Convivium

The structuring of the Byzantine mystical experience draws on the dynamics of the horizontal mirror - that is, the reflective surface of a lake, which gathers sky and earth - and the process of in-spiriting. Both phenomena appear in two distinct - and, from a modern viewpoint, incompatible - contexts: the Byzantine liturgy and the Late Antique engagement with Anacreontic poetry. What meanings emerge when the call to “forget your earthly worries” of the Cheroubikon sung at the Great Entrance is juxtaposed with the invitation to partake in the halcyon revelry in the Anacreontic? In recognizing that the Byzantine concept of creativity is defined as an act of mirroring and vital in-breathing (in-spriting), can we put it in a productive relationship to the role of the art historian today of breathing-in new life in the shell of antiquity? The analysis here draws on Aby Warburg’s unorthodox but compelling ideas about the role of empathy in the production and perception of animation.

The curtain, or Catapetasma, over the main altar table of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople was not only an outstanding and unique art object of Byzantine culture, but also the most important liturgical object of the main cathedral of the Empire. Now lost, it has never been a particular subject of study. This article deals with interconnected topics around its reconstruction and interpretation. It proposes the existence of still compositions created in the space as a whole image made up of various objects - that is, when considered in terms of modern art. The analysis here shows that the Catapetasma played a critical role in such installations around Hagia Sophia’s main altar table, where there was a special system of various crosses, votive crowns, veils, and other liturgical objects. The fact of such spatial compositions, which should not be analyzed in the traditional iconographic way, once again points to the necessity to formulate a new concept of image-paradigm - in this case, of an iconic curtain - that is distinct from one of flat images.

Rin Yamashita (1857-1939), Japan's sole icon painter, spent the years 1881-1882 in St. Petersbourg. Research into the three hundred Yamashita icons that remain intact has revealed all of them to be copies of Russian originals. This is attributable to the Byzantine idea of anonymous icons, expressed in the second Nicean Council of 787. At the time before Kondakov and Wölfflin, who saw art as an expression of an era, Yamashita borrowed two distinct styles for her icons, one academic, and the other one antiquarian, indigenous, primitive style with an affinity with the icons in Palekh and the same figure from the 1911 lithograph icon by I. E. Fesenko. According to the Nicean Council, the icon was a dead matter par excellence. This relaltive attitude toward matter finds parallels in the work of Kierkegaard. In modern Japan, where icons by Yamashita co-exist with portraits of emperors, viewers are expected suspend the idea of living matter and hold the idea of representation as Kierkegaard says that Christianity introduced it into the world.

A miniature eulogia token in the collection of the British Museum was originally listed in the register as depicting Christ’s Ascension into Heaven, yet its composition incorporates features that evoke images of the Adored Christ. This paper analyzes the iconography on a number of comparable Late Antique pilgrimage eulogia produced in the Levant, revealing that this unique token would more accurately be defined as the Adoration of Christ in Majesty. The token also provides evidence of the prophylactic and apotropaic properties attributed to blessings of holy soil from sacred sites. The unusual composition of the artefact considered here offers a rare insight into the developing iconography displayed on Late Antique pilgrimage eulogia.

Epigraphic inscriptions are very common in early medieval art and have been studied in a an abundant bibliographic production since the last quarter of the twentieth century in research on text/image interactions in medieval artistic culture. Insofar as verse inscriptions were used everywhere in Carolingian epigraphic documentation, and insofar as they coexisted with many texts in prose, why did images always use metrics? What kind of links connected iconic construction and poetic composition? To propose answers to these questions, this paper explores some different approaches to epigraphic tituli on early medieval works of art. By limiting its scope to metrical texts, it highlights some salient features of this very rich epigraphic documentation without separating the form and meaning of the text from the material. The symbiosis of these three primordial elements actually allowed the creation of a kind of “Carolingian aesthetics” and gave efficiency to the interactions between texts and images.

As depictions of the Holy Spirit appearing to Christ’s followers and filling them with speech, images of Pentecost engage critical themes in medieval visual culture: the relationship between image and epigraph (titulus), and the visualization of ruach (pneuma, spiritus) and the senses. This article examines two miniatures of Pentecost in Ottonian manuscripts, the Codex Egberti (ca. 980) and the Benedictional of Archbishop Robert (late tenth century). These case studies show two differing visual interpretations of Pentecost in the context of the Ottonian debate concerning “spiritual seeing” and demonstrate the ways that artists invoked the senses other than sight in order to create images of mystical experience.

The narrative cycle that adorns the central nave in the Basilica di S. Piero a Grado in Pisa (ca. 1302) comprises various episodes from the lives of Sts Peter and Paul drawn from biblical and apocryphal sources and local legend and fashioned after the portico frescos in Old St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. While previous studies have engaged mainly with the chronology and circumstances of the edifice's construction, the iconography and political implication of the frescos, which are a unique compilation of the narrative, have gone unnoticed. By analyzing the cycle from within the medieval notion of icon and image making, this article proposes that the painted narrative evokes a theological argument concerning the sacredness of the image and the power it possesses. It demonstrates that the fragmented narratives chosen for the murals are organized in three thematic groups, revealing the process by which the saints’ real, corporeal bodies become transformed into icons. Functioning as a visualized theology that advocates the cult of images, the cycle allows the faithful viewer to identify the saints, compare the various stages of their metamorphosis from body to icon, and, finally, witness, reveal, and affirm their status as a true icon.