owners.

  • 24 R. S. Nelson, The Italian Appreciation and Appropriation of Illuminated Byzantine Manuscripts, c. 1 (...)
  • 25 H. Buchthal, H. Belting, Patronage in thirteenth-century Constantinople: An Atelier of late Byzanti (...)

5During the Renaissance, patterns of collecting shifted to manuscripts of classical authors and to objets d’art that had an antique character,24 but once again, Byzantium was a source for the visual raw materials that Western Europeans employed for their self-fashionings. For this reason, Renaissance collectors of Greek manuscripts embellished their manuscripts with frontispieces and marks of ownership, gave them rich and decorated bindings, and housed the finest books in specially outfitted libraries and cabinets. To take one example, two Greek manuscripts that once belonged to a female member of the Palaeologan family were given to Pope Innocent VIII. Additional pages with illuminated coats-of-arms marked the donation, and because the books had a special significance, they did not join the other Greek manuscripts but were placed in a separate compartment in the Vatican Library.25

  • 26 D. S. Chambers, A Renaissance Cardinal and his Worldly Goods: The Will and Inventory of Francesco G (...)

6Of greater interest were classical Greek authors. The historicizing intent of the Renaissance led artists and patrons to seek ways of decorating Renaissance Greek texts for which direct visual models were lacking. A particularly fascinating case is the first opening of a luxurious edition of the Iliad in Greek and Latin that was written in Rome for Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga in 1477.26 The manuscript has frontispieces appropriate to both languages. The Latin evokes the antiquities of ancient Rome; the Greek copies what was known of ancient Greece in Renaissance Rome - that is, Greek manuscripts of Byzantine date. The ornamental patterns in the frame are based on Middle Byzantine ornament of the sort that could be seen in manuscripts then already in the Vatican Library. The Renaissance illuminator mistook Byzantine for ancient Greek ornament, just as Renaissance scribes copied Carolingian scripts, because they thought they were ancient. Such acts of historicism are not medieval and fully warrant to be called Renaissance. Nevertheless, the Western appreciation of Byzantine art remained much the same. Byzantine art was still valued and incorporated into new Western creations.

7If the West maintained this abiding interest in Byzantine art, why is it that Byzantium did not reciprocate? Both the West and the East had the means and possibility of importing each other’s art and artists, but only the West wished to do so. Byzantium had no place, literally and conceptually, for the objects and iconographies of the West. Because the latter, like all victors or survivors, has written the history, its solutions have been favored and defined as normative, but there is no intrinsic reason that cultural assimilation is superior to cultural integrity. At the core of these issues is the nature of religious art in the two cultures to which I now turn.

  • 27 C. M. Chazelle, Pictures, Books, and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I's Letters to Serenus of Marseil (...)
  • 28 G. Manetti, Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity, Bloomington 1993, p. 157-168. The importan (...)

8Put simply, reductively, and thus dangerously, the West could better incorporate the foreign, because its visual art illustrated, documented, narrated and instructed and functioned like words to convey religious doctrines and political messages. As Pope Gregory the Great put it about 600 A.D., “a picture stands in the place of reading” for the illiterate, a formulation that has been regarded as seminal for Western medieval art.27 Thus, the visual is to be interpreted in the manner of the verbal, an innovation that began with Augustine, who made language the primary model of signification, according to the historian of ancient semiotics Giovanni Manetti.28 The didactic function of art is also known in the East, but Byzantium had a less disruptive Dark Ages, enjoyed a fully developed and semiotically rich iconographic heritage from early Christianity, and had no great artistic need to imitate Western creations.

  • 29 On the impact of Aristotle: P. J. Alexander, The Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople, Oxford 195 (...)

9More importantly, Byzantium continued from antiquity a system of signification that was indebted to a Neoplatonism, had been integrated into Christianity in late antiquity, and was informed by Aristotelian causality during the later stages of Iconoclasm.29 This system of signification privileged, did not denigrate the visual, valuing it as a means of access to the holy, especially in regard to key religious images. For the figure of Jesus or Mary in Byzantine art, there was no Western impact; the influence went decidedly in the opposite direction. To simplify the remainder of my paper, I will concentrate on images of Christ and on the processes Byzantine beholders considered them meaningful. But first a short detour back to antiquity is needed.

  • 30 Manetti, Theories of the Sign (as in n. 28), p. xiv, 80-83, 98.

10As Manetti has explained, ancient non-verbal signs referred to their referents by implication rather than equivalence and thus were more strongly motivated than verbal signs. The frequently deduced examples are from medicine or divination. For example, if a woman has milk in her breasts, she has recently given birth. In these cases, milk does not portray or illustrate pregnancy; instead it indicates or signals it and is both consequence and sign of the referent.30 This strongly motivated relationship of the sign to its referent is encountered in the Bible as well. Consider the opening of the 16th chapter of Matthew. The Pharisees and Sadducees went to Jesus and asked him to show them “a sign from heaven.” The “sign of Jonah,” which is discussed typologically in chapter 12, is here evoked again, but now in different terms. Working from the interpretative practices of his audience, Jesus finds fault with his examiners. They can recognize the signs in the sky of good or bad weather, but cannot recognize the equally obvious “signs of the times.” Just as signs in the sky point to and are symptoms of the future weather, “signs of the times” lead as inexorably to their referents for those who believe.

  • 31 Plato, Theaetetus, 191-195. On this notion of memory more generally, see M. Carruthers, The Book of (...)
  • 32 St. Theodore the Studite, Antirrheticus iii, PG 99, col. 432-433; translated in On the Holy Icons, (...)
  • 33 C. Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm, Princeton (...)
  • 34 Nicephorus, Antirrheticus i, PG 100, col. 277; Alexander, Nicephorus (as. in n. 29), p. 200-201.

11In antiquity, one analogy for such a sign was a seal and its imprint, a well known model for sensory perception, cognition, and memory,31 and this relationship was later used by the Iconophiles to explain the relationship of the icon to the holy person.32 The icon was also a strongly motivated sign. It was more powerful than a portrait that merely illustrates or stands for its subject or a narrative picture that can be read like a text, as Pope Gregory advocated. The icon of Christ put him before the believer and was present-oriented. It did not merely illustrate the past; it re-presented it, making the past present. For this reason, inscriptions on icons employ the present tense. At the same time, an icon of Christ was not Christ. It was a means of access to Christ, what Charles Barber calls in his book, a “directed absence,”33 or what Patriarch Nicephorus described as an object which exists in a state of “being towards” (πρóς τι) its referent, a notion dependent upon Aristotle.34

  • 35 Nicephorus, Antirrheticus iii, PG 100, col. 381; quoted in Barber, Figure and Likeness (as in n. 33 (...)
  • 36 The Discourse of Icons, Then and Now, Art History 12, 1989, p. 147-149. In general Peirce defines t (...)

12The nature of that “being towards,” that special motivation, that semiotic insistence, is what interests me. For the Iconophiles, the verbal and the visual were not identical. Nicephorus repeats the ancient notion that words equal their referent, but argues painting does something different. It “directly and immediately leads the minds of the viewers to the facts themselves, as if they were present already.”35 That capacity of reference, the Iconophiles insisted, was not one of equivalence, because equating the image with the prototype would be idolatry. Rather, the particular insistence of the relationship, its strongly motivated quality, has more in keeping with the “index,” a type of sign defined by American Charles Saunders Peirce, as I once argued.36 A seal, for example, is an index by Peirce’s definition. Art historians and everyone else in our world are conditioned to look at an icon not as an index, but as a painting, which it was of course. However by entertaining only this restricted significance, we neglect the ways in which the Byzantine icon does more than depict the holy person.

  • 37 Manetti, Theories of the Sign, p. 159-162.

13In the West, the hostility to Byzantine image doctrines in the Libri Carolini is evidence of the gulf that had arisen between the two worlds by the late eighth century. But important developments took place yet earlier. The ancient sense of implication began to give way, Manetti explains, with St. Augustine, who makes language the prime and determinative semiotic system, one that privileges equivalence.37 Like the East, the West inherited the ancient notion that words were understood to equal their referents. Thanks to Augustine’s influential assertion of the primacy of linguistic signification, equivalence, the operational relationship of language, becomes the principle relationship of both verbal and non-verbal signs to their referents. For religious art, Pope Gregory made official this merger of the verbal and non-verbal sign. Reading becomes the way to interpret an image, and pictures become subordinate to texts, but only in the West. Iconophiles rejected this argument.

  • 38 E. Mâle, L'art religieux du xiiie siècle en France, Paris 1919.
  • 39 E. Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Cleveland 1957.
  • 40 P. Bourdieu prepared the French translation of the preceding: Architecture gothique et pensee scola (...)

14The Western tradition of interpreting and explaining signs by means of equivalence had a lasting consequence that extends to present-day art historians and to their interest in words and images, as if they were equivalent and could be brought together unproblematically in a single journal (i.e. Word and Image), and to the semiotic system of Saussure that underlies both Structuralism and Poststructuralism. Western medieval art, not surprisingly, better conforms to this Western system of iconographical analysis, one that decodes the visual, translating it into verbal equivalents and reading the image as Pope Gregory advocated. Thus Emile Male and Erwin Panofsky understood Gothic cathedrals by means of medieval encyclopedias38 or scholastic treatises,39 and these habits of mind - what Pierre Bourdieu calls “habitus” - have a long life that extends, for example, to the French sociologist himself, who often refers to Panofsky.40

  • 41 J. Tuerk, How to Do Things with Words and Images in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, PhD. (...)

15Byzantium did not share in these developments and remained closer to ancient notions of signification. For that reason, it is productive to explore the logical operations surrounding the Byzantine icon and ancient magic, as Jacqueline Tuerk is doing.41 Because Byzantine art belonged to a different tradition, it needs methods of interpretation different from those applied to Western medieval art. I suggest that a historical, theological, and especially phenomenological approach is more useful than the iconography of art history or a strict application of the structural or the post-structural methods of cultural analysis.

  • 42 K. Weitzmann, The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai, The Icons, 1, Princeton 1976, pi. 1; (...)
  • 43 Discourse of Icons (as in n. 36), p. 144-157.

16For the latter portion of my paper, I want to offer examples of such analysis, focusing on icons of Christ, especially those enveloped in dialogue. All believers prayed to Christ icons, and some answered back, as can be seen where inscriptional evidence is preserved. A case in point is the iconic miniature of Christ from the eleventh-century Dumbarton Oaks Psalter New Testament (Fig. 1). The image belongs to a long tradition that extends back at least as far as the famous encaustic icon of Christ at the monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai, an example of an image creating its own history, as Gilbert Dagron explained.42 The miniature, which I discussed some years ago,43 illustrates the beginning of Psalm 77: “Give heed, O my people, to my law; incline your ear to the words of my mouth.” To the Byzantine beholder, the image was a traditional and thus venerable icon of Christ. Consequently, the miniature could validate and animate the text, so that this Christ becomes the person speaking these words to the person holding the book and reading its words out loud. The Psalmist commands that listeners incline their ears to the words, which is to say, pay close attention to the oral communication. The injunction was followed to judge from the condition of the miniature. Over time, believers have inclined not just their ears, but also their lips to Christ, kissing this and other iconic miniatures in the manuscript.

Fig. 1 - Psalter New Testament, Washington, DC, Dumbarton Oaks, ms. 3, f. 39r.
© Dumbarton Oaks, Byzantine Collection, Washington, DC

Fig. 2 - Carolingian Psalter Utrecht, Bib. Rijksuniv., MS. 32, f. 45r.
(By courtesy of Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Utrecht)

  • 44 Michael Psellos in Belting, Likeness and Presence (as in n. 23), p. 529.

17Such an image was useful to the literate and non-literate alike, for its utility exceeded the mere act of reading the image, as Pope Gregory advocated. The contrasting Western approach may be seen in the corresponding Psalm illustration in the Carolingian Psalter in Utrecht (Fig. 2). Here the artist shows the people assembled for a lecture from the Psalmist or Moses, who stands before a lectern. The miniature therefore illustrates reading and listening in a literal manner. Byzantine art knew similar imagery, witness certain types of illustration in the marginal Psalter. However, by means of icons Byzantine illuminators were also able to develop visual communications that operated differently. Whereas the Utrecht illustration is incomprehensible without the text and thus dependent upon it, the Dumbarton Oaks miniature can function independently, because it is a self-contained entity, a “living painting,” to quote a contemporary formulation.44 It re-presents the imperative of the text, asserts the Christian interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures by means of the speaking image, and puts Christ into the text in a way that no marginal gloss could equal, whether textual or pictorial. Such an image constituted a powerful object of devotion for either the literate or the illiterate viewer.

  • 45 Carruthers, Book of Memory (as in n. 31), p. 221-229; Id., The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetor (...)

18The Latin reader/viewer of the Utrecht Psalter page, of course, might also have looked at more than read on occasion, but he/she could only have done so with understanding, if the Psalm itself were already known. In that case, the intricate details of the miniature would have served as mnemonic clues to the contents of the Psalm, “imagines verborum,” as they called to mind the words, especially the sounds, of the text.45 Image, however, remains subordinate to text. In the cases of both the Latin and the Greek Psalters, one can imagine, therefore, that the miniatures might be viewed separately from the text below, but that process, its consequences and association, and the general relationship of word and image differed in the two cultures.

19Because of the present-oriented environment of holy images, Byzantine art did not have the same need for a visual language of the past or the future, the principle tenses of Western medieval art. Recall that apocalypticism is everywhere to be seen in the West, but less common and less central in Byzantium. Since the visual in the West tended to serve as evidence rather than presence, it could more easily incorporate into its visual system better or more detailed narratives or foreign elements in general. The foreign could legitimate, and thus the West continually sought better representations of power from the religious and political imagery of the Middle Ages to fragments of the classical past evoked in the Renaissance. Byzantium instead relied upon its rich pictorial tradition and a different conceptual and ideological system to validate the implicative logic of its religious images.

  • 46 M. Taylor, The Pentecost at Vezelay, Gesta 19, 1980, p. 9-15; A. Katzenellenbogen, The Central Tymp (...)

20Many other examples of the same difference could be deduced, but I will continue with images of Christ and turn to the mosaic of Christ above the door that leads from the narthex into the nave of the Katholicon at Hosios Loukas (Fig. 3). Analogous in date and location is the sculpted lunette at the church of Ste. Madeleine at Vezelay. The Romanesque tympanum presents a complex assembly of figures, variously identified as the Pentecost with Christ present at its center, the Mission of the Apostles, or other themes, and it makes reference to the Crusades by means of the intricate depictions of the foreign peoples of the world.46 Once more the Latin image is didactic and narrative, representing the past of the Bible and the future of the Christian Crusades. In contrast, the Byzantine mosaic focuses only on Christ, whose book is open to the passage, “I am the Light of the World, he who follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” Conveyed by an icon of the person who spoke it, this text addresses itself to the experiences of the faithful. By passing through the door below, they walked toward the light of life that they will receive at the altar. The image sacralized and transformed the space of the church; it was not a didactic billboard. It belonged and belongs to the present.

Fig. 3 — Hosios Loukas, Christ over narthex door

Fig. 4 — Venice, Treasury of San Marco, paten
(Per gentile concessione della Procuratoria di San Marco - Venezia)

  • 47 The Glory of Byzantium (as in n. 17), p. 68; H. R. Hahnloser, Il Tesoro di San Marco, 2, Florence 1 (...)

21Such a bust portrait of Christ, gesturing and holding a jeweled book, can be as large as the monumental mosaic of the Pantocrator in the dome at Daphni, or as small as an enamel medallion at the center of an alabaster paten in Venice (Fig. 4).47

22Around the icon of Christ in the center is abbreviated his words, “Take, eat, this is my body.” Note that the inscription is heavily abridged after the word “this,” TOYTO, so that what is easily read is “Take, eat this.” The word “this,” is a deitic, a word that is used and can only be understood within an actual physical setting, in this case, the paten’s raison d’etre, the display of the Eucharistic bread.

  • 48 G. Galavaris, Bread and the Liturgy: The Symbolism of early Christian and Byzantine Bread Stamps, M (...)
  • 49 Ibid., p. 86.

23To judge from contemporary pictorial representations, the communion bread was round and stamped. Its center, marked with a cross and often the letters IC XC NIKA, constituted the host, which was consecrated at the altar and distributed to the faithful. Other particles were also arranged on the paten at the preliminary rite of preparation that took place in the prothesis. In a mid eleventh-century fresco at St. Sophia, Ochrid, St. Basil is shown celebrating the liturgy and reading from an inscribed scroll held next to a round loaf of bread. At the center of the latter is a circle with a cross inside.48 The center of the paten in Venice may refer to such a circular host, and the six elegantly scalloped lobes of alabaster around it could have served as the places for the other portions of the bread. According to George Galavaris, Eucharistic bread stamps were embossed with various symbols and inscriptions, but not an image of Christ49

  • 50 Ibid., p. 89.

24Thus the enameled medallion itself does not refer by pictorial analogy to the bread and its stamped decoration but to the prototype of the image, the person who first spoke these words. Those same words are found on a later bread stamp, although not in abbreviated form.50 The placement and abridgment of the inscription on the Venice paten distinguishes the icon from the bread to be placed above it. Effectively ending with “this” heightens the dialogic element, so that the reader/viewer must ground the deictic in an actual context. During the performance of the liturgy, contexts shift, this being a prime purpose of the liturgy. During the preparatory prothesis rite and the placement of the bread on the paten, the inscription and its image mark the place for the host, the center of the paten. During the anaphora, the culminating event of the liturgy that follows, inscription, image, and bread change. The “this” of the inscription and the words of the institution, “This is my body,” refer to the bread, which as a result of the epiclesis, or the coming of the Holy Spirit, becomes the body of Christ. At that moment, the “this” in the paten’s inscription also refers to the body by means of the adjacent image of Christ, which is simultaneously speaking subject and sacrificed object. Such a complex and theological rich semiosis overwhelms the simple interpretative models of modern semiotics.

  • 51 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge, Mass. 1975.
  • 52 R. E. Taft, Byzantine Communion Spoons: A Review of the Evidence, DOP 50, 1996, p. 209-212, 224.

25When Jesus said the words of institution and when the priest repeats them, the saying constitutes the doing, what modern philosophers define as a speech act.51 The messages of the Venice paten were addressed, I am assuming, to the priest celebrating the Eucharist, for I take it that the laity would not have easily seen the paten. At the time the paten was made, the laity in Byzantium received the bread dipped in the wine by means of a liturgical spoon.52 It, therefore, was primarily the priest, who looked at the decorated surface of the paten during the performance of the Eucharist. The same person pronounced the words of institution inscribed here and in so doing assumed the role of Christ. Once again saying is doing. In this particular context, seeing is also doing and vice versa. For the priest, the enameled medallion, like all icons for the faithful, serves as a model to emulate. At the moment of the institution, the icon is a mirror before the priest. The general process at work here is conveniently indicated by the word TOYTO on the Venice paten. All is a tautology, or repeated declarations to the effect that this is this is this. The semiotic system is circular, closed, and hermetic.

  • 53 Hahnloser Il Tesoro di San Marco (as in n. 47), p. 63.

26A similar interpretation is inescapable for another small image of Christ attached to a Eucharistic chalice also in Venice.53 In this case, no inscription around the medallion is necessary, although the words of institution are inscribed on the base of the chalice. The placement of the icon at the bottom of the bowl itself determines the meaning and significance. When the wine and bread were introduced to the chalice, the icon mingled with Eucharistic elements that became the body and blood of Christ. Image and word, the icon and the priestly pronouncement, collaborated similarly.

  • 54 D. Chidester, Word and Light: Seeing, Hearing, and Religious Discourse, Chicago 1992, p. 92.
  • 55 R. T. Neer, Style and Politics in Athenian Vase-Painting: The Craft of Democracy, ca. 530-460 B.C.E (...)

27Such synesthesia had long been an aspect of the Eucharist. At an early date, a verse from Psalm 33 was used as an Eucharistic hymn: “Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.”54 The Psalm verse and the medallion in the chalice are further examples of the implicative logic of the ancient non-verbal sign. Tasting leads to seeing leads to God. In the chalice, the act of seeing and the object seen, the medallion, do not instruct about God or merely stand for or symbolize God. These signs of the times imply the divine presence and direct the believer to God. The theology and the senses of language and image are Byzantine, but the visual mechanices employed, the interplay of self and other through the decoration of a cup, had occurred long before in ancient Greek vase painting, as a recent book explains.55

  • 56 P. A. Underwood, The Kariye Djami, New York 1967, 2, p. 17; on the mystical and liturgical meanings (...)

28In conclusion, these icons of Christ are signs of a distinctive sort and are not easily analyzed by the modern senses of word and image that derive ultimately from the changes inspired by Augustine and Gregory in the early Middle Ages. Byzantine icons continue the ancient logic of implication, albeit in different ways thanks to the Iconoclastic controversy. They can be productively studied phenomenologically through their use and function in the lives of believers. They transform objects and people, enveloping all into a spiritual world, or the land of the living, as the inscription announces to believers as they walk beneath the mosaic of Christ at the entrance to the fourteenth-century church of the Chora.56 This Byzantine system of religious signification was powerfully motivated, justified in exacting theological detail as a consequence of Iconoclasm, and validated by visual traditions that were centuries old. Often tautological in its operation, this was a closed system that turned in or itself and did not admit elements from the outside in contrast to that which prevailed in the Latin West. These properties made for great emotional force and explanatory power, but at the same time limited the ability and the need for Byzantine art to adapt to changing conditions, one last difference between Byzantium and the West. In sum, the absence of a Byzantine counterpart to the Italian Renaissance is not solely due to 1453.

Notes

1 Manuel d'iconographie chrétienne, Paris 1845, p. ix: “L'artiste grec est asservi aux traditions comme l'animal a son instinct; il fait une figure comme l'hirondelle son nid ou l'abeille sa ruche.” The metaphor of the bees resembles Hegel's pejorative description of Egyptian art: “The Egyptians constructed their towering religious buildings in the same instinctive way in which bees build their cells...” Quoted in E. H. Gombrich, The Father of Art History, A Reading of the Lectures on Aesthetics of G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), Tributes, Interpreters of our Cultural Tradition, Ithaca 1984, p. 57.

2 L. Brehier, L'art byzantin, Paris 1924, p. 1. More generally on responses to Byzantium and its art, especially in France, see J.-M. Spieser, Hellénisme et connaissance de l'art byzantin au xixe siecle, Hellenismos: quelques jalons pour une histoire de l'identite grecque. New York 1991, p. 337-362; and Id., Du Cange and Byzantium, Through the Looking Glass: Byzantium through British Eyes, ed. R. Cormack, E. Jeffreys, Burlington 2000, p. 199-210.

3 Lord Lindsay, Sketches of the History of Christian Art, 1, London 1847, p. 61.

4 E. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, New York 1991, p. 50.
Byzance et le monde extérieur, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2005 (Byzantina Sorbonensia, 21)

5 A. Barr, Russian Icons, New York 1931; R. Lynes, Good Old Modern: The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1973, p. 21, 27-30; A. G. Marquis, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern, Chicago 1989, p. 53-54, 117.

6 E. Müntz, Les artistes byzantins dans l'Europe latine du ve au xvie siècle, Revue de l'art chrétien 4, 1893, p. 181ff; O. Demus, Byzantine Art and the West, New York 1970.

7 D. Buckton, “All that glisters...”. Byzantine Enamel on Copper, ƟYMIAMA στη µνήµη της ασκαρίνας Mπoύρα, 1, Athens 1994, p. 47-49; Id., Byzantine Enamel and the West, Byz. Forsch. 13, 1988, p. 235-244.

8 L. Brubaker, The Introduction of Painted Initials in Byzantium, Speculum 45, 1991, p. 22-46.

9 R. G. Ousterhout, The Architecture of the Kariye Camii in Istanbul, Washington 1987, p. 107.

10 There are two opposing views in this regard. A. Grabar sees such compositions as Western inspired: La decoration des coupoles a Kariye Camii et les peintures italiennes du Dugento, JÖBG 6, 1957, p. 111-124. O. Demus disagrees: The Style of the Kariye Djami and its Place in the Development of Palaeologan Art, The Kariye Djami, 4, Studies in the Art of Kariye Djami and its Intellectual Background, ed. P. A. Underwood. Princeton 1975, p. 138.

11 R. S. Nelson, The Iconography of Preface and Miniature in the Byzantine Gospel Book, New York 1980, p. 43.

12 Especially the author sharpening his pen: H. Buchthal, Toward a History of Palaeologan Illumination, in K. Weitzmann et al., The Place of Book Illumination in Byzantine Art, Princeton, N. J. 1975, p. 146; R. S. Nelson, Theodore Hagiopetrites: A late Byzantine Scribe and Illuminator, Vienna 1991, p. 108.

13 M. D. Taylor, A Historiated Tree of Jesse, DOP 34-35, 1980-1981, p. 125-176.

14 R. Krautheimer, S. Ćurčić, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 4th ed., New York 1986, p. 449-450.

15 The importation of Western fabrics was criticized by Byzantine writers: A. E. Laiou-Thomadakis, The Byzantine Economy in the Mediterranean Trade System: Thirteenth-Fifteenth Centuries, DOP 34-35, 1980-1981, p. 187.

16 Sutton Hoo: M. Carver, Sutton Hoo: Burial Ground of Kings?, Philadelphia 1998, p. 181.

17 E.g. a textile in Auxerre: The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era A.D. 843-1261, ed. H. C. Evans, W. D. Wixom, New York 1997, p. 224-225.

18 H. Bloch, Monte Cassino in the Middle Ages, I, Cambridge, Mass. 1986, p. 40-71.

19 A. Cutler, A Byzantine Triptych in Medieval Germany and its Modern Recovery, Gesta 37, 1998, p. 3-12.

20 R. S. Nelson, A Byzantine Painter in Trecento Genoa: The Last Judgment at San Lorenzo, The Art Bulletin 67, 1985, p. 548-565.

21 The magisterial study of the former is O. Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice, Chicago 1984. On the tradition that mosaicists from Venice worked in Florence, see ibid., 2, p. 19, 221. On Sicily recently see W. Tronzo, The Cultures of his Kingdom: Roger II and the Cappella Palatina in Palermo, Princeton 1997.

22 On the latter see now the excellent exhibition catalogue, Le trésor de la Sainte-Chapelle, ed. J. Durand, M.-P. Laffitte, Paris 2001.

23 H. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, Chicago 1994.

24 R. S. Nelson, The Italian Appreciation and Appropriation of Illuminated Byzantine Manuscripts, c. 1200-1450, DOP 49, 1995, p. 209-235; A. Cutler, From Loot to Scholarship: Changing Modes in the Italian Response to Byzantine Artifacts, ca. 1250-1750, ibid., p. 237-267.

25 H. Buchthal, H. Belting, Patronage in thirteenth-century Constantinople: An Atelier of late Byzantine Book Illumination and Calligraphy, Washington 1978, p. 6-7, 116-119; G. Mercati, I mss. biblici greci donati da Carlotta di Lusignano ad Innocenzo VIII, Opere Minori, 2, Vatican 1937, p. 480-481.

26 D. S. Chambers, A Renaissance Cardinal and his Worldly Goods: The Will and Inventory of Francesco Gonzaga (1444-1483), London 1992, p. 60-63, figs. 8-10.

27 C. M. Chazelle, Pictures, Books, and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I's Letters to Serenus of Marseilles, Word and Image 6, 1990, p. 139-140. W. J. Diebold makes the letter the beginning and foundation of his excellent book: Word and Image: An Introduction to early Medieval Art, Boulder, Colorado 2000, p. 1. Also useful, especially for the West, is H. L. Kessler. Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God's Invisibility in Medieval Art, Philadelphia 2000.

28 G. Manetti, Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity, Bloomington 1993, p. 157-168. The importance of Augustine for medieval theories of the sign is discussed by M. L. Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study of the Medieval Theory of Knowledge, New Haven 1968.

29 On the impact of Aristotle: P. J. Alexander, The Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople, Oxford 1958, p. 189-213; M.-J. Baudinet, La relation iconique a Byzance au ixe siecle d'apres Nicephore le Patriarche ; un destin de l'aristotelisme, Les Etudes Philo-sophiques 1978, p. 85-106.

30 Manetti, Theories of the Sign (as in n. 28), p. xiv, 80-83, 98.

31 Plato, Theaetetus, 191-195. On this notion of memory more generally, see M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, New York 1990, p. 16-23. Stamping and sealing metaphors are important to a Stoic sense of vision: S. Goldhill, The Erotic Eye: Visual Stimulation and Cultural Conflict, Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, ed. S. Goldhill, New York 2001, p. 175-177.

32 St. Theodore the Studite, Antirrheticus iii, PG 99, col. 432-433; translated in On the Holy Icons, C. P. Roth, trans., Crestwood, New York 1981, p. 112.

33 C. Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm, Princeton 2002, p. 121.

34 Nicephorus, Antirrheticus i, PG 100, col. 277; Alexander, Nicephorus (as. in n. 29), p. 200-201.

35 Nicephorus, Antirrheticus iii, PG 100, col. 381; quoted in Barber, Figure and Likeness (as in n. 33).

36 The Discourse of Icons, Then and Now, Art History 12, 1989, p. 147-149. In general Peirce defines the sign in a manner that makes his semiology a useful way to approach Byzantine art: “A sign is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity”: Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 2, ed. C. Hartsthorne, P. Weiss, Cambridge, Mass. 1974, p. 228. The importance of the referent and interpreter and the interest in various means of conveying signification distinguish this approach from the more language-based semiotics of Ferdinand de Saussure and his numerous followers. Peirce, for example, stresses that “semiosis...[is] an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.” Ibid., 5, p. 484, quoted in G. Cosenza, Peirce and Ancient Semiotics, Versus 50/51, 1988, p. 159. Peirce's assimulation of ancient Greek philosophy is relevant for the utility of his semiotics to Byzantium.

37 Manetti, Theories of the Sign, p. 159-162.

38 E. Mâle, L'art religieux du xiiie siècle en France, Paris 1919.

39 E. Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Cleveland 1957.

40 P. Bourdieu prepared the French translation of the preceding: Architecture gothique et pensee scolastique, Paris 1967. On Male and Panofsky and more recent French literature on Western medieval art, see R. W. Maxwell in The Art Bulletin 83, 2001, p. 757-762.

41 J. Tuerk, How to Do Things with Words and Images in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, PhD. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2002.

42 K. Weitzmann, The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai, The Icons, 1, Princeton 1976, pi. 1; G. Dagron, Holy Images and Likeness, DOP 45, 1991, p. 23-24.

43 Discourse of Icons (as in n. 36), p. 144-157.

44 Michael Psellos in Belting, Likeness and Presence (as in n. 23), p. 529.

45 Carruthers, Book of Memory (as in n. 31), p. 221-229; Id., The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200, New York 1998, p. 203.

46 M. Taylor, The Pentecost at Vezelay, Gesta 19, 1980, p. 9-15; A. Katzenellenbogen, The Central Tympanum at Vezelay: Its Encyclopaedic Meaning and its Relation to the First Crusade, Art Bulletin 26, 1944, p. 141-151.

47 The Glory of Byzantium (as in n. 17), p. 68; H. R. Hahnloser, Il Tesoro di San Marco, 2, Florence 1971, p. 72

48 G. Galavaris, Bread and the Liturgy: The Symbolism of early Christian and Byzantine Bread Stamps, Madison 1970, fig. 92.

49 Ibid., p. 86.

50 Ibid., p. 89.

51 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge, Mass. 1975.

52 R. E. Taft, Byzantine Communion Spoons: A Review of the Evidence, DOP 50, 1996, p. 209-212, 224.

53 Hahnloser Il Tesoro di San Marco (as in n. 47), p. 63.

54 D. Chidester, Word and Light: Seeing, Hearing, and Religious Discourse, Chicago 1992, p. 92.

55 R. T. Neer, Style and Politics in Athenian Vase-Painting: The Craft of Democracy, ca. 530-460 B.C.E., New York 2002, p. 41-43.

56 P. A. Underwood, The Kariye Djami, New York 1967, 2, p. 17; on the mystical and liturgical meanings of the epithet, see Id., ibid., 1, p. 39-41.

Table des illustrations

Légende Fig. 1 - Psalter New Testament, Washington, DC, Dumbarton Oaks, ms. 3, f. 39r.© Dumbarton Oaks, Byzantine Collection, Washington, DC
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Légende Fig. 2 - Carolingian Psalter Utrecht, Bib. Rijksuniv., MS. 32, f. 45r.(By courtesy of Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Utrecht)
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Légende Fig. 3 — Hosios Loukas, Christ over narthex door
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Fichier image/jpeg, 396k
Légende Fig. 4 — Venice, Treasury of San Marco, paten(Per gentile concessione della Procuratoria di San Marco - Venezia)
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