This collection of nine essays represents the results of a conference in October 2008 held at the Index of Christian art, Princeton University, and it is another witness to the active and productive work of the Index and its director, Colum Hourihane. It also stands as a well-deserved recognition of the contributions of Lois Drewer to the Index's work; anyone who has used the Index has certainly benefitted from Lois's scholarship and good humor. The contents of the book are suitably wide-ranging then, and the brief given by the editor appears to have been generously open-ended. The other two components of the title reflect that position: the studies deal with "matters iconographical," with no further editorial determination or explanation. The studies are recent in the sense that they are published commendably soon after delivery in the conference, and those of us not able to attend that conference can weigh its contributions without any real delay. The essays are not recent in the sense of being "state of the question or field"; they were written by well- established scholars who chose their topics (for the most part) and delivered them in familiar voices. Anyone looking for a collection on Byzantine art that performs "recent" as vanguard, contemporary or experimental will have to look elsewhere. Indeed, two of the essays are on manuscripts and historiography, and not art per se. Several of the essays are well worth seeking out, but many readers may be misled or simply uncompelled by the rather vague and unmotivated "Byzantine art" and "recent studies" in the title.
I will simply provide brief summaries of the essays to guide possible readers:
In "Representations of Towers in Byzantine Art: The Question of Meaning" (1-37), Slobodan Curcic follows a research track more completely realized in the recent exhibition on depictions of architecture. [1] He argues that representations of towers "played a distinctive iconographic, and above all symbolic, role." He breaks the tower types into groups and follows them through a variety of media, location and period. In keeping with his subtitle, he finds strikingly little diversity; a singly question leads to a single meaning: architecture played a role like figural components in Byzantine art and needs to be examined equally for its symbolic significance.
In "Monastic Challenges: Some Manuscripts of the Heavenly Ladder" (39-62), Nancy P. Sevcenko examines several manuscripts of that text of John Climachus. This essay represents a preliminary statement of a larger study on that manuscript tradition that takes a distinct turn from the Princeton tradition of illustrated manuscript studies. Sevcenko treats "some" Climachus manuscripts as individual creations that responded to their own agendas and not as part of a family or stemma. Typically careful and lucid, this essay situates the manuscripts in a Lenten context in which monks approached that proscriptive text through the liturgical progress of that period. It looks at the textual and visual developments of the manuscript tradition, and it strikes out in a different direction than earlier scholarship on these manuscripts.
In "Legal Iconicity: The Documentary Image, the Problem of Genre, and the Work of the Beholder" (63-79), Anthony Cutler examines icon of the emperor and empress on the Chrysobull of Alexis III Komnenos of 1374, and poses the question of its function" "an embellishment, an illustration attached to the text, or as its enactment." Naturally, Cutler concludes that the image did not fall into the first category, but he searchingly unpacks the meanings behind the imperial icon on that donation roll and others related to it. In that way, he provides useful thinking points for understanding the function of the roll in Byzantine culture. Left to the final paragraph, however, the viewer is not a developed part of the subtitle, and he/she becomes for Cutler a "noetic" participant, who provides "cognitive supplement" to the work. He/she has a tantalizing, apparently disembodied role in this model of Byzantine seeing.
In "The Bahattin Samanligi Kilisesi at Belisirma (Cappadocia) Revisited" (81-110), Catherine Jolivet-Lévy examines a tenth- /eleventh-century fresco cycle with regard to its "provincial" (her scare-marks) style and finds unsurprisingly--though by means of careful description of and comparisons to art of the capital--that the program represents a combination of local and cosmopolitan styles. The photographs in many of the essays are marred by murkiness, and the argument and description are difficult to follow at points because of that quality of the figures.
In "Moslems, Christians, and Iconoclasm: Erasures from Church Floor Mosaics during the Early Islamic Period" (111-19), Henry Maguire concisely states his case: revised floor mosaics in Palestine in the Early Middle Ages reflect debates amongst Christians and not inter- faith conflict between Moslems and Christians. He takes the altered floor mosaic at Madaba from 767 as an example of Palestinian response to Constantinopolitan arguments over the place of animals in a true Christian art. As opposed to iconoclasts in the capital, those Palestinian Christians worshipped the true image of God and his mother in the apse (now lost and hypothesized by an inscription on the floor), and they thereby aligned themselves with theological/political developments in the Byzantine capital and were not contending, at least at the first level, with issues immediate to their lives under Islam.
In "Muslims, Christians, and Iconoclasm: A Vase Study of Images and Erasure on Lamps in the Johns Hopkins University Archaeological Collection" (121-52), Eunice Waterman Maguire focuses carefully, and at some length, on several oil lamps being "re-excavated" in that University's collection. Erased figures may reflect Early Medieval changes in attitudes towards figural art on quotidian objects. With such an intense analysis, such lamps emerge as far more significant bearers and makers of meaning than normally permitted by scholars.
In "Byzantium between East and West, and the Origins of Heraldry" (153-70), Robert Ousterhout presents a version of an essay already published in German. Like other essays in the volume, he takes as a point of departure a small object, in this case a capital in the crypt of St. Demetrius in Thessaloniki. He uses it to make a wider argument about the cross-cultural valences of heraldic signs, and he exposes eastern roots of "the complex visual language of signs, symbols and insignia" that led to heraldry in Western Europe.
In "Manuscripts Speaking The History of Readership and Ownership" (171-84), Sofia Kotzabassi describes some of the inscriptions contained in manuscripts of the Princeton University Library and presumably anticipates aspects of the catalogue of that library's Greek holdings. [2]
In "From Byzantium to Princeton: A Century of Collecting Greek Manuscripts" (185-97), Don Skemer gives a succinct overview of the Greek fond in the manuscript collection at Princeton, including two memorable figures, of Robert Garrett a great collector and Princeton benefactor as a young man competing at the first modern Olympics, and of his engraved bookplate, which reveal the extent of his academic interests even beyond Hellenism.
NOTES
[1] Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art , ed. Slobodan Curcic and Evangeli Chatzetryphonos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
[2] Sofia Kotzabassi, Don Skemer and Nancy Patterson Sevcenko, Greek Manuscripts at Princeton, Sixth to Nineteenth Century: A Descriptive Catalogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).