Conditions of Visibility 0198845561, 9780198845560

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C ON DI T ION S OF V I S I BI L I T Y

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V I SU A L C O N VE RS AT I O N S I N A RT A N D A RC H A E O LO G Y General Editor: Jaś Elsner Visual Conversations is a series designed to foster a new model of comparative inquiry in the histories of ancient art. The aim is to create the spirit of a comparative conversation across the different areas of the art history and archaeology of the pre-modern world—across Eurasia, Africa, Australasia, and the Americas—in ways that are academically and theoretically stimulating. The books serve collectively as a public platform to demonstrate by example the possibilities of a comparative exercise of working with objects across cultures and religions within defined, but broad, historical trajectories.

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Conditions of Visibility Edited by

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2019 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019936325 ISBN 978–0–19–884556–0 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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The authors dedicate this book with gratitude to their students and to the attendees at the Global Ancient Art conferences, whose conversation and debate have inspired these essays.

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P RE FA C E Richard Neer The Chicago Center for Global Ancient Art was founded in 2009 by members of the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Its animating idea is that a new research paradigm is emerging within art history. Antiquity was, of course, one of the original topics of this discipline as it emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century. For many years, however, art history derived its basic research questions and its accepted ways of answering such questions from the study of more recent epochs: the Latin Middle Ages, the European Renaissance, nineteenth-century Paris, 1960s New York. That situation is changing: as the discipline grows and expands, new questions and new ways of answering them start to appear. The Center, in particular, explores two developments in recent scholarship: an increasing tendency amongst art historians to study archaeological corpora, and a corresponding tendency amongst archaeologists to move beyond functionalism into “art historical” topics like beholding, iconography, materials, phenomenology, stylistics, and aesthetics. What happens when these two worlds collide? We define ancient in procedural terms: wherever it is from, whenever it was made, art is ancient if our knowledge of it derives to a significant degree from archaeological data: stratigraphic, archaeometric, typological/stylistic, even quantitative. Antiquity is, in short, a function of method. Because these methods apply to a broad range of regions and corpora, this definition makes it possible to speak in global, comparative terms—a comparativism, however, not so much of the objects of knowledge as of the ways of producing and ordering them. Scholars of ancient China, Greece, and Mexico may work with radically different materials and possess radically different research skills, yet they all use similar kinds of data, produce facts in similar ways. In a discipline that still partitions itself according to nation, religion, and date (we have sinologists and classicists, modernists and Islamists), these affinities of method provide a new, “horizontal” way to organize research. On offer, in short, is a comparativism of method. Perhaps the most controversial, even tendentious aspect of this program is the apparently cavalier use of the term art. Art, we are sometimes told, is a quintessentially modern concept that can be applied to older or alien materials only on pain of gross anachronism. We do not pretend to know in advance the compass of this term or the limits of the aesthetic. On the contrary, it is only by testing the

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methods of art history against the materials and protocols of archaeology that we may be in a position to discover whether our questions are well formed, our answers cogent. Like global and ancient, in short, our use of the term art is procedural, a function of method—a usage that, in its turn, enables comparison across cultures, times, and places. Each volume in this series examines and compares a basic concept or category of art historical and archaeological inquiry. Unlike the widely available handbooks or companions to standing fields of inquiry, these books do not codify or survey well-defined bodies of knowledge. They are, instead, exploratory: at once primers for students seeking to expand their research horizons and provocations to specialists. They offer, in short, theory from the ground up: an apt description, we hope, of a truly archaeological history of art.

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CO NT E NT S List of Illustrations

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List of Contributors

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Introduction1 Richard Neer

1. Three Types of Invisibility: The Acropolis of Athens

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Richard Neer

2. What Lies Beneath: Carving on the Underside of Aztec Sculpture

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Claudia Brittenham

3. Concealment and Revelation: The Pola Casket and the Visuality of Early Christian Relics

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Jas ́ Elsner

4. The Archaeology of Passage: Reading Invisibility in Chinese Tombs111 Wu Hung Index147

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L I S T O F I L L U S T RAT I O NS 1.1. Athens, Acropolis, view from the Pnyx. 8 1.2. Rogier van der Weyden, The Vision of the Magi, c.1445–8. Oil on panel. 9 Berlin, Gemäldegalerie der Staatlichen Museen. 1.3. Athens, sanctuary of Athena Nike, parapet relief: Nike unclasping sandal. Marble, c.416 bce. Athens, Acropolis Museum. 10 1.4. Kore from the “Kore Pit” on the Athenian Acropolis. Marble, c.520–500 bce. Athens, Acropolis Museum 671. 12 1.5. Athens, Acropolis, Parthenon, east pediment: Figure D (Dionysos), front view. Marble, 447–432 bce. London: British Museum, inv. 1816,0610.93.17 1.6. Athens, Acropolis, Parthenon, east pediment: Figure D (Dionysos), back view. Marble, 447–432 bce. London: British Museum, inv. 1816,0610.93.18 1.7. Athens, Acropolis, Parthenon, north frieze, Block II: Figure 4 (youth with heifer). Marble, 447–432 bce. Athens, Acropolis Museum. 19 1.8. Athens, Acropolis, Parthenon: angles for viewing frieze. 20 1.9. Athens, Acropolis, Parthenon, east porch: exposed clamp. 22 1.10. Athens, Acropolis, temple of Athena Polias (Erechtheum), with modern restorations: view from southeast. 421–406 bce.25 1.11. Athens, Acropolis, temple of Athena Nike and bastion: view from northwest. Late 430s–420s bce.29 1.12. Athens, Acropolis, bastion of the temple of Athena Nike: polygonal gap in the cladding of the bastion, revealing Mycenaean masonry. Late 430s bce.30 1.13. Delphi, sanctuary of Apollo: polygonal masonry of sanctuary wall. Sixth century bce.31 1.14. Olympia: Nike of Paionios, commemorating the Messenian and Naupaktian contribution to the victory of the Athenians and their allies over the Spartans at Sphakteria in 425 bce. Marble, c.425–420 bce. Olympia, Museum. 34 1.15. Athens, Acropolis, Parthenon, south frieze, Block XLIII (youth restraining heifer). Marble, 447–432 bce. London, British Museum. 35 1.16. Athens, Acropolis, sanctuary of Athena Nike, parapet relief: Nike restraining bull. Marble, c.425–400 bce. Athens, Acropolis Museum. 36 1.17. Athens, Acropolis, temple of Athena Polias (Erechtheum): caryatid. Marble, 421–406 bce. London, British Museum 1816,0610.128. 37 2.1. Coiled serpent, Mexica/Aztec, c.1480–1519. British Museum Am1849,0629.1.44 2.2. Hackmack Box, Mexica/Aztec, 1503. Museum fur Volkerkunde, Hamburg, B 3767. 48

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2.3. Coatlicue, Mexica/Aztec, c.1480–1510, Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico. 50 2.4. Xiuhmolpilli or “bundle of years”, Mexica/Aztec. Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico. 56 2.5. Coiled and knotted rattlesnake, Aztec. Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico. 56 2.6. Coiled Xiuhcoatl, Mexica/Aztec, 1507. Dumbarton Oaks Research 58 Library and Collection PC.B.069. 2.7. Altars with maize cobs, Mexica/Aztec. Museo Nacional de Antropologia and Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin. 59 2.8. Stone cactii with images of Tenoch on the underside, Mexica/Aztec 61 c.1400–1520. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico. 2.9. Feathered Serpent and Flowering Tree mural, probably from Techinantitla apartment compound, Teotihuacan, c.100–550 ce. 62 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco 185.104.1a–b. 2.10. Coiled serpent, Teotihuacan. First–sixth century ce. Museo de Sitio de Teotihuacan.62 2.11. Feathered serpent with Tlaltecuhtli underneath, Mexica/Aztec, 63 c.1400–1519. Museum der Kulturen Basel IVb 1359. 2.12. Offering vessel (cuauhxicalli), Mexica/Aztec, c.1400–1519. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, IV Ca 1. 66 3.1. Marble statue of Flavius Palmatus from Aphrodisias in Asia Minor, early sixth century ce. Aphrodisias Museum. 75 3.2. Bronze head of Augustus, from Meroe, Sudan, c.30 bce. British Museum. 76 3.3. Silver-gilt so-called Projecta casket from the Esquiline Treasure found in Rome, c.350–80 ce. British Museum. 77 3.4. Silver objects from the Traprain Law hoard, containing mainly ‘hack-silver’ (cut up and ready for the melting pot) found in Edinburgh, fourth–fifth century ce. National Museums of Scotland. 78 3.5. Silver missorium of Theodosius, folded and perhaps intended for the melting pot, from near Merida in Spain, c.388 ce. Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid. 79 3.6. Gold and niello pectoral cross from Pliska, Bulgaria, ninth century ce. National Museum, Sofia. 80 3.7. The Pola casket, from the front and right. Ivory plaques and silver brackets at the corners, as well as a silver lock and hinges, over a wooden core. Found near Pola in Istria, early to mid-fifth century. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Venice. 81 3.8. The Pola casket, from the front, with the Hetoimasia and Lamb between apostles. Venice. 82 3.9. The Pola casket, back, showing a church interior (perhaps Old St Peter’s) with worshippers. 83

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3.10. The Pola casket, from the left, showing a church interior with closed door and approaching devotees. 84 3.11. The Pola casket, from the right, showing a church interior with devotees.85 3.12. The Pola casket, lid, with Christ between Peter and Paul, palm trees, and lambs. 86 3.13. The Pola casket, lid, conjectural restoration. 87 3.14. Stone container and lid in which the Pola casket was found, from the Church of St Hermagoras, Samagher, Istria. 88 3.15. The Basilica of St Maria Maggiore, triumphal arch mosaic with empty throne, 432–40 ce. Rome. 88 3.16. Marble spiral columns (probably second century ce) reused for the shrine of St Peter in the Vatican, first half of the fourth century ce, 90 and reused again in the Reniassance Basilica of St Peter’s. 3.17. Mosaic of Theodora and her entourage, from the Presbytery of the Church of San Vitale, c.545–9 ce. Ravenna. 94 4.1. Cross-section and plan of Mawangdui Tomb 1 at Changsha, Hunan. Western Han, early second century bce.113 4.2. Plan of Leigudun Tomb 1 at Suixian, Hubei. Early Warring States period, fifth century bce.115 4.3. Marquis Yi’s outer coffin from Leigudun Tomb 1. 116 4.4. Marquis Yi’s inner coffin from Leigudun Tomb 1. 117 4.5. Drawing of a detail of the lacquer painting on Marquis Yi’s inner coffin. 118 4.6. Pottery coffin for a child from Zhengzhou, Henan, Yanshao culture. Neolithic, fifth millennium bce.119 4.7. Jade bi-disk. Neolithic period, Liangzhu culture, third millennium bce.123 4.8. The “jade body” of Prince Liu Sheng of the Zhongshan principality, from Mancheng Tomb 1, Hebei. Western Han, 113 bce.125 4.9. Detail of Dou Wan’s “jade body” from Mancheng Tomb 2, Hebei. Western Han, 104 bce.125 4.10. The “jade head” of Prince Liu Yan of the Zhongshan principality, excavated in Dingzhou, Hebei. Eastern Han, first century ce.126 4.11. Lacquer painting on the front side of a coffin from Shazitang, Changsha, Hunan. Western Han, 157 bce (?). 128 4.12. Mawangdui Tomb 1: (a) top view, (b) cross section. Located at Changsha, Hunan. Western Han, second century bce.129 4.13. Bi-disk placed on the front top of the innermost coffin in Mawangdui Tomb 1. 130 4.14. Drawing of the silk painting from Mawangdui Tomb 1. Arrows indicate three “ground levels” which devide the painting into four sections. 131 4.15. Detail of the silk painting from Mawangdui Tomb 1. 132 4.16. Drawing of the lacquer painting on the “red” coffin from Mawangdui Tomb 1: (a) a narrow side, (b) a long side. 133

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4.17. A diagram showing the relationship between the bi-disk and the two dragons in the silk painting from Mawangdui Tomb 1. 134 4.18. A miniature screen from Mawangdui Tomb 1: (a) front side, (b) back side. 136 4.19. A mural in Zhang Shiqing’s tomb (Tomb 1) at Xuanhua, Hebei. Liao dynasty, 1116 ce.142 4.20. Drawing of a mural in Houshiguo Tomb 1 at Mixian, Henan. Eastern Han, mid-second century ce.142

Whilst every effort has been made to secure permission to reproduce the illustrations, we may have failed in a few cases to trace the copyright holders. If contacted, the publisher will be pleased to rectify any omissions at the earliest opportunity.

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L I S T O F C ONT RI B UT O RS Claudia Brittenham is Associate Professor of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the art of Mesoamerica, especially Central Mexico and the Maya area, with particular interests in the materiality of art and the politics of style. She is the author of The Murals of Cacaxtla: The Power of Painting in Ancient Central Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2015), The Spectacle of the Late Maya  Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak (University of Texas Press, 2013; co-authored with Mary Miller), and Veiled Brightness: A History of Ancient Maya Color (University of Texas Press, 2009; co-authored with Stephen Houston, Cassandra Mesick, Alexandre Tokovinine, and Christina Warinner). Jaś Elsner is Professor of Late Antique Art at the University of Oxford and Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has been a Visiting Professor in Art History at the University of Chicago since 2003, and also at the Divinity School since 2014, and was Senior Research Keeper in the Empires of Faith Project on art and religion in late antiquity at the British Museum from 2013 to 2018. Since 2009 he has been an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He works on art and its many receptions (including ritual, religion, pilgrimage, viewing, description, collecting) in antiquity and Byzantium, including into modernity, with strong interests in comparativism, global art history, and the critical historiography of the discipline. Richard Neer is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in Art History, Cinema & Media  Studies and the College at the University of Chicago, where is also Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities. From 2010 to 2018 he was the Executive Editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, where he continues to serve as co-editor. He has published widely on Greek art, early modern French painting, stylistics, and mid-20th century cinema.  His most recent books are;  Art and Archaeology of the Greek World: A New History, 2500–100 bce  (Thames & Hudson, second, expanded edition, 2018); Davidson and His Interlocutors, co-edited with Daniele Lorenzini (special issue of Critical Inquiry, Winter 2019); and Pindar, Song, and Space: Towards a Lyric Archaeology, co-authored with Leslie Kurke (Johns Hopkins, 2019). Wu Hung is Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago, and also Director of the

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Center for the Art of East Asia and Consulting Curator of the Smart Museum of Art. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and sits on the boards and advisory committees of many research institutes and museums in both the United States and China. He has published widely on both traditional and contemporary Chinese art, experimenting with different ways to integrate these conventionally separate phases into new kinds of art historical narratives, as exemplified by two of his most recent books, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Several of his ongoing projects follow this direction to explore the interrelation between art medium, pictorial image, and architectural space, the dialectical relationship between absence and presence in Chinese art and visual culture, and the relationship between art discourse and practice. The contributors to this volume are the founding members of the Center for Global Ancient Art at the University of Chicago.

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Introduction Richard Neer

What conditions must be met, what has to be in place, for an artifact or a work of art to be visible as such? At some level the answer is simple: the lights must be on. Quickly, however, the issues become more complex and turn out to vary from discipline to discipline. Not everything is visible at every time, which means that not every research program can see the same things. Material conditions are certainly important, but so are perceptual capacities, technologies of visualization, protocols of classification, and a great deal more. Archaeology is, among other things, the science of making things visible. It does so by digging them out of the ground; what time has hidden, the archaeologist reveals. The discipline is, as a result, keenly attuned to the material conditions under which such visibility becomes possible. Those conditions can be institutional, practical, and technological—funding, permits, and tools, be they picks and shovels or ground penetrating radar. But the conditions that archaeology investigates can also be historical, in the sense that, even in the distant past, visibility was neither uniform nor given. Historical agents, no less than time, may do the work of concealment: burying things, hiding them, rendering them variously obscure. It follows that archaeologists excavate more than artifacts. Equally, they excavate the conditions of each artifact’s potential visibility: the material conditions under which entities in a past world could be conspicuous and obtrusive, or recede into an unremarkable background. In short, they excavate relations no less than things—hence, by extension, a potential stratification in who saw what and at what time. Art history, on the other hand, tends to take visibility for granted. Integral to the discipline is a vast infrastructure of imaging and autopsy, from ArtSTOR to high-quality printing to travel grants—all committed to what Michael Fried has called “the primordial convention” that pictures and sculptures are meant to be beheld.1 This commitment exceeds the requirements of empirical research: even   Fried 1998, 33. For discussion of this phrase, see Melville 1996, 178–80.

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the most thorough technical documentation and the most meticulous description will, by broad consensus, be no substitute for seeing the object with one’s own eyes. Procedurally, archaeologists can use type-specimens to stand in for large classes of object, but art historians typically attend to each and every instance and its specific look (even mechanical prints and photographs come in editions and impressions). It is as though there were something about the object of study that required beholding, in the sense of autopsy. This “to-be-seen-ness” may seem an essential, definitional criterion of the art historical object, but Fried’s insight is that the visibility in question counts as essential only within specific historical circumstances. Attending to the ways in which such works articulate a relation to beholders helps us “to historicize essence,” that is, to produce “a narrative of the shifting depths over time of the need for one or more basic conventions within a pictorial or sculptural tradition.”2 Beholding—hence visibility in an extended sense, the very interface of sensibility and comportment—is not a presupposition but an object of art historical research. The present volume documents four recent experiments in the historicization of essence, under the aegis of the Center for Global Ancient Art in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Such experiments are, in themselves, nothing new; the historical determination of the visible has been one of art history’s major preoccupations since the days of Aloïs Riegl and Erwin Panofsky and goes back ultimately to the Aesthetics of Hegel.3 New, however, is the way that these experiments situate themselves at the intersection of the two modes of visibility outlined above: the archaeological and the art historical. The relation of disciplinary conditions of visibility to historical ones is, in each case, a specific topic of reflection.4 Such reflection is, arguably, only possible within a mongrel subdiscipline like archaeological art history, which might be defined as the application of art historical research questions to corpora formed by stratigraphic and archaeometric analysis. Constitutively interdisciplinary—or, better, constitutively undisciplined—this subfield cuts across the traditional ethnic, religious, and chronological categories that segregate the history of art into pagan and Christian, Chinese and Roman, Maya and Greek. United around shared problems of method, this second-order reflection is cheerfully parasitic on

  Fried 1998, 33. Italics original.   For Panofsky and the historicization of the senses, see Wood 1991. For Riegl, see Olin 1992. For an analysis of the Hegelian legacy in recent art history, see Pippin 2013. A particularly good recent treatment of the historicization of the senses in art historical discourse is Davis 2011. 4  A pioneering work in this regard is Alpers  1983, on how new technologies of viewing (notably, microscopes) produced new ways of construing truthfulness in early modern painting. Joel Snyder’s account of how the apparatus of photography produced new kinds of visual fact is also extremely germane: see e.g. Snyder 1980; 2002. Outside art history proper, see the discussion of scientific illustration in Galison and Daston 2010. Bringing these topics into art criticism, see Bourdieu 1984; Rancière 2000. 2 3

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(hence, respectful of ) traditional, corpus-building scholarship, even as it aspires to a new formation. The goal is nothing less than a triple comparativism: between the academic present and the historical past; between the protocols of art history and those of  archaeology; and between the various area-studies subfields that define ­current research. This concern with the conditions under which a picture, a glyph, a coffin, or a building is “to-be-seen” produces a series of essays that address the interface of revelation and concealment. The question of invisibility—of artifacts coming to light and receding into obscurity—turns out to be no less important than visibility itself. For Claudia Brittenham, the question turns on the carved undersides of certain Aztec sculpture: glyphs and other texts set where no eyes could see them. Brittenham discusses such works in light of recent literature on absconding, that is, the intentional concealment of images.5 But she also adduces Aztec poetry as an analogy to sculptural practice. This literature can represent concepts and things by elaborate circumlocutions or kennings, which often have a binary structure: a couplet pairing two terms that, in tandem, represent a larger conceptual whole. For the phrase to be meaningful it necessarily combines the two kennings in a regular, rule-bound manner. Brittenham argues that Aztec sculpture works the same way: visible and hidden combine like a couplet, in an interplay of seeing and knowing, of what the eye apprehends and what the mind understands to be invisible and yet present all the same. The field of the visible is not just informed but structured by all that passes stipulatively unseen; there is no “to-beseen-ness” without a concomitant “to-be-unseen-ness.” Jaś Elsner is likewise concerned with absconding, but in a very different context: a specific object and its unique conditions of discovery. The object is a late antique box of wood, ivory, and silver found beneath the altar of a church near Pola in Istria. As so often in the archaeological disciplines, the very circumstance that requires excavation also denudes the artifact of secondary documentation. Although the Pola casket was deliberately interred as a reliquary, we do not know whether this role represents its primary function or was an adventitious, secondary reuse. The casket, in any event, is a hidden box that contains hidden relics; Elsner describes its figural décor in a tour de force of close reading, a semiology of absence that shows how the casket both narrates and performs the apophasis of deity. Such close reading is arguably more common in the archaeological wings of art history than it is in the study of later, better documented epochs; the absence of secondary documentation means that scholars rely especially heavily on the object as a source of data. Perhaps the boldest wager of Elsner’s paper is that the distinction of primary versus secondary use really does not matter very much; whether originally intended to do so or not, the Pola casket did provide a   Wu, Hay, and Pellizzi 2009.

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theologically inflected commentary on both relics and reliquaries. That is, the casket’s thematic of visibility and apophasis may be entirely circumstantial, entirely dependent upon the ritual and material conditions of its deposition—and no less grounded in iconographic and stylistic detail for all that. In this way, the casket’s own conditions of visibility turn out to be as religiously significant as they are archaeologically, forensically determinative. For the present author (Neer), the issue is less theology than power and access. The conditions of visibility are material and social. Who gets to see? The case study here is the most public, conspicuous monument of Classical Athenian democracy: the Acropolis. Only in the crudest, most literal sense does the question of visibility turn on literal occlusion or hiding from view, as in the case of a pit in which certain recognizable statues were reverently buried after a Persian army looted the sanctuary in 480 bce. More often it is a matter of privileged or impoverished views, as in the case of the sculpted frieze of the Parthenon—a costly addition that nobody could see from ground level. That the frieze contains a wealth of finicky iconographic detail can be explained with the pious suggestion that its intended audience is the goddess Athena, but de facto visibility must have been restricted to the overseers and functionaries who supervised the project. The result was a differential in the visible, which turns out to extend even to monuments in plain sight. There is good evidence to suggest that the iconography of Athenian public art was incomprehensible to most Athenians; the commons could not recognize, could not see, the gods and goddesses that adorned their monuments. In this way, the very capacity to see was effectively rationed, not by any calculating ideologue, but by the material conditions of production and consumption. The sanctuary of Athena Nike (the Victorious) at the entry to the Acropolis is a virtual allegory of this social rationing of visibility. A Bronze Age bastion sheathed in a veil of marble that opens to reveal the rock within, adorned with sculpted figures that wear the most diaphanous drapery in the Classical canon, it stages its own “to-beseen-ness” simultaneously as erotic access and martial power. Lastly, Wu Hung asks how it is that an absence can become conspicuous in the first place. How can you see a nothing? The question arises in a discussion of Chinese tombs of the first millennium bce, which Wu finds to be staging grounds for what he calls “constructed emptiness.” Starting with the Late Eastern Zhou and working his way to the famous Mawangdui tombs of the Western Han, Wu traces an archaeology of passages in which conspicuous voids, perforations, and channels made way for the peregrinations of a soul after death. If the earlier tombs consist of elaborate architectural ensembles within which conspicuous voids chart the movement of an invisible soul, later ones distill this dialectic into circular disks known as bi, each perforated with a large central hole to facilitate the soul’s movement. The bi-disk effects a play of materiality and pure absence in mutual implication: the disc exists for the soul but constitutes emptiness as

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such by its own perforation. From the semiology of absconding and the pragmatics of visibility, in short, we move with Wu’s exegesis to a pure dialectic whereby the portable disk amounts to something like a roving nonsite, a no-place for a no-thing. Crucially, for present purposes, it is only in the archaeological context of the excavated tomb, and by means of the archaeological methods of typology and diachronic comparison, that this dialectic becomes visible in the present. In this way, the reconstitution of early Chinese metaphysical contemplation coincides with the canons of empirical research. Each of the essays, then, reflects on the imbrication of visibility and invisibility under specific historical and disciplinary conditions. The explanatory terms are varied: ritual and poetry (Brittenham), theology (Elsner), power (Neer), and a seriation of archaeological typologies and mortuary customs (Wu). Uniting them all, however, is an ambition to probe the specific limitations and opportunities that archaeological excavation affords to the close study of specific monuments. On the one hand, the general absence of direct textual documentation (no Vasari, no Bellori, no Diderot) returns attention to the objects themselves and the material circumstances of their deposition and display; on the other, the vast data sets of archaeological research tend to thicken descriptions and to draw attention from specific artifacts to larger assemblages and contexts. The results cannot be called postdisciplinary, insofar as they rely overtly on the most traditional forms of philological, stylistic, and stratigraphic evidence. But they do point the way to a new disciplinary cosmopolitanism. One of the great challenges of recent years has been to produce a truly global art history.6 This goal has proved elusive; it has, perhaps, been easier to retrofit the old area-studies model in terms of diffusion and networking or simply to shift faculty lines from “depleted” subfields to ones that promise growth. There are very good reasons for this drag on diversification: for example, insofar as linguistic competence is a sine qua non of serious historical research, it is very difficult even for scholars (let alone graduate students) to acquire the requisite expertise in multiple subfields. Truly to globalize the discipline requires globalizing the skill sets of researchers, and that is no mean feat. More feasible, perhaps, is a comparativism of methods and research programs. That is what Chicago’s Center for Global Ancient Art undertakes and what these papers exemplify: a triple comparativism as a way to produce an art history that is cosmopolitan in method and global in scope, to establish new ways of seeing—new conditions of visibility for—shared objects of study. It is by such attention to the basic methods and concepts of the discipline that new research questions may arise—and new ways of answering them.   See e.g. Summers 2003; Elkins 2007; Mitter 2008; Ching, Jarzombek, and Prakash 2011; Casid and D’Souza 2014; Necipoǧlu and Payne 2016. 6

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R EF ER ENCE S A lpers , S. (1983), The art of describing: Dutch art in the seventeenth century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). B ourdieu , P. (1984), “Outline of a sociological theory of art perception,” in The field of cultural production: essays on art and literature (New York: Columbia University Press), 215–37. C asid , J.  and D’S ouza , A., eds (2014), Art history in the wake of the global turn (Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute). C hing , F. D. K., J arzombek , M., and P rakash , V.  (2011), A global history of architecture, 2nd edn (Hoboken: Wiley). D avis , W.  (2011), A general theory of visual culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press). E lkins , J., ed. (2007), Is art history global? (New York: Taylor and Francis). F ried , M.  (1998), Art and objecthood: essays and reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). G alison , P. and D aston , L. (2010), Objectivity (New York: Zone Books). M elville , S. (1996), Seams: art as a philosophical context (New York: Routledge). M itter , P.  (2008), “Decentering modernism: art history and avant-garde from the periphery,” The Art Bulletin 90, 531–48. N ecipo ǧ lu , G.  and P ayne , A., eds (2016), Histories of ornament: from global to local (Princeton: Princeton University Press). O lin , M. (1992), Forms of representation in Alois Riegl’s theory of art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press). P ippin , R.  (2013), After the beautiful: Hegel and the philosophy of pictorial modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). R ancière , J. (2000), Le partage du sensible: ésthetique et politique (Paris: Le Fabrique). S nyder , J. (1980), “Picturing vision,” Critical Inquiry 6, 499–526. S nyder , J. (2002), “Enabling confusion,” History of Photography 26, 154–60. S ummers , D.  (2003), Real spaces: world art history and the rise of Western modernism (London: Phaidon). W u H ung , H ay , J., and P ellizzi , F., eds (2009), “Absconding,” special issue of RES 55/56. W ood , C. S.  (1991), Introduction to E. Panofsky, Perspective as symbolic form, trans. C. S. Wood (New York: Zone Books), 7–24.

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Three Types of Invisibility The Acropolis of Athens Richard Neer

Classical Greek monuments were meant to be seen. The poet Pindar often refers to the conspicuousness of architecture: “When a work is begun,” he declares, “it is necessary to make its façade far-beaming” (Olympian 6.3–4), and a sacred precinct can be te ̄lephantos, “shining from afar” (fr. 5 SM).1 According to Plato, the works of Pheidias were made “conspicuously” (periphano s̄ ), literally, “so as to seen round about,” a term that can also be used to distinguish freestanding sculpture from relief (Meno 91d).2 The philosopher may have been thinking of Pheidias’ great bronze Athena on the Acropolis of Athens, the spear and helmet of which, we are told, were visible to ships at sea.3 The conspicuousness of Greek architecture was integral to its function. The Acropolis itself, for instance, was the supreme monument of the most powerful and long-lived democracy of Classical antiquity (Fig. 1.1).4 Soaring over Athens, its great buildings—the temple of Athena Nike, the Parthenon, the Erechtheum— were statements of the official ideology of the Athenian empire and testaments to its glory. Clustered around them were numerous private and public dedications: statues, objets d’art, and inscriptions on stone. Today these monuments are landmarks of art history and magnets for tourism. Curiously, however, many of the Acropolis monuments were more or less invisible in the 400s bce. Visibility was circumstantial and contingent, in ways that I would like to thank Claudia Brittenham, Jaś Elsner, Wu Hung, and audiences in Chicago, Palo Alto, and Williamstown for advice and debate. 1   Pindar uses te ̄lephantos also of the island of Delos, as part of an elaborate conceit in which he imagines the island as a giant, temple-like structure resting atop columns (fr. 33 SM). On Pindar and conspicuous monuments, see Neer and Kurke 2019. 2   Pausanias (2.12.5) uses this same term of grave monuments atop a hill. 3   Pausanias 5.25.12. On the Promachos, see Davison 2009, 277–96. 4   For overview, see Hurwit 1999.

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F ig . 1.1.  Athens, Acropolis, view from the Pnyx. Photo: Mirjanamimi, Wikimedia Commons.

I shall elaborate below. From this starting point flow two questions: what does it mean for a democracy that its most glorious public monuments should be, to a greater or lesser degree, unseen? And what are the consequences for art history?

T H R EE T Y PE S OF I N V ISI BI LI T Y

The Acropolis monuments were subject to at least three distinct types of invisibility. First, literal invisibility, in the sense of occlusion or concealment. In this case, any light that strikes the object does not bounce back and hit an observer’s eye. Were one to bury a statue in a hole, it would be occluded in this sense; the statue would be, literally, invisible. When H. G. Wells spoke of an Invisible Man, this is what he had in mind. Such literal invisibility shares with the other modes the capacity to be either conspicuous or circumspect. One can trumpet the fact of invisibility, advertise that something is hidden from view, or one can give no signs at all so that what is out of sight truly is out of mind as well.

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Second, practical invisibility, invisibility for all intents and purposes. In this case, the light might reach your eye, but either you do not notice the image or do not know what to make of it; you fail to recognize it in some way, hence properly to see it at all. When Ralph Ellison spoke of an Invisible Man, this is what he had in mind. Sometimes practical invisibility is just a matter of the extreme circumspection of certain entities in the visual field: the way that, due to habituation or habitus, they pass unseen. At other times it is a matter of access to information, in a word, iconography. To use Panofsky’s famous example, there is a difference between seeing the baby in Figure 1.2 as a miraculous vision of the Messiah appearing to the Magi and seeing it as an unfortunate tot who has been hurled into the air from a catapult.5 Iconographic information determines what can and cannot be seen: to one unacquainted with Renaissance altarpieces, the Messiah simply is not to be seen at all, either as vision or as flesh; to one inculcated in the historically specific way of seeing, by contrast, it is perverse to see anything else. The third type is what I shall call diaphanous invisibility (e.g. Fig. 1.3). In Greek as in English, one can speak of things that one does not literally see as though one did see them. If someone were to ask, with reference to Figure 1.2, if we can F ig . 1.2.  Rogier van der Weyden, The Vision of the Magi, c.1445–8. Oil on panel. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie der Staatlichen Museen. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Google Art Project.

5

  Cf. Panofsky 1955, 33–5.

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F ig . 1.3.  Athens, sanctuary of Athena Nike, parapet relief: Nike unclasping sandal. Marble, c.416 bce. Athens, Acropolis Museum. Photo: Richard Neer.

see the leg of the rightmost Wise Man in the picture, then it would be perfectly correct to answer in the affirmative: of course we can see his leg. But it would also be correct to say the opposite: we cannot see his leg because it is encased in a brown stocking. A clothed limb is no less occluded than a buried statue, yet there is world of difference between the two; in one sense we do see the limb, in another sense we do not. In a word, we see one thing through another. Sometimes, in English, we speak of clothing that leaves little to imagination, but this phrase, while handy, is also a bit prejudicial, insofar as it imposes an artificial distinction between seeing and imagining; seeing is itself complex, even multiplex. Diaphanous invisibility, while cumbersome, refers to the way in which one can see without seeing, in which two mutually exclusive descriptions can pertain simultaneously but without paradox. This third class is in some ways the most interesting because in such cases works of art can reflect upon, engage us in thinking about, their own conditions of visibility. On the ancient Acropolis, all three modes of invisibility overlapped and coincided to produce an invisible promenade, whereby a visitor passed countless items seen and unseen—conspicuously invisible in some cases, circumspectly so in others—such that literal, practical, and diaphanous invisibility combined and

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recombined to create a public, political environment. Within this dazzling site, the weave of visible and invisible organized architecture and sculptures: images, times, and places. One of the benefits of combining archaeological and art-historical methods in the examination of such environments is that doing so brings out the texture of that weave and reveals some of its patterns.

LI T ER A L I N V ISI BI LI T Y

Who could see the Acropolis?6 From a distance, anyone; all citizens would get more or less the view in Figure 1.1 when they assembled to conduct the business of democracy. But only some people were allowed through the gates at certain times. In general it does seem that any Athenian citizen could enter, but archers could be posted near the gates to keep runaway slaves or criminals from seeking sanctuary on holy ground.7 Once you did get inside, access was unequal and situational. A decree of the early fifth century mandates that certain small rooms or buildings be opened for public inspection three times a month, which implies that they were closed at other times—the idea here being to make sure that nobody had made off with sacred treasure—and the Parthenon could be screened off with grilles for basically the same reason.8 The temple of Athena Polias (“Guardian of the City”), known today as the Erechtheum, seems to have been open most of the time but was sealed during one month of the year.9 Herodotos tells a story of how King Kleomenes of Sparta was refused access because he was ethnically Dorian, not Ionian like the Athenians (it is not clear whether this rule was invented on the spot, to annoy the king).10 Kleomenes wanted to have a word with the ancient statue of the goddess in the temple, but he never got to see it.11

The Kore Pit and the Parthenon These rules are all ways of enforcing literal or partial invisibility. They remind us that visibility is often a question of access. A more extreme example of images rendered literally invisible is the so-called Kore Pit, which happens to be the only stratigraphically secure Archaic deposit on the Acropolis and the linchpin of ancient Greek   On this question, see Hurwit 1999, 54–7, from which I have drawn the examples in this paragraph.  Archers: Inscriptiones Graecae I3 45. 8  On grilles and screens, see Mylonopoulos  2011, 269–91. For general discussion of access to Athenian sacred spaces, see Gawlinski 2015. 9 10   Sealing Erechtheum: Inscriptiones Graecae I3 7.   Herodotos 5.72. 11   Herodotos uses the verb prosereo ,̄ “to address,” literally “to inquire outwardly.” 6 7

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F ig . 1.4.  Kore from the “Kore Pit” on the Athenian Acropolis. Marble, c.520–500 bce. Athens, Acropolis Museum 671. Photo: Richard Neer.

sculptural chronology.12 It is, as the name suggests, a hole in the ground, on the north side of the Acropolis rock to the northwest of the Erechtheum. It contained nine, and perhaps as many as fourteen, statues of the so-called kore (“maiden”) type, carefully laid out (Fig. 1.4).13 It also contained a monument erected after the battle of Marathon and known today as the Nike of Kallimakhos, as well as some inscriptions and small bronzes.14 A pit of this sort is known in Classical archaeology as a votive deposit: a ritual burial of gifts to the gods. Such deposits are by no means uncommon in the Greek world. Sometimes statues were knocked down by vandals or invaders and reverently buried afterwards; sometimes renovations in a sanctuary made it expedient to bury goods.15 Votive deposits typically represent secondary uses of the artifacts in question. The statues and bronzes were not intended for burial;  On the kore pit, see Kavvadias and Kawerau  1906, 23–32; Lindenlauf  1997, 70 n. 179 and pl. 7; Stewart 2008, with extensive earlier bibliography. On Archaic dedications on the Acropolis, see Scholl 2006. 13   The korai certainly in the Pit are: Athens, Acropolis Museum inv. 670, 672, 673, 677, 678, 680, 681, and 682, with AkrM 671. Akr. 679, 593, 594, and 595 seem to have been found elsewhere along the north wall, and Akr. 671 was built into the wall. See Lindenlauf 1997 382. 14   Athens, Acropolis Museum 691. 15   On statue burials, see Donderer 1991–2. 12

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rather, the burial occurred after some disturbance in the original display context. The Acropolis, for instance, suffered wholesale destruction when the Persians sacked Athens in 480 bce; the entire rock was razed and its monuments thrown down. The items in the Kore Pit were reverently interred at some point after the invaders withdrew the following year; many showed signs of burning. This is why the Pit is so important for archaeologists; everything in it, supposedly, must pre-date the sack of 480 bce, so it is a chronological fixed point. The origins of Classical Greek sculpture are pegged to this date.16 The Persians were gone by 479 bce. How soon after their departure were the statues buried, that is, rendered invisible? It is usual to assume that the burial took place immediately, but that is far from certain. In fact, the Kore Pit contained an unburnt Athenian coin of c.460–450 bce.17 Although it is possible that the coin is just an intrusion, there is an outside chance that it is integral to the deposit.18 Its presence suggests that the statues in the Pit may have been above ground for two decades before burial. Regardless of whether the Kore Pit was created in the 470s, the 450s bce, or sometime in between, it was an anomaly on the Acropolis rock; not all victims of the Persian destruction received reverent burial. Countless statues and inscriptions were damaged in the sack but, instead of being interred, were built into the wall of the Acropolis or lay around for years before being tossed into the vast mound of earth and rubble that supports the walls of the citadel, built 467–430. Many of these less fortunate statues and inscriptions are now on public view in the Acropolis Museum. In other words, we have to imagine any number of damaged monuments remaining on the Acropolis, possibly for decades, at which point some got treated as lumber while others were singled out for special treatment. Why the disparity? It is hard to discern a pattern to distinguish the objects in the Pit from those elsewhere. Quality or state of preservation is not an index. Rather, there seem to have been at least two necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for inclusion. First, every inscription in the Pit has a proper name on it, even if the inscription itself is incomplete. Not every inscription with a name made the cut; some inscriptions with names were just tossed into the fill. The relevant factor cannot have been just any old name, but only certain, apparently special names. Second, all the   Cf. Stewart 2008.   Stewart 2008, 383 with n. 28 (dismissed as an intrusion). On coins in votive deposits, see Crawford 2003. 18   This runs into the vexed question of the Pit’s association with the date of the north wall of the Acropolis. The pit is part of the fill of the wall and should be contemporary with it; certainly the excavators thought they went together (Kavvadias and Kawerau 1906, 28; see also Lindenlauf 1997, 70–1 and n. 187). The wall’s date is not uncontroversial but, arguing for a high date (hence against deposition in the 450s), see Korres 2002, with earlier bibliography. None of the arguments for dating (whether high, low, or in between) is especially solid. 16 17

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inscriptions in the Pit record private, not public, dedications. Again, not every private dedication made the cut, but only some special ones; no state dedication did so. This pattern, such as it is, does suggest that some principle of selection governed the inclusion of debris in the Pit. It is not just a random assortment of debris. What might the principle have been? In some cases, the individual in question was prominent, a worthy. For example, a general named Kallimakhos died fighting the Persians at the battle of Marathon in 490 bce; his family erected a monument to his memory; ten years later the Persians knocked it down, and it wound up in the Pit.19 It is very likely that the monument’s association with the Persian Wars was an important factor. But, again, neither prominence nor an association with the war was necessary or sufficient for inclusion; there is no evidence that any of the other inscriptions had such associations. The Kallimakhos dedication does, however, share a feature with at least some of the other inscriptions in the Pit: it attests to family bonds. Kallimakhos did not make the offering himself (he was dead); his family made it in his honor. Another inscription from the Pit records two names, inscribed at different times, each with a dedication to go with it: c.500 bce one Onesimos son of Smikythos made an offering, and then, some fifteen years later, Onesimos’ son Theodoros added a second dedication to the same base and had his own name cut alongside that of his father.20 Onesimos was a pious man who made many dedications on the Acropolis, and Theodoros likely made at least one other, but only the inscription that bears both names found its way into the Pit.21 Such use across multiple generations may indicate particularly strong ties between monument and family, not unlike the Kallimakhos monument. This sample is desperately small but it may, perhaps, indicate that family members with connections to a given inscription influenced the decision to include that inscription in the Pit. A “pleasing gift” (agalma) that was in some way a “memorial” (mne ̄ma) was specially apt for burial. In short, the conditions for inclusion were: a private dedication with a proper name and, just perhaps, a special family connection. The case is even less clear with the statues. It is certainly possible that those in the Pit represent a random sample of post-Persian ruination. The korai are generic by nature. Given that there was a principle of selection in the case of inscriptions, however, it seems unlikely that there was none at all when it came to statues. If so, then it seems most economical (albeit speculative) to suppose the same principle

  Athens, Acropolis Museum inv. 690; Inscriptiones Graecae I3 784.  Onesimos and Smikythos: Inscriptiones Graecae I3 699A–B; Löhr  2000, 37–8; Keesling  2005; Jim 2014, 136–7. 21   On the dedications: Inscriptiones Graecae I3 926–32, 941. 19 20

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pertained in each case. We must imagine the Athenian returning to the Acropolis in 479 bce to find a spectacle of desolation: a smoking ruin with scattered stone bodies lying about like so many petrified corpses. Perhaps statues with family got good treatment, while orphans, so to speak, did not. Selection on just these terms is exactly what happened on countless Greek battlefields in both myth and reality, the classic example being Antigone picking through the corpses at Thebes to find her brother and give him proper burial. “Who would want a girl bereft of family?” as Euripides put it; in Athens, perhaps, they dumped those girls, those korai, into the foundations of the Parthenon, while the ones “with family” got something like burial.22 There is a telling analogy here with the famous Phrasikleia kore from Merenda: after being knocked down by the Persians, it was interred alongside a kouros and honored with an offering trench not unlike those that dead humans received.23 A statue was like a corpse; it was the job of a survivor to give it burial. That said, it is noteworthy that the korai in the Pit do not come with inscriptions to match them; all (or all but one) were separated from their bases when knocked down, so there are no identifying texts, no public marks of ownership.24 In other words, the texts have names, but the statues do not (with, again, one possible exception). What did the work of a proper name in the case of statues? As a practical matter, the absence of a text means that any claim on a statue must have proceeded by simple recognition while picking through the rubble. But since the statues bear no identifying inscriptions, the principle of selection (if there was one) can only have been simple face-to-face recognition; eight of the statues still had their heads.25 In short, if there were any principle of selection at all—if this is not just a random sample of korai—then somebody had to recognize these statues in the absence of any accompanying inscription and on that basis decide what got special burial and what did not. The capacity to see, to recognize, a statue was as important as family prestige. This point may seem banal, but, as we shall see, visibility does not come about of itself. In the case of the Pit, visibility is a function of external factors, from macrohistorical ones like the Persian Wars of 480–479 bce to microhistorical ones like family ties in the town of Athens. But it is also a function of how a generic, stereotyped statue was seen by particular people at a particular moment, its own peculiar mode of visibility. What mattered was a qualitative difference in perception,  Euripides, The Children of Heracles, ll. 523–4.  On the burial of Phrasikleia, with evidence for dating, see Rosenberg-Dimitracopoulou  2015, 85–99. On the funerary ritual, see Kistler 1998. 24   The possible exception is the kore Akr. 681 (“Antenor’s kore”), which is commonly associated with a base that was also found in the pit but to which it matches imperfectly at best: see Payne 1950, 31–2 and n. 2. Fragments of both base and statue were found scattered across the Acropolis, both in the Pit and outside it. 25   Kavvadias and Kowerau 1906, 28. The text gives the impression that all eight come from the Pit. 22 23

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between seeing any old generic kore statue and seeing one’s very own generic kore statue. It is a small but essential point: the Kore Pit directs us to attend less to the specific fact of invisibility than to the conditions under which it arises. In order to be made invisible in this special way—buried in a pit—the statue has first to be visible in a special way, seen in a special way, by people in the know. In short, a statue does not cease to be important once it becomes invisible. Rather, the way it becomes invisible, the why and the how of invisibility, give it lasting meaning, or consign it to oblivion. For a second and third example of literal occlusion, we can turn to cases that are not accidental, not a result of external interventions like a war, but an entirely predictable, even intentional feature of the work. Both come from the Parthenon.26 It is well known that the pedimental sculptures are, in effect, freestanding statues in an architectural frame: they were carved in the round to a high finish, an unusual feature in Greece, and likewise painted (Figs 1.5–1.6).27 In addition, the east pediment showed the chariot of the sun rising out of the sea at one corner, the chariot of the moon sinking into the waves on the other. The waves are in each case carved on a low, horizontal slab that lay directly atop the floor of the gable. This position made it nearly impossible to see them from ground level; a crucial iconographic detail, establishing the spatial parameters of the scene, was almost perversely obscure. The Parthenon frieze is an even more complex case (Fig. 1.7).28 Famously it shows a great procession in honor of Athena. It is bewitchingly complex and subtle in both its carving and its iconography, and scholars have devoted a great deal of energy to both. With regard to style, the so-called pie-crust selvage is a highly distinctive stylistic tic of the sculptors: the edge of a cloak or robe is crinkled or crimped like the crust of a pie. This mannerism allows scholars to trace the Parthenon sculptors as they pursued other projects after the great project was finished. With regard to iconography, normal science consists in various forms of decoding: Is the child holding Athena’s robe a boy or a girl? Why does one rider, and one rider only, have a gorgon’s head on his breastplate? What’s inside the jars that a group of young men are carrying?29 Iconography then shades into cultural history: what do the answers to such questions tell us about ancient Athenian religion or the political messaging of the Athenian empire? The justification for this research program is, quite simply, the evident care and deliberation that went into the frieze. These details really do seem carefully pondered, hence significant.

  For a guide to bibliography on the Parthenon, see Barletta 2014.   For basic discussions of the pediments, see Palagia 1993; Mostratos 2004; Williams 2013. Paint: Jenkins and Middleton 1988. 28   Basic discussion: Neils 2001. 29   Neils 2001 is an excellent statement of this approach; for a more recent example, see Nicgorski 2004. 26 27

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F ig . 1.5.  Athens, Acropolis, Parthenon, east pediment: Figure D (Dionysos), front view. Marble, 447–432 bce. London: British Museum, inv. 1816,0610.93. Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum.

Even as both iconography and style cry out for close inspection, the fact remains that the Parthenon frieze was almost impossible to see (Fig. 1.8).30 As Richard Stillwell demonstrated long ago, the ideal viewing angle for the frieze would have been “a zone or belt of observation, a few feet wide, that runs parallel to the four sides of the building, approximately thirty feet away from the stylobate.”31 From this position you are close enough that the top of the frieze does not get cut off by the slabs that rest atop the columns, but not so close that the figures become impossibly foreshortened. However, Stillwell took no account of lighting conditions or of the loss of acuity that even a person with 20/20 vision will experience when looking at fine detail from such a distance. As to light, the frieze, as noted, was tucked up into the rafters of a building and will have received partial illumination only from certain angles when the sun was very low in the sky or, more commonly, from reflected light bouncing up from the marble floor. As to distance, for a person standing within Stillwell’s “zone of observation,” the minimum distance from eye to frieze will have been roughly 19.5 m (64 ft). Each frieze block,

  The basic study is Stillwell 1969. More recently, see Osborne 1987; Marconi 2009.   Stillwell 1969, 232.

30 31

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F ig . 1.6.  Athens, Acropolis, Parthenon, east pediment: Figure D (Dionysos), back view. Marble, 447–432 bce. London: British Museum, inv. 1816,0610.93. Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum.

meanwhile, is just 1.16 m (3 ft 4 in.) high—difficult to see at such distance even under the best conditions. In short, the Parthenon frieze was not completely occluded from view, like the backs of the pedimental sculptures, but it was sufficiently obscure that details of the sort that fascinate classicists were never clearly visible to anyone without a tall ladder and an oil lamp. Ironically, this sheltered position accounts in large part for the good preservation of the frieze and of the fine details that so intrigue historians of art. The challenge, therefore, is to reconcile the evident care and precision of the frieze with its functional invisibility. The standard explanations are either religious or aesthetic. As to religion, it has been suggested that even if mortals eyes could not see these details, still the goddess could do so; as Clemente Marconi puts it, “those parts of the Parthenon frieze that would have remained obscure or invisible to the visitors to the Acropolis would have been visible and a source of

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F ig . 1.7.  Athens, Acropolis, Parthenon, north frieze, Block II: Figure 4 (youth with heifer). Marble, 447–432 bce. Athens, Acropolis Museum. Photo: Richard Neer.

delight to Athena and the other gods.”32 As to aesthetics, Ruskin stated the basic principle back in the nineteenth century: “Whenever, by the construction of a building, some parts of it are hidden from the eye which are the continuation of others bearing some consistent ornament, it is not well that the ornament should cease in the parts concealed; credit is given for it, and it should not be deceptively withdrawn: as, for instance, in the sculpture of the backs of statues of a temple pediment: never, perhaps, to be seen, but yet not lawfully to be left unfinished.”33 In for a penny, in for a pound. If sculpture you must have, then best to do the job right. A compromise position takes partial occlusion as a salient visual fact in its own right. Stillwell himself pioneered this approach, in which he has been followed by Robin Osborne and, more recently, Marconi.34 On this view, a passerby would look up through the colonnade to see snippets of the continuous frieze, like so many frames in a comic strip; walking round the building one would experience a continuous stream of such views, the comic strip becoming a film strip, so to speak. The argument is surely correct, but it only takes us so far. While it is certainly   See e.g. Marconi 2009, 173.

32

  Ruskin 1903, 47.

33

 Osborne 1987.

34

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F ig . 1.8.  Athens, Acropolis, Parthenon: angles for viewing frieze. Drawing by the author after Richard Stillwell, Hesperia 38 (1969), fig. 1.

possible that the columns framed segments of the frieze, the basic problems of distance, size, and lighting remain intractable. We are still talking about small figures in semi-darkness seen from a great distance. Tonio Hölscher offers a third way, playing on the affinity between “decoration” and “decorum”: rather than communicating ideological messages or even telling coherent stories, he suggests, the task of architectural sculpture in Greece is “to convey cultural emphasis and ‘value’ by aesthetic and semantic exaltation,” such that a temple “is a value in itself.”35 Sculpture need only be appropriate in theme and lavish in execution in order to acquit its votive function; it is not intended to communicate propositions but to exemplify a literally decorous piety. This thesis represents a significant departure insofar as it tends to diminish the importance of the viewer, whether real (a mortal visitor to the shrine) or imagined (Athena). In what follows I will explore the space that Hölscher has opened up. Explanations in terms of supernatural creatures and cultural rules are, of their nature, rather abstract. As a practical matter, there is always somebody here in   Hölscher 2009, 54–67 (italics original).

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the sublunar world who must apply the law or ensure that the supernatural creature is getting its due. Who decides what is pious, what is “appropriate,” what is “lawful”? A big public-works project, like a temple, makes such questions clear and concrete: there is inevitably an overseer, a functionary, somebody specifically tasked to exercise a normative role. In Athens this office was called epistate ̄s, literally, the “Bystander”; five served each year on a one-year term.36 De facto if not de jure, the final cause in the carving of the pedimental figures was not Athena, or an abstract principle of decorum, but the committee that approved the contract, the supervisor who checked the work, the foreman who looked over the mason’s shoulder. Plutarch mentions freeborn women who visited Pheidias’ workshop to see the sculptures, which became a source of gossip; though the anecdote has been much derided, it does not have to be literally true to underscore the general sense that visibility was, in this situation, rationed.37 In short, the goddess may have been the ideal audience in theory, but in practice it was a select group of human beings. In some cases the principle of selection will have been formal, as with the commissioners and foremen; in others, a matter of friendship and “access.” What mattered, therefore, were everyday relations of power, relations articulated in and through the carving of stone. Insofar as it leads us to overlook this point, religion is the opiate of art historians. So let us look more closely at patronage. But first it is necessary to recall some basic facts of Greek architecture. As a general rule, the design of any Greek temple followed one of two set formulae or orders: the Doric and the Ionic. These formulae governed everything from the layout of columns to details of ornamentation. The Parthenon is Doric, for the most part. Canonically, a Doric building features a row of alternating flat and scored panels above the columns, known as metopes and triglyphs. That is just what the Parthenon has on its exterior. An Ionic building, by contrast, would have a continuous, ribbon-like frieze in the same location. The carved frieze of the Parthenon, set inside the building’s colonnade, is thus an architectural anomaly: an Ionic element on a Doric building.38 There is good evidence to show that the Parthenon frieze was an afterthought.39 The original plan called for Doric metopes and triglyphs over each doorway, and indeed there are decorative elements (regulae and guttae) directly under the frieze that would have matched up with metopes and triglyphs but have been left stranded, as it were. Once the Athenians had built up to this height, they changed their minds, scrapped the metopes and triglyphs, and added the frieze instead.40 Manolis Korres has shown, however, that the visibility of this frieze was taken 36   On the epistatai, see Marginesu 2010. For the building procedure, see Burford 1963; Shear 2016, 41–78. 37 38  Plutarch, Life of Pericles 13.9.   On Attic Ionic: McGowan 1997. 39   Korres 1994a; 1994b. For a contrary position, Barletta 2009. 40  Korres 1994a.

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into account; a concession was made. In order to provide a slightly better viewing angle in the porches, it was necessary to truncate the entire inner building. The newly built east end was therefore dismantled and pushed back about 16 cm, while the columns of the front porch were taken down, shifted westward by about 2 cm, and rebuilt. Figure 1.9 shows a cutting for a metal clamp in the east doorway of the building (essentially a giant staple, which Greek builders used instead of mortar to keep blocks from shifting). Ordinarily this clamp would have been hidden beneath one of the steps leading into the temple, but it was revealed when the building was pushed backward those 16 cm—a conspicuous and untoward visibility. Similar small but costly adjustments elsewhere on the building only inflated the budget further. Although it was not unknown for Greek temple builders to revise plans on the fly, in this case the sheer wastefulness and expense is staggering; Pheidias, head sculptor and project supervisor, must have played a leading role.41 Such inefficiencies reek of corruption, and it is hardly surprising that, in 438 bce, Pheidias had

F ig . 1.9.  Athens, Acropolis, Parthenon, east porch: exposed clamp. Photo: Richard Neer.

  On Pheidias, see Davison 2009, with copious bibliography.

41

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to flee Athens to avoid charges of fiscal impropriety.42 Although the indictment centered on the golden statue, cost overruns associated with the building itself can hardly have endeared the sculptor to state auditors, who wound up selling off unneeded supplies that he had purchased.43 The scandal threatened to spread; in his comedy Peace (421 bce), Aristophanes even suggested that Pericles had started the Peloponnesian War to divert attention from his own role in the affair.44 This relatively sordid aspect of the Parthenon holds an important clue. It suggests that we need a more pragmatic approach to questions of architectural sculpture and to visibility in general. Lavish decor was not just a value in itself, not just an expression of communal piety to delight a supernatural beholder. It may have been those things, in some extended sense, but it was also an expression of cronyism. The Parthenon was, in short, a public works project like any other. What is distinctive about this building is that, by its very exquisiteness, it makes these unseemly features visible. Visitors should not be able to see the clamps on the floor; they are unsightly, aprepe ̄s in Greek, “things that should not be conspicuous,” all the more shocking for the context in which they appear. With the clamps, other things come to light that usually remain obscure: a world of wasteful expense, inflated budgets, and outright embezzlement, all chronic problems in Athens and, indeed, throughout the Greek world.45 It is in the space between this tawdry reality and the idea that decoration is “a value in itself ” that ideology becomes visible. The politics of visibility, however, go deeper than an exposed clamp or a sweetheart deal. The sense that there is something amiss if a complex and expensive work of public art is occluded from view may be a modern invention. There is only a contradiction between finicky iconography and functional invisibility— hence there is only a need for supernatural explanations—if it is assumed that the intended beholder of these works was the Athenian hoi polloi. Perhaps that is the wrong way to think about it. We need to get our heads around the massive disregard that even the leaders of Athenian democracy had when it came to the ordinary citizens. When it comes to the frieze, there is only one beholder who really matters, and that is the epistate ̄s, the “Bystander” who comes into the workshop to make sure that the commission has been properly executed. And there is only one rationale for its construction—a rationale that is by no means inconsistent with piety—which is the usual one for boondoggles: graft, patronage, and profiteering. It does not follow that a research agenda based on iconographic details is invalid, merely that we need to acknowledge the institutional and   Ephorus in Diodorus Siculus 12.39.1–2; Plutarch, Life of Pericles 31.2–5; Philochorus, Fragmente der  griechischen Historiker 328 F 121. On Parthenon financing, see Kallet-Marx  1989; Kallet  2005; Giovannini 2008. 43   Sale of supplies: Inscriptiones Graecae I3 449.389–94 (434 bce). 44 45  Aristophanes, Peace, ll. 603–14.   See, for instance, Strauss 1985; Taylor 2001. 42

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political setting in which it can arise. The conditions of iconographic visibility is less a matter of propaganda or the ideology of empire than a social rationing of the visible. The Parthenon is a work of public art, produced in what was, at the time, a radically inclusive democracy. It is a deep assumption of contemporary art history that public art should address a public on a modern, liberal understanding of the term. This way of thinking leads us to parse the building for ideological messages or blind spots, to ask what it tells us about the Athenian empire, and so on. One lesson of the Parthenon is that this notion is often inapt; the building is astonishingly unconcerned with its public. Such disregard is integral to the political setting in which the monument arose. If Hölscher has shown that architectural sculpture is not necessarily concerned to communicate “messages,” that does not obviate the political. On the contrary, the disregard of the beholder in Athenian public art testifies to a stratification of seeing, in the literal sense of who sees the sculpture, whose gaze matters. That stratification is the true ideological component of the Parthenon frieze and what it shares with the Kore Pit. What matters is not the ideological content of its iconography (a set of propositions, say, about the Panathenaic procession), but the distribution of visibility that it enforces. Literal occlusion is, in these cases, the function of a differential in visibility as such.

PR ACT IC A L I N V ISI BI LI T Y

The second form of invisibility is not literal but practical; the artifact is not literally obscured from view, but it is effectively unseeable, unrecognizable, unnoticed, incomprehensible, or illegible. A good example is the main temple on the Acropolis, which is not the Parthenon but the so-called Erechtheum (Fig. 1.10).46 This building had a sculpted frieze on the outside, which employed an unusual technique whereby the figures were carved in white marble and then doweled into slabs of blue limestone.47 The frieze is quite fragmentary, so it can be hard to identify the scenes; naturally almost every academic article on the topic for the last fifty years has consisted of a new and ingenious decipherment. The same building also featured the famous caryatid porch: six maidens serving as columns. In keeping with the iconographic paradigm of current scholarship, the big question with the caryatids is: who are they? Participants in the Panathenaic procession, mourners for a dead king, ancient princesses transported into constellations, a lyric chorus—all have been mooted in recent years.48 46   The basic study of the Erechtheum is Paton et al. 1927. More recently, see Lesk 2004. A longer version of this section appears in Neer 2018, 228–34. 47   On the Erechtheum frieze, see Boulter 1970. 48   Scholl 1995; Robertson 1996, 34. Gaifman 2018 is a superb treatment.

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F ig . 1.10.  Athens, Acropolis, temple of Athena Polias (Erechtheum), with modern restorations: view from southeast. 421–406 bce. Photo: Richard Neer.

We happen to have an exactly contemporary description of the Erechtheum frieze and the caryatids. This description comes in the form of public records concerning the building’s construction, which were carved on stone and set up in public.49 The accounts tell us who carved which figure and how much he was paid, and along the way they describe each figure. The following extract gives the flavor: For the man holding the spear 60 drachmas. [To] Phyromachos of Kephisia, [for] the young man with the breastplate: 60 drachmas. [To] Praxias living in Melite, [for] the horse and the man who is visible behind it and who strikes its flank: 120 drachmas. [To] Antiphanes from Kerameis, [for] the chariot, the young man, and the horse being harnessed: 240 drachmas. [To] Phyromachos of Kephisia, [for] the one leading the horse: 60 drachmas. [To] Mynnion living in Argyle, [for] the horse and the man striking it and the stele which he added later: 127 drachmas. [To] Soklos resident at Alopeke, [for] the man holding the bridle: 60 drachmas. [To] Phyromachos of Kephisia, [for] the man leaning on his staff beside the altar: 60 drachmas. [To] Iasos of Kollytos, [for] the woman embraced by the girl: 80 drachmas.50   Inscriptiones Graecae I3 474–9.

49

  Inscriptiones Graecae I3 476, ll. 159–80.

50

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One inscription even mentions the porch with the caryatids—to whom it refers simply as “the maidens.”51 In short, the building accounts fail to provide positive identification for any figure; they name the sculptors but not the figures they carved. Instead, they provide thumbnail descriptions, like “the man holding the bridle.” Modern scholars have been able to identify some of the figures—Apollo, for instance—but no thanks to the public records. The importance of these texts for our understanding of Athenian art can hardly be overstated. Scholars have made much use of them for the information they provide about workshop organization and payment systems, but they are clearly useless for an art history that takes iconography as its basic research question. Or are they? Maybe the fact that they are useless for this question shows that the question is misplaced. These texts come from public accounts, carved onto marble, and set up for everyone to see. In short, they are no more and no less “public” monuments than the Erechtheum itself. And they tell us what the Athenian state believed an average Athenian would see when he looked at the sculpture. He or she would not see, could not be counted on to see, mythological characters like Apollo, so the state had to use simpler, more general terms. The clear implication is that, as a practical matter, most people did not know who the caryatids were or what the frieze represented. Indeed, it is not even clear that the functionaries who composed this building’s accounts knew what they were talking about; they may have been as mystified as everyone else. Here it is well to recall that, on the best estimates, literacy in Athens ran at about 5–10 per cent; the democracy’s habit of carving texts onto stone was as much symbolic as practical, an attempt to impress and overwhelm an illiterate public as much to inform.52 Incomprehensibility was not always a bad thing in Greece. Poetry, for instance, was often fiercely difficult to parse. As Pindar described his own impenetrable verse, “I have many swift arrows in their quiver under my arm; they speak to the perspicacious, but the crowd needs hermeneuts” (Olympian 2.82–6, translated by the author). We might approach sculpture the same way. Set the Erechtheum inscriptions alongside a passage in Ion, an almost exactly contemporary play by Euripides (c.414 bce). Some Athenian women—servants of the city’s princess— are visiting Delphi; as they look at the sculptures on the temple of Apollo, they read out the iconography. —Look! come see, the son of Zeus is killing the Lernean Hydra with a golden sickle; my dear, look at it! —I see it.

  Inscriptiones Graecae I3 474, l. 86.   See the excellent discussion in Day 2010, 31. On literacy rates, see Harris 1989, 90; Thomas, 2009, 13–45. For a more expansive view, see Pébarthe 2006. 51 52

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—And another near him, who is raising a fiery torch, is he the one whose story is told when I am at my loom, the warrior Iolaus, who joins with the son of Zeus in bearing his labors? —And look at this one sitting on a winged horse; he is killing the mighty fire-breathing creature that has three bodies. —I am glancing around everywhere. See the battle of the giants, on the stone walls. —I am looking at it, my friends. —Do you see the one brandishing her gorgon shield against Enceladus?— I see Pallas, my own goddess . . . .53 And so on and so on. As Marconi notes, this passage “provides . . . the model for understanding the process of reception of the images on the Parthenon at the time of its construction.”54 But where Marconi takes the passage as evidence for attentive contemplation of monuments, the Erechtheum accounts encourage a different conclusion. The women of the chorus, while servile, are denizens of the highest stratum of Athenian society; they actually live in the predecessor of the Erechtheum, the house of King Erechtheus that, as Euripides puts it, “makes one dwelling with that of Pallas.”55 As such, they have access to a kind of k­ nowledge that ordinary people simply did not; they are, as Pindar would have it, “perspicacious.” “Look!” they say, “I see Pallas, I see it, I see”—but we know that “I see Pallas” is exactly the sort of thing that an average Athenian could not say when confronted with the sculptures of the Erechtheum. Pallas (or whomever) was de facto invisible, and the average Athenian could only see something like “a man holding a bridle.” Staging will have underlined the point; Nicolaos Hourmouziades and others have argued that the chorus addresses an imaginary façade. There were no sets or scenes behind the orchestra, so “nothing of what was referred to in the chorus’s description was seen by the audience.”56 This ekphrasis of the invisible, in short, attests to a differential or inequality in the capacity to see. The “perspicacious” women of the chorus inhabit a different visual world from the theater-going public. They do not need hermeneuts, they are hermeneuts. Euripides, in short, helps us to recognize a social stratification in the capacity to see architectural sculpture. His chorus exemplifies what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible,” the distribution or sharing-out of the capacity to see at all.57 The Erechtheum—for all that it is democratic, public art—instantiates a differential between those who can see and those who cannot, those who are  Euripides, Ion, ll. 191–210. On this famous passage, see Stieber 2011, 284–302, with summary of earlier discussions. 54 55 56   Marconi 2009, 168.  Euripides, Ion, ll. 235–6.   Hourmouziades 1965, 53–7. 57  Rancière 2000. 53

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perspicacious and those who require hermeneuts. A similar distribution of sensibility was one function of the Acropolis. That is where we should be looking for the ideology of this monument, not in the symbolism of this or that iconographic detail. Ideology is upstream from iconography. Plato recognized that who sees what is an essential question of politics; he famously condemned Athens as a theatrocracy (Laws 701b–c) or “rule by beholders,” a politics in which the theatrical audience was sovereign. Instead of keeping to their places, the common people set themselves up as judges of performances they were not, on Plato’s view, competent to see at all. What appalled the philosopher most about theatrocracy was its failure to respect proper distinctions, be they social (e.g. can artisans judge art?) or ontological (e.g. is a mere imitation worthy of thought?). Rancière has, in his turn, celebrated exactly these features of “rule by beholders.”58 But the invisible Parthenon reveals how the architects of Athenian theatrocracy constituted the demos as beholders of that which it cannot properly be said to see: a theater of the blind, so to speak. To the extent that it was merely incomprehensible, dazzling, unseeable, unrecognizable, invisible . . . to that extent, the Parthenon might make visible exactly the conceptual ­anarchy, the failure of proper discrimination, that Plato deplored. Yet even this pure spectacle was policed, a cog in the creaky machinery of patronage.

DI A PH A NOUS I N V ISI BI LI T Y

Our last class of invisibility is the diaphanous: a double seeing, seeing what is not there, a pun or play on two ways of articulating the distinction between visibility and invisibility. The example here is the temple of Athena Nike that sits atop a bastion just outside the gateway to the Acropolis proper (Fig. 1.11).59 This bastion, a spur of fortification wall projecting from the citadel proper, was built in the Late Bronze Age to provide a base for assaults on the exposed flanks of attacking infantrymen.60 Later it became sacred to Athena in her aspect as a goddess of military victory. Starting in the late 430s bce—some eight hundred years after its initial construction—the Athenians sheathed this bastion in a skin of white marble and crowned it with a small temple.61 But it can get windy up on the bastion and, without some sort of barrier, there was a real danger of falling;  For good synthetic discussions, see Hallward  2006; Halpern  2011. I am particularly grateful to Richard P. Martin and Richard Meyer for pressing me on this point during a discussion at Stanford University. 59   Convenient resources for the temple are Mark 1993; Giraud 1994; Shear 2016, 341–58. For the date of the temple, see Gill 2001; Shear 2016, 346–8. On the entry to the Acropolis, see Shear 1999; Paga 2017 (with thorough review of the early history of the Nike precinct). 60   On the Mycenaean bastion, see Wright 1994; Shear 1999; Iakovides 2006. 61   Sheathing of bastion: Mark 1993, 69–70; Giraud 1994, 43–6; Shear 2016, 27–35. 58

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F ig . 1.11.  Athens, Acropolis, temple of Athena Nike and bastion: view from northwest. Late 430s–420s bce. Photo: Richard Neer.

so it was not long before the Athenians enclosed the shrine with a low marble parapet wall, running right along the bastion’s upper edge.62 This parapet bore magnificent relief sculpture on its exterior face: a procession of Nikai, personifications of victory, leading a sacrifice to Athena in a way that seems calculated to recall the Parthenon frieze (see Fig. 1.3). Literal visibility is very much at issue here. The architects let several windows or niches into the cladding of the bastion so that visitors could see the older phases underneath the new, peeping through the marble covering as though it were a veil. First one would encounter two (or perhaps just one, if the modern reconstruction is incorrect) large, rectangular apertures giving access to the Mycenaean masonry. The Classical sheathing occludes an older and apparently sacred niche in the Bronze Age wall; the openings are clearly fifth-century “replacements” for the now-invisible cult space. Next, as visitors turned right and mounted the ramp toward the Acropolis gateway, they would pass a smaller, irregularly   Parapet: Brouskari 1998, with comprehensive discussion and earlier bibliography; Shear 2016, 356–8.

62

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F ig . 1.12.  Athens, Acropolis, temple of Athena Nike bastion: polygonal gap in the cladding of the bastion, revealing Mycenaean masonry. Late 430s bce. Photo: Richard Neer.

shaped gap in the marble sheath (Fig. 1.12).63 This last aperture responds to, and frames, a projecting boulder that is part of the original, Mycenaean bastion. Yet its profile is distinctly evocative of an older, Archaic style of masonry, in which blocks were not the homogenous, rectangular ashlars of the Classical period but large irregular polygons, neatly trimmed—exactly the sort used to build the old, 63  On the niche(s): Mark  1993, 13–14; Giraud  1994, 43–6. Polygonal gap: Mark  1993, 69–70; Giraud 1994, 43–6. This aperture may have a functional explanation: it accommodates the projecting tip of a boulder that is part of the old Mycenaean bastion (Mark  1993, 70: “The ashlar courses . . . are obliquely jointed to fit around the boulder, while the salient tip of the boulder appears to have been capped by a thin polygonal slab, now missing”). Yet this explanation is not wholly satisfactory. First, there was no need to break the regularity of the ashlar courses in order to mask the projecting block of the Mycenaean bastion: one or more rectilinear slabs will have done just as well, which means that the gap’s polygonal shape derives from a choice, not a constraint. Second, the masking slab would have had to have been exceedingly thin, as the marble sheathing clears the boulder by just 2.5 cm. Third, any such slab would have required clamps to hold it in place, yet there are no cuttings for same. That the gap responds to the boulder is not in doubt; that the boulder was originally hidden by a paper-thin slab, and that the polygonal form of the gap was dictated by necessity, is altogether less likely.

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F ig . 1.13.  Delphi, sanctuary of Apollo: polygonal masonry of sanctuary wall. Sixth century bce. Photo: Richard Neer.

Archaic ramp leading up into the Acropolis (Fig. 1.13).64 As one looked at this hole in the wall, a polygonal shape interrupting the regular pace of the Classical blocks, one saw, as it were, the ghost of an old wall. Its inner faces were prepared with anathyrosis as if to receive a polygonal block or slab, but no such block could ever have been put in place (it would have had to have been less than 2.5 cm thick in order to clear the boulder). Thus the polygonal hole evokes polygonal masonry but only on the negative, as emptiness (for similar voids in China, see Wu Hung’s contribution to this volume). Thanks to these apertures, the blank wall becomes a veil, conspicuously masking something underneath its surface, something we can only glimpse. After a few years the Athenians hung the shields of enemy soldiers from the bastion as a sort of trophy, thereby underscoring its protective function and, by extension, its curious juxtaposition of occlusion and visibility, defense and access.65

  On the ramp, see Vanderpool 1974, 156–60.

64

  Lippman, Scahill, and Schultz 2006.

65

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Like the Parthenon frieze, with which it shares a thematic connection, the carved parapet atop the Nike bastion would have been difficult to see in the best of circumstances. Situated alongside the entry to the Acropolis and well above ground level, most of its viewers (if that is the word) would have been ambient passersby; since you need to crane your neck even to see it, viewing the frieze is inconsistent with watching where you’re going as you walk. Few people will have noticed it, at any rate, without special effort—a practical, as opposed to a literal, occlusion. The frieze simply cannot have been an object of sustained attention; it was, at best, part of the background. Unlike the Parthenon, however, the Nike parapet thematizes visibility in and through iconography. The Nikai wear fine, eroticized drapery that appears to cling to the body, revealing everything; the one in Figure 1.3 is even taking off her sandal, the traditional gesture of a bride on her wedding night. This diaphanous material recapitulates the marble cladding of the ancient bastion itself; each occludes only to reveal. That is, just as the bastion has gaps in its marble façade that the eye can penetrate, so, too, the personifications of victory; each Nike is fully clad while leaving little to the imagination.66 Visibility here is, again, a way to instantiate relations of power. These figures are personifications of military victory, erected at the height of the Peloponnesian War that pitted Athens against Sparta.67 In Classical Greece, as in Berlin or Bosnia or Congo, military victory entailed the systematic rape of defeated populations. The solicitation of masculine desire in the visible play of seen and unseen could hardly be more explicit in its reference to the gratifications that await a victor. Very crudely, the ability to see what is not literally before the eyes both mimes and promises a violent disparity of power relations, one that could hardly be more horrific or more literal. The entrance to the Acropolis— the shrine of the virgin war goddess—is what Laura Mulvey calls a “topography of curiosity,” a space that constitutes the invisible as that which it is desirable to see, hence feminine.68 Euripides made the fate of captives a recurrent theme, in ways strikingly analogous to the parapet. In Hekabe (c.424 bce), the Trojan princess Polyxena bares her bosom as she is sacrificed at the grave of Achilles, in a grotesque “marriage to death” that is also a violation. The chorus, in describing the scene, likens her explicitly to a votive statue in one of the most famous passages in Classical tragedy: When [Polyxena] heard the command of her masters, she seized her robe and tore it from the shoulder to the middle of her waist, by the navel, displaying breasts and 66  On diaphanous drapery, gaps, and tears, see Neer  2010, 116–17; as a motif in comedy: Henderson 1974, 148–9. On female nudity in Greek art, see Kreilinger 2007. 67   On the drapery, its eroticism, and its intimation of violence, see Stewart 1997, 128–36. 68   Mulvey 1996, 53–64.

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bosom as beautiful as a statue’s [agalma], then sinking to her knees she spoke words of surpassing bravery: “Here, young man, if it is my breast you are keen to strike, strike here, or if it is beneath my neck, my neck is yours to cut.” And he, for pity of the girl both willing and reluctant, cut the breath’s passageway with his sword, and blood gushed forth. She, though her life was ebbing out, still took great care to fall in seemly fashion to the ground, concealing from male eyes what should be concealed.69

What sort of statue did the poet have in mind? Exposed breasts are, in fact, quite rare in Classical sculpture; individual instances do exist (Amazons, women fighting off centaurs), but they are exceptional, while Euripides seems to refer to something routine, a familiar type.70 Only one statue-type was widely ­visible in Athens c.424 bce and regularly bared the breast: the Nike, or “Victory.”71 The Athenians and their allies raised a great many Nikai at home and at Panhellenic sanctuaries in just these years, of which the Nike of Paionios at Olympia is best known; it commemorated the same victory over the Spartans in 425 bce that led the  Athenians to build the Nike temple (Fig.  1.14).72 Polyxena, in short, becomes like a Nike, a monument to her own “surpassing bravery,” in  the moment of her self-exposure (and so, fittingly, contrives to conceal her sex from male eyes even as she falls).73 Froma Zeitlin has already argued that  “Polyxena, by her mode of dying, turns sacrifice into victory”; the ­v isual allusion only underscores the point.74 The result is, if not an outright

69  Euripides, Hecuba, ll. 556–70, trans. D. Kovacs (modified by the author). The passage is much discussed; see, inter alia, Loraux 1991, 36–42; Scodel 1998, 137–54; Gregory 1999, 112–13; Dué 2006, ch. 4; Mastronarde 2010, 266–8. On the image of Polyxena, see Neer 2012. 70   Exceptions collected in Cohen 1997 (Nikai mentioned in passing, p. 70 and n. 38). Nearly all the exceptions are from vase-painting or architectural sculpture; freestanding statues (agalmata as usually understood) with exposed breasts include the Ephesian Amazons and the so-called Barberini Suppliant, all known through Roman versions. See also Coccagna 2014. 71   Iconography of Nike: Goulaki 1981; Thöne 1999; Thomsen 2011. Stieber 2011, 147–50 suggests that Euripides took a specific pedimental figure (a dying Niobid now in the Palazzo Massimo in Rome) as the prototype; but this statue is a unicum and such a reference would have been incomprehensible. On the Niobid, see Hartswick 2004, 93–104. 72   On the Nike of Paionios, see Hölscher 1974, 70–111. 73  The connection to Nike clarifies a curious image from the end of the play. The treacherous Polymestor—having been blinded, appropriately enough, by Trojan women wielding the pins that hold up their garments—predicts that Hekabe will climb the mast of the ship that bears her from Troy, change her shape into that of a dog, and fall into the sea; like a hero, she will be commemorated with a tomb visible to sailors (ll. 1259–73). This transformation / commemoration clearly parallels Polyxena’s earlier “agalmatization” (I borrow this term from Victoria Wohl): the daughter becomes a statue, the mother a monument or “sign” (se ̄ma). Hekabe initially scoffs; when told she will climb the mast she asks, “How? With wings on my back?” (l. 1264). This line is no throwaway: by suggesting that, at the moment of her transformation, she might acquire wings and stand atop a columnar mast, Hekabe inadvertently likens herself to Nike and thereby underscores the connection between her own fate and that of her daughter. “Agalmatization”: Wohl 2010. 74   Zeitlin 1996, 191.

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F ig . 1.14.  Olympia: Nike of Paionios, commemorating the Messenian and Naupaktian contribution to the victory of the Athenians and their allies over the Spartans at Sphakteria in 425 bce. Marble, c.425–420 bce. Olympia, Museum. Photo: Richard Neer.

critique, at least an ironization of iconographic convention. Euripides seems to have been under no illusion as to what was at stake in the peekaboo drapery of the Classical Nike. The visibility of the body was an index of power relations, hence of ­violence. Euripidean allusion brings out another way in which the Nike Parapet ­presents the invisible: visual citation, that is, reference to monuments unseen (Figs 1.15–1.16). The basic theme—a procession to Athena—is common to both, but the later parapet actually quotes whole groups from the earlier Parthenon, like a plunging victim restrained by an attendant who braces one foot on a rock.75 Such allusions belong in the category of diaphanous invisibility, insofar as a beholder may be said to see something that is not literally present: a Parthenonian penumbra around the parapet. Who could savor this reference? One temptation is to label it a workshop tradition, a mere formal parallel, devoid   Yet there is some ambiguity to the parapet, in that its Nikai, puzzlingly, sacrifice bulls instead of the heifers appropriate to Athena: here it is the blood of males that will “gush forth.” 75

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F ig . 1.15.  Athens, Acropolis, Parthenon, south frieze, Block XLIII (youth restraining heifer). Marble, 447–432 bce. London, British Museum. Photo: Richard Neer.

of significance. But that would be too simple. Riffing on a motif that almost nobody could have known is not a meaningless exercise, but it is meaningful only in certain restrictive conditions. What matters, in a way, is that the gesture be made, the connection be established; those who do not know about it, who cannot see it, do not matter. Something similar is afoot with the Caryatid porch of the Erechtheum. It happens to stand just a stone’s throw from the Kore Pit with which we began—even as the caryatids themselves, whose iconography has proved so puzzling to modern scholars, effectively update the old Archaic type (Fig. 1.17). The porch itself rests upon on the foundations of the old, Archaic temple of Athena, destroyed by the Persians in 480 bce—a literal bridge to the past.76 The democracy appropriates a traditional genre of aristocratic dedication, literally incorporating it into a

  As Shear puts it (2016, 385), “The chief function of the porch was no doubt always to link the new temple to its Archaic predecessor by means of the physical contact that it made with the ruined foundations of the earlier building.” 76

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F ig . 1.16.  Athens, Acropolis, sanctuary of Athena Nike, parapet relief: Nike restraining bull. Marble, c.425–400 bce. Athens, Acropolis Museum. Photo: Richard Neer.

communal monument.77 There is an extended, attenuated sort of diaphanous visibility, as it becomes possible—for the perspicacious, the ones with eyes to see—to perceive these statues as heirs to the private offerings hidden nearby. What we see here, from our privileged position, is the doubling up of an already restrictive visibility, a rationing of the rationed. Quoting invisible sculptures, describing visible ones in a text that no one can read, in terms that no one can understand, soliciting the eye with an eroticized body on a frieze that is itself hard to see, atop a bastion that choreographs voyeuristic peeks through its own marble veil: these are techniques by which visibility is political under democracy. Indeed, the Nike parapet is an apt metaphor for Athenian democracy itself; for those within its circuit, it was protective, saving lives by preventing people from falling from a great height to injury or death. But to those on the other side, those outside its ambit, there was a pretty screen that staged the invisible—literal,   For this account of caryatids, see Neer 2001; 2007.

77

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F ig . 1.17.  Athens, Acropolis, temple of Athena Polias (Erechtheum): caryatid. Marble, 421–406 bce. London, British Museum 1816,0610.128. Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum.

practical, diaphanous—which is to say, established politically overdetermined conditions of visibility as such. Those conditions are themselves visible in and as the “archaeological record.”

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H ölscher , T. (2009), “Architectural sculpture: messages? programs? towards rehabilitating the notion of ‘decoration,’ ” in P. Schultz and R. von den Hoff (eds), Structure, image, ornament: architectural sculpture in the Greek world (Oxford: Oxbow), 54–67. H ourmouziades , N. C.  (1965), Production and imagination in Euripides: form and function of the scenic space (Athens: Greek Society for Humanistic Studies). H urwit , J. M. (1999), The Athenian Acropolis: history, mythology, and archaeology from the Neolithic era to the present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). I akovides , S. (2006), The Mycenaean Acropolis of Athens, trans. M. Caskey, rev. edn (Athens, Greece: Athens Archaeological Society). J enkins , I.  and M iddleton , A. P. (1988), “Paint on the Parthenon sculptures,” Annual of the British School at Athens 83, 183–207. J im , T. S. F.  (2014), Sharing with the gods: aparchai and dekatai in ancient Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 136–7. K allet , L.  (2005), “Wealth, power, and prestige: Athens at home and abroad,” in J.  Neils (ed.), The Parthenon: from antiquity to the present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 35–65. K allet -M arx , L.  (1989), “Did tribute fund the Parthenon?” Classical Antiquity 8, 252–66. K avvadias , P. and K awerau , G. (1906), Die Ausgrabung der Akropolis vom Jahre 1885 bis zum 1890 (Athens: Hestia). K eesling , C.  (2005), “Patrons of Athenian votive monuments of the Archaic and Classical periods: three studies,” Hesperia 74, 395–426. K istler , E. (1998), Die “Opferinnen-Zeremonie.” Bankettideologie am Grab, Oriental­ isierung und Formierung einer Adelsgesellschaft in Athen (Stuttgart: Steiner). K orres , M. (1994a), “Der Plan des Parthenon,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologis­ chen Instituts, Athenische Abteilung 109, 53–120. K orres , M. (1994b), “The architecture of the Parthenon,” in P. Tournikiotis (ed.), The Parthenon and its impact in modern times (Athens, Greece: Melissa), 54–97. K orres , M.  (2002), “On the north Acropolis wall,” in M.  Stamatopoulou and M. Yeroulanou (eds), Excavating classical culture: recent archaeological discoveries in Greece (Oxford: Archeopress), 179–86. K reilinger , U.  (2007), Anständige Nackheit. Körperpflege, Reinigungsriten und das Phänomen weiblicher Nackheit im archaisch-klassischen Athen (Rahden: Verlag Marie Leidorf ). L indenlauf , A.  (1997), “Der Perserschutt der Athener Akropolis,” in W.  Hoepfner (ed.), Kult und Kultbauten auf der Akropolis: Internationales Symposion vom 7. bis 9. Juli 1995 in Berlin (Berlin: Archäologisches Seminar der Freien Universität Berlin), 46–115. L esk , A.  (2004), “A diachronic examination of the Erechtheion and its reception” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati). L ippman , M., S cahill , D.,  and S chultz , P. (2006), “Knights 843–59, the Nike temple bastion and Cleon’s shields from Pylos,” American Journal of Archaeology 110, 551–63. L öhr , C. (2000), Griechische Familienweihungen: Untersuchungen einer Repräsentations­ form von ihren Anfängen bis zum Ende des 4. Jhs. v. Chr. (Rahden: Marie Leindorf).

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P ébarthe , C. (2006), Cité, démocratie et écriture. histoire de l’alphabétisation d’Athènes à l’époque classique (Paris: De Boccard). R ancière , J. (2000), Le partage du sensible: ésthetique et politique (Paris: Le Fabrique). R obertson , N. (1996), “Athena’s shrines and festivals,” in J. Neils (ed.), Worshipping Athena (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), 27–77. R osenberg -D imitracopoulou , A. (2015), “Funerals for statues? The case of Phrasikleia and her ‘brother,’ ” in M. Miles (ed.), Autopsy in Athens: recent archaeological research on Athens and Attica (Oxford: Oxbow), 85–99. R uskin , J.  (1903), The seven lamps of architecture, in E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (eds), vol. 8 of The works of John Ruskin (London: George Allen). S choll , A.  (1995), “ΧΟΗΦΟΡΟΙ. Zur Deutung der Korenhalle des Erechtheion,” Jahrbuch des deutschen archäologischen Instituts 110, 179–212. S choll , A. (2006), “ΑΝΑΘΗΜΑΤΑ ΤΩΝ ΑΡΧΑΙΩΝ. Die Akropolisvotive aus dem 8. bis frühen 6. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. und die Staatswerdung Athens,” Jahrbuch des deutschen archäologischen Instituts 121, 1–173. S codel , R. (1998), “The captive’s dilemma: sexual acquiescence in Euripides’ Hecuba and Troades,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 98, 137–54. S hear , I. M.  (1999), “The western approach to the Athenian Akropolis,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 119, 86–127. S hear , T. L.,  Jr (2016), Trophies of victory: public buildings in Periklean Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press). S tieber , M. (2011), Euripides and the language of craft (Leiden: Brill). S tewart , A. (1997), Art, desire and the body in ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). S tewart , A. F. (2008), “The Persian and Carthaginian invasions of 480 B.C.E. and the beginning of the classical style, part 1, the stratigraphy, chronology, and significance of the Acropolis deposits,” American Journal of Archaeology 112, 382–85. S tillwell , R. (1969), “The Panathenaic frieze: optical relations,” Hesperia 38, 231–41. S trauss , B. (1985), “The cultural significance of bribery and embezzlement in Athenian politics: the evidence of the period 403–386 B.C.,” The Ancient World 11, 67–74. T aylor , C. (2001), “Bribery in Athenian politics (parts I and II),” Greece and Rome 48, 53–66, 154–72. T homas , R. (2009), “Writing, reading, public and private ‘literacies,’ ” in W. A. Johnson and H. N. Parker (eds), Ancient literacies: the culture of reading in Greece and Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 13–45. T homsen , A. (2011), Die Wirkung der Götter: Bilder mit Flügelfiguren auf griechischen Vasen des 6. und 5. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. (Berlin: de Gruyter). T höne , C.  (1999), Ikonographische Studien zu Nike im 5. Jahrhundert v. Chr.: Untersuchungen zur Wirkungsweise und Wesenart (Heidelberg: Verlag Archäologie und Geschichte). V anderpool , E.  (1974), “The date of the pre-Persian city wall of Athens,” in D. W. Bradeen and M. F. McGregor (eds), Phoros: tribute to B. C. Meritt (New York: J. J. Augustin), 156–60. W illiams , D. (2013), The east pediment of the Parthenon: from Perikles to Nero (London: Institute of Classical Studies).

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What Lies Beneath Carving on the Underside of Aztec Sculpture Claudia Brittenham

Not all ancient art was made to be seen. Consider, for example, a sculpture of a rattlesnake, today in the British Museum (Fig. 2.1). Its visible body is smooth and simple, coiled into three highly polished circuits. The mouth is daubed with red paint, open to reveal fierce fangs and an elongated forked tongue; the body terminates in thirteen rounded rattles. In between, the only decoration is the varied coloration of the gleaming stone. On the underside, the carving is far more elaborate. The rattles and then the ventral scales of the serpent are lavishly detailed as they spiral upwards. At regular intervals, dots of red pigment have been added to these hidden coils, ornamenting the rattlesnake’s belly. The threedimensionality of this sculpture challenges display; photographs, casts, or ingeniously rigged mirrors can simultaneously make both the top and bottom of the sculpture visible for modern audiences, but it is likely that in Aztec times the serpent’s coils were invisible, only hinted at by the rounded forms at the base of the sculpture. One of over one hundred Aztec sculptures with documented carving on its underside, this coiled serpent was not an isolated caprice but part of a coherent and meaningful practice.1 Much ancient art was difficult to see in its original context. From the dedicatory inscription on the back of a Neo-Assyrian sculpture such as the Lamassu in   The British Museum serpent is discussed in Matos Moctezuma and Solís 2002, cat. no. 81; Nicholson and Quiñones Keber 1983, 134–5. See also Gutiérrez Solana 1987 and the general comments on coiled serpent sculptures in Clendinnen 1991, 228. The practice of carving the undersides of Aztec sculpture is often acknowledged, but rarely analyzed systematically. It has most commonly been addressed piecemeal in exhibition catalogs (especially Nicholson and Quiñones 1983 and Alcina Franch, Léon-Portilla, and Matos Moctezuma 1992), survey texts (e.g. Pasztory 1983), and in focused studies of the earth deity Tlaltecuhtli, whose image frequently occurs on the undersides of sculptures (see n. 17 below). One partial compilation of the Aztec corpus, with preliminary classification, is Alcina Franch 1989. See also Read 1995. 1

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F ig . 2.1.  Coiled serpent, Mexica/Aztec, c.1480–1519. 36 cm high, 53 cm diameter. British Museum Am1849,0629.1. Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Chicago’s Oriental Institute to the surface of the Column of Trajan spiraling out of sight or the gargoyles on medieval cathedrals, ancient art frequently thwarted the gaze.2 Many objects alternated between moments of visibility and concealment: displayed briefly, but crucially, at a funeral ceremony before being sealed within a tomb, for example; or stored in darkness between moments of exposure in procession or performance. Other images ended up hidden after complex histories of reuse and recycling. Still other examples hovered at the edge of a gradient of diminishing visibility—possible to see, perhaps, if only one’s gaze were powerful enough. Images might even have drawn power from their invisibility or restricted visibility; Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, writing in the 1550s, observed that Maya people in Guatemala put their images in dark and obscure caves “to show them more reverence.”3 Aztec art was no exception. Although Aztec architects, sculptors, and painters made many powerful works of public art, intended to be seen by large audiences, unimpeded visual access was not the norm for other classes of Aztec sculpture. As Esther Pasztory has observed, the small, windowless enclosures of Aztec temples housing cult images were located atop massive pyramidal platforms, creating spaces that only a few—priests, rulers, or sacrificial victims—would attain.4 There were other obstacles to visibility as well, which sixteenth-century Spanish chronicler Francisco Cervantes de Salazar summarized in his description of the Templo Mayor, principal temple of the Aztec empire, and the surrounding Sacred Precinct: [there were] many chapels or rooms with very small doors and dark inside, where there were an infinite number of idols, large and small, made out of many kinds of metal and other materials. All of them were bathed in blood and black as if they had been smeared and sprinkled with it when they sacrificed a man, and even the walls had a crust of blood on them, two fingers high and the floor, a handspan thick; it reeked pestilentially, and with all of this, as custom makes one used to things, the priests entered every day with as much ease as if they were entering a very rich and fragrant room. They did not let anyone enter except very important people . . .5   For Neo-Assyrian inscriptions, see Russell 1999, 19–30, 76–9, 101–3, 127–8, 211–12. The Oriental Institute sculpture, from Sargon II’s palace at Dar Sharrukin (modern Khorsabad), is discussed on pp. 101–3, and its text is translated by J. A. Brinkman in a pamphlet published by the Oriental Institute, kindly provided to me by Jack Green. Other carvings on the backs of Near Eastern sculptures are explicitly not invisible. Irene Winter notes that the inscriptions on the backs of Sumerian royal sculptures would be legible to viewers while the statues faced the cult image; see Winter 1992, 25. For the visibility of the Column of Trajan, see Veyne 1988, esp. 2–5; cited in Marconi 2009, 169–70. See also de Angelis 2014. For medieval gargoyles, see Camille 1992, 77–85; see also the discussion of misericords on 93–7. 3 4   Las Casas 1967, vol. 2, 216.   Pasztory 1983, 119. 5   Cervantes de Salazar 1971, libro 4, cápitulo 21, 332–3. This chronicle draws on several different eyewitness sources, some of which stress that both concealed and highly visible images coexisted at the Templo Mayor. Here, for example, is Hernán Cortés’s 1520 Second Letter, likely one of the sources for Cervantes de Salazar: “There are three rooms within this great temple for the principal idols, which are of remarkable size and stature and decorated with many designs and sculptures, both in stone and in 2

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Restricted in access, shrouded in darkness, and anointed with sacrificial blood, Aztec images could have been tremendously difficult to see. Yet, even in this context, the carvings on the undersides of Aztec sculptures seem exceptional. Both top and bottom of the sculpture were carved at once, an integral whole moving seamlessly between the realms of the visible and invisible. Even—perhaps especially—when the top is displayed, the bottom remains obdurately invisible, hidden in plain sight, “absconded” from view.6 This deliberate practice was unprecedented in Mesoamerican art. While isolated Zapotec, Olmec, and Maya sculptures were concealed or incorporated hidden images, they usually seem to be the result of complex histories of recarving and resetting earlier sculpture.7 Only for the Aztecs—or perhaps specifically the Mexica, rulers of that great empire8—is there evidence for a systematic and intentional practice, where carvings were intended from the outset to be hidden, conceived of as part of a unified program with both visible and invisible elements. Such invisibility is a challenge to our ideas about the nature of art and art making, which often implicitly assume that art is made to be seen.

E X PL A I N I NG T H E I N V ISI BL E

When confronted with such extreme examples of invisible art around the world, scholars have generally proposed three kinds of explanations, involving different moments of visibility and different kinds of audiences. The first is an attempt to wood. Within these rooms are other chapels, and the doors to them are very small. Inside there is no light whatsoever; there only some of the priests may enter, for inside are the sculptured figures of the idols, although, as I have said, there are also many outside” (Cortés 2001, 106). For a compilation of Spanish and Nahua descriptions of the Templo Mayor, see Dalghren, Pérez-Rocha, Suárez Diaz, and Valle 2009, 103–225. One vivid description of the gore in Aztec temples can be found in Bernal Diaz, who complains that “everything was covered with blood, both walls and altar, and the stench was such that we could hardly wait the moment to get out of it” (Diaz del Castillo 2008, 178).   The term is from Wu, Hay, and Pellizzi 2009.   The most notable examples are the carvings on the undersides of stelae that formed part of the retaining wall of the south platform at the Zapotec city of Monte Alban in the second half of the first millennium ce. Javier Urcid has made a compelling case that all of the carvings lining this wall are reused and reset from previous structures, although some of the details of his reconstructions of those previous structures are open to debate (Urcid Serrano 2001, esp. figs 5.3–5.5). Commemorative caches lay below several of the most controversial hidden carvings at the corners of the platform; see Acosta 1959 and Marcus 1983. For the reuse of figurines with breakage and other signs of wear in the buried Offering 4 at La Venta, see Drucker, Heizer, and Squier 1959, 152–6, and for Maya sculptures which end up hidden and remembered, see O’Neil 2009 and 2012, 153–70. 8  The term Aztec is a nineteenth-century invention. Before the Spanish invasion, the city-state or altepetl was a more important form of identification than any larger political or social unit. In this text, I use the term Mexica to refer specifically to the inhabitants of the imperial city-state of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and Aztec to refer to all Nahuatl-speaking peoples around the valley of Mexico before the arrival of the Spanish, as well as to subjects of the empire controlled by the Triple Alliance of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco, and Tlacopan. 6 7

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recuperate the visibility of these images: perhaps they are not as invisible as they seem? The second kind of account posits a supernatural audience. The third focuses on moments when the invisible is visible—that is, moments of making when artists and patrons have visual access to the otherwise hidden parts of a sculpture. These three explanations are not mutually exclusive, and all can be applied to the Aztec case.

Recovering the Invisible Many Aztec sculptures were small enough that they could be manipulated, perhaps occasionally lifted so that their undersides might be examined. The serpent in Figure 2.1 likely weighs less than 175 kilograms—a considerable amount, to be certain, but not so much that it would be impossible for a small group of men to shift.9 Other Aztec objects carved on their undersides were even smaller, like a carved stone box that might have held autosacrificial paraphernalia for a Mexica king (Fig. 2.2) or a greenstone tankard for drinking alcoholic pulque, both of which bear images of a crouching earth deity on their undersides.10 However, other objects, such as the 8 ft tall, 2 ton sculptures today called the Coatlicue and the Yolloticue, were surely largely immobile once they were installed (Fig. 2.3). Even more importantly, many of the sculptures, like the Coatlicue or the coiled serpents, are carved so fully in the round that there was no possible way to display the images carved on their bases. Indeed, it is unlikely that these intricate carvings were made to be seen—at least most of the time, at least by human eyes.

Divine Audiences But could the gods still see them? In Mesoamerica, powerful sight was a specifically divine attribute. This is made most clear in the seventeenth-century Maya text known as the Popol Vuh, in many ways a cognate to Aztec creation stories. When humans were first created, their sight was like that of the gods: Perfect was their sight, and perfect was their knowledge of everything beneath the sky. If they gazed about them, looking intently, they beheld that which was in the sky and that which was upon the earth. Instantly, they were able to behold everything. 9   It has been impossible to verify the exact weight of this sculpture, so this generous estimate is based on the weight of the coiled Xiuhcoatl in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection, illustrated in Figure 2.6, which weighs 127 kg (Miriam Doutriaux, personal communication, 2012). 10   On the “Hackmack Box,” see Barnes 2009, 334–58 and the foundational study by Seler 1992, vol. 3, 87–113. Brief and useful expositions are also found in Alcina Franch, Léon-Portilla, and Matos Moctezuma 1992, 202–4; McEwan and López Luján 2009, 148–9; Nicholson and Quiñones  1983, 64–6; Pasztory 1983, 255–7; and Umberger 1981, 99–105. The literature on the “Bilimek Vase” is equally extensive: see especially Seler 1992, vol. 3, 199–223; and Taube 1993. See also Pasztory 1983, 259–60; Nicholson and Quiñones 1983, 62–3.

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F ig . 2.2.  Hackmack Box, Mexica/Aztec, 1503. Museum für Völkerkunde, Hamburg, B 3767. Copyright: Museum fuer Voelkerkunde Hamburg. Line drawing by Lucia Henderson.

They did not have to walk to see all that existed beneath the sky. They merely saw it from wherever they were. Thus their knowledge became full. Their vision passed beyond the trees and the rocks, beyond the lakes and the seas, beyond the mountains and the valleys.11

This potent vision, and the knowledge that came along with it, threatened the gods who had created humanity; because of their powerful sight, the first humans were too godlike. So the gods blurred their sight, “like breath upon the face of a 11

  Christenson 2003, 197–8, discussed in Houston and Taube 2000, 281.

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F ig . 2.2. Continued.

mirror,” and humans entered their present condition of limited seeing and knowing.12 Yet in spite of this originary loss, there is still considerable evidence for the moral importance of the senses, and especially the primacy of sight, in Mesoamerican thought. Mesoamericans believed that sight was extramissive, as Nahua images of projecting eyes observing distant phenomena indicate; more powerfully, sight was “procreative” and “agentive,” capable of affecting the surrounding world.13 Sight was inextricably linked to knowledge. As Evon Vogt observes in an ethnography of Mayan-speaking Zinacantan, Mexico: “Seeing is more than a metaphor for vision; it is knowing, insight in general.”14 Thus, if the hidden carving on the bottom of the coiled serpent addressed a divine audience, it posited preternatural powers of vision, capable of seeing through obdurate stone.15 Perhaps it also allowed human viewers who knew of the carvings underneath to lay claim to godlike sight. Equally importantly, these hidden carvings may have addressed senses beyond the visual. There’s something particularly evocative about the ways that they press against the ground. One might imagine the impressions that they might leave in wet mud, although where   Christenson 2003, 200–1.   Images of Nahua extramissive sight are compiled in Houston and Taube 2000, fig. 15; the terms are from Houston and Taube 2000, 281, and Hanks 1990, 89. See also López Austín 1988, vol. 1, 177: “Senses were believed to be special centers for a certain kind of consciousness; and decision, will, and creative action were localized in them.” The primacy of vision is clear in the disproportionate emphasis on the eye in the catalog of body parts in Book 10 of the Florentine Codex, Sahagún 1950–82, bk. 10, ch. 27, 103–13. 14   Vogt 1976, 205. 15   Wu Hung relates a similar story in the context of Buddhist art: as a master is laboriously completing the back of a statue, destined to be out of sight, his student asks him why he bothers. The master replies: “the god will see” (Wu 1992, 134–5). 12 13

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F ig . 2.3.  Coatlicue, Mexica/Aztec, c.1480–1510, Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico. Photograph of sculpture by Luidger–Luidger, from Wikimedia Commons; photo of cast of underside by the author.

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we can reconstruct original contexts, such sculptures were just as likely to rest on the stone flagstones of a paved plaza or temple floor.16 These two divine senses—sight and touch—have frequently converged in explanations of the carvings on the undersides of Aztec sculptures. Tlaltecuhtli, the Earth Lord, has often been posited as both subject and audience for hidden Aztec carvings, as though the images might be understood as much through their touch against the surface of the earth as through divine vision.17 While this suggestion is both powerful and compelling, it may not be sufficient. As I will argue below, what is carved underneath is not separable from what is carved above, as this model of divided audiences seems to imply. Furthermore, images of the Earth Lord, often assumed to be the normative kind of carving on the undersides of Aztec sculptures, constitute only the bare majority of a diverse and complex corpus of concealed images, whose very complexity and diversity call out for more investigation.

Making, Patronage, and Dedication There is of course one moment when the underside of a sculpture is visible to human audiences—and that is the moment of its creation. By eliminating the primacy of vision, studying unseen images refocuses attention on the power and  See Boone  1999 for one proposal about the original context of the Coatlicue and Yollotlicue sculptures: that they were originally placed outside the Temple of Huitzilopochtli on the summit of the Templo Mayor pyramid. Exactly where and how other sculptures with carving on their undersides were used remains mysterious; we sadly lack archaeological provenance for many of these sculptures, and even those that have been professionally excavated have rarely been found in their original contexts. Yet when Aztec sculptures have been excavated from their original sites, as at the Templo Mayor, they are almost always found on top of stone pavements. 17   This is an elusive, but critically important, member of the Aztec pantheon. The name, Tlaltecuhtli, or “earth lord,” consists of the word tlalli, or earth, and tecuhtli (teuctli), a word that we translate as “lord” but which was a gender-neutral term for a noble in Nahuatl. Like many Aztec deities, Tlaltecuhtli seems to have had both male and female forms. The longest account of this deity comes in the sixteenthcentury Histoyre du Mechique, where the earth was created when the gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca transformed themselves into serpents and penetrated the body of Tlaltecuhtli—in this version, a goddess, floating on the primordial sea—tearing her apart to form the earth and the sky. Later, “to compensate the goddess for the harms that those two gods had done to her, all the gods descended to console her and ordered that from her should emerge all the fruits necessary for the life of men. To do this, they made of her hair, trees and flowers and herbs; of her skin, tiny grasses and little flowers; of her eyes, springs and pools and little caves; of her mouth, rivers and large caverns; of her nose, valleys and mountains.” This did not placate her, and the goddess still hungers for blood: “This goddess sometimes cried out at night, wishing to eat the hearts of men, and she would not be silent unless they gave them to her—she didn’t wish to give fruit unless she was showered with the blood of men” (de Jonghe 1905, 28–9; for discussion, see Graulich 1997, 49–52; Nicholson 1967, esp. 83–5; Solís Olguín and González Licón 1989, 26–30). Most scholarship so far has focused on the iconographic identification of three interrelated forms of the earth deity that frequently ornament the bottoms of sculptures both great and small and occur more rarely on the surfaces of monuments. Notable studies include Seler 1992, vol. 3, 79–86; Nicholson 1954; 1967; Solís Olguín and González Licón 1989, 26–30; Gutiérrez Solana 1990; Baquedano 1993; Matos Moctezuma 1997; and Henderson 2007. On the recently discovered Tlaltecuhtli monolith at the Templo Mayor, see Matos Moctezuma and López Luján 2007, and López Luján 2011. 16

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process of artistic creation. An Aztec artist was called a toltecatl, a term which associated the act of art making with the wondrous ancient city of Tollan, home of the mythical ruler Quetzalcoatl. The wonder of this artistry is emphasized by sixteenth-century Nahua sources: The good potter: he takes great pains with his work; he teaches the clay to lie; he converses with his heart; he makes things live; he creates them; he knows all, as though he were a Toltec; he trains his hands to be skillful.18

Yet the artist is not the only person who sees a work in the workshop, as Richard Neer’s chapter in this volume reminds us. A patron, or his or her agent, must have authorized the expenditure of time and materials on these labor-intensive hidden carvings and presumably signed off on the results as well.19 Commissioning, making, and dedicating an image may have been more important than viewing it later, as Wu Hung and Robert Sharf have suggested was the case for Buddhist paintings in the dimly lit caves of Dunhuang, China.20 Even divine taste is dictated by human patrons. In the case of the Aztec sculptures, those patrons likely came from the highest levels of society. With a few interesting exceptions, carved undersides are common on metropolitan sculptures and rare on provincial ones; much more likely to occur later rather than earlier within the Aztec corpus; and extremely frequent on sculptures made out of exquisite materials, like hard diorite, precious greenstone, or luscious alabaster. These are courtly—even sometimes royal—objects (see e.g. Figs 2.2 and 2.6). The act of commissioning and dedicating an important sculpture had tremendous significance. Diego Durán’s Historia de las indias de la nueva España lavishes attention on the celebrations and sacrifices that accompanied the completion of royal commissions of sculpted stones for the Templo Mayor.21 In this account, artistic patronage almost seems to drive imperial expansion, as the need to secure captives for the dedication ceremonies of sacrificial stones offered a common pretext for military campaigns. The dedication ceremonies for these sculptures 18   Bernadino de Sahagún and informants, Códice Matritense de la Real Academia, 8, f. 117v, trans. in León-Portilla 1963, 173. See also León-Portilla 1982. 19  This is not necessarily true of all unseen carvings. Michael Camille, for example, has argued for considerable artistic autonomy in the satirical gargoyles and capitals of medieval cathedrals (Camille 1992, 79–85; see also Marconi 2009, 170). But there is none of that kind of subversion in Aztec sculpture, where the cohesiveness of the three-dimensional programs suggests that all elements of it were known to patrons. 20   Wu 1992, 132–5; Sharf 2013. 21   Durán 1994, chs. 20, 22–3, 36, 38, 43, 66, pp. 169–74, 186–93, 272–7, 288–90, 328–36, 477–82.

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closely resembled the celebrations that accompanied the dedication of each successive renovation of the Templo Mayor.22 Visitors from neighboring kingdoms were brought, sometimes in secret, to witness these demonstrations of Aztec might. Both kinds of dedications involved ephemeral performances of dance, feasting, tribute payment, gift giving, and human sacrifice, but the temple dedications also involved buried caches and offerings, seeded throughout the building to ensoul and center it. Complex, layered accumulations of works of art and products of the natural world, these offerings arranged sands, shells, corals, animal bodies, vessels, jewels, and sculptures made out of wood, stone, and resin in precise configurations designed to appeal to particular deities and symbolically re-create the order of the universe.23 To an even greater extent than the carvings on the undersides of sculptures, these dedicatory caches became invisible and inaccessible once sealed inside the walls of the temple mound. The dedication ceremonies, though, were widely attended festivities and offer another way that knowledge of what was hidden—whether caches or carvings on the undersides of sculptures—might have circulated. The celebrations surrounding the installation of a sculpture could have provided an opportunity for some to glimpse the carving underneath, but even those who did not have visual access to the work being dedicated might later recall the celebrations surrounding a major dedication. Indeed, an exhortation to memory was part of the dedication of the Templo Mayor in 1487: Nezahualpilli [ruler of the neighboring city-state of Texcoco] turned to King Ahuitzotl and suggested that he have a message sent to everyone in the region, that the day before the festival all the people of the cities be told to come, young and old, women and men, old people and youths, so that this solemn ceremony would be remembered forever.24

  Vividly described in Durán 1994, chs. 43–4, pp. 328–41.   Over 130 offerings and caches have been excavated from the seven successive construction phases of the Templo Mayor. They are studied systematically in López Luján 2005. See also Broda 1987, 61–123, and Nagao 1985. For a broader compilation of Mesoamerican dedicatory practices, see Mock 1998. The caches inside the Templo Mayor are not recognizably described in any sixteenth-century source, but Durán does describe another kind of offering concealed in the foundations of the structure: “Seeing that the temple began to rise so rapidly, King Moteuczoma [Ilhuicamina, r. 1440–69] desired to honor his god even further and gave orders that all the friendly rulers of the land contribute quantities of precious stones: greenstones, which they call chalchihuitl, rock crystal, bloodstone, emeralds, rubies, and carnelian, that is all kinds of precious stones and fine jewels. At each braza [approximately 1.7 m] this wealth of jewels and stones was to be thrown into the mortar. Therefore, when this tribute arrived, the lords of each city contributing jewels and precious stones and offering these by throwing them into the mixture at every braza, each one in his turn, the amount of riches was amazing. But they said that since the god had given them all that wealth it was only just that he receive it in turn because it really belonged to him” (Durán 1994, ch. 28, 227, cited in López Luján 2005, 77). 24   Durán 1994, ch. 44, 338. 22 23

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Social processes enlivened art and made it meaningful, beginning with rituals of dedication and extending to oral traditions and performances that kept an object alive in memory after it had been concealed.

W H AT LI E S BEN E AT H

These explanations propose ways that hidden images might be visible at least at some times and at least to some audiences, either human or divine. They also hint at some reasons a concealed carving might be particularly efficacious. But they do not explain what is carved on the bottom of Aztec sculpture. Indeed, these hidden carvings are diverse and varied, not by any means a monotonous series of images of the Earth Lord Tlaltecuhtli, as has so often been assumed. Given the diversity of the corpus, it is unlikely that a single explanation perfectly encompasses every program. Yet what is clear is that these hidden carvings are neither automatic nor random; on the contrary, they are common on certain classes of objects, but never reported on others. Even more importantly, these invisible images are coherent parts of three-dimensional programs. Top and bottom are never reversible or interchangeable; the carving on the underside of a sculpture belongs, logically and conceptually, on the bottom, where its concealment simultaneously makes programmatic sense and amplifies the symbolic power of the entire program. Carvings on the underside of Aztec sculpture are inseparable from what lies above them. But what is so intriguing about the Aztec works is that the converse is not true. The visible surfaces of the object are complete in and of themselves, meaningful and satisfying, leaving no clue to an uninitiated viewer that something is hidden underneath.25 The hidden carvings extend and augment the visible themes, continuing them, restating them, or posing puzzles of complementary opposition. Together, visible and hidden surfaces create a second program, richer than what is merely seen. What lies beneath derives its power from dialogue with what lies above—and from its own concealment. The coiled serpent in Figure 2.1 might seem to posit a simple model: that the hidden scales of the serpent are required to make this sculpture ontologically complete, a sculpture that is fully in the round, a sculpture that, like its referent, has both a top and a bottom. This is true to a certain extent, but Aztec sculptural ontology is by no means always so naïve. Many Aztec sculptures are carved fully in the round, sometimes with only minimal detailing on the underside, but not all sculptures receive such fully three-dimensional treatment. On the contrary,  Or perhaps just the faintest hint of the concealed carving, if one knows where to look; see Brittenham 2015. 25

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many Aztec sculptures are not carved on their undersides; in fact, some sculptures even incorporate a base on which the figure stands, articulating a different relationship between image and world.26 Carving all surfaces of a sculpture was a deliberate and meaningful choice. The coiled serpent can be understood as related to the class of Aztec skeuomorphs, or objects in one medium evoking the properties of another, which are often carved fully in the round, underside and all.27 These include elite replicas of everyday creatures and objects, such as grasshoppers or squashes, made out of precious materials like greenstone, diorite, or carneolite,28 as well as basalt ­versions of the reed xiuhmolpilli, or bundle of years, used in Aztec New Fire ceremonies (Fig. 2.4).29 Yet there is a significant difference between a small round or cylindrical object that is carved in three dimensions and a coiled serpent sculpture, where top is immediately distinguished from bottom, visible from invisible. Rattlesnakes rarely coil neatly like this, though other serpents might.30 Rattle­ snakes are more likely to knot and tangle their sinuous bodies—another frequent subject of Aztec sculptural representation, where almost no attention is paid to the ventral scales (Fig. 2.5). Perhaps the pyramidal coil of the serpent in Figure 2.1 conflates the characteristics of rattlesnakes with those of other species of serpents—such conflations are frequent in Aztec art—but it also serves to yield an image where the top and bottom surfaces can be powerfully contrasted, smooth simplicity opposed to rich rhythm and texture. What is so striking, indeed, about

  These patterns of distribution are just beginning to emerge from a thorough study of the corpus of Aztec sculpture with carving on its underside, and further compilation will undoubtedly make the patterns more clear. 27  I am grateful to Stephen Houston for sharing his observations about Maya skeuomorphs; see Houston 2014, 31–73. 28  See Clendinnen  1991, 225; Matos Moctezuma and Solís 2002, cat. nos. 55–76; Nicholson and Quiñones 1983, 113–18. 29   Torches made of bundles of reeds, each representing one of the fifty-two years in an Aztec calendrical cycle, were set afire during the New Fire ceremony that marked the passage from one fifty-two-year cycle to the next. But these ephemeral reed objects, made to be destroyed, were also echoed in stone. Nearly twenty basalt cylinders survive, each delineating the contours of each reed, the rope that binds them together, and a square cartouche wrapping around the curve of the bundle, denoting the year of the New Fire ceremony (often corresponding to the year 2 Reed, or 1507, in the Aztec calendar). In 1900, Leopoldo Batres excavated two of these stone bundles from an altar decorated with skulls and crossbones on the Calle Escallerias, which they had been buried inside (Batres 1902, 45; discussed in Nicholson and Quiñones 1983, 43–5). 30   I am grateful to Alan Resetar, collection manager for the Division of Amphibians and Reptiles at the Field Museum of Natural History, for sharing his expertise on the appearance and behavior of rattlesnakes (personal communication, 2012) and to Cécile Fromont for highlighting the importance of this information. Rattlesnakes seem to prefer to position their heads so that they form a 180-degree U-curve with respect to the rest of the body; in preparation for a strike, such a position allows for rapid forward motion. Taxidermy, which often presents neatly coiled rattlesnakes, has given us a distorted idea of their habits. 26

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F ig . 2.4.  Xiuhmolpilli or “bundle of years”, Mexica/Aztec, 1507. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico. Photo by the author.

F ig . 2.5.  Coiled and knotted rattlesnake, Aztec, c.1400–1521. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico. Photo by the author.

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the serpent in Figure 2.1 is the luscious excess of carving on its hidden underside relative to the smoothness of its visible surface. Equally importantly, the programs on the undersides of sculptures are frequently rich and allusive, proposing relationships between visible and invisible that move beyond mimesis, but remain equally coherent as three-dimensional programs. Take for example the underside of a diorite Xiuhcoatl, or fire serpent, in the Dumbarton Oaks collection (Fig. 2.6). This carving shows not just the serpent’s coils, here squared and flattened instead of receding into space, but also, superimposed upon them, a brief inscription.31 It begins with the name glyph of Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin, who ruled from 1502–20 and fatefully welcomed Hernán Cortés and other Spaniards to his territories in 1519. His name translates “He Who Grows Angry [like a] Lord,” and the name glyph shows the royal diadem and noseplug, as well as a speech scroll denoting lordly, choleric speech, all surrounding a void where the scales of the serpent have been left uncarved. Below Moteuczoma’s name glyph lies a date enclosed in a square cartouche. This date, the year 2 Reed in the Aztec calendar, corresponds to 1507, the year in which Moteuczoma celebrated the New Fire Ceremony, a ritually critical “binding of the years” that occurred once every fifty-two years. The rope binding the reed in the date glyph further reinforces the allusion to this event. Perhaps this fire serpent was made to commemorate this important celebration, but, if so, the sculpture spoke differently to different audiences; historical specificity was concealed on the bottom, with only the more general or multivalent image of the fire serpent visible above. Audiences close to the dedication date of this monument would surely have remembered the spectacular New Fire ceremony in 1507 and associated the serpent with Moteuczoma, so perhaps in this case the hidden text was for posterity, directed at a future audience that might not remember. This highlights one important aspect of the carvings on the undersides of Aztec sculpture: because the sculptures are freestanding, the hidden carvings were not permanently and immutably inaccessible. Although certainly difficult to access, their existence and subjects remain at least potentially verifiable. Text alone may decorate the bottom of a sculpture, sometimes restating themes articulated on the visible surfaces in a different mode. A square block decorated on all four lateral sides with maize cobs, for example, has the date 7 Serpent on the bottom, where the rattle of the snake’s tail has been converted into another maize cob (Fig. 2.7).32 7 Serpent, or Chicomecoatl, is the name and natal day of  McEwan and López 2009, 174; Umberger 1981, 97. There are two other coiled supernatural serpents so similar that they likely came out of the same workshop: another Xiuhcoatl in the collection of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City and a jaguar serpent in the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. Nothing is carved on the underside of the Berlin sculpture. Gutiérrez Solana 1987, láms. 59–60, 80–1. 32   Umberger 1981, 110; Gutiérrez Solana 1983, 66; Alcina Franch, Léon-Portilla, and Matos Moctezuma 1992, 55. 31

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F ig . 2.6.  Coiled Xiuhcoatl, Mexica/Aztec, 1507. 43.5 × 45.4 cm. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection PC.B.069. © Dumbarton Oaks, Pre-Columbian Collection, Washington, DC.

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F ig . 2.7.  Altars with maize cobs, Mexica/Aztec, c.1400–1520. Top: a complete example in the Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico, underside unknown. Bottom and following page: damaged example with 7 Serpent carved on the underside, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, IV Ca 3771. Photos: by the author (top) and Martin Franken (bottom and follwing).

an important Aztec maize goddess. Bottom and sides of the block display mutually reinforcing messages. Perhaps the text offers greater specificity, indicating that the carved block is dedicated to Chicomecoatl and not to another maize deity like Xilonen or Cinteotl, but what is clear is that this concealed text demands a literate audience. Other hidden carvings were both playful and erudite, adding another layer to a jest among elites. Felipe Solís has presented a set of four sculptures, some of

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F ig . 2.7. Continued.

them now fragmentary, which are all carved on the bottom with the head and name-glyph of Tenoch, the eponymous and largely mythical founder of the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan (Fig. 2.8).33 These images are carved on the bottoms of stone organ cactuses—skeuomorphs or permanent renditions of a kind of vegetal boundary marker still used in Mexico City today. Solís argues convincingly that these sculptures marked the boundary between the cities of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, which falls along a street still called the “Calle del Organo,” perhaps in memory of these very sculptures.34 This kind of cactus is called a teonochtli in at least one sixteenth-century source;35 given Nahuatl hieroglyphic conventions, where underspelling is common, this hidden carving might simply label the cactus as a te-[o]-NOCHTLI, restating the name of the cactus in its glyphic form.36 The visual relationship to the name of Tenoch, the Mexica dynastic founder, is equally significant. The sculptures play on a rhetoric of roots that is equally powerful in Nahuatl as in English: the roots of the cactus are carved on its sides, as if exposed above ground, looking not incidentally like pubic hair for the phallic cactus; under the sculpture is Tenoch, dynastic patriarch, who established the 33   Solís 2004, 357–75. The sculptures are also discussed in Nicholson and Quiñones 1983, 112 and McEwan and López 2009, 46–7. 34   In a bit of historical irony, the Calle del Organo was Mexico City’s red-light district until the 1970s; the pun holds just as well in Spanish as in English; see Solís 2004, 369. 35   Cruz and Badiano 1940 [1552], f. 17v, pl. 28. 36   For underspelling and other Nahuatl glyphic conventions, see Lacadena García-Gallo 2006. Here, hieroglyphic writing is represented with the following conventions: logographs are represented in bold caps, syllabic transcriptions in bold, and transliterations in italics.

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F ig . 2.8.  Stone cactii with images of Tenoch on the underside, Mexica/Aztec, c.1400–1520. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico. Photos by the author; line drawing by David Recksieck.

boundaries of Tenochtitlan, and lay at the root of the Mexica royal family tree— or perhaps cactus. Here the hidden carving adds unexpected delight to an already clever skeuomorph, opening up a more richly layered joke for the small audience in the know—and how delicious that such wit is hidden in plain sight. Equally importantly, the root metaphor itself has deep Central Mexican roots: a fourth- or fifth-century ce mural painting from the Techinantitla apartment compound at Teotihuacan draws on similar metaphors of lineage and generation, the name glyphs of specific individuals or lineages once again juxtaposed with the twisting roots of the flowering trees (Fig. 2.9).37 The great abandoned city of Teotihuacan was a frequent touchstone for Mexica rulers as they sought legitimacy for their new empire.38 Indeed, the genre of coiled serpent sculptures, so powerfully and characteristically Aztec, may also have its roots at Teotihuacan, where archaeologists have found several diminutive coiled serpents (Fig. 2.10).39 Both the stone cactus and the coiled serpent may thus draw on a recondite body of knowledge, invoking rich antiquarian parallels for those in the know and claiming kinship to works from the place where gods were born.40   The Techinantitla mural is discussed in Cowgill 1992, and Taube 2000, 7–10, 26. See also Berrin 1988. Flowering plants with twisted roots and glyphs also occur on the lower talud of the “Tlalocan” murals of the Tepantitla apartment compound, and in several other contexts (see Taube 2000, figs 4 and 6). While it’s impossible to prove that the Aztecs saw any of the works of art with this theme that we know today, the very prevalence of this metaphor at Teotihuacan suggests that the Aztecs may have had some familiarity with it and associated it with that ancient city. 38   Umberger 1987, esp. 66–8, 82–90. See also Boone 2000 and López Luján 1989. 39   Solís Olguín 2009, cat. nos. 40 and 113. 40   This is certainly the case with the bust of a skeletal deity rendered in an archaizing Teotihuacan-like style, where the clear citation of a Teotihuacan prototype is combined with an image of the earth deity 37

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F ig . 2.9.  Feathered Serpent and Flowering Tree mural, probably from Techinantitla apartment compound, Teotihuacan, c.100–550 ce. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco 185.104.1a–b. Bequest of Harald J. Wagner.

F ig . 2.10.  Coiled serpent, Teotihuacan. First–sixth century ce. Museo de Sitio de Teotihuacán. Photo by the author.

In other cases, simply interpreting the relationship between top and bottom might require a profound knowledge of myth and history, the ability to resolve carved on the underside of the sculpture. See Pasztory  1983, 157; Umberger  1987, 86–7. Other archaizing genres, such as chacmools, citing sculpture from Tula, Hidalgo, sometimes feature carving on their undersides (see López Austin and López Luján 2001)—but other archaizing sculptures, like the five miniature atlanteans found in Tenochtitlan, seem not to be carved on the undersides of their integral bases. As Jack Green has observed in conversation, the link between indigenous archaeology and hidden images is not limited to the Aztecs; Neo-Assyrian sculptures with concealed inscriptions often cite archaic prototypes and again coincide with an interest in the material past (personal communication, 2012). See also Russell 1999, 77–8, 212; Marconi 2009, 172.

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a puzzle posed by the juxtaposition of disparate concepts. In his chapter in this volume, Richard Neer terms this gap between seeing and understanding “­phenomenological invisibility.” Take for example an image of a coiled feathered serpent, on whose underside is carved an image of the earth deity, superimposed upon the serpent’s coils (Fig. 2.11). The composition is a frequent one, repeated on at least nine (and likely more) Aztec sculptures. It juxtaposes two of the most important deities of the Aztec pantheon, confronting Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent—god of wind, rain, and rulership, bringer of culture, and

F ig . 2.11.  Feathered serpent with Tlaltecuhtli underneath, Mexica/Aztec, c.1400–1519, 28 × 20 cm. © IVb 1359 Museum der Kulturen Basel, Col. Lukas Vischer (1780–1840). Photos by Peter Horner, 1985; drawing by Lucia Henderson.

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F ig . 2.11. Continued.

patron of the arts—with Tlaltecuhtli, the ravening, incoherent, hungry earth.41 Together, the two may form a diagram of the world, with the body of the feathered serpent superimposed on the earth deity below, its blue-green quetzal feather plumes like the foliage of maize plants growing out of the land. But this composition may also allude to a particular moment in an Aztec creation narrative, when the gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca transformed themselves into serpents and penetrated the body of Tlaltecuhtli—in this version, a goddess, floating on the primordial sea—tearing her apart to form the earth and the sky.42 Beyond the particulars of myth, however, this kind of pairing is a frequent mode of Aztec rhetoric and culture, extending from poetic speech to ritual practice and even architectural construction. Aztec speech was full of difrasismos, or “diphrastic kennings,” paired couplets that together represented complex concepts in elegant and poetical ways.43 Poetry, indeed, was termed in xochitl in cuicatl, “the flower, the song.” In tlilli in tlapalli, “the red, the black” was a frequent expression for “writing” or “knowledge”; a city-state was an altepetl, a contraction of in atl in tepetl, “the water, the mountain,” and in atl in tlachinolli, “the water, the fire,” signified “warfare.” Likewise, the Templo Mayor, principal   See Pasztory 1983, 82, for an interpretation of related juxtapositions of earth and sun deities.   De Jonghe 1905, 28–9; for discussion, see Graulich 1997, 49–52; Nicholson 1967, esp. 83–5. 43   Garibay Kintana 1953–4, vol. 1, 19; León-Portilla 1963, 102; Montes de Oca 2013. A number of examples are compiled in Sahagún 1950–82, bk. 6, chs. 41 and 43, 219–53, 241–60. For Maya parallels, see Knowlton 2002 and Stuart 2003. As Stuart emphasizes, while some couplets consist of oppositions (e.g. day/night, sky/earth), others pair more closely related elements (e.g. cloud/rain, food/water); in all cases, the goal is to illustrate a conceptual whole. For dualism in other aspects of Aztec life, see Graulich 1988; and van Zantwijk 1963; López Luján 2005, 222–3. 41 42

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sanctuary of the Aztec empire, was a twin temple, its north side dedicated to the rain god Tlaloc and its south side to the solar god Huitzilopochtli. The north and south sides were not merely opposed but also complementary, together encapsulating whole and completed periods: a day, a year, an agricultural cycle.44 What is important about Aztec binary oppositions is that they resolve into coherent wholes, greater than and often distinct from the sum of their parts. They exemplify a Mesoamerican poetic and philosophical tradition, a way of thinking through metaphors of opposition and reconciliation. In this way, a sculpture carved on both top and bottom was like a difrasismo, a puzzle whose oppositions had to be resolved in order to achieve its true meaning. Visibility/invisibility was only one of numerous binaries manipulated in the process. Possessed with the knowledge of the whole program, the initiated viewer would grasp its cohesive meaning as well as the distinctive parts that constituted it, just as the reader of an atl-tlachinolli glyph would know it signified “warfare,” perhaps even before identifying the graphemes for water and fire that composed it. The stakes in such cohesive compositions can be cosmic. We can see this most clearly in a set of greenstone cuauhxicalli, or offering vessels, which may have been used to hold the excised hearts of sacrificial victims (Fig. 2.12).45 The Earth Lord, in her monstrous, flint-tongued form, is carved on the bottom of these vessels; the sides are figured as a woven basket, fringed with the eagle feathers that give the vessel its name and balls of cotton down, a now-familiar skeuomorphic presentation in precious stone. Inside each vessel is the glyph for nahui ollin, or 4 Movement, the name of the present sun; the Mexica claimed that they lived in the era of the fifth sun, 4 Movement, named for the day on which it would be destroyed, and that there had been four previous suns, or eras, each also named for the day and means of its destruction. With the bottom unseen, the program is coherent enough; sacrificial hearts feed the sun and keep it in motion. But the hidden carving on the bottom renders the program more powerful still, converting the vessel into a microcosm, a richly symbolic diagram of the layered universe. The Aztecs believed that the earth swallowed the sun at night; it died, and like other corpses, was eaten by the earth.46 The sun passed through the underworld at night to be reborn out of the earth’s body at dawn. Karl Taube, following   Graulich 2001; see also the extensive review and discussion in López Austin and López Luján 2009.   First discussed in Seler 1992, vol. 3, 79–86, and most recently addressed in Taube 2009. See also Alcina Franch, Léon-Portilla, and Matos Moctezuma 1992, 306–10. 46   The sixteenth-century Codex Telleriano-Remensis, for example, on f. 20r shows Tonatiuh, the sun god, being swallowed by a crouching Earth Lord whose pose and attributes are very similar to those on the bottoms of these vessels; see Quiñones Keber 1995, 43, 184–5. There is a cognate image on f. 14 of the Codex Borbonicus. For discussion, see also Nicholson 1967, 84–5. 44 45

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F ig . 2.12.  Offering vessel (cuauhxicalli), Mexica/Aztec, c.1400–1519, 14.3 × 23.8 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, IV Ca 1. Photos: Martin Franken; line drawings by Karl Taube.

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Eduard Seler, has argued that it is precisely this moment that the cuauhxicalli captures in three dimensions; as the earth deity lies on her back on the underside of the vessel, the sun seems to rise up out of her navel—a place of birth and emergence in many classes of Aztec imagery.47 Moving effortlessly between different modes of representation, the vessel constructs a series of complex equivalences and oppositions: earth is opposed to sun, figural to glyphic representation, visible to invisible surfaces, all as the program proposes binaries that resolve into an eloquent restatement of the basic tenets of Aztec cosmology. If the end of the world threatens the collapse of the sky into the earth, undoing the primordial violence of creation that separated the body of Tlaltecuhtli, it is sacrifice that staves off this final destruction.48 As Michel Graulich has argued, every Aztec sacrifice was a double immolation, the heart designated to feed the sun, the blood to nourish the earth.49 Both are fed here. What is hidden underneath converts this small and precious sculpture from a receptacle for sacrificial hearts into an image of the universe and a diagram of the universal economy of sacrifice.

T H E POW ER OF I N V ISI BI LI T Y

In these royal and courtly examples, we see the power of the secret to produce and maintain difference. A secret is only a secret if someone—but not everyone— knows it; it’s perhaps even more powerful if rumor and speculation circulate, but the truth, like the carving on the underside of a sculpture set in place, cannot be easily verified.50 These works highlight the ways that art might circulate outside the realm of the visual, spoken or whispered about, perhaps exaggerated or misreported in the heat of conversation. Indeed, the visual details, particularly in the case of the rather illegibly carved Tenoch heads underneath the organ cactuses, might well have mattered less than the sheer existence of the conceit. In other cases, though, the underside was richly detailed, perhaps even more elaborate than the visible surface. It represented considerable artistic labor—and the wealth to command it—destined to be concealed. Like an offering in a dedicatory cache, it moved wealth from the earthly realm of the visible to the unseen realm of the gods, while simultaneously demonstrating the piety and magnificence of the patron who could perform such an extravagant gesture. But unlike the caches, which disappeared into the body of a structure, what mattered about the sculptures was that this material and rhetorical wealth was hidden in plain sight. The gods—and elites who knew of the invisible carvings and thus might assert godlike sight—had access to a reality that others could not know existed. 47 50

 Taube 2009, 1–10.    48 See Townsend 1979.    49 Graulich 1988.   Derrida 2007. See also the discussion in Pellizzi 2009.

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L as C asas , B.  de (1967 [c.1550]), Apologética historia sumaria de la Indias, 2 vols (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). L eón -P ortilla , M. (1963), Aztec thought and culture: a study of the ancient nahuatl mind (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press). L eón -P ortilla , M.  (1982), Toltecáyotl: estudios de cultura náhuatl (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica). L ópez A ustin , A. (1988), The human body and ideology: concepts of the ancient Nahuas, trans. T.  Ortiz de Montellano and B.  Ortiz de Montellano, 2 vols (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press). L ópez A ustin , A.  and L ópez L uján , L.  (2001a), “El chacmool mexica,” Caravelle: Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso-bresilien 76/77, 59–84. L ópez A ustin , A.  and L ópez L uján , L.  (2001b), “Los mexicas y el chacmool,” Arqueología Mexicana 9, 68–73. L ópez A ustin , A.  and L ópez L uján , L.  (2009), Monte Sagrado-Templo Mayor (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). L ópez L uján , L. (1989), La recuperación mexica del pasado teotihuacano (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia). L ópez L uján , L.  (2005), The Offerings of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan, trans. B. Ortiz de Montellano and T. Ortiz de Montellano (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press). L ópez L uján , L. (2011), “El ídolo sin pies ni cabeza: La Coatlicue en el siglo XVIII,” Estudios de cultura náhuatl, 42, 203–32. M atos M octezuma , E. and S olís O lguín , F. (eds) (2002), Aztecs (London: Royal Academy of Arts). M c E wan , C. and L ópez L uján , L. (eds) (2009), Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler (London: British Museum Press). M arconi , C. (2009), “The Parthenon frieze: degrees of visibility,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 55/56, 156–73. M arcus , J. (1983), “Teotihuacán Visitors on Monte Albán Monuments and Murals,” in K. V. Flannery and J. Marcus (eds), The Cloud People: Divergent Evolution of Zapotec and Mixtec Civilizations (New York: Academic Press), 175–81. M atos M octezuma , E. (1997), “Tlaltecuhtli, Señor de la Tierra,” Estudios de cultura náhuatl 27, 15–40. M atos M octezuma , E. and L ópez L uján , L. (2007), “La diosa Tlaltecuhtli de la casa de Ajaracas y el rey Ahuitzotl,” Arqueología Mexicana 14, 22–9. Montes de Oca, M.  (2013), Los difrasismos en náhuatl en los siglos XVI y XVII (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas). M ock , S.  B.  (ed.) (1998), The sowing and the dawning: termination, dedication, and transformation in the archaeological and ethnographic record of Mesoamerica (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press). N agao , D. (1985), Mexica buried offerings: a historical and contextual analysis (Oxford: B.A.R).

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N icholson , H. B. (1954), “The birth of the smoking mirror,” Antiquity 7, 164–70. N icholson , H. B. (1967), “A fragment of an Aztec relief carving of the Earth Monster,” Journal de la Societé des Américanistes 56, 81–94. N icholson , H. B., and Q uiñones K eber , E. (1983), Art of Aztec Mexico: treasures of Tenochtitlan. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. O’N eil , M.  (2009), “Ancient Maya sculptures of Tikal, seen and unseen,” RES: Anthroplogy and Aesthetics 55/56, 119–34. O’N eil , M.  (2012), Engaging ancient Maya sculpture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press). P azstory , E. (1983), Aztec art (New York: Harry N. Abrams). P ellizzi , F.  (2009), “Further comments on ‘Absconding,’ ” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 55/56, 347–60. Q uiñones K eber , E. (1995), Codex Telleriano-Remensis: ritual, divination, and history in a pictorial Aztec manuscript (Austin: University of Texas Press). R ead , K. (1995), “Sun and Earth rulers: what the eyes cannot see in Mesoamerica,” History of Religions 34, 351–84. R ussell , J. M. (1999), The writing on the wall: studies in the architectural context of late Assyrian palace inscriptions (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns). S ahagún , B. de (1950–82 [1575–7]), Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, trans. A. J. O. Anderson and C. E. Dibble, 13 vols (Santa Fe: School of American Research). S eler , E.  (1992 [1902]), “The pulque vessel of the Bilimec collection,” in Collected works in Mesoamerican linguistics and archaeology, vol. 3 (Culver City, CA: Labyrinthos), 199–223. S harf , R, (2013), “Art in the dark: the ritual context of Buddhist caves in western China,” in D.  Park, K.  Wangmo, and S.  Cather (eds), Art of merit: studies in Buddhist art and its conservation (London: Archetype Publications, Courtauld Institute of Art), 38–65. S olís O lguín , F. (2004), “La imagen de Tenoch en los monumentos conmemorativos de la capital azteca,” in M.  T.  Uriarte and L.  S.  Cicero (eds), Acercarse y mirar: homenaje a Beatriz de la Fuente (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), 357–75. S olís O lguín , F. (2009), Teotihuacan: cité des dieux (Paris: Musée du Quai Branly and Somogy Editions d’Art). S olís O lguín , F. and G onzález L icón , E. (1989), “Tlaltecuhtli, el Señor de la Tierra,” Antropolgía: Boletín Oficial del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Nueva época 25, 26–30. S tuart , D.  (2003), “On the Paired Variants of TZ’AK.” Mesoweb, www.mesoweb. com/stuart/notes/tzak.pdf. T aube , K. A. (1993), “The Bilimek pulque vessel: starlore, calendrics, and cosmology of late postclassic Central Mexico,” Ancient Mesoamerica 4, 1–15. T aube , K.  A.  (2000), The writing system of ancient Teotihuacan (Washington, DC: Center for Ancient American Studies). T aube , K.  A.  (2009), “The womb of the world: the cuauhxicalli and other offering bowls of ancient and contemporary Mesoamerica,” in C.  Golden, S.  Houston, and J.  Skidmore (eds), Maya Archaeology 1 (San Francisco: Precolumbia Mesoweb Press), 86–106.

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T ownsend , R. F. (1979), State and cosmos in the art of Tenochtitlan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection). U mberger , E.  (1981), “Aztec sculptures, hieroglyphs, and history,” Ph.D.  thesis (Columbia University). U mberger , E.  (1987), “Antiques, revivals, and references to the past in Aztec art,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13, 63–105. U rcid S errano , J. (2001), Zapotec hieroglyphic writing (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection). V eyne , P. (1988), “Conduct without belief and works of art without viewers,” Diogenes 143, 1–22. W inter , I. J. (1992), “ ‘Idols of the king’: royal images as recipients of ritual action in ancient Mesopotamia,” Journal of Ritual Studies 6(1), 13–42. W u H ung (1992), “What is Bianxiang? On the relationship between Dunhuang art and Dunhuang literature,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 52(1), 111–92. W u H ung , H ay , J., and P ellizzi , F. (2009), “Absconding,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 55/56, 1. Z antwijk , R. van (1963), “Principios organizadores de los mexicas, una introducción al estudio del sistema interno del regimen azteca,” Estudios de cultura náhuatl 4, 187–222.

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3

Concealment and Revelation The Pola Casket and the Visuality of Early Christian Relics Jas ́ Elsner

The archaeological artefact is typically unearthed. It comes to us marked by the depredations of time, tarnished by burial, reclaimed from loss. Yet the perspective of excavation, according to which all objects are disinterred and salvaged for the collection or the museum, with more or less of a contextual history arising from their unearthing, may risk simplifying or ignoring the conditions of their original interment. The differences between the kinds of burial, between the multiple processes at stake in the loss of objects to the earth in the past—insofar as they can be reconstructed—are interesting. For example, the amazingly well-preserved statue of Flavius Palmatus, Consular Governor of Caria and acting Vicar of Asiana at some point before 536 ce, was discovered toppled beside its inscribed base at the west colonnade of the square adjoining the theater of the city of Aphrodisias in Asia Minor, in the mid-twentieth century (Fig. 3.1).1 It fell in the course of time, we have no idea when—probably as the result of an earthquake—in a city virtually abandoned after the seventh century and was subsequently covered by debris and soil until its excavation in modernity. By contrast, the Meroe head, an over-life-size bronze head of Augustus, which was excavated by the British in Sudan in the teens of the twentieth century, was probably cut from the statue of which it was part and buried by barbarian tribesmen beneath steps leading to the native temple of Victory in the Kushite capital of Meroe in the Sudan (Fig. 3.2).2 Far from falling where it stood, it was the victim of deliberate iconoclasm and burial by the enemies of the Roman empire, probably shortly after its erection when the Kushites invaded

  See Smith 1999, esp. 168–70; Smith 2016, no. 10, 151–2.   See Haynes 1983, 177–81; Boschung 1993, no. 122, 160–1.

1 2

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F ig . 3.1.  Marble statue of Flavius Palmatus from Aphrodisias in Asia Minor, early sixth century ce. Aphrodisias Museum. Photograph: New York University Excavations at Aphrodisias (G. Petruccioli).

Roman Egypt in 25 bce. In its buried form it lay as a hidden trophy permanently trampled by the Kushites—a sign of independence from Rome, autonomy, and hatred of the Roman emperor even when the tribesmen had forgotten that it was hidden there. Other kinds of deliberate burial, however, were made by those who owned the objects interred, rather than thieves or rampagers. The Projecta casket, for instance, made in the mid- to late fourth century ce, was excavated in 1793 in the grounds of the ruined monastery of San Francesco di Paola ai Monti on the Esquiline Hill in Rome (Fig. 3.3). It was part of a large hoard of over sixty silver and silver-gilt objects, probably the heirlooms of a family collection, buried together by its original owners or by those who had acquired it (perhaps in the context of the sack of Rome in 410 by Alaric the Goth) and never retrieved.3 The Esquiline items were clearly buried with the hope of being salvaged and reused in their original function as opposed to being melted down for bullion. The Traprain Law treasure however, also late fourth or early fifth century, excavated in Edinburgh,

  See Shelton 1981, 13–17 on date and findspot, 19–23 for the number of items, their state, and contents.

3

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F ig . 3.2.  Bronze head of Augustus, from Meroe, Sudan, c.30 bce. British Museum. Photograph: British Museum.

includes items cut up and sized for eventual melting and reuse (Fig. 3.4).4 Even so impressive and famous an object as the missorium of Theodosius, made in 388 ce to be a princely gift from the emperor to a deserving official, was found in Spain, buried by its then owner, no one knows when, folded over and surely intended for the melting pot had it been recovered (Fig.  3.5).5 These pieces were deliberately buried but then lost or forgotten, presumably at the demise or capture of their owners. Other objects, like the exquisite ninth-century Pliska cross, found in Bulgaria in 1973, complete with its relic of the True Cross inside, appear to have been simply lost by their owners, as one might today lose a watch or a pen (Fig. 3.6).6 Now it is not my aim to make a classification of objects on the basis of the logic of their interment, although clearly such an approach is possible and has the benefit of being available for cross-cultural comparison with objects from quite   See Curle 1923 and now Hunter and Painter 2013, with extensive discussion of “Hacksilber,” 215–396.   See Almagro-Gorbea 2000; Leader-Newby 2004, 11–12. 6   See Dontcheva 1976; Doncheva-Petkova 1979. 4 5

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F ig . 3.3.  Silver-gilt so-called Projecta casket from the Esquiline Treasure found in Rome, c.350–80 ce. British Museum. Photograph: British Museum.

different times and contexts that may have been similarly buried. I want instead to focus on one class of such objects, from the Christian side of late antiquity, that were deliberately buried by their purchasers, and may indeed have been made to be so. In this quality of being made to be hidden, they belong to that range of artworks across cultures which have been described as “absconding.”7 I mean reliquaries made to contain the relics of a saint and then to be buried beneath the sanctuary of a church as a necessary part of the consecration of the building and its altar.8 We possess many such objects, most of them relatively simple and in a variety of media from stone and wood to silver and ivory. Interestingly, their form is sometimes an architectural miniature, and in this case they reflect the building which they sanctify, implying a kind of mimetic play which may have 7   See the essays gathered in Pellizzi 2009. Unfortunately this volume lacks a theoretical introduction grounding the concept. 8   The class of surviving objects is large but has never been systematically gathered into a corpus. On this class of objects—reliquaries buried beneath early Christian altars—see e.g. Peschlow  2006, with ­bibliography; Yasin 2009, 150–7; Kalinowski 2011, 47–62; Comte 2012, 77–98 for issues of placement; Yasin 2015. The best collection of archaeologically attested objects remains Buschhausen 1971, sections B (mainly metal reliquaries with figural imagery) and C (other buried reliquaries, mainly stone), although these contain some non-reliquary material, despite the titles of the relevant sections. For silver reliquaries, see Noga-Banai  2008, 38–61; for those from Bulgaria, see Minchev  2003; for sarcophagus-shaped ­reliquaries, see Aydin 2011, 83–110 (for English summary of a book in Turkish). A good art historical discussion of early Christian material is Hahn 2012, 45–64.

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F ig . 3.4.  Silver objects from the Traprain Law hoard, containing mainly ‘hack-silver’ (cut up and ready for the melting pot) found in Edinburgh, fourth–fifth century ce. National Museums of Scotland. Photograph: National Museums of Scotland.

magical or talismanic properties,9 or a two-dimensional visual commentary that interrogates the conceptual nature of the object which the images decorate in relation to its functions and intended context. What I want to do here is to examine the Pola casket, one of the most remarkable examples of this genre, in this case heavily decorated with imagery, to explore its figural reflections on its function as a consecrating marker of holy space (Fig. 3.7). The casket’s iconography is potent both as a transformation of much

9

  See for example Padgett 2011, no. 91, 131.

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F ig . 3.5.  Silver missorium of Theodosius, folded and perhaps intended for the melting pot, from near Merida in Spain, c.388 ce. Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid. Photograph: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

older (pre-Christian) traditions of visual types on which it draws,10 and as an image-discourse for interrogating in visual means some very complex contemporary theological issues relevant to the cult of relics. It is worth noting here that the casket’s most likely date of production is between the end of the fourth ­century and the middle of the fifth, the very years in which the cult of relics took off in Western Europe, in the wake of significant interventions in Italy in terms of the “invention” (a technical term for the discovery) of the relics of many saints and martyrs by Damasus of Rome (Pope 366–84) and Ambrose of Milan (Bishop 375–97) during the second half of the fourth century.11 The casket’s iconography, I shall argue, is in part a theologically inflected commentary on its nature   On which, see at length Elsner 2013.   On Damasus, see Pietri 1976, vol. 1, 514–51, 595–624; Curran 2000, 142–57; Sághy 2000. On Ambrose, see Dassmann  1975; McLynn  1994, 209–17, 226–36, 347–60. On the fourth-century West, see Brown 1981, 87–94; Clark 2001. On the early Church in relation to pre-Christian reliquary practices, see Hartmann  2010, 593–660. In general on the West, key studies in a vast field include: Braun  1940; Herrmann-Mascard  1975; Geary  1978; Augenendt  1994; Geary  1994, 41–4, 177–220; Snoek 1995; Chagranti 2008; Bynum 2011. 10 11

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F ig . 3.6.  Gold and niello pectoral cross from Pliska, Bulgaria, ninth century ce. National Museum, Sofia. Photograph: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

as a relic-container and on what the embodied specificity of the relic as mediating metonym for the sacred might mean for Christian salvation; but it is also a visual intervention in a social, ecclesiastical, and political debate in its time (around the phenomenon of relics and the possibility of there being special places or objects that had privileged access to the holy), which focused especially on relics as items of prestige and sanctification.

T H E POL A C A SK ET

The Pola casket is a box made of wood, ivory, and silver and was discovered ­during archaeological excavations below what was once the altar space in the sanctuary of the early Christian church of St Hermagoras in the village of Samagher near Pola in Istria (Figs 3.7–3.13).12 With a size of 19 × 20 × 16 cm, the casket   On the dig and the details of the archaeological context, see Gnirs 1906, esp. 232–46; and 1908, esp. 19–48. 12

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F ig . 3.7.  The Pola casket, from the front and right. Ivory plaques and silver brackets at the corners, as well as a silver lock and hinges, over a wooden core. Found near Pola in Istria, early to mid-fifth century. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Venice. Photograph: Alinari/Art Resource NY.

was certainly buried as a container for relics, although this may well be a secondary use. It was, according to the original publication, placed inside a hollowed-out stone container (probably older and not made for this purpose, Fig. 3.14) with a make-shift lid, and then buried beneath the altar in the apse of the church as an act of consecration.13 Much of the damage to, and discoloring of, the ivory casket is the result of water-penetration under ground (for the current brown coloring, see Fig. 3.9). The casket therefore belongs to a kind of object vividly described in our early Christian sources of the period of its making, that is the later fourth and early fifth century. Here for instance is what Paulinus of Nola (c.354–431 ce), writing from Campania in Southern Italy, says in a letter to the Gallic Christian writer Sulpicius Severus, in the early fifth century. Paulinus’ new basilica, dedicated to Christ and the martyr Felix, “is venerable not merely through the respect paid to the blessed Felix, but also because of the consecrated relics of apostles and martyrs

  See Gnirs 1908, 19–20.

13

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F ig . 3.8.  The Pola casket, from the front, with the Hetoimasia and Lamb between apostles. Venice. Photograph: Alinari/Art Resource NY.

[reliquiis apostolorum et martyrum] kept under the altar in the tripartite apse.”14 Paulinus tells us that these relics—buried in the same place and context in the church as the Pola casket—were marked by a verse inscription (titulus):15 Here is reverence and fostering faith and Christ’s glory; here is the Cross, joined with those who witnessed to it. For the tiny splinter from the wood of the Cross is a mighty promise. The whole power of the Cross lies in this small segment . . . .

 Paulinus, Epistle 32.10, trans. P.  G.  Walsh. For the culture of relics surrounding Paulinus, see Mratschek, 2002, 433–43; Yasin 2009, 152–9; 2012. On the archaeology of Paulinus’ churches, see Brandenburg 1995; and esp. Lehmann 2004. On the descriptive strategies of Paulinus’ letters and poems on these churches, see Herbert de la Portbarré-Viard 2006; Dijkstra 2016, 238–66, esp. 241–2 on letter 32. For a contemporary parallel of martyr cult in the Eastern empire, see Limberis 2011, 9–52. 15   Further on tituli, see Arnulf 1997, 23–146 on the early Christian tradition and its antecedents; van Dael 1999, 122–32; Dijkstra 2016, 49–58 with bibliography; Leatherbury 2017, 544–82 on their framing. 14

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F ig . 3.9.  The Pola casket, back, showing a church interior (perhaps Old St Peter’s) with worshippers. Photograph: Scala/Art Resource NY.

The holy altar conceals a twofold honor to God, for it combines the cross and the ashes of the martyrs. How right it is that the bones of holy men lie with the wood of the Cross, so that there is rest on the cross for those who died for it!16

Paulinus discusses Severus’ church at Primuliacum (again with relics of martyrs alongside a fragment of the True Cross beneath the altar),17 and goes on in the same letter to describe the basilica he built at his own estate in Fundi en route to Rome. Here, “under the lighted altar, a royal slab of purple marble covers the bones of holy men.” After listing those whose relics he interned (including Saints Andrew, Luke, Nazarius, Protasius, and Gervasius) Paulinus comments “one simple casket (arcula) embraces here this holy band, and in its tiny bosom embraces names so great.”18 The Pola casket fits well into the context evoked by Paulinus, both as a type of object (an arcula for the kinds of bone and ash relics

16   Epistle 32.11; cf. Epistle 31.1 for more on the same relic of the True Cross. Further on tituli in Paulinus, see Engemann 1974; Lehmann 1992; Arnulf 1997, 47–66; Brandenburg and Ermini Pani 2003. 17   Epistle 32.7–8 with Trout 1999, 241–2. 18   Epistle 32.17; cf. Paulinus Carmina 27.402–48 for a long list of relics beneath the altar at Nola and Carmina 19 on the power of the relics at Nola. See Dijkstra, 2016, 259–60.

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F ig . 3.10.  The Pola casket, from the left, showing a church interior with closed door and approaching devotees. Photograph: Alinari/Art Resource NY.

that he describes) and in the place of its burial beneath the altar at Samagher. It differs—as we shall see—in that it offers no texts to define what relics it ­contained (by contrast with Paulinus’ titulus, letters, and poems) nor is its imagery easily tied to specific scriptural writings or saints’ lives. The casket’s sides have three tiers of decoration carved on ivory plaques attached to each of the main faces of the base, plus the lip of the lid which forms

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F ig . 3.11.  The Pola casket, from the right, showing a church interior with devotees. Photograph: Alinari/Art Resource NY.

a fourth tier (Figs 3.8–3.11).19 The central register on all four sides is significantly larger than the two narrower tiers between which it is sandwiched. This means that each side presents a range of decoration—a main scene in the largest register and bands of framing imagery above and below as well as the lip of the lid. The top of the lid—the scene one would see as one looked down onto and first handled 19   See Volbach 1976, no. 120, 85; Buschhausen, 1971, B. 10, 219–23. Monographs include Angiolini 1970; Longhi  2006 (the latter with much bibliography); see also Buddensieg  1959; Künzle and Fink 1976; Polacco and Traversari 1988; Bisconti 2009; Kalinowski 2011, 143–7; Elsner 2013.

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F ig . 3.12.  The Pola casket, lid, with Christ between Peter and Paul, palm trees, and lambs. Photograph: Alinari/Art Resource NY.

the box, with a slender and unadorned frame, but which is the part of the object that has survived in worst condition—has a single image (Figs 3.12–3.13). Christ stands between Peter, who carries a cross, and Paul, who offers a gesture of approbation, with palms behind and two lambs below Peter. The iconography is recognizable from a number of early Christian parallels as Jesus handing the law to Peter (the scroll of the law is lost now) in the presence of Paul,20 and we may expect there to have been two lambs beneath Paul in a section now lost, facing those beneath Peter, as well perhaps as a lamb below Christ.21 The sides of the base all have a lower register with a Latin cross in the middle of a somewhat abstract laurel frieze (Figs 3.7–3.11), whose subject evokes the martyrological associations of laurel crowns, such as that in the center of the upper tier on the casket’s back (Fig. 3.9).22 The upper register of the base shows lambs proceeding   On the parallels with early Christian imagery from Rome, notably the late fourth-century small apse mosaic in St Costanza of the same theme, see Davis-Weyer  1961, esp. 15–16. On this scene, see Angiolini 1970, 66–76; Longhi 2006, 36–42; and Bisconti 2009, 218–22. 21   This reconstruction was already largely in place in Gnirs 1908, 26–9, with more details and a drawing in Longhi 2006, 36–43 and tav. IV. 22   See Angiolini 1970, 12; Longhi 2006, 32. 20

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F ig . 3.13.  The Pola casket, lid, conjectural restoration. Photograph: after Angiolini, 1970.

from arches within buildings made of brick or dressed stone, towards the center (two on each side in the front and back, one on each side in the right and left ends, making twelve lambs in all, perhaps to signify the apostles, Figs 7–11). In the center of this tier on the right and left are plain Latin crosses without gems, at the back a martyr crown with the christogram between alpha and omega, and on the front the silver lock and key-hole, into which the key would have been inserted. 23 A further register on all four sides is made by the lip of the lid, resting on top of the base, which shows on each face four doves (two on each side) turned towards a jeweled Latin cross.24 These numerous small tiers frame the main decoration of the base, which comprises on the front a scene of the Hetoimasia, or the empty throne of God in preparation for the Second Coming (Figs 3.7–3.8).25 It is unfortunate that the

  See Angiolini 1970, 9–11; Longhi 2006, 25–32.   See Angiolini 1970, 9, 11; Longhi 2006, 14–25. 25   See Angiolini 1970, 52–66; Guarducci 1978, 58–66; Longhi 2006, 43–55. Generally on the empty throne, see e.g. Hellemo 1989, 102–8; and Bezzi 2007, 75–144 and 144–82 on the empty throne and its Greco-Roman antecedents, with specific discussion of the Pola casket at 94–6. 23 24

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F ig . 3.14.  Stone container and lid in which the Pola casket was found, from the Church of St Hermagoras, Samagher, Istria. Photograph: after Gnirs 1908.

F ig . 3.15.  The Basilica of St Maria Maggiore, triumphal arch mosaic with empty throne, 432–40 ce. Rome. Photograph: Maria Lidova.

section of the ivory between the throne’s cushion and the silver lock on the front has not survived, so we cannot tell what was on the throne, if anything. Options include a dove and scroll, as in the probably fifth-century mosaics in a lunette in the church of St Prisca near Capua,26 or a jeweled cross, as in the mid-fifth ­century mosaics at the apex of the triumphal arch of St Maria Maggiore in Rome (Fig. 3.15),27 or nothing. Beneath the throne stands the Lamb of God with the four 26

  See Farioli 1967, esp. 280–2.

  Davis-Weyer and Mostert 2005, 367–94; Foletti 2017.

27

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rivers of paradise flowing beneath.28 The potent absence of the empty throne plays against the imagery of the other three sides. In each case these show a church building with columns and arcades—either just outside the front (but within the atrium) or already within the interior (as perhaps implied by the hanging lamps and crowns on the back and left sides), and with two male figures on the left and two females on the right in each case (Figs 3.9–3.11). This division by gender is the same on all three sides with building iconography. Each face effectively offers three intercolumniations with the central one clearly the most important and the object of cult. The damaged nature of the casket prevents a complete assessment of the original iconography, but certainly on the left and right faces there are curtains drawn back in the central intercolumniation, while—on the left and the back—curtains are also drawn back on the two flanking intercolumniations.29 The central niche on both left and back has closed doors with figures approaching who may perhaps be pilgrims and are surely worshippers (Figs 3.10–3.11). On the left side (Fig. 3.10), a woman ushers a child towards the door, while a man, seen from behind, is trying the handle. The scene on the right is too damaged to permit certain reconstruction, but a woman approaches what would either have been a closed door (in parallel with the left and back) or perhaps an open space, behind the drawn curtains (Fig. 3.11).30 On the back, above the doors where two people appear to kneel (a man to the left and a woman to the right), is either a tympanum with a Cross flanked by two figures (possibly angels) or perhaps a view beyond the screen constituted by the doors towards the decorated apse of an inner sanctuary (Fig. 3.9).31 Scholarly discussion has focused obsessively on identifying the specific places represented by these three buildings—and it is indeed likely that the twisted columns of the back were intended to refer to the very rare twisted columns which had been appropriated as spolia to adorn the shrine of St Peter on the Vatican during the fourth century (Fig. 3.16).32 Although in the Renaissance, the spiral columns of St Peter’s were believed to have come from the Temple of Solomon, it appears that this association is high medieval, and the Pola casket—if it is

  See Hellemo 1989, 117–21, on the Lamb.   For curtains, see Paulinus of Nola, Carmina 14.98–9: “Now the golden threshold is adorned with snow-white curtains [niveis velis], and the altars crowned with crowds of lanterns”; 18.30–2: “fine curtains [pulcra vela] made of gleaming white linen [puro splendida lino] or of material covered with bright shapes, for covering the doorways.” 30   Longhi 2006, 89–96 is much too optimistic in restoring a cross in the lost space. 31   On the devotional nature of the imagery, see Hahn 2012, 20–1. 32  Angiolini  1970, 12–51; Guarducci  1978, 16–58; Longhi  2006, 55–108; Bisconti  2009, 222–7; Kalinowski 2011, 146–7, all with long bibliographies. On the famous twisted columns of St Peter’s, see Ward Perkins  1952, esp. 24–33; Toynbee and Ward Perkins  1956, 203–5; 247–51; Guarducci  1978, 18–27; Nobiloni 1997; Kinney 2005, esp. 22–3, 29–30, 35–7. 28 29

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F ig . 3.16.  Marble spiral columns (probably second century ce) reused for the shrine of St Peter in the Vatican, first half of the fourth century ce, and reused again in the Reniassance Basilica of St Peter’s. Photograph: Jaś Elsner.

referencing an actual building—is alluding to St Peter’s.33 At the same time, the universal assumption in the archaeological literature on the Vatican, that the back face of the Pola casket is “graphic evidence” for, or “a representation of,” even a “remarkably clear picture of ” the shrine of St Peter, is a case of positivistic idealism which is at best unproven and unprovable.34 However tempting it may be, within a regime of documentary positivism which is so dominant in the archaeology and art history of the visual monuments of this period, to attempt to suggest other sites in Rome for the two remaining sides,35 it is not certain that the casket’s imagery was to be taken so specifically or in so documentary a manner, and anyway our evidential base will never allow sufficient precision for such identifications to be

  See Toynbee and Ward Perkins 1956, 249; Cahn 1976, esp. 55–6.   Quotes respectively from Krautheimer, Corbtt, and Frazer 1977, vol. 5, 257; Ward Perkins 1952, 22; Toybee and Ward Perkins 1956, 203. 35   e.g. on the left, Buddensieg 1959, arguing for San Paolo fuori le mure; Angiolini 1970, 50–1 and Guarducci  1978, 75–6, arguing for St Croce in Gerusalemme; Longhi  2006, 66–89, arguing for San Lorenzo. On the right, Buddensieg 1959, 185–7 and Angiolini 1970, 37–40, arguing for an octagonal baptistery, perhaps the Lateran; Longhi 2006, 89–96, arguing for St Croce or even for Jerusalem itself. 33 34

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compelling. Arguably, what is more significant than specific intended locations, is the variety and differentiation of the buildings and the closed doorways depicted on the casket’s sides and back. What the casket offers may be the actual depiction of precise intended referents or it may be a reality effect of such precision—the visual evocation, exempli gratia, of imagery suggesting real sites of real cult in the world, to set against the eschatological and paradisal resonances of the throne of God and the giving of the law. The fact is that the two sides and the back are careful to differentiate their architectural mimesis—not only offering visual imitations in two dimensions of different kinds of columns, capitals, entablatures, and decorative schemes, but also setting these specifically against the wholly natural palm tree colonnade of the casket’s front (Figs 3.9–3.11). Certainly the back seems to evoke a scene of depth with a more interior space in the center, with apparently straight columns set behind the spiral columns of the front, making a space within which the two smaller kneeling figures are placed. This is surmounted by a dome or baldachin of some kind as well as an entablature of carved stone with a form of ovolo or egg-and-dart molding. The right face does appear to be a polygonal structure, with something more like a bead-and-reel motif in its entablature and complex floral decorations in its roofing. The left side gives the appearance of a brick or dressed stone arcade on smooth columns, which resembles the visual treatment of the buildings with arches from which lambs emerge in the upper tier of all four sides, as well as the bottom right of the lid. Turning from buildings to entrances, beneath the arch at the center of the back a paneled door is firmly shut. On the left side, behind curtains which are drawn back, are closed doors in the form of a lattice or grill, which might imply that they can be peeped through.36 The right side, although not susceptible to compelling restoration since too little survives, certainly had drawn-back curtains and may have offered a variation on these themes of closure, opening, and the gaze of worshippers as they attempt to transgress the threshold into the inner sanctuary.37 Again all this imagery of buildings and enclosure is in play against the plein-air openness of the front where the throne is a kind of building or baldachin enclosing the lamb—fully revealed above the waters of paradise, while the colonnade is a wholly natural one of palms beneath whose   See Longhi 2006, 69–71. The diagonal criss-cross of the lattice has some parallels in the mid-fourthcentury Christian sarcophagus now at Boville-Ernica in Italy, whose main front is fashioned in the form of two grill-doors fastened at the center (see Dresken-Weiland 1998, no. 63, 20–1), the cut down ends of a Red Sea Crossing sarcophagus now in the museum at Arles (see Christern-Briesenick 2003, no. 43, 31–2, although the photograph does not show the sides) and the unusual five-panel sarcophagus of the late third century now in the Huntington Library in California, where lattice imagery replaces the much more normal use of strigilation (see Kranz 1984, no. 182, 229; Koch 1990). 37   Further on relics and interiority from antiquity to early Christianity, see Elsner 2015, esp. 13–31. 36

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intercolumniations (echoing the so-called “tree sarcophagi”) the apostles stand (Figs 3.7–3.8). The lid and the front, signalling the future coming of the Lord and his gift of the law, make a vigorous pronouncement of divine presence, even if this is modulated by the emptiness of the throne (Figs 3.7–3.8, 3.12–3.13). But the sides, with their firm emphasis on cult and on worshippers of both sexes, including children, approaching closed shrines on the left end and perhaps the right, or standing frontally in the Orans posture and apparently kneeling in veneration on the back, make a brilliant visual case for the play of closure and ostentation (Figs 3.9–3.11). The pilgrim’s desire for penetrating the closed enclave into the inner sanctum represented and occluded by the arcades, curtains and closed doors mirrors the box’s own play with the desire of anyone who might see it and wish to open it. The imagery implies a hidden and sacred secret and indicates the ways to approach that secret, while the box—used for relics in its final deposition beneath an altar—signals the sacred matter hidden within. Just as anyone handling the box is effectively constructed as a devotee, so the iconography of approaching sacred buildings casts all the people depicted on the casket as worshippers. The movement on the sides of the base up from the enclosures of the main scenes to the lambs emerging from buildings to venerate the Cross in the upper tier to the birds in the free air before the Cross in the lip of the lid, implies in the vertical axis a movement from the material to the ethereal, from the limitations of real space and its constrictions to the free and direct openness of full revelation (Figs 3.8–3.11). This upward movement is parallel with the movement from closure to openness, from built and man-made sanctity to the garden of paradise in the shift from back and sides to front and lid. The upwards movement of the sides, the closure of the imagery on the back and sides, the emptiness of the Hetoimasia on the front (Fig. 3.8), are all visually and eschatologically fulfilled in the full presence of Christ before Peter and Paul on the lid (Figs 3.12–3.13). That presence includes direct reflection of the iconography of the base—notably the two lambs emerging from a building at the lid’s bottom right, which emulates the upper tier of the all four sides of the base, and the four rivers of paradise (as well as the lamb above them, if this is correctly restored on the lid) which picks up the imagery of the four rivers beneath the lamb in the Hetoimasia panel of the front.38 Likewise the palm trees flanking the main image of the lid picks up on the palms that function as a paradisal arcade over the apostles in the Hetoimasia scene.

38   If it is the case that the lunette above the door that closes off St Peter’s tomb on the casket’s back depicts the Cross set on a hillock with the rivers issuing from it (as has been claimed but I cannot certainly make out from any photograph I have seen nor from my own autopsy of the original), then the rivers iconography at the center of both the back and the front of the base finds itself fulfilled on the lid. See Kessler 2007, esp. 116–17.

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The iconography of the back and ends reflects the closure and the man-made nature of church architecture, the wealth of liturgical fitments (including baldachins, screens, curtains, hanging crowns, and lamps) that construct sanctity (Figs 3.9–3.11).39 The columnar arcades and entablatures of these three sides give way to the open air of palm arcades in a paradisal setting on the front (Figs 3.7–3.8), which rises to the image of Jesus incarnate in paradise on the lid handing the law to the apostles who will establish his church in Rome and in Italy (Figs 3.12–3.13). That is to say, the casket’s pictorial language of closure and penetration to the sacred allows simultaneously a visual discourse of the plein-air landscape of paradise. Paradoxically, penetration into the deep interior, the inner sanctum, is at the same time a form of emergence into the pastoral locus amoenus of the Lamb and the Resurrected presence of Christ himself. All this of course serves as an iconographical argument for the precious, indeed perhaps magical, nature of the sacred matter contained inside the box, whose penetration gives access to relics that are themselves direct links to the salvific world signified by the images of Paradise and the Second Coming on the casket’s front and lid. The Pola casket, whether originally made for relics or not, ended up not only as a reliquary but as one that was buried out of sight for centuries. Its concealment of relics within a highly wrought box of expensive material and complex iconography was itself then re-performed in its own concealment within yet another, this time undecorated, stone box beneath the altar of the church of St Hermagoras (Fig. 3.14), as a sanctifying deposit. In this it is a high quality example of a significant class of reliquaries that were interred beneath or in hidden cavities within the altars of late antique churches.40 The relics of the Pola casket themselves are mentioned in no publication and do not appear to have been preserved by the excavators, if they survived at all. Beyond the casket’s function as a box, its iconography signaled the concealment of its contents behind a repeated imagery of closed doors. That is, its imagery drew attention to its function as a sealed container of sacred things, to the promise of their revelation through the opening of doors or lid, and to the interest in the sacred within from the people shown approaching the doors. Moreover, the imagery figures the veneration due to such absconded objects of sanctity through its repeated devotees represented in a variety of acts of worship (including standing in the Orans posture, kneeling, and walking bowed towards the doors). In its hidden place at the heart of the church, beneath the altar, the casket not only guaranteed the sanctity of the site through the sanctity of the relics secured within, but also played out the performance of veneration and

  So Kessler 2007, 116–17.   See generally Yasin 2015; for specific discussion of the reliquaries, relic deposits, and caskets for their interment found in archaeological excavation within altar complexes in southern France, see Narasawa 2015. 39 40

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worship as well as the beneficence of Christ’s epiphanic post-mortem appearance, as represented on the lid, which was the fulfillment of that worship. None of this could be seen by those who prayed in the church in the centuries during which it remained in use, after the casket was buried and until it was disinterred in 1906. But it was all foreseen, and the casket deliberately was chosen for its iconographic mimesis of the act of worship by those who buried it in the foundations of the church they were building.41 The brilliant—one might almost say magical—move of consecrating sacred space with a reliquary whose imagery constituted a perpetual (if hidden) model for the activities of devotion which characterize that space, was paralleled a century later in the mosaics of San Vitale in Ravenna, directly across the Adriatic Sea from

F ig . 3.17.  Mosaic of Theodora and her entourage, from the Presbytery of the Church of San Vitale, c.545–9 ce. Ravenna. Photograph: Scala/Art Resource NY.

41   In this sense, as providing a kind of invisible cognitive reliability for the sanctity of the church that amounts almost to the magical, the Pola casket echoes (in a different political context) some of the issues about the politics of invisibility that Richard Neer discusses in the context of Athenian democracy in this volume.

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Pola. In the famous panel of the empress Theodora on the southwest wall to the right of the apse in the presbytery of the church, the empress and her entourage walk through what is apparently a church atrium—with fountain and conch-shell canopy over her haloed presence—carrying liturgical gifts towards a door whose beautifully decorated curtain is being drawn back by an attendant (Fig. 3.17).42 The approach to a half-open door that leads, one presumes, into a church within the courtyard of a sacred precinct in an act of devotion is itself echoed by the image of the three Magi embroidered in gold on the hem of Theodora’s purple chlamys. This panel offers a parallel iconographic theme to those of the sides and back of the Pola casket with similar mimetic ramifications. But it has none of the reliquary, secret, or magical functions of the buried box from Samagher.

V ISUA L T H EOLOG Y

I now want to move beyond the casket itself to the specific conceptual implications of invisibility, in relation both to what it contained (relics) and to its iconography’s obsession with desire for seeing the invisible, as an instantiation of Christian theological thinking in its time. This has not been done before in relation to this object, despite the fact that the casket is one of our richest reliquaries from the early Christian period (iconographically speaking) and that both its contents and its imagery directly respond to a series of key debates within the culture in a period of rapid and indeed transformative change within Christianity. There are three issues here, all directly relevant to what may be called the casket’s “discussion” of sanctity as a work of material culture. First, the rise of the cult of relics and the specific debate about relics in the later fourth and early fifth century, a theme clearly central to the casket’s function as a reliquary. Second, the question of holy space and whether particular places—sanctified by the presence of a holy body, the site of a scriptural event, the special focus of ritual attention—could offer a more direct link to the divine than other spaces. This theme is directly raised by the specificity of place evoked by the church interiors of the Pola casket’s back and sides, in contrast with the paradisal generality of the scriptural and eschatological intimations of the front and lid. Third, there is the bigger theological issue of how the material—something limited, physically instantiated through bones and ashes, temporally determined, but above all human—can relate with the divine, which is by definition eternal and infinite. That theme, utterly central for Christian

42   The literature is vast. Fundamental remains Deichmann  1976, 180–95 with earlier bibliography. Later discussions include: Barber 1990; Andreescu-Treadgold 1994 (on restoration history); Elsner 1995, 177–88; Andreescu-Treadgold and Treadgold 1997; McClanan 1998; Gulowsen 1999; Abramowski 2001, esp. 291–302; Deckers 2002; McClanan 2002; Pasi 2006, 29–42; Deliyannis 2010, 237–43.

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thinking because of the Incarnation, which enabled God to become man and the divine Word to be embodied in flesh, is effectively played through visually by the casket’s iconography of particular places marked by human devotees set against scenes from Revelation on the front and the image of the Incarnate God handing his law to St Peter on the lid. One of the things the devotees appear to do on the back and the ends of the casket is to attempt to peer through barriers that render the inner sanctum invisible. That invisibility, like the closure of the box itself, marks the great—perhaps insuperable—difficulty of penetrating beyond the material to the paradisiacal world rendered through imagery in the lid and front.43 Let us begin with relics. As we have seen, the cult of relics arose with extraordinary rapidity in the last part of the fourth century and spread widely through the fifth.44 There was certainly resistance. A presbyter from Gaul, Vigilantius, anticipating what would a millennium and more later be a very rich Protestant literature on this topic, asked “why do you kiss and adore a bit of powder wrapped up in cloth?”45 and for his views received the most incandescently venomous of invectives in response from St Jerome.46 The vitriol may perhaps be explained by the fact that Vigilantius was, in effect, accusing the worshippers of relics of being idolaters.47 The defence of relics—as mounted for example in an extant sermon of Victricius of Rouen, and by Paulinus of Nola, in the early fifth century— consists above all in a metonymic logic whereby the whole is perceived in the part: when we “open the eyes of the heart,” a spiritual totality becomes possible and accessible through a bodily fragment.48 Victricius says, “I touch fragments; I affirm that in these relics lies perfect grace and virtue” (11.27); while Paulinus writes “where there is part of a saint’s body, there too his power emerges . . . great power [magna virtus] evinced even in a particle of the saint’s ashes proclaims the power   Here the casket represents a theoretical reflection, articulated through visual means, on the relations of the immaterial with the physicality of the manufactured object, as discussed in a Chinese context by Wu Hung in his chapter in this book. 44   See the references in n. 11 above. 45   Quoted by Jerome, Contra Vigilantium 4, trans. S. Rebenich. 46   This is Contra Vigilantium, probably composed in 404. The text is in Patrologia Latina 23.339–52, trans. S. Rebenich 2002, 106–18. It opens with “the world has given birth to many monsters” and continues with Vigilantius being treated to the terminology of “madman” (5), “live dog” (6), “viper’s tongue” (15). For discussion, see Hunter 1999; Trout 1999, 97–101 and 220–3; Bitton-Ashkelony 2005, 97–105. 47   In general the rich recent literature on the debates about relics and sacred space in late antiquity (that were conducted at a high level of theological generality and on issues of principle) has been keen to subject arguments to a strongly historicist and locally specific set of readings. For example, Hunter 1999, 429–30 reading Vigilantius in terms of late fourth-century arguments in the Gallic church and BittonAshkelony 2005, 85–97 reading Jerome very much in the context of his political and sectarian engagements in late fourth-century Palestine. This modern trend certainly need not be untrue, but in its constraint of general and theoretical claims to very specific sectional and local interests, it risks reductionism. 48   See Vitricius, Praising the Saints 2.12–14, 9.45, 10.4–5, 10.15–20, 11.1, 11.27 in Clark  1999). Also Paulinus, Epistle 31.1: “Let your faith not shrink because the eyes of the body behold evidence so small; let it look with the inner eye on the whole power of the cross in this tiny segment.” 43

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[vim] of the bodies of the apostles at the prompting of the Word” (Carmina 27.440–9). The force of this power was most directly manifested in miracles— for example the long list attested from personal experience by St Augustine in the last book of his City of God 22.8 (finished in 426 ce).49 Now none of this is represented on the Pola casket, although clearly relics are what it contained. But the miraculous quality of relics is what convinces the faithful of their value, and it is that which turns them into devotees. The images of worshippers on the back and sides of the casket, given the box’s contents—and the ways repeated sanctuary spaces represented on the box might refer to the sanctity of what is in the box itself—are a kind of visual rendition of Augustine’s personal witnessing (Figs 3.8–3.10). One aspect of the logic of reliquary metonymy is that relics are about fragmentation—breaking up and spreading the original sanctity of a specific sacred center, of the sort represented as devotional sanctuary spaces on the casket’s back and sides.50 The relic in its new place not only gives access to the sacred presence of that now absent site, but it participates in a logic of collection whereby fragments of many saints can be brought together beneath one altar—a theme repeated by Paulinus in his comments on the churches at Nola, Primuliacum, and Fundi. In a certain sense, this makes of each new reliquary context an entirely original sacred center, defined by the specific collection of saints and objects gathered there.51 Arguably, if the back and sides of the casket represent different sites of the cults of different saints, then the casket as a whole brings them together in the collective of its front where three saints stand on each side of the Lamb in the heavenly garden at the ending of days. Even specific aspects of the kinds of church furnishings on which Paulinus’ letters and poems linger— panel-work,52 colonnades,53 grille,54 curtains,55 lamps,56 etc.—are evoked in the imagery of the casket’s back and sides.57 But beyond relics, the very specific, yet not specifically identifiable or textually labeled, representations of church space on the back and sides of the Pola casket, raise questions about the sanctity of particular places which were at the heart of a debate quite as vibrant as that about relics in the late fourth and early fifth century. This concerned sacred space as such and the question of pilgrimage. In historical   On Augustine, see Trout 1999, 245–51; Bitton-Ashkelony 2005, 127–32.  For a good account of reliquary fragmentation (concentrating on a site rather than a body) see Wharton 2006, 9–48. 51   For relics as a “differentiated network” of fragments that together make a new collection, see Cox Miller 1998, esp. 130–8; Cox Miller 2015; and (on the holy land) Krueger 2015. 52 53   Epistle 32.12.   Epistle 32.12. 54 55   “The lattice pervious to light” at Epistle 32.13–14.  e.g. Carmina 14.98; 18.30–2. 56   Carmina 14.99–103; 18.35–7; 19.405–24; 27.389–92. 57   Conybeare 2000, 91–7 argues that Paulinus “displays relatively little interest in describing material objects as such” (92) but is herself rather effective at exploring his extensive range of material references to show their potential spiritual implications. 49 50

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terms, there is no doubt that Christianity was a religion which had no interest in holy places (and may even have shown some resistance to the idea of them) before 300,58 but became infatuated by them in the course of the fourth century.59 As with the cult of relics, the implication that the holy (which is to say a material point of special access to the divine) might be constrained to a specific material place or object was theologically controversial. In a text that was to prove especially resonant in the arguments of the Refor­ mation and Counter-reformation,60 Gregory of Nyssa—writing after his journey to Palestine in 381 ce—offered a significant critique of pilgrimage.61 The fundamental point lies in the rhetorical question: “what evidence is there that in those places [specifically, holy sites like Jerusalem], grace abounds more [than anywhere else]?” (Letter 2.10). The assumption that Jerusalem, Bethlehem, or the Mount of Olives (2.15), or by extension any site containing a saint’s body and relics, should be more holy than any other is an essential misconception: “What gain shall he have when he has reached those places? Is it that the Lord still lives in the body in those places and has stayed away from our regions? Or is it that the Holy Spirit abides among the inhabitants of Jerusalem, but is unable to come to us?” (2.8). The effect of the view that there can in principle be nothing theologically special about a specific place means that pilgrimage has no virtue and indeed we must ask why “a pastime that neither renders us blessed nor directs us to the Kingdom should be made an object of our zeal?” (2.3). Moreover, given the risks of vice and “contaminating the eye” in traveling (Figs 2.6–2.7), pilgrimage becomes positively negative. It is worth noting that this critique comes from one who is in other texts no enemy of the cult of the saints nor of the holy land itself, and who professes himself “filled with a joy so great that it cannot be described in words” “when I saw the holy places with the senses” (Letter 3.3). Theologically, the position that God cannot be contained by a specific place or object, and that divine grace cannot be curtailed or determined by human decisions about where it is best distributed, is unassailable. In different ways, a number of other Church fathers—many of them no less sympathetic to the emotional effects of holy places than Gregory—make the same point. Jerome wrote to Paulinus: “I do not presume to limit God’s omnipotence nor to restrict to a narrow strip of earth Him whom the heaven cannot contain . . . . The true worshippers worship   Taylor 1993, 295.   See Markus 1994, esp. 259. The early materials are rich and complex and the discussion is nuanced: see Walker 1990, 35–50 and 311–401 for differences in the positions of Eusebius and Cyril of Jerusalem. The best historical survey of the process remains Hunt 1982. 60   See Maraval 1986; Williams 1998, 94–134. 61  This is his second letter, translated by A.  Silvas in Gregory of Nyssa  2007. For discussion, see Kötting 1962, 360–7; Pietrella 1981; Cardman 1982; Maraval 1986; Ulrich 1999; Bitton-Ashkelony 2005, 30–64. 58 59

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the Father neither at Jerusalem nor at Mt Gerizim; for ‘God is a spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth’ [John 4.24].”62 Again Jerome was a notable advocate of the holy places, as in his Letter 46 to Marcella (of 386) and his Letter 108 to Eustochium in praise of her mother Paula (written in 404).63 Strikingly it is often when Christian writers endorse pilgrimage and the notion of holy space that they simultaneously affirm the impossibility of restricting the sacred exclusively to such sites. In his Letter 78, dated to 404, Augustine claims that miracles are more likely to happen in holy places—such as where “the blessed Felix of Nola is buried” as well as the shrines of the saints in Milan and in Africa “full of the bodies of holy martyrs”; yet simultaneously he pronounces “that God is everywhere, that He is not confined or bounded by any place, because he made everything . . . .”64 Similarly, when the Antiochene theologian Theodoret of Cyrus, writing in the early 440s, describes the pilgrimage of Peter the Galatian to Palestine “to see the places where occurred the sufferings of salvation and to worship in them the God who saved us,” he instantly modulates this description with “not that He is circumscribed in place (for Peter knew the lack of circumscription in His nature).”65 Theodoret goes on to make a subtle point. Peter’s impulse to pilgrimage is about the senses, which is to say a literal and materially instantiated form of spirituality located in place, but it transcends this limitation since the physical is merely a support for a metaphorical level of insight, which is necessarily more universal, and may effectively be invisible to the material eye.66 Theodoret has Peter travel to the holy land “in order to feast his eyes with seeing what he desired and so that the eyes of the soul should not through faith enjoy spiritual delight on their own without the sense of sight” (Religious History 9.2). The text then proceeds into a series of quotations from the Song of Songs, to conclude that actual pilgrimage is “a desire to behold as if a shadow of the bridegroom” (9.2), implying that it may aid the “eyes of the soul” to glimpse the bridegroom himself. In the case of the Pola casket, the physical eyes of all the devotees, female and male, on the sides and the back, as they seek to peer beyond the sanctuary enclosures, are in contrast to the spiritual eyes of the saints on the front (who see

 Jerome, Epistle 58.3, trans. W. Fremantle. See also Jerome’s Homily 23 (On Psalm 95): “When I say the Cross I am not thinking of the wood but of the Passion. This Cross, moreover, is in Britain and in India, and in the whole habitable world” (trans. Marie Ewald). 63   For Jerome’s complex attitudes to pilgrimage and to the holy places, see Bitton-Ashkelony 2005, 65–105 with further bibliography. 64  Augustine, Letter 78.3, trans. W. Parsons. On the contradictions, see Bitton-Ashkelony 2005, 123–4. 65  Theodoret, Religious History 9.2 (trans. R. Price); Wilken 1992, 116–17; Bitton-Ashkelony 2005, 177–8; Dietz 2005, 38–9. 66   A parallel movement from literal senses to salvific knowing can be traced in the analysis of scent. See Ashbrook Harvey 2006. 62

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the Lamb and the empty throne) and of the saints on the lid (who see Christ the “bridegroom” directly).67 The contradictions, so vividly in evidence in the early Christian accounts of holy places, are above all about the literal versus the metaphorical as a means to spirituality, not only in the understanding of pilgrimage,68 but in the sense of whether the sacred journey is an external one or an inner progression.69 It is against the intensity of these arguments about the specificity and yet universalism of the sacred, its literal and metaphorical instantiations, and all the questions of how access to it can be restricted, that the Pola casket’s imagery was created. The casket shows a series of highly specific places of devotion (Figs 3.9–3.11)—yet not so specific that they can certainly be identified—and plays these against the scriptural generality of its eschatological front (Figs 3.7–3.8) and the divine presence in an undifferentiatedly paradisal setting on the lid (Figs 3.12–3.13). These are powerful theological gestures, made entirely through visual means. They comment on the function of the casket in two ways. First, it is an item to consecrate a specific place and make that place sacred through the relics gathered inside the box, actual metonymic fragments of the holy; and, second, it is an object that both hides the relics it contains and was itself interred, merging any specific sanctity it possessed in its own right with the general sanctity of the sanctuary space it occupied. Moreover, all the images in which its claims were couched were made to be buried too. The casket makes claims both to specificity (through its discourse of relics, which of course are the active ingredient in sanctification) and to generality in its discourse of images—generic sacred spaces, such as the one that its relics have consecrated, and the universal space of the Lamb and the giving of the law on the front and lid (Figs 3.7, 3.11–3.12). In doing so, it deliberately addresses the complex of contemporary questions about the holiness of space through a visual argument of its own, which clearly affirms the sanctifying power of relics but also alludes to their universal nature as mediating links to the divine. In the consecrating act of the reliquary’s burial—the act that also constitutes its initial and deliberate archaeological commitment to the earth—the Pola casket denies both sight and touch, the two senses repeatedly emphasized in the

67   The spiritual eye of the believer, which can see the invisible nonetheless, is a further position within the taxonomy suggested by Claudia Brittenham in her chapter in this volume—that invisible objects may not be as invisible as they seem, that they may be visible to supernatural viewers, and that in the process of making or before burial they were overtly visible to select audiences. 68   See for example Edwards 2005, 5–23. 69   For the emphasis on the inner, one might point to Evagrius of Pontus in the later fourth century, with Bitton-Ashkelony 2005, 146–60 and esp. 168–74, or Ignatius of Loyola in the sixteenth century for a translation of pilgrimage entirely into inner space, with Smith 1987, 117.

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more enthusiastic writings on the holy places,70 and the two senses most keenly evoked in its own imagery of doorways to be penetrated and lattices to be peeped through and by its function as a box to be opened.71 That is, as object, the casket insists on making visually present the complex of problems associated with the invention of Christian sacred space in its time (sight, touch, specificity, generality). But, as an object made to be buried, it consigns all this to hiding, making absent its careful articulation of themes within the contemporary arguments about relics, pilgrimage, and spatial sanctity. If we turn to an argument not made by the early theologians but by modern scholars, albeit one well illustrated by ancient Christian texts, the sanctification of place is above all due to ritual.72 Certainly, the traveller Egeria, who went to the holy land in the 380s, devotes a significant portion of what survives of her account to the liturgical activities of the holy places (Travels 24.1–49.1). Likewise, the panegyrical and ecphrastic literature on martyr cult and shrines has a strong emphasis on worshippers and the devotional flock of the faithful.73 Again the Pola casket is distinctive in depicting its sacred spaces with active congregations, both male and female, in a variety of forms and positions of worship, from the Orans posture and supplicatory kneeling on the back via a variety of other forms of approach on the sides. In this emphasis on devotion, it differs markedly from the tradition of depicting sanctuary doorways in pre-Christian Greco-Roman culture (whose iconographies it adapts)—for in pagan culture these are invariably absent of the depiction of worshippers.74 We may say that its emphasis on ritual action by ordinary people (even children) in sacred space on the back and sides

  For example: Paulinus, Epistle 49.14: “No other sentiment draws men to Jerusalem but the desire to see and touch the places where Christ was physically present”; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 13.22: “Others merely hear, but we see and touch” (my italics in both texts). On the combination of ­haptic and visual piety in late antiquity, see Frank 2000, 118–33; Cox Miller 2001. 71   On the questions of closure and penetration, see Elsner 2013. 72  Smith  1987, 88–95, modeling his analysis on the late fourth-century pilgrimage text of Egeria; Markus 1994, 265–8. 73  For instance on the Greek side, see Basil, Homily on the 40 Martyrs of Sebaste 8: “Here a pious woman is found praying for her children, begging for the return of her husband who is away, for his safety because he is sick” (trans. P. Allen, dated to c.373); Gregory of Nyssa, Homily on Theodore the Recruit 61.4: “You people of Christ, the holy flock . . . inhabitants of cities and villages, who have streamed together from everywhere” (trans. J. Leemans, dated to between 379 and 381); Gregory of Nyssa, First Homily on the 40 Martyrs of Sebaste (1a) 137.5: “Being crowded against each other appears to be for many an unpleasant thing; to me, however, it is the summit of joy”; 137.15: “the noise of the multitude”; 141.27: “such a large crowd” (trans. J. Leemans, dated before 376). On the Latin side, see Paulinus, Carmina 13.24–5: “See the crowds of many hues bring colour to the roads in their mottled throng, and we eye with astonishment countless cities in a single city” (on St Felix’s birthday, 396 ce, trans. P. G. Walshe); 14.44–5 and 55–78; 20.191–2. On the Cappadocian fathers, see Limberis 2011, 55–7. 74   For discussion, see Elsner 2013, 201–20, esp. 219–20. 70

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contrasts with the attendance of saints on the Lamb in the front and with the presence of Peter and Paul before Christ on the lid. If indeed the back represents the Vatican cult-site where St Peter’s body was venerated, as is likely, then the shift from the populace worshipping Peter to the saint himself before the Incarnate God on the lid is a brilliant visual argument for the mediating function of the saints and for the devotional mimesis, whereby the worshipper’s ritual action before the saint’s relics is an imitation of the saint’s action before Christ in heaven on behalf of the worshipper.75 Theologically, underlying the debates about pilgrimage and relics, one key argument needs to be considered. This is the Arian controversy, which the first Ecumenical Council of Nicaea was convened to resolve in 325 but which rumbled on at length and with great complexity through the fourth century.76 It concerns the fundamental question of salvation—how God can relate to man and by what intermediary mechanism man can be saved. One might argue that any solution which overly emphasizes the human (as Arius and his adherents were accused of doing when they discussed the Second Person of the Trinity and argued that by His association with human weakness the Son was different by nature from the Father)77 or which excessively emphasizes the divine, prevents the possibility of salvation through Christ as the unique combination of the two natures of God and man in one person.78 All the arguments about the specialness and specificity of relics or holy places are ones that risk emphasizing the specific and limited (i.e. the human), whereas all arguments that generalize or universalize are at risk of losing sight of the human element which allows intercession with God. In terms of the artistic issues at the heart of this book, visibility has the tendency to overstress the human and invisibility to overstress the divine. The Pola casket itself confronts these issues by emphasizing humanity and sacred space on its back and sides, but situating its visual world of sanctuaries and worship within the dispensation of the scriptural references of the front (to the Lamb and Revelation) and of the direct image of Christ as the incarnate God-man on the lid. The choice of imagery and its careful disposition effectively reveals a theologically thoughtful design behind the casket. Yet it is always liable to an interpretation that emphasizes the humanity of the back and sides, or one that stresses the eschatological finality of the lid and front. The two must be taken together for 75   The call to imitation by worshippers of martyrs is made e.g. by John Chrysostom, Homily on Julian the Martyr 4 (delivered perhaps in the 390s): “We won’t just be in the martyrs’ presence but also imitate martyrs” (trans. W. Mayer). 76   The topic is vast in both its theological intricacy and its historical complexity, while the sources—at any rate on the Arian (i.e. what came to be seen as the heretical) side of the dispute—have survived in pitiful condition. For detailed and theologically nuanced accounts, see Williams  1987; Hanson  1988; Wiles 1996, esp. 1–51. A useful summary is Lyman 2008, 237–57. 77 78   See Gwynn 2007, 186–202, 245–9.   See e.g. Pelikan 1971, 191–210.

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the casket’s call to salvation through the intercession of relics and images to be activated. Its theology—intelligent, well-situated in contemporary theory, and brilliantly marshaled by material and visual means—nonetheless requires interpretative care in the act of visual exegesis by its potential viewers.

CODA

Methodologically, this paper has attempted to do three things. First to present the archaeological specificity of the Pola casket as a kind of item made to be buried permanently, within a class of such items, and by contrast with the taxonomy of accidental or temporary interments which I sketched at the outset. Second, it has presented the formal structure and iconography of the object as a work of art, showing how iconography happens to comment with thoughtful intelligence on its functions. Third, it has attempted to place the cultural meanings of the casket’s images within the intellectual thought-world of the time and the early Christian context in which it was created. These moves—at least the second two—are standard gestures within the iconological practice of the discipline of art history as prescribed by Erwin Panofsky in the 1930s: that is, an iconographical analysis according to the relevant history of styles, forms, and types followed by an analysis of cultural symptoms or symbols in general, which comes down to the adduction of a wealth of texts.79 I would certainly stand by what I have argued in this second move (of textual elucidation), but there is surely (always) this more to be said, were my knowledge of the rich literature of the church fathers deeper and more extensive. Certainly the fullness and subtlety of the Pola casket’s imagery puts it in a class of its own within the category of reliquaries made-to-be-buried. But two points need adding. First, the casket does not just reflect meaning given in or by the culture. It actively translates complex and controversial positions, to which we only have access through often highly polemical texts, into an entirely visual discourse; and it makes its own visual and material contribution (as a box for relics that uses the imagery of cult practice and scripture) to the early Christian debate. It is thus a much more active and direct participant in its visual world than a simple interpretative iconology might allow. Second, the casket does all this under the cloak of “absconding”: it is made to be hidden, its rich imagery made to be invisible, its play of absence and presence made to be visually absent from any congregant’s eyes while materially and invisibly present beneath the altar. None of its visual arguments were made to be seen after the point when   My terms here are drawn from the tables in Panofsky 1939, 14–15 and 1955, 40–1. For more on these tables and the way they differ from his first venture into the tabulation of Iconology in 1932, see Elsner and Lorenz 2012, esp. 498–506. 79

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its magical purpose as a consecrating sanctifier of holy space had been activated. The archaeological impulse to burial and the need for its complex and diverse imagery to be hidden in the act of consecration are essential to its purpose as the altar reliquary at Samagher. Both within its historical/archaeological significance and within its theoretical resonance as a particular and in its own right intensely thoughtful object of art, this richness of meaning within a regime of absconding creates a far more complex space for the art historical object than traditional Panofskian theory will allow. That is, I wish to argue that the archaeological nature of the object, as one made- or acquired-to-be-buried, became essential to its visual meanings and definition. This is not art under erasure,80 nor sacred imagery created to be destroyed.81 Its existence mattered alongside its hiddenness. In the case of this casket—though not necessarily in the case of the invisibility of the other works of art discussed in this volume—that hiddenness (itself referred to both by the closure of the relics in the box and by the closure of the sanctuary doors depicted on the casket’s back and sides) operates through a kind of mimesis. Just as the figures on the back worship at the tomb of St Peter, who is himself on the lid a worshipper in the presence of Christ, so the congregation in the church at Samagher in the centuries after the object’s interment—not knowing either the imagery on the Pola casket or even of its existence beneath their altar—emulate the worshippers on its back and sides. As the human figures within the casket approach church spaces whose interiors are concealed, and as the apostles of the front approach a throne that is empty, so the devotees at Samagher stand before an altar beneath which, unbeknownst to them though as a token of their faith, lies hidden an object that both foretells their activity of devotion and gives it, in its collected relics, a specific and instantiated focus. ACK NOW L EDGM EN T My thanks are due above all to my three collaborators—readers, inspirers, raisers of my game—and to all who commented at the first presentation of this chapter in Chicago and then at the Late Antique Seminar in Oxford, where it had a subsequent airing.

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H erbert de la P ortbarré -V iard , G.  (2006), Descriptions monumentales et discours sur l’édification chez Paulin de Nole: le regard et la lumière (epist. 32 et carm. 27 et 28) (Leiden: Brill). H errmann -M ascard , N.  (1975), Les reliques des saints: formation coutumière d’un droit (Paris: Klincksieck). H unt , E. D.  (1982), Holy land pilgrimage in the later Roman empire, AD 312–460 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). H unter , D. (1999), “Vigilantius of Calagurris and Victricius of Rouen: ascetics, relics, and clerics in late Roman Gaul,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 7, 401–30. H unter , F.  and Painter, K., eds (2013), Late Roman silver: the Traprain treasure in context (Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland). K alinowski , A.  (2011), Frühchristliche Reliquiare im Kontext von Kultstrategien, Heilserwartung und sozialer Selbstdarstellung (Wiebaden: Reichert). K essler , H. (2007), “Bright gardens of paradise,” in J. Spier (ed.), Picturing the Bible: the earliest Christian art (New Haven: Yale University Press), 111–39. K inney , D. (2005), “Spolia,” in W. Tronzo (ed.), St Peter’s in the Vatican (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). K och , G.  (1990), “Ein dekorativer Sarkophag mit Scherengitter in der Henry E. Huntingdon Library and Art Gallery, Can Marino,” in M. True and G. Koch (eds), Roman funerary monuments in the J. Paul Getty Museum (Malibu, CA: Getty), 59–70. K ötting , B. (1962), “Gregor von Nyssa’s Wallfahrtskritik,” Studia Patristica 53, 60–7. K ranz , P. (1984), Jahreszeiten Sarkophage (ASR V.4) (Berlin: Mann). K rautheimer , R., C orbett , S.,  and F razer , A., eds (1977), Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum Romae (Vatican: Pontificio istituto di archeologia cristiana). K rueger , D. (2015), “Liturgical time and Holy Land reliquaries in early Byzantium,” in C. Hahn and H. Klein (eds), Saints and sacred matter: the cult of relics in Byzantium and beyond (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Publications). K üchler , S. (1999), “The place of memory,” in A. Forty and S. Küchler (eds), The art of forgetting (Oxford: Berg), 53–72. K ünzle , P.  and F ink , J.  (1976), “Das Petrusreliquiare von Samagher,” Römische Quartalschrift 71, 22–41. L eader -N ewby , R. (2004), Silver and society in late antiquity (Aldershot: Ashgate). L eatherbury , S. (2017), “Writing, reading and seeing between the lines: framing late antique inscriptions as texts and images,” in V. Platt and M. Squire (eds), The Frame in classical art: a cultural history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 544–82. L ehmann , T.  (1992), “Eine spätantike Inschriftensammlung und der Besuch des Papstes Damasus an der Pilgerstätte des hl. Felix in Cimitile/Nola,” Zeitschrift für Papayrologie und Epigraphik 91, 243–81. L ehmann , T. (2004), Paulinus Nolanus und die Basilica Nova in Cimitile/Nola: Studien zu einem zentralen Denkmal der spätantik-frühchristlichen Architektur (Wiesbaden: Reichert). L imberis , V. (2011), Architects of piety: the Cappadocian fathers and the cult of martyrs (Oxford: Oxford University Press). L onghi , D.  (2006), La capsella eburnean di Samagher: iconografia e commitrenza (Ravenna: Edizioni del Girasole).

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L yman , R.  (2008), “Arius and Arians,” in S. Ashbrook Harvey and D. Hunter (eds), The Oxford handbook of early Christian studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 237–57. M araval , P. (1986), “Une controverse sur les pèlerinages autur d’un texte patristique,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuse 66, 131–46. M arkus , R. (1994), “How on earth could places become holy? Origins of the Christian idea of holy places,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2, 257–71. M c C lanan , A. (1998), “Ritual and representation in the Byzantine empresses court at San Vitale Ravenna,” in N. Cambi and E. Marin (eds), Radovi 13 (Split: Arheološki muzej), 11–20. M c C lanan , A. (2002), Representations of early Byzantine empresses: image and empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). M c L ynn , N. (1994), Ambrose of Milan (Berkeley: University of California Press). M inchev , A. (2003), Early Christian reliquaries from Bulgaria (Varna: Stalker). M ratschek , S.  (2002), Der Briefwechsel des Paulinus von Nola (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). N arasawa , Y. (2015), Les autels chrétiens du Sud de la Gaule (Ve–XIIe siècles) (Turnhout: Brepols). N obiloni , B. (1997), “Le colonne vitinee della basilica di San Pietro a Roma,” Xenia antiqua 6, 81–142. N oga -B anai , G.  (2008), The trophies of the martyrs: an art historical study of early Christian silver reliquaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press). P adgett , J.  (2011), “Reliquary in the form of a shrine,” in A.  Lazaridou (ed.), Transition to Christianity: art of late antiquity, 3rd to 7th century ad (New York: Onassis Foundation), 131. P anofsky , I.  (1939 [1967]), Studies in iconology: humanistic themes in the art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row). P anofsky , I. (1955), Meaning in the visual arts: papers in and on art history (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). P asi , S. (2006), Ravenna, San Vitale: It corteo di Giustiano e Teodora (Modena: Panini). Pelikan, J. (1971), The Christian tradition: 1 the emergence of the Catholic tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). P ellizzi , F., ed. (2009), “Absconding,” RES 55/56. P eschlow , U. (2006), “Altar und Reliquie. Form und Nutzung der frühbyzantinischen Reliquienaltars in Konstantinopel,” in M. Altripp and C. Nauerth (eds), Architektur und Liturgie (Wiesbaden: Reichert), 175–202. P ietrella , E. (1981), “I pellegrinaggi ai Luoghi Santi e il culto dei martiri in Gregorio di Nissa,” Augustinianum 21, 135–51. P ietri , C. (1976), Roma Christiana, 2 vols (Rome: Bretschneider). P olacco , R. and T raversari , G., eds (1988), Sculture romane e avori tardo-antichi e medievali del Museo archeologico di Venezia (Rome: Bretschneider). R ebenich , S. (2002), Jerome (London: Routledge). S ághy , M.  (2000), “Scinditur in partes populus. Pope Damasus and the martyrs of Rome,” Early Medieval Europe 9, 273–88. S helton , K. J. (1981), The Esquiline Treasure (London: British Museum Press).

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S mith , J.  Z.  (1987), To take place: toward theory in ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). S mith , R. R. R. (1999), “Late antique portraits in a public context: honorific statuary at Aphrodisias in Caria”, Journal of Roman Studies 89, 155–89. S mith , R. R. R. (2016), “Aphrodisias,” in R. R. R. Smith and B. Ward-Perkins (eds), The last statues of antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 145–59. S noek , G. (1995), Medieval piety from relics to the Eucharist: a process of mutual interaction (Leiden: Brill). T aylor , J. (1993), Christians and the holy places (Oxford: Oxford University Press). T oynbee , J. and P erkins , J. W. (1956), The shrine of St Peter and the Vatican excavations (London: Longmans, Green). T rout , D. (1999), Paulinus of Nola (Berkeley: University of California Press ). U lrich , J. (1999), “Wallfahrt und Wallfahrtskritik bei Gregor von Nyssa,” Journal of Ancient Christianity 3, 87–96. van D ael , P.  (1999), “Biblical cycles on church walls: pro lectione pictura,” in J. den Boeft and M.  L.  van Poll-van de Lisdonk (eds), The impact of scripture in early Christianity (Leiden: Brill), 122–32. V olbach , W. F.  (1976), Elfenbeinarbeiten der spätantike und des frühen Mittelalters (Mainz: Von Zabern). W alker , P.  (1990), Holy city, holy places? Christian attitudes to Jerusalem and the holy land in the fourth century (Oxford: Oxford University Press). W ard P erkins , J.  (1952), “The shrine of St Peter and its spiral columns,” Journal of Roman Studies 42, 20–33. W harton , A. (2000), “Erasure: eliminating the space of ancient Judaism,” in L. Levine and Z.  Weiss (eds), From Dura to Sepphoris: studies in Jewish art and society in late antiquity (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplements), 195–214. W harton , A. (2006), Selling Jerusalem: relics, replicas, theme parks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). W iles , M.  (1996), Archetypal heresy: Arianism through the centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press). W ilken , R. (1992), The land called holy (New Haven: Yale University Press). W illiams , R. (1987), Arius: heresy and tradition (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd). W illiams , W.  (1998), Pilgrimage and narrative in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Y asin , A-M.  (2009), Saints and church spaces in the late antique Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Y asin A-M. (2012), “Sight lines of sanctity at late antique Martyria,” in B. D. Wescoat and R.  G.  Ousterhout (eds), Architecture of the sacred: space, ritual, and experience from classical Greece to Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 259–69. Y asin , A-M. (2015), “Sacred installations: the material conditions of relic collections in late antique churches,” in C. Hahn and H. Klein (eds), Saints and sacred matter: the cult of relics in Byzantium and beyond (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Publications), 133–51.

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4

The Archaeology of Passage Reading Invisibility in Chinese Tombs Wu Hung

The eleventh section of Daode jing (Tao Te Ching), the foundational text of Taoism, reads: Thirty spokes share a hub; Because [the wheel] is empty, it can be used in a cart. Knead clay to make a vessel. Because it is empty, it can function as a vessel. Carve out doors and windows to make a room. Because they are empty, they make a room usable. Thus we possess things and benefit from them, But it is their emptiness that makes them useful.1

This section has always been appreciated as a supreme piece of rhetoric on the powers of nothingness, a philosophical concept fiercely articulated in the Daode jing. Whereas that may indeed be the author’s intention, the empirical evidence evoked to demonstrate this concept reveals an alternative way of seeing manufactured objects by focusing on their immaterial aspects. This way of looking at things has important implications for archaeological and art historical scholarship on ancient artifacts and ­architecture precisely because these two disciplines identify themselves with the study of physical remains of the past so firmly that tangibility has become an undisputed condition of academic research in these fields. Archaeologists routinely classify objects from an excavation into categories based on material and then inventory their sizes, shapes, and decoration. Art historians typically start their interpretation of images, objects, and monuments by identifying their formal attributes. Whereas such trained attention to material   My translation. For the Chinese text, see Wang Bi 1986, vol. 1, 6. The Daode jing is traditionally attributed to Laozi, who lived in the sixth century bce. The text’s true authorship and date remain topics of debate. For a concise introduction to the text, see Robinet 2008. 1

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and formal evidence will surely persist for good reasons, the Daode jing section cautions us of the danger of ignoring the immaterial aspects of man-made forms, which, though eluding conventional typological classification and visual analysis, are nevertheless indispensible to their existence as objects and buildings. The current chapter incorporates this approach into a study of ancient Chinese art and visual culture by arguing that constructed empty spaces on artifacts and structures—holes, vacuums, doors, and windows—possess vital significance to understanding the minds and hands that created them and thus deserve a serious look into their meaning. Like other chapters in this volume, it questions the conventional wisdom of taking visual presentation/perception as an essential criterion of the art historical object.2 On the other hand, the kind of invisibility discussed here differs from and complements the cases analyzed in other chapters: the intricately carved undersides of Aztec sculptures, the amazing casket of concealed relics buried beneath the Pola altar, and the famed Parthenon frieze that could not be seen from ground level. Instead of absconding images from the visual field, the empty spaces studied in this chapter negate images altogether while contributing to a larger system of visual and architectural construction. For this purpose I will examine two groups of archaeological evidence. The first group, including more than a dozen ancient Chinese tombs dating from the fifth to third century bce, displays a subtle but important change in funerary architecture: small doors and windows were created inside a tomb to connect separate spaces into a continuum. The second part of the chapter studies bi-disks buried or depicted in tombs dating from the fourth to the second century bce. One of the most revered ritual symbols in ancient China, the bi became a subject of antiquarian scholarship from at least the eleventh century and has attracted renewed interest in recent years due to numerous new discoveries. Without exception, researchers focus on the material, size, and surface patterns of their examples. The current chapter examines instead the hole drilled in the center of a bi to suggest that it was indeed this empty space that prompted ritual specialists to install certain bi, or their images, in crucial parts of a tomb. Within each group I will focus on a particular tomb, Laigudui Tomb 1 for the first group and Mawangdui Tomb 1 for the second. In the end, both groups of evidence encourage us to include various kinds of constructed emptiness into our research agenda. As studies of ancient art and culture steadily move away from isolated images to explore complex relationships between form and space and between object and subject, an archaeology of passage—a study of an “empty form” that by nature disrupts boundaries and connects spaces—appears to be both a logical consequence of this scholarly direction and a methodological advancement of it.

  See Richard Neer’s introduction to this volume, pp. 1–5.

2

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DOOR S A N D W I N DOWS I N L AT E E A ST ER N ZHOU (475 –221

b c e)

TOM BS

Until the end of the first millennium bce, most elite Chinese tombs took shape as boxlike timber structures buried at the bottom of vertical shafts (Fig. 4.1), earning names such as “casket grave” or “vertical-pit grave” for this type of burial.3 In the course of its development, the timber structure gradually grew into a

Earthen mound Rammed earth (external) Rammed earth (internal) Undisturbed earth Charcoal Coffin structrure

White clay 0

3 Metres

F ig . 4.1.  Cross-section and plan of Mawangdui Tomb 1 at Changsha, Hunan. Western Han, early second century bce. Kongjian de meishushi, fig. 3.14.   Scholars have traced the origin of this burial type to the single-coffin tombs of Yangshao culture, a large cultural complex which flourished in the mid- and upper Yellow River regions from the fifth to third millennia bce. For a general introduction to this burial type, see Wu Hung 2010, 20–4. 3

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complex coffin assemblage, consisting of an outer encasement (guo) that enclosed one or more inner coffins (guan) (see Fig. 4.12 below, p. 129). The assemblage as a whole, however, remained a self-contained unit, without a side entrance connecting its interior with the outside. Placed in the innermost coffin, the deceased was protected by multiple caskets as well as a thick layer of earth. Underlying this arrangement is the idea of cang or “hiding away,” glossed as the oldest definition of a burial in two Eastern Zhou texts.4 For several thousand years this idea dictated the general design of the casket tomb, but changes, both large and small, took place during its long history.5 One of these changes occurred from the fifth to third centuries bce in present-day Hubei, then the core area of Chu culture; whereas the entire coffin assemblage remained a tightly sealed unit, real or simulated openings appeared inside the unit to break down its internal divisions. The earliest and most elaborate example of this new type of burial is Leigudun Tomb 1 at Suixian—the great tomb of Marquis Yi of the state of Zeng who died in the late fifth century.6 Thirteen meters below ground level, the enormous tomb was built from large timber and sealed by a fill of charcoal and then by a layer of clay. Unlike most contemporary casket graves, it had an irregular floor plan, with four sections conceived as adjacent “rooms” (Fig. 4.2). Over three meters high, these sections were tall enough for an adult to enter. Rows of hooks fixed on the walls allude to vanished fabric hangings. The identity of each room is indicated by the objects it contained. The central room mirrored the formal audience hall in the marquis’s residence. The largest chamber of the four, it yielded most of the ritual bronzes in the tomb, as well as a huge set of bronze bells and an accompanying set of chimestones, two musical instruments that were essential for a ritual orchestra.7 The north chamber was an armory, storing most of the 4500 items of weaponry, armor, shields, and fittings from horse chariots. The west chamber supplied an underground harem or a female orchestra, concealing the bodies of thirteen young women in their respective lacquer coffins. Eight more women and a dog were found in individual coffins in the east room, the burial chamber that also housed Marquis

4   “Burying means hiding away; and that hiding [of the cadaver] is from a wish that men should not see it. Hence there are the clothes sufficient for embellishing the body; the guan-coffin all around the clothes; the guo-casket all around the guan-coffin; the earth all around the guo-casket; and a mound further raised over that grave with trees planted on it”; Ruan Yuan 1980, 1292; based on Legge 1967, vol. 1, 155–6. 5   For the development of casket tombs, see Zhao Huacheng 1998; Huang Xiaofen 2003, 26–42; Luan Fengshi 2006. 6   Although this tomb was looted once, the robbers only penetrated the northeast corner of the tomb’s central chamber and took few, if any, objects. For the excavation report, see Zenghou Yi mu 1989. 7   The bell and chimestone sets are the centerpieces of 115 musical instruments found in this chamber. The Chinese scholar Tan Weisi believes that the whole assemblage closely imitated a band used by the Zeng royal house to play formal ritual music. See Zenghou Yi mu 1989, vol. 1, 119.

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Fig. 4.2.  Plan of Leigudun Tomb 1 at Suixian, Hubei. Early Warring States period, fifth century bce. Kongjian de meishushi, fig. 3.3.

Yi’s enormous outer and inner coffins assembled in a single set. The musical instruments buried in this room include zithers and mouth organs. Unlike the grand ritual orchestra in the central room, these portable instruments suggest informal performances taking place in the marquis’s private quarter.8 Three kinds of passages redefined these partitioned rooms and separately built coffins as linked architectonic spaces. The first consists of three openings on the partition walls between the four rooms (for locations see Fig. 4.2). The walls are made of thick timber over half a meter thick. Thus although the openings are unadorned and relatively small, one thirty-five centimeters and two slightly over fifty centimeters tall, to create them would still have required considerable effort and hence serious motivation. Both their rectangular shape and near-floor position identify them as doorways. Their limited size, however, indicates that they were prepared, not for real people, but for a transformed being capable of penetrating small holes to reach different quarters in this underground residence. The second kind of opening is represented by a hole on the marquis’s outer coffin. The coffin is a massive, formidable structure 3.2 m long, 2.1 m wide, and   See von Falkenhausen 1991, 82. Also see Zenghou Yi mu 1989, vol. 1, 119.

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F ig . 4.3.  Marquis Yi’s outer coffin from Leigudun Tomb 1. Kongjian de meishushi, fig. 3.12.

2.19 m high, strengthened by an internal bronze framework and standing on ten solid bronze feet (Fig. 4.3). Ornate lacquer painting covers its entire surface, featuring interlacing patterns on well-proportioned panels and borders. It is shocking, therefore, to find a gaping hole that abruptly disrupts the rhythmic decoration and exposes the coffin’s plain interior. But if the hole degrades the coffin’s security and beauty, it aligns itself with the three doorways on the partition walls by both shape and size; it is likewise rectangular, and its dimensions, 34 × 25 cm, are almost identical to the opening between the central and north chambers. These consistencies and inconsistencies indicate that the tomb’s designers gave priority to a cross-sectional program of passage over the strength and visual coherence of a particular section. Openings of the third kind are not real but are represented by painted images. There are at least seventeen of them, three on the marquis’s inner coffin and the rest on thirteen small coffins of sacrificed females.9 After comparing these images   Based on photos and line drawings published in the excavation report, Alain Thôte thinks that at least twelve small coffins are decorated with images of openings, six from the east chamber (nos. 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8) 9

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with earlier and contemporary architectural models and drawings, Alain Thôte concludes that two images on the long sides of the marquis’s inner coffin represent a double-leafed door while an image on the rear panel represents a casement window (Fig. 4.4).10 Images of doors are absent on the women’s much smaller and cruder coffins, which only have windows depicted on one or both narrow ends. Compared with the hollowed out openings of the two previous kinds, these painted doors and windows have a different ontological status and realize their symbolic function within a pictorial as well as architectural context. They do not simply provide empty channels to connect architectural spaces but mimic doors and windows in a realistic manner, with latticework and patterned frames as their own visual properties. Painted on the smooth surface of the coffins, they interact with the surrounding images to form larger pictorial programs. The two doors on the marquis’s inner coffin, in particular, are flanked by horned creatures

F ig . 4.4.  Marquis Yi’s inner coffin from Leigudun Tomb 1. Kongjian de meishushi, fig. 3.11a.

and the six from the west chamber (nos. 1, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13); Thôte 1991, 44, n. 16. Wang Lihua, however, states that the no. 6 coffin from the east chamber also bears such an image; Wang 1994, vol. 3, 308. Moreover, the excavation report mentions in passing that some coffins are decorated with window images on both ends, but does not specify these coffins; Zenghou Yi mu 1989, 53. Among the photos and drawings included in the report, only those of no. 2 coffin from the east room show two windows on both ends. There are therefore at least seventeen doors and windows painted on coffins in total.   Thôte 1991, 34–5.

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F ig . 4.5.  Drawing of a detail of the lacquer painting on Marquis Yi’s inner coffin. Kongjian de meishushi, fig. 3.11b.

with long halberds in their claws (Fig. 4.5). Thôte notices a detail that clinches an intrinsic relationship between the doors and the nearby creatures: the latter always direct the sharp blades of their halberds away from the door.11 As guardians of the coffin they are equipped with halberds; but they must not threaten the man inside the door with their dangerous weapons. Scholars, including this author, have suggested that these openings, whether actual or painted, were prepared for the marquis’s posthumous soul, which, to his contemporaries, would continue to possess mobility and desire nourishment.12 Similar beliefs in the autonomous posthumous soul may have existed in East Asia thousands of years before the construction of the Leigudun tomb; Chinese archaeologists have found many jar-shaped pottery coffins with circular perforations drilled on their walls or bottoms from prehistoric cemeteries (Fig. 4.6).13 Based on ethnographical evidence, they have interpreted such holes as passages that would allow the soul of the dead to move in and out of the jar-coffins.14 Explicit textual discourse on the soul only appeared much later in Eastern Zhou texts. Based on this information, Ying-shih Yü has detected a crucial change in the sixth century bce, when a theory of dual souls began to gain currency. Differing from the earlier view that each person possesses one soul, this theory posits that two souls, hun and po, are united in a living body but split from the other when   Thôte 1991, 37–8.   See, for example, Wang Lihua  1994, 315; Wu Hung  2010, 192–3. It should be noted that not everyone in the late Eastern Zhou or Han held this belief. The philosopher Xunzi, for example, once claimed that ancestor spirits were a product of people’s anxiety or hallucination. His view was further developed by Han writers such as Wang Chong (27–c.100 ce). For a discussion of this approach, see Brashier  2011, 219–26. But in general, such skepticism was directed against “conventional beliefs” among the population, and hence prove the wide existence of such beliefs. 13 14   Xu Hong 1989, 334.   Xu Hong 1989, 336. Also, Li Yangsong 1976. 11

12

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F ig . 4.6.  Pottery coffin for a child from Zhengzhou, Henan, Yanshao culture. Neolithic, fifth millennium bce. Zhongguo gudai yishu he jianzhu zhong de “jinianbei xing”, 2.37.

death occurs. Endowed with a greater ability of movement, the breathlike hun-soul would fly away, whereas the po-soul, with a heavier substance and restricted mobility, would continue to associate itself with the dead and stay underground.15 I have further suggested in an earlier essay that this dualistic conception of the soul was related to the twin centers in ancestral worship.16 The ancient Chinese worshiped many deities, but their religion was “primarily a cult of the ancestors concerned with the relationships between the dead and living kin.”17 During most of the Zhou, ancestral rituals were conducted in two major places: the temple at the center of a city or town and the graveyard outside the residential area. An important passage in The Book of Rites (Li ji) relates these two places to the two posthumous souls; it says that in answering a question from his student Zai Wo about the nature of spirits and ghosts, Confucius explains that “ghost” means the po-soul that remains underground after death, but the spirit, or the hun-soul, flies on high to become a divine being. “Once this opposition is established,” the Master continued, “two kinds of rituals are framed in accordance and (different) sacrifices are regulated.”18 Whereas these transmitted texts, including The Book of Rites, are rife with questions about authorship and provenance, the design of Leigudun Tomb 1 reflects a particular notion of the posthumous soul in the fifth century bce which seems to correlate closely with the textual description of the earthly po-soul. Historians of religion may take this as a crucial piece of evidence in studying the changing conception of the soul in ancient China. To historians of religious art, however, the issue at stake is always how forms transform beliefs into visual expressions. Applying the Daode jing text to a coffin drilled or painted with an 16   Ying-Shih Yu 1987, esp. 370–8.   Wu Hung 1988. 18   Keightley 1978, 217.   Ruan Yuan 1980, 1595.

15 17

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opening, we can say that if a regular, intact coffin functions as a “vessel” to contain the deceased body, it becomes a “room” when a hole—a window or door—is opened on its wall to allow the soul in and out. The fifth-millennium bce pottery coffin in Fig. 4.6 already implies this logic. The painted doors and window on Marquis Yi’s inner coffin signify a greater effort to model a coffin as a room, even though these are the only architectural references integrated into the coffin’s decoration (see Fig. 4.4). The idea is to present the coffin as a symbolic counterpart, not a literal replica, of an actual room. As Xunzi (c.312–230 bce) stated in his “Discoursing on Rites” (“Li lun”): The grave and grave mound in form symbolize a house; the inner and outer coffin in form symbolize the sideboards, top, and front and back boards of a carriage; the coffin covers and decorations and the cover of the funeral carriage in form symbolize the curtains and hangings of a door or room; the wooden lining and framework of the grave pit in form symbolize railings and roof.19

The character he used for “to symbolize”—xiang—can also be translated as “to resemble” or “to represent.” But because tombs at Xunzi’s time remained the casket kind, which neither resembled nor imitated the actual appearance of a house, he could not mean that a tomb mimicked a house literally and could only mean that it was designed to symbolize or allude to a residence. Leigudun Tomb 1 is the earliest known example in Bronze Age China to be equipped with a system of passages to facilitate the soul’s movement inside a sealed grave. This movement must have been imagined as starting from the space inside the inner coffin, where the deceased marquis lay. The painted doors and window would allow the posthumous soul to penetrate this innermost layer of protection; the rectangular opening on the outer coffin would then provide an easy outlet for the soul to leave the coffin assemblage altogether. Once outside the coffins, the soul, now functioning as the marquis’s disembodied avatar, would find itself inside a private chamber entertained by a band of female musicians. From here the soul could enter the next space—the central room of the tomb— through the rectangular opening on the partition wall. He would find himself at the center of a grand ritual offering. Food and drink would be offered to him in numerous sacrificial vessels; sounds of bronze bells and chimestones would mark the solemn occasion. “Doorways” on the north and west walls of this room provide further access to two more chambers, one of which contained a huge cache of weapons while the other contained thirteen sacrificed young women. The armory clearly highlights the marquis’s role as a military leader, but the identities of the women are not self-evident. It is worth noting that six of them had individual   Translation based on Watson 1963, 105. Watson translated the term xiang as “to imitate.” I have changed it to “to symbolize” for the reason stated in this chapter. 19

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coffins painted with window images, which allude to the mobility of their posthumous souls. It is possible that these women were the players of the musical instruments found in the central room. Significantly, this “female chamber” was constructed alongside the central room, so the women’s coffins were placed immediately behind the bell set across a partition wall (see Fig. 4.2). The “doorway” on the wall would allow the female musicians to assume their duties in the central ritual hall, but would also provide the marquis with access to his harem.20 A question remains: Why were two different methods used to create passages in this tomb—painted images for thirteen coffins but actual openings for the partition walls and Marquis Yi’s outer coffin? A simple hypothesis is that the painted “metaphorical” doors and windows were intended to meet two conflicting requirements. On the one hand, the corpse had to be securely concealed and protected according to ritual protocol; on the other, the animated soul demanded an outlet to escape the coffin’s confinement. Once this dilemma was solved by painting doors and a window on the innermost coffin, the tomb builder felt liberated to carve actual holes on the outer coffin and partition walls to facilitate the soul’s movement. A more complex explanation may incorporate this hypothesis while also taking funeral rites into consideration. According to the Ceremonies and Rites (Yi li), a set of Eastern Zhou ritual prescriptions, the initial sequence of the funerary ritual for a shi-gentleman would consist of two phases. During the first phase, inside the mourning hall, the deceased would undergo a symbolic process of rejuvenation; his body would be removed from the ground to a couch, purified, dressed, and offered food and wine. The second phase would initiate the transformation of the dead from this world to the other world; the corpse, now carefully dressed and wrapped, would be concealed inside a coffin and moved outside. Guests would arrive to pay their condolences, and, in receiving these guests, the members of the family would demonstrate their extreme grief.21 This second phase differs from the first in its semi-public nature; the dead would no longer be on view but would be represented by his coffin. Marquis Yi’s inner coffin, with its painted doors and window, would have been displayed on this second ritual occasion. Only later was it put into the outer coffin and lowered into the tomb; neither were subject to a public presentation.

20   The findings in the east room seem to support this hypothesis. Here at least six of the eight subsidiary coffins of sacrificed young women bear painted windows. These coffins were placed in the east side of the chamber, opposite to the marquis’s coffin in the west side. Ten musical instruments were also found to the east of the marquis’s coffin. See Zenghou Yi mu 1989, 53–5, 76. 21   The most systematic prescription of these funerary rite services appears in Yi li (Ceremonies and Rites). Scholars agree that this text was written during the later Eastern Zhou. For a summary of a standard funerary service and subsequent sacrifices, see Brashier 2011, 58–9. For a description of the funerary rites mentioned here, see Wu Hung 1992.

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Installing doors and windows in tombs became a popular, though never dominant, ritual practice in the Chu area over the next two centuries. More than a dozen middle-sized casket graves with such devices from the fourth and third centuries bce have been found near Jiangling, then the capital of the Chu state.22 None of them belonged to members of the royal family, and their construction and decoration are much more modest than Leigudun Tomb 1. Without exception, they all included a special chamber for the coffin; one or more compartments were constructed above and/or next to the coffin chamber to store grave furnishings, including food, drink, clothes, and household articles. Openings appear only on the partitions between the coffin chamber and adjacent storage chambers and never on the coffin itself. Some of these openings are small, rudimentary holes resembling the ones carved on the partition walls in Leigudun Tomb 1. Others translate the painted windows and doors on Leigudun coffins into three-dimensional forms. An interesting tendency is to build miniature doors with columns and movable leaves, reflecting a heightening desire to mimic a real household in the realm of the dead.23 But generally, the conceptual basis and visual language of these doors and windows remained the same as those in the Leigudun tomb. Around this time, however, a different type of passage began to emerge in tombs. Instead of deriving architectural features from the real world, it employed a time-honored ritual object to mark not only the soul’s movement but also its expected location. Passages in a tomb were thus reinvented in both form and symbolism, and in this process gave new meaning to an underground burial.

BI A S OPEN A N D CLOSED PA SSAGE S

The bi is an extremely important, if not the most important, ritual instrument of ancient China. Usually made of hard jade, it has the highly abstract form of a circular disk with a round perforation in the center (Fig. 4.7).24 The longevity of this simple artifact is astonishing; it was invented six thousand years ago, continuously produced during successive dynasties, and most recently inspired the design of the 2008 Beijing Olympic medals. Its original significance is unknown, but some

  For a detailed discussion of these devices, see Wang 1986, 306–17.   For examples, see Wang 1986, 308–10. 24   The second-century bce dictionary Erya distinguishes three types of ritual disks and rings: the bi is a disk whose central perforation does not exceed one third of the diameter of the entire object; the yuan has a perforation over one third of the diameter of the object in width; and the huan’s perforation reaches half of the width of the object. Archaeological excavations, however, have shown that these types, especially bi and yuan, are not clearly distinguished in actual ritual practices. In this paper the term bi refers mainly to the first type, but does not exclude the other two kinds if they are used in similar ways. 22 23

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F ig . 4.7. Jade bi-disk. Western Han, second-first century bce. Hubei Museum, Mawangdui Han mu qiqi zhengli yu yanjiu, fig. 3, 102.

prehistoric graves of the late fourth millennium bce had a large number of bi covering the body of the dead, indicating a prominent funerary function for the object.25 During the Zhou, the bi was given multiple meanings and used on different ritual occasions: as a primary symbol of Heaven, as a diplomatic gift in state affairs, and as personal credentials.26 It retained its funerary usage, however, and routinely appeared in elite tombs to surround the vital part of a corpse. In explaining this practice scholars commonly cite the belief in jade’s apotropaic function, which would be enhanced by making the material into bi-disks. Sun Qingwei noticed that from the early to late Western Zhou (eleventh century–771 bce), jade bi were regularly placed around the upper torso of a deceased aristocrat; the number of bi grew from a few pieces to as many as twenty in a single grave.27 Gu Fang has further studied this custom during the late Eastern Zhou and Western   Wu Hung 1995, 28.   These functions are recorded in Eastern Zhou texts such as the Rites of Zhou (Zhou li), The Records of Examination of Craftsman (Kaogong ji), and Xunzi (Writings of Xunzi). For a summary, see Strassberg and Foster 1986, 11–12. 27   Sun Qingwei 2008, 261–5. 25 26

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Han, identifying many instances that reflect obsessive use of the bi as a protective device.28 In one spectacular case, forty-three jade bi protected the body of Zhao Mo, who ruled the Southern Yue kingdom until his death in 122 bce. The disks, some thirty centimeters in diameter, were connected to make a special shroud, wrapping the king from head to toe.29 This and other examples demonstrate three consistent features of this mortuary practice: multiple bi-disks were always used, bi were always placed around the corpse, and the physicality of bi as ritual objects was always emphasized. A number of clues alert us to this last feature: bi found on these occasions are made of the hardest material known to the ancient Chinese; they are often large and heavy; and they bear zoomorphic and geometric patterns.30 No evidence indicates any special symbolism at the time for the hole on a bi, which seemingly only made it convenient to tie multiple disks together with ribbons and strings. In some aristocratic burials from the fourth century bce onward, however, a different method of using bi-disks emerged that implied an acute interest in the central perforation as the passage of the posthumous soul. The strongest evidence for this new significance of the bi comes from the so-called jade suit, a piece of special mortuary equipment reserved for members of the Han dynasty royal family.31 I thus interrupt my chronological account to introduce this amazing artifact from a slightly later period, which, as I have proposed elsewhere, was manufactured as a “jade body” invulnerable to time and elements.32 Taking Mancheng tombs 1 and 2 for example, these two royal tombs from the late second century bce yielded two jade bodies containing the remains of Prince Liu Sheng of the Zhongshan Principality and his wife Lady Dou Wan (Fig. 4.8). Both jade bodies have rudimentary facial features: each face bears three slits for eyes and a mouth; plaques were fitted together to represent a raised nose; Dou Wan even has a pair of protruding jade ears. The modeling of body parts also attests to a consistent attention to representing human anatomy: the arms are smoothly connected to two hands; fingers are shaped with plaques of different sizes; the torso has subtle curves; Liu Sheng is equipped with jade genitals. There is, however, one part of the jade bodies that seems at odd with this painstaking effort to transform flesh into the incorruptible material of jade. It is the bi-disk fitted on top of each jade head (Fig. 4.9). Lacking any anatomical significance, its main role is to provide an opening directly above the skull. More than ten jade bodies have been found so far. Created over the course of two centuries and belonging to at least three different types,33 they are all equipped with bi-disks in the same summit position. Some later examples, such   Gu Fang 2005.   Gu Fang 2005. 32   Wu Hung 1997.

  Guangzhou Municipal Administration of Cultural Relics 1991, 149–58.   For the excavations of these jade suits or “jade bodies,” see Lu 1981; 1989. 33   See Wu Hung 2010, 132–4.

28

29

30

31

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F ig . 4.8.  The “jade body” of Prince Liu Sheng of the Zhongshan principality, from Mancheng Tomb 1, Hebei. Western Han, 113 bce. Kongjian de meishushi, fig. 3.21.

Fig. 4.9.  Detail of Dou Wan’s “jade body” from Mancheng Tomb 2, Hebei. Western Han, 104 bce. Huangquan xia de meishu, 2–42.

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F ig . 4.10.  The “jade head” of Prince Liu Yan of the Zhongshan principality, excavated in Dingzhou, Hebei. Eastern Han, first century ce. Liyi zhong de meishu, vol. 1, color plate 6.

as the one belonging to a first-century Zhongshan prince, has sculpted eyes and mouth, but the hole above the head remains open (Fig. 4.10). This arrangement reminds us of the hole on the prehistoric jar-coffin (see Fig. 4.6); and indeed the basic idea behind both cases may be quite similar. The hole on the head of a jade prince, however, was not just any opening but an opening provided by a paramount ritual instrument endowed with supernatural powers. This means that the posthumous soul would receive enhanced protection and guidance after it left its former body. A bi may have also offered opportunities for auspicious transformation; rather than a simple door or window, its passage, like a magical tunnel, might rejuvenate the soul or transport it to a different time/space. As we will see, such imaginary scenarios did indeed stimulate Han pictorial art. But when Eastern Zhou people first placed the bi above the head of a tomb occupant, they had probably just begun to sense the potential of this alternative way of constructing passages in a tomb. This alternative way of using bi in mortuary rites was likely invented in the fourth century bce when certain people in the Chu region began to install a single

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bi-disk near the head of the dead, either placing it on a top front position above the inner coffin or attaching it to the coffin’s headboard.34 In addition to their singular appearance and special placement, bi-disks used in this manner also possessed two other distinctive features. First, some later examples are made of thin, dark tortoise shells and thus have a markedly different materiality and visual effect from the large, heavy disks wrapped around a corpse.35 Second, one or two silk ribbons were frequently tied on these bi to form hanging tassels or streamers. Moreover, two second-century bce coffins from the same region offer painted images of single bi-disks with an assortment of decoration. Combining the ritual object with fantastic images of animals and birds, the pictures also reveal the imaginary world that Chu people associated with this type of bi. The first picture decorates the headboard of the inner coffin from Shazitang Tomb 1, possibly the grave of a local prince who died in 157 bce.36 In the center of the composition is an enormous bi-disk suspended on an ornate device; a beaded tassel hangs down from the lower rim of the bi to the ground (Fig. 4.11). Two tall birds, possibly cranes, mirror each other to flank the bi. Wearing the caps of ritual officials and holding pearls and dangling huang-pendants in their beaks, these are clearly no ordinary birds but must have possessed special religious or ritual significance. Part of their special significance must derive from their intimate relationship with the bi; with their long, curving necks penetrating the bi’s perforation, they help highlight the role of the ritual disk as a passage. This “penetration” imagery recurs in the second picture from Mawangdui Tomb 1, but here two meandering dragons replace the birds (see Fig. 4.16a below, p. 133). Riding on clouds, they are slithering through the hole to ascend to the sky. The bi is hung on a silk ribbon and has beautiful streamers. Once again it appears in the exact center of the composition to represent an imaginary passage. This second picture leads us to a series of bi in the Mawangdui tomb, one of the most spectacular finds in world archaeology. Located in Changsha, Hunan, the tomb was constructed some time before 168 bce for Marquise Dai, the wife of a local governor. As is typical of a casket grave, its timber structure was concealed at the bottom of a vertical shaft, sixteen meters from ground level. Inside this sealed timber structure, four rooms surrounded the coffin chamber in the

34   Eastern Zhou examples include Shazhong Tomb 3 at Wangshan in Jiangling, Shibao Tomb 5 at Zhongxiangzhong, Baoshan Tomb 2 at Jingmen. See Sun Qingwei 2008, 266. Western Han examples include Mawangdui Tombs 1, 2, and 3, Mancheng Tomb 1 of Prince Liu Sheng in Hebei, and the tomb of Liu Xu, king of the Guangling Principality, at Shenjushan in Gaoyo. 35   Specimens of bi made of dark turtle shells have been found in Mawangdui Tombs 1, 2, 3, all dating from the second century bce. The example from Tomb 3 is not recorded in the excavation report, But according to Ms. Nie Fei of the Hunan Provincial Museum, the tomb did yield such a bi. Private communication. 36   See Xin Lixiang 2000, 201.

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F ig . 4.11.  Lacquer painting on the front side of a coffin from Shazitang, Changsha, Hunan. Western Han, 157 bce (?). Hubei Museum, Mawangdui Han mu qiqi zhengli yu yanjiu, fig. 5, 102.

middle, within which four coffins of diminishing sizes nested in one another like a set of Russian dolls (Fig. 4.12). A two-meter-long painting centered on Marquise Dai’s portrait was found on top of the innermost coffin. In a previous essay I distinguished three successive “layers” in the tomb, including (1) a core unit consisting of the woman’s innermost coffin, her body, and her portrait; (2)  a middle section consisting of the remaining three coffins with different ­decorative programs; and (3) an outer section consisting of the four peripheral chambers and their content. That discussion overlooked a crucial structural link in the tomb: an actual bi-disk and three bi images connected these layers into a continuum. We have seen a similar strategy in Leigudun Tomb 1. Constructed 250 years later, however, passage in the Mawangdui tomb conveyed more complex meanings.

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F ig . 4.12.  Mawangdui Tomb 1: (a) top view, (b) cross section. Located at Changsha, Hunan. Western Han, second century bce. Liyi zhong de meishu, vol. 1, 6.12, 6.13.

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F ig . 4.13.  Bi-disk placed on the front top of the innermost coffin in Mawangdui Tomb 1. Chen Jianming, Nie Fei, Mawangdui Han mu qiqi zhengli yu yanjiu, fig. 6, 103, 2018.

Starting from the core unit, we see that a tortoise-shell bi was placed on the innermost coffin near the front edge; a thick ribbon, dark brown and tied to the bi, reached down to the coffin’s headboard (Fig. 4.13). The meaning of the bi’s unusual material still eludes a definite interpretation, but its position clearly corresponded to the head of the deceased woman. Next to the bi lay the famous painting, with its painted side facing down to cover the innermost coffin (and the woman inside it). The numerous studies on this painting have treated it as an independent work, focusing on its nomenclature, ritual function, and iconography.37 The present discussion on the passage presents a different angle to see the painting as part of a larger symbolic program underlying the tomb’s design and decoration. Three horizontal “ground levels” divide the T-shaped painting into four sections along the vertical axis, including, from top to bottom, the celestial sphere, a portrait of Marquise Dai, a sacrificial scene, and the underworld (Fig. 4.14).38 A large, luminous bi-disk appears in the exact center of the vertical section of

37

  For titles of related studies, see Zheng Yan 2004.   For a more detailed explanation of this pictorial program, see Wu Hung 1992.

38

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F ig . 4.14.  Drawing of the silk painting from Mawangdui Tomb 1. Arrows indicate three “ground levels” which devide the painting into four sections. Liyi zhong de meishu, vol. 1, 6.4.

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the T. In this position it both divides and connects Marquise Dai and the sacrificial scene—a structural significance that is reinforced by two ascending dragons, whose serpentine bodies form a crossover at the bi’s center and block the hole (Figs 4.15, 4.17). Below the bi and framed by the tails of the dragons, the sacrificial scene represents the first stage of funerary rites, during which family members offered food and drink to the cadaver (the picture represents the deceased marquise on a low bed under a patterned shroud). Above the bi and framed by the dragon’s head and upper body, Marquise Dai is shown as a living person, attended by servants and receiving their homage. The link between the portrait and the sacrificial scene is established by a series of images associated with the bi, including a triangular huang-pendent hanging down from the bi and a diagonal “bridge” connecting the bi and the portrait. One can imagine the marquise’s posthumous soul, guided by these paraphernalia and reinforced by the upward movement of the dragons and the two hybrid “bird-men,” leaving her shrouded body and attaching itself to the portrait at the center of the universe. The chief mediator of this transformation is the bi-disk. There is little doubt that this painting is conceptually linked to the coffin that enclosed it because the composite bi/dragon image reappears on a narrow side

F ig . 4.15.  Detail of the silk painting from Mawangdui Tomb 1. Kongjian de meishushi, fig. 1.37.

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F ig . 4.16.  Drawing of the lacquer painting on the “red” coffin from Mawangdui Tomb 1: (a) a narrow side, (b) a long side. Liyi zhong de meishu, vol. 1, 6.10.

133

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F ig . 4.17.  A diagram showing the relationship between the bi-disk and the two dragons in the silk painting from Mawangdui Tomb 1. Drawing by Wu Hung.

of the coffin in a very similar manner (Fig. 4.16a).39 In fact the two works may have come from the same workshop: their dragons have identical features; both their bi-disks bear numerous white dots, representing the tiny bosses on a fine jade bi in reality; and both have two extravagant streamers going sideways left and right. There is an important difference between the bi/dragon images on this coffin and in the silk painting, however. We have noticed that the two dragons in the painting form a crossover at the bi’s center and seal off the perforation (see Figs 14.15, 14.17), but on the coffin, as mentioned earlier, the dragons have disentangled from each other and are flying through the disk (Fig. 4.16a). This previously unobserved difference provides a new basis for understanding the two images. In other words, we have obtained a crucial piece of visual evidence to decipher the bi’s two alternative operations in this tomb. In the silk painting, this magical instrument functions as a “buckle” to lock in the two dragons, which were supposed to carry the marquise’s disembodied soul. The bi halts the sweeping movement of the mythical beasts, arrests the soul, and transfers it to the portrait   The excavation report identifies the position of the painting as the “rear panel” of the coffin. During a visit to the Hunan Provincial Museum to examine this and other objects from the Mawangdui tomb, I tried but failed to find the original excavation record of the image’s location. Instead, I was told by the researchers in the museum that because the excavation took place at the height of the Cultural Revolution, archaeologists faced great obstacles to conduct a careful scientific excavation. There is a possibility that like the Shazitang tomb, the bi image actually decorates the front panel of the coffin. 39

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through the diagonal “bridge” above the bi.40 This “binding” significance of the bi is absent on the coffin, where the ritual object appears as a fully open passage to let the dragons through. The destination of the dragon—and hence the woman’s soul—is presented on a long side of the same coffin; the two dragons reappear for a third time to flank the magical mountain Kunlun, recognizable by its three pointed peaks (Fig. 4.16b).41 Other images in this picture—including a heavenly horse, a feathered fairy, an elaborate bird, and a winged tiger—identify the place as an immortal realm.42 Yet this is still not the end of the story. The tomb yielded one more bi-image on a miniature screen made specifically for the subsidiary chamber above the coffin chamber (see Fig. 4.12). Whereas the other three chambers surrounding the coffin chambers were filled with grave goods, this chamber at the head of the deceased woman was arranged as a stage. Silk curtains were hung on the walls and a bamboo mat covered the floor. Elaborate lacquer vessels were displayed in front of an empty couch furnished with thick cushions and backed by the screen— a seat prepared for an invisible subject. We recognize the identity of this subject from the things placed around the seat: before the couch were two pairs of women’s shoes, while next to the couch were two toilet boxes containing cosmetics and a wig—all intimate personal belongings of the late marquise. Joining these objects to frame the seat were several groups of figurines, including eight singers and dancers performing in the company of five musicians. This performance was staged at the east end of the chamber, opposite to the couch at the west end. We can well imagine the invisible Marquise Dai, while enjoying food and drink, watching the performance from the empty couch. In traditional Chinese visual culture, this kind of “spirit seat” (shenzuo) was a special form of a wei—a special “position” constructed through marking and framing an empty place for an invisible subject. Typically appearing in temples, tombs, and family shrines, a wei allowed people to represent the subject of worship without actually portraying it.43 In Mawangdui Tomb 1, the miniature screen was an object specifically fashioned to identify Marquise Dai’s wei or “spirit seat.” Ancient texts frequently mention the screen’s symbiotic relationship with the person sitting in front of it; it bore the sitter’s status symbols, defined his or her “place” in society, and was perceived as an extension of his or her body.44 Unlike screens used in daily life, Marquise Dai’s posthumous screen has a bi-image in its exact center (Fig. 4.18a). Painted on the front side of the screen and thus appearing immediately behind the empty couch, the bi identifies   For a more detailed analysis of this image, see Wu Hung 1994.   Hiroshi Sôfukawa 1979. 42   For a more detailed discussion of this significance, see Wu Hung 1992, 131–4. 43   For a more detailed discussion of this visual technology, see Wu Hung 2002. 44   For this significance of the screen, see Wu Hung 1996, 11–12. 40 41

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F ig . 4.18.  A miniature screen from Mawangdui Tomb 1: (a) front side, (b) back side. Hubei Museum, Mawangdui Han mu qiqi zhengli yu yanjiu, fig. 9, 103.

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her soul’s existence and “binds” the soul to the seat. Not coincidently, two straight bands seal off the bi’s central hole while fixing the disk in its proper position, in the same way that the two dragons are interlocked with the bi below Marquise’s Dai’s portrait in the silk painting (see Figs 4.15, 4.17). The reverse side of the screen displays a single dragon (Fig. 4.18b). Detached from the bi and making an upturned movement, it seems to have unloaded the woman’s soul and is free to fly away.

R E A DI NG I N V ISI BI LI T Y I N CH I N E SE TOM BS

Mawangdui Tomb 1 culminated the long development of the casket grave in two complementary ways. On the one hand, it had the most structurally balanced and precisely executed timber burial structure recovered from ancient China.45 On the other hand, it also presented the most complex system of open and closed passages in any casket grave we know, reflecting conflicting intentions to penetrate the layers of caskets and to create multiple stations for the posthumous soul. This conflict emerged from a crucial change in the conception of the posthumous soul itself. As mentioned earlier, a dominant Eastern Zhou theory of the soul was based on the hun-po dualism, which was in turn related to the twin centers of ancestor sacrifices at the lineage temple and the graveyard. Following the disintegration of Zhou society and the obsolescence of the lineage temple, this dual-soul theory lost its social and religious basis during the Han. The tomb became the dominant place for ancestor worship; the hun and po were reunited there to receive offerings.46 Numerous Han texts, including inscriptions in tombs and on funerary shrines, attest to this situation. As K. E. Brashier has shown, in most Han sources hun and po form a compound that simply means “the soul,” and the tomb is imagined as its dwelling place.47 Components of temple rituals were consequently transferred into the graveyard. Most important, the wei of the deceased, the centerpiece of the traditional temple, reappeared in burials.48 This is likely why in the Mawangdui tomb, in addition to the marquise’s portrait installed in close proximity to her body, a spirit seat for her invisible soul was constructed in the head chamber as the focus of ritual offerings. Interestingly, Gan Bao (?–336 ce) related in the early fourth century that a great Han tomb at Guangling was opened during the reign of Sun Xiu (258–64 ce). The corpse, 46   Lai Delin 2011.   Wu Hung 1988.  Brashier  1996. Other textual evidence is discussed by Anna Seidel and Mu-Chou Poo. See Seidel 1982, 107; 1987a; Poo Mu-chou 1993, 216. 48   This phenomenon became increasingly common during the Han. For example, after studying sacrificial “altars” in Eastern Han tombs, Lukas Nichel concludes that “almost certainly this empty space was where the occupant was expected to sit”: Nichel 2000, 73. 45 47

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protected by thirty bi-disks made of white jade, was still lifelike. The tomb also contained a separate spirit seat. The record offers a detailed account of the surrounding sculptures but not a single word about the seat itself. It must have been an empty seat like the one in the Mawangdui tomb.49 The image of the immortal land in Mawangdui Tomb 1 reveals yet another new element in funerary art. The pre-Han idea of immortality dwelled upon the hope of escaping death. Starting from the Han, however, a new belief in “postmortem immortality” prevailed.50 Miraculous tales circulated, describing how ancient sages such as the Yellow Emperor ascended to heaven after having been buried in a grave. A certain Canon of Immortality (Xian jing) further classifies immortals into different ranks: while those of the higher ranks have the ability to defy death, those of the lowest rank “cannot avoid death and have to shed their physical shells like a cicada.”51 According to this new belief, instead of preventing eternal happiness, death actually offers an alternative route to achieve it. This idea soon attracted millions of people of different classes, mainly because it finally guaranteed the possibility of immortality without demanding additional effort. No external proof was required to demonstrate the magical transformation taking place in the afterlife. Alternatively, such proof could be produced through artistic means by transforming a tomb, or part of it, into a fantastic paradise. Archaeologists and art historians have identified many new types of grave ­furnishings, paintings, figurines, even entire tomb structures that were associated with these emerging trends in Han religion. One topic that has consistently eluded their discussions, however, is the posthumous soul—the subject for which all these concrete forms were made. To be sure, although hiding away bodily remains may have been the initial impulse to bury the dead, the ancient Chinese created an elaborate funerary art and architecture to fulfill the needs of the soul, not the body. For the most part they treated the posthumous soul as a living subject with consciousness, mobility, and human desires.52 Thus Confucius’ famous retort—“If one doesn’t know how to serve the living how can one serve ghosts [i.e. ancestral spirits]?”53—may simply refer to this conceptual equivalence. The chief signifier of the soul’s otherworldly status was in fact its invisibility, a basic premise in ancestor worship that is stated plainly in texts like The Book of Rites and Writings by Master Huainan (Huainan Zi): “As for ghosts and spirits, they 50   Gan Bao 1979, 187.   See Robinet 1979; Seidel 1987b.   This Han text is cited in Ge Hong, Baopu zi, “Lun xian” (On Immortals). See Wang Ming, Baopu zi neipian jiaoshi (20). 52   Whereas this attitude toward the dead provided the rituals of ancestor worship with a general basis, different reasons were used to justify it. For many people the ancestors would literally consume the offerings; for others the offerings were expressions of their filial devotion and a means to communicate with the dead through ritual performances. For an in-depth study of this second way of thinking, see Brashier 2011, 184–228. 53   Liu Baonan 1986, vol. 1, 243. 49 51

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are invisible when being looked at, inaudible when being listened to.”54 Confucius thus instructed his students that “he who sacrifices to the spirits should treat the spirits as if they were present” (italics added).55 Conceived in visual terms, the Master’s teaching meant that filial piety in ancestor worship could be realized only in finding meaning in the invisibility of the posthumous soul. It also implies that all material and visual trappings on a ritual occasion—sacrificial vessels, offerings, and all other ritual paraphernalia and furnishings—should serve two simultaneous functions, both constructing the subject’s invisibility and indicating its whereabouts and movement. These ritual trappings would have no intrinsic meaning if they did not perform these two roles. We are reminded of a line from the Daode jing cited at the beginning of this chapter: “Thus we possess things and benefit from them, but it is their emptiness that makes them useful.” Thinking over the archaeological finds discussed in this chapter, what we find is exactly this symbiosis between substance and emptiness, form and formlessness, and visibility and invisibility. In particular, this unearthed evidence presents “passage” as a type of empty space constructed in tombs to facilitate the soul’s movement, enabling it to escape any physical confinement in a grave, be it the shrouded body, a sealed coffin, or the thick walls of a burial chamber. We found such passages in Leigudun Tomb 1 from the fifth century bce, the first known Chinese burial to take the dialogue between materiality and immateriality as a conceptual basis in architectural planning and decoration. Consequently the tomb allows us to detect the invisibility of the soul, tracking its motion along a series of doors and windows from inner to outer spaces, and from the marquis’s private quarters to the grand audience hall and the armory. This tradition of constructing physical passages inside tombs to facilitate the soul’s movement continued into later periods. When China developed into an empire during the Western Han in the second and first centuries bce, for example, members of the local princes in the Shandong-Jiangsu region built huge tombs for themselves deep inside rocky hills. Multiple chambers were opened up along the tomb tunnel to represent different sections of a palace. After entombment, the tunnel was completely sealed with large stone blocks to prevent unwelcomed intrusion. During the excavations of some of these tombs at Yangguishan and Tuolanshan, both in Xuzhou, archaeologists noticed that a network of narrow channels was carved out on the surface of the sealing stones, linking the side chambers with the main chamber.56 There is little doubt that these channels, like the holes connecting the separate rooms in the Leigudun, allowed the souls of the tomb occupants

54   Huainan Zi 1992, 665. The Book of Rites states: “Looking at them [i.e. the ancestors’ spirits] one cannot see them; listening to them one cannot hear them”; Ruan Yuan 1980, 1628. 55   Liu 1986, vol. 1, 53. 56   Geng Jianjun 2013, esp. 84.

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to travel inside their underground palaces, enjoying various kinds of pleasures offered in different chambers. Around the same time, the adoption of the bi-disk as the soul’s passage introduced a new dynamic in reading invisibility: if the doors and windows in the Leigudun tomb carried little additional significance besides being the soul’s outlets, a jade bi was loaded with ritual and religious meanings due to its special shape, materiality, and history. Once a bi was used as a passage in mortuary contexts, it brought about a dialogue between the object’s own materiality and immateriality. This dialogue was most thoroughly internalized by the bi on a Han dynasty “jade body.” On the one hand, the disk was drilled with tiny holes around the edge so it could be tied together with other jade pieces to form a head (see Fig. 4.9); the bi’s material substance thus contributed to the protection and transformation of the cadaver. On the other hand, the bi’s immaterial feature— the indispensible perforation at its center—was left open to free the invisible soul, even at the risk of compromising the preservation of the body. Neither aspect can exist without the other in such an interpretation of the object; the bi’s materiality thus serves as the precondition for reading the soul’s invisibility. When the jade bi appears in pictorial forms, a situation recurring three times in Mawangdui Tomb 1, these images constitute a new subject and context for reading invisibility. At first glance we are amazed by the painter’s seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity in imagining such vivid images, as the pictures present all sorts of fictional characters and events—gods and fairies, dragons and winged beasts, celestial performances, and magical mountains—that do not exist in the observed world. A closer probing, however, discovers that many of these images continue to play the two roles of ritual trappings defined earlier, both constructing the soul’s invisibility and alluding to its existence. But as pictorial images, they provide new means to indicate the soul’s whereabouts and movement. Most fascinating, dragons interact with the bi to either halt or speed up the soul’s motion. The painter carefully distinguishes these two scenarios. In the first scenario, he has depicted two interlocking dragons (or straight bands) to close off the perforation on the bi; in the second scenario, he has released the dragons so the two divine beasts are flying through the perforation. The blockage of passage happens twice in this tomb: in the silk painting below Marquise Dai’s portrait and on the miniature screen behind the spirit seat of the same woman. It seems that when passage is blocked at these two places, the disk itself becomes the carrier of the soul, arresting the soul and binding it to the spirit seat or the portrait. Significantly, these are the two places in the tomb where the marquise’s soul is supposed to lodge; she receives homage and offerings in both places, even though her soul remains invisible in one place and merges with her likeness in the second place. It is tempting to identify these two places as those of her hun and po souls, reunited in her tomb while still maintaining their duality. The Book of Rites in one passage calls these two souls “hun-breath” (hunqi) and “po-with-a-form”

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(xingpo) and goes on to say that “all ancestor sacrifices should seek meaning from this dualism.”57 The different forms and separate locations of the portrait and the spirit seat seem to underscore this ritual prescription. The portrait covered the woman’s body across the top of the innermost coffin; the spirit seat was installed above her head in a miniature offering hall. These visual and architectural devices—the doors and windows opened on coffins and walls, and the bi and dragons depicted on mortuary banners and ­furnishings—began to constitute what may be called a language of passage in Chinese funerary art. Less than a century after the construction of Mawangdui Tomb 1, a type of stone sarcophagus appeared in the eastern region of the Han empire in present-day southern Shandong and northern Jiangsu. This was one of the earliest uses of stone in Chinese art and architecture. The bi-disk and doors were repeatedly carved on the stone boxes, assuring the penetrability of an art medium newly introduced to China from the Indian world.58 From the first century bce onward, the visual language of passage went through a reinvention due to the appearance and eventual dominance of the “chamber grave.”59 Built laterally with a side entrance, this houselike underground structure redefined the meaning of a tomb. A tomb was no longer completely cut off from the living. Even after it was buried, its gate and passageway remained in people’s minds beneath the earth’s surface. The potential accessibility of the buried chambers inspired a new kind of imagination, as stories about certain underground adventures began to circulate, telling how a traveler accidentally entered an ancient tomb and met historical figures of the remote past.60 Alternatively, it was imagined that the spirit of the dead could venture beyond the grave; powerful divine forces would be especially helpful on its quest for immortality.61 Quite conveniently, a chamber tomb provided ample interior space for exhibiting sculptures and ­pictures—a precondition for the development of funerary art over the next ­millennium. Multiple doors and windows, real or painted, connected rooms, courtyards, and corridors inside a large tomb. Illusionistic murals depicted ­servants and guardians crossing such passages, either walking over thresholds or watching through window frames (Figs 4.19–4.20). New types of images emerged to denote the soul’s existence, including gendered symbols for each member of a  deceased couple and “portraits” as wei of wandering spirits.62 As surviving   Ruan Yuan 1980, 1457.   For the introduction of stone as an art and architectural material, see Wu Hung 1995, 121–42. 59   For the invention and some basic features of the chamber grave, see Wu Hung 2010, 24–30. 60   One such tale is introduced in Wu Hung 2010, 26. 61   For a discussion of such imaginary journeys, see Wu Hung 2010, 192–217. 62   Scholars have noticed that “portraits” of the dead in tombs from a given period often follow a fixed pictorial formula and are even “interchangeable” in appearance. See Spiro 1990, 39–41; Zheng Yan 1997; Wu Hung 2010, 68–76. One such portrait from the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), found in a tomb in Yulin, Shaanxi province, identifies the image is the wei of the tomb occupant. The accompanying inscription reads “The wei of Huang Qinzhong”; Diancang (Art & Collection), no. 230 (November 11), 348. 57 58

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F ig . 4.19.  A mural in Zhang Shiqing’s tomb (Tomb 1) at Xuanhua, Hebei. Liao dynasty, 1116 ce. Huangquan zhong de meishu, C-11.

F ig . 4.20.  Drawing of a mural in Houshiguo Tomb 1 at Mixian, Henan. Eastern Han, mid-second century ce. Huangquan zhong de meishu, C-9.

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­evidence for the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, these visual and material forms have been topics of independent stylistic and iconographic studies. But as this chapter shows, many of these forms belonged to a language of passage that signified an invisible subject in the original mortuary context. The reasons for these images are not self-evident in their tangibility but must be sought from the implied existence of the soul. Instead of substituting metaphysical contemplation for empirical research, this attempt to uncover a reading of invisibility has aimed to enrich and even transform our archaeological and art historical k­ nowledge. R EF ER ENCE S B rashier , K. E.  (1996), “Han thanatology and the division of ‘souls,’ ” Early China 16, 1–35. B rashier , K. E. (2011), Ancestral memory in early China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center). F alkenhausen , L. V on   (1991), “Chu ritual music,” in Thomas Lawton (ed.), New perspectives on Chu culture during the eastern Zhou period (Washington, DC: Authur M. Sackler Gallery). G an B ao  (1979), Soushen ji (Search for spirits) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju). G eng J ianjun   (2013), “Xuzhou Xi Han Chu wang mu saishi de kaizao yu fengtian” (The quarrying and sealing of the sealing stones of the tombs of the vassal kings of the Chu state of the Western Han in Xuzhou), Kaogu 3, 75–85. G u F ang   (2005), “Cong Nanyue wang mu chutu de yubi tan Handai de xuanbi” (A discussion of Han dynasty xuanbi based on the jade bi unearthed from the tomb of a king of the Southern Yue kingdom), in Chinese Association of Qin-Han Historical Studies, Nanyue guo shiji yantaohui lunwen xuanji (Selected papers from the symposium on historical remains of the Nanyue kingdom), (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe). G uangzhou M unicipal A dministration of C ultural R elics   (1991), Xi Han Nanyue wang mu (Tomb of a Nanyue king of the Western Han) (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe). H iroshi , S ôfukawa   (1979), “Konronzan to Shôsenzu” (Mt. Kunlun and pictures representing ascensions to immortality), Tôhô gakuhô 51, 87–102. H uainan Z i  (1992), Huainan honglie jijie (Writings of Master Huainan with collected explications) (Taipei: Wenshizhe). H uang X iaofen  (2003), Han mu de kaoguxue yanjiu (An archaeological study of Han dynasty tombs) (Changsha: Yuelu shushe). K eightley , D. N. (1978), “The religious commitment: Shang theology and the genesis of Chinese political culture,” History of Religions 17, 211–25. L ai D elin  (2011), “Shi zangpin zhudao haishi guankuo zhudao de sheji—cong Mawangdui Han mu kan Zhanguo yilai Zhongguo mugou sheji guannian de yige zhuanbian” (An object-determined design, or a coffin determined design: Mawangdui Tombs in the change of timber-structure designs since the Warring Sates perod), Yishushi yanjiu (The study of art history) (Guangzhou: Zhongshan University), vol. 13, 1–20. L egge , J., trans. (1967), Li Chi: book of rites, 2 vols (New York: University Books).

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L i Y angsong  (1976), “Tantan Yangshao wenhua de wengguan zang” (On jar-burials of Yangshao culture), Kaogu 6, 356–60. L iu B aonan , comp. (1986), “Lunyu zhengyi” (Correct meaning of Analects), in Zhuzi jicheng (A complete collection of writings of ancient Chinese philosopher) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju), vol. 1. L u Z haoyin   (1981), “Shi lun liang Han de yuyi” (A preliminary investigation of the jade suits of the Western and Eastern Han), Wenwu 1, 51–8. L u Z haoyin  (1989), “Zailun Liang Han de yu yi” (A further discussion of jade suits of the Western and Eastern Han), Wenwu 10, 60–7. L uan F engshi  (2006), “Shiqian guanguo de chansheng, fazhan he guanguo zhidu de xingcheng” (The emergence and development of coffins in prehistoric times and the establishment of the guan-guo system), Wenwu 6, 49–55. N ichel , L.  (2000), “Some Han dynasty paintings in the British Museum,” Artibus Asiae 60, 59–77. P oo M u - chou  (1993), Muzang yu shengsi: Zhongguo dudai zongjiao zhi xingsi (Burials and life/death: reflections on ancient Chinese religion) (Taipei: Liangjing). R uan Y uan ,  comp. (1980), “Li ji” (The book of rites) in Shisanjing zhushu (An annotated edition of the Thirteen Classics) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju). R obinet , I.  (1979), “Metamorphosis and deliverance from the corpse in Taoism,” History of Religions 19, 57–70. R obinet , I.  (2008), “Daode jing,” in F.  Pregadio (ed.), The encyclopedia of Taoism, 2 vols (London: Routledge), vol. 1, 321–5. S eidel , A. (1982), “Tokens of immortality in Han graves,” Numen 29, 79–114. S eidel , A.  (1987a), “Traces of Han religion in funerary texts found in tombs,” in A.  Kan’ei (ed.), Do k̄ yo ̄ to shūkyo ̄ bunka (Taosim and religious culture) (Tokyo: Hirakawa), pp. 21–57. S eidel , A. (1987b), “Post-mortem immortality or: the Taoist resurrection of the body,” in S. S. Shulman and G. G. Strousma (eds), Gilgul: essays on transformation, revolution, and permanence in the history of religions (Leiden: Brill), 223–37. S piro , A. (1990), Contemplating the ancients: aesthetic and social issues in early Chinese Portraiture (Berkeley: University of California Press). S trassberg , R. E.  and F oster , S.  H.  (1986), Chinese jade: the image from within (Pasadena: Pacific Asia Museum). S un Q ingwei  (2008), Zhoudai yongyu zhidu yanjiu (A study of the regulations of using jade artifacts during the Zhou dynasty) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe). T hôte , A. (1991), “The double coffin of Leigudun tomb no, 1: iconographic sources and related problems,” in Thomas Lawton (ed.), New perspectives on Chu culture during the eastern Zhou period (Washington, DC: Authur M. Sackler Gallery). W ang B i , ed. (1986), Laozi zhu (Laozi with annotations), in Zhuzi jicheng (A complete collection of writings of ancient Chinese philosopher) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju), vol. 1. W ang L ihua  (1994), “Shilun Chu mu muguo zhong de menchuang jiegou ji fanying de wenti” (A preliminary discussion on the door and window structures in the wooden caskets of Chu tombs and their implications), Chu wenhua yanjiu lunji (Papers on the study of Chu culture) (Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe), vol. 3.

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W atson , B.,  trans. (1963), Basic writings of Mo Tzu, Hsün Tzu, and Han Fei Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press). W u H ong (W u H ung ) (2015), “Mawangdui yihao Han mu zhong de long, bi tuxiang” (Images of dragons and the bi-disks in Mawangdui Tomb 1), Wenwu 2015(1), 54–61. W u H ung  (1997), “The prince of jade revisited: material symbolism of jade as observed in the Mencheng Tombs,” in R. E. Scott (ed.), Chinese Jades (London: Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art), 147–70. W u H ung   (1988), “From temple to tomb: ancient Chinese art and religion in transition,” Early China 13, 83–90. W u H ung  (1992), “Art in its ritual context: rethinking Mawangdui,” Early China 17: 111–45. W u H ung   (1995), Monumentality in early Chinese art and architecture (Stanford: Stanford University Press). W u H ung   (1996), The double screen: medium and representation in Chinese painting (London: Reaktion Books). W u H ung  (2002), “A deity without form: the earliest representation of Laozi and the concept of Wei in Chinese ritual art,” Orientations 34, 38–45. W u H ung  (2010), The art of the Yellow Springs: understanding Chinese tombs (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press). X in L ixiang   (2000), Han dai huaxiangshi zonghe yangjiu (A synthetic study of Han dynasty pictorial stone carvings) (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe). X u H ong  (1989), “Luelun wo guo shiqian shiqi wenguanzang” (A short discussion on prehistorical jar-burials found in China), Kaogu 4, 334–6. Y ing -S hih Y u  (1987), “ ‘O soul, come back!’: a study in the changing conceptions of the soul and afterlife in pre-Buddhist China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47, 363–95. Z hao H uacheng  (1998), “Zhoudai guanguo duochong zhidu yanjiu” (A study of the system of multilayered inner and outer coffins), Guoxue yanjiu 5, 27–74. Z heng Y an  (1997), “Muzhu huaxiang yanjiu” (A study of portraits of tomb occupants), in Liu Dunyuan xiansheng jinian wenji (A collection of papers in memory of Mr. Liu Dunyuan) (Ji’nan: Shandong Daxue chubanshe), 450–68. Z heng Y an   (2004), “Mawangdui Han mu wenxian yaomu” (A basic bibliography on Han tombs at Mawangdui), in He Jiejun (ed.), Changsha Mawangdui er, san hao Han mu (Tombs 2 and 3 of the Han dynasty at Mawangdui, Changsha) (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe), vol. 1, 281–383. Z enghou Y i mu  (Tomb of Marquis Yi of the state of Zeng) (1989), 2 vols (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe).

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I NDE X Note: Numbers in italics refer to illustrations. absconding  3, 4, 5, 46, 77, 93, 103–4, 112; see also cang (hiding away) access, restrictions of  9–10, 11, 21, 29, 31, 45–7, 80, 93, 97–8, 100; see also literacy allusion  33–7, 57–61 altar with maize cobs (Berlin)  57–9, 59–60 ancestor worship  119, 137–9, 141 arcula (casket)  83–4; see also Pola casket Arian heresy  102–3 Aristophanes 23 Athens, Acropolis  8 Athena Nike bastion of  28–33, 29, 30, 36 parapet of  10, 29–36, 36 temple of  28, 29 Athena Polias, temple of (“Erechtheum”) 24–8, 25 building accounts  25–6 caryatids  24, 25, 26, 35–6, 37 frieze 25–6 destruction of (480 bce)  13, 14, 15, 35 Kore Pit  4, 11–16, 24, 35 Parthenon  11, 15, 22 finances 21–4 frieze  4, 16–24, 19, 20, 34–5, 35 pediments 16, 17, 18 see also kore type Augustine, St  97, 99 Augustus, head of, from Meroë (London) 74–5, 76 bi-disks  112, 122–37, 140–1, 123, 130, 133, 134 Book of Rites (Li ji)  119, 138–9, 140–1 boxes and containers see arcula (casket); casket grave; coffins and sarcophagi; Hackmack Box; Pola casket; Projecta casket Brashier, K. E.  137 burial and interment: of Aztec offerings  45, 46n, 53, 55n, 68

of Chinese tombs and their contents  112–13, 114, 137–41 of Christian reliquaries and caskets  74–7, 81–4, 93–5, 99–104 of Greek korai  4, 11–16 primary vs. secondary  3, 99–104 see also casket graves; iconoclasm; Pola casket; votive deposits cacti, stone (Mexico City)  60–1, 61 cang (hiding away)  114 Canon of Immortality (Xian jing) 138 casket grave  113–22, 127, 137 Ceremonies and Rites (Yi li) 121 Changsha, Hunan see Mawangdui tomb 1; Shazitang tomb 1 Christ  82, 86, 86, 92, 93, 94, 100, 102, 104 Chu  114, 122, 126, 127 Coatlicue (Mexico City)  47–51, 50 coffins and sarcophagi  77n, 91n, 92, 113–22, 127–35, 141 Confucius  119, 138, 139 cuauhxicalli (offering vessels)  65, 66–7, 68 Dai, Marquise  127–37 Daode jing (Tao Te Ching) 111–12, 119–20, 139 dedication ceremonies  52–4 difrasismos (diphrastic kenning) see kenning Discoursing on Rites (Li lun) see Xunzi divine viewers see viewership, divine doors and windows  21, 22, 29, 111–22, 126, 139–41; see also gaps, holes, and voids Dou Wan, jade body of (Shijiazhuang, Hebei) see jade bodies dragons  127, 132, 134–5, 137; see also snakes and serpents Durán, Diego  52–3 empty spaces see gaps, holes, and voids; Hetoimasia (empty throne of God) epigraphy see inscriptions

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epistate ̄s (overseer, “bystander”)  21, 23 Euripides: Children of Herakles 15 Hekabe 32–4 Ion 26–7 extramission 49 eyes of the heart/eyes of the soul  96, 99

invisibility  112, 137–43 diaphanous  10, 28–37 literal  8, 11–24 practical  9, 24–8 see also absconding; burial and interment; cang (hiding away); undersides and backs; visibility

Feathered Serpent and Flowering Tree mural (San Francisco)  61, 62; see also serpents and snakes Flavius Palmatus, statue of (Aphrodisias) 74, 75 Fried, Michael  1–2 funerary ritual  121, 123, 132

jade bodies  124–6, 140 Dou Wan, jade body of (Shijiazhuang, Hebei) 124, 125 Liu Yan, jade head of (Shijiazhuang, Hebei)  126 Liu Sheng, jade body of (Shijiazhuang, Hebei) 124, 125 Mancheng, tombs  1 and 2 (Shijiazhuang, Hebei) 124, 125 see also bi-disks Jiangling (Jingzhou), Hubei  122, 127n

Gan Bao  137 gaps, holes, and voids  4, 57, 112, 115–16, 120–7, 132, 137 in Chinese coffins  115–16, 118–20 in Greek walls  29–31, 30 painted, in Chinese tombs  116–18, 121 see also bi-disks; doors and windows; Hetoimasia (empty throne of God); passages; shenzuo (spirit seat); wei (position) Graulich, Michel  68 Hackmack Box (Hamburg)  47, 48–9 Han dynasty  137–41 Western  123–4, 139 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  2 Herodotos 11 Hetoimasia (empty throne of God)  87–9, 91, 92, 100, 104; see also absconding; Pola casket; shenzuo (spirit seat) Hölscher, Tonio  20 Houshiguo tomb 1 (Mixian, Henan)  142 Huainan Zi see Writings by Master Huainan iconoclasm  13–15, 74–5 immortality  138, 141 incarnation 95–6 inscriptions: Chinese 137 Greek  12, 13–15, 25–6 Latin 82–3 Nahuatl glyphs  57, 60–1, 65, 68 see also kenning; literacy

kenning  3, 64–5 Kore Pit see Athens, Acropolis, Kore Pit kore type  12, 14–16, 12; see also Athens, Acropolis, Kore Pit; Phrasikleia Korres, Manolis  21 Kunlun Shan  135 Leigudun tomb 1 (Suixian, Hubei)  114–22, 116, 117, 118, 128, 139–40 Li ji see Book of Rites Li lun (Discoursing on Rites) see Xunzi literacy  25–6, 59, 61; see also inscriptions; kenning; viewership Liu Sheng, jade body of (Shijiazhuang, Hebei) see jade bodies Liu Yan, jade head of (Shijiazhuang, Hebei) see jade bodies Mancheng, tombs 1 and 2 see jade bodies Marconi, Clemente  18–19, 27 Mawangdui tomb 1 (Changsha, Hunan) 127–41 bi-disk on inmost coffin  130 miniature screen from  135, 136 plans and sections  113, 129 “red” coffin from  133 silk painting from  128, 130–4, 131, 132, 134

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INDEX  

Mixian, Henan see Houshiguo tomb 1 Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin  57 New Fire ceremony, Aztec  55–7 Nike  12, 28–9, 32–4 of Kallimakhos (Athens)  12 of Paionios (Olympia)  33, 34 Polyxena as  32–4 see also Athens, Acropolis, Athena Nike openings see doors and windows; gaps, holes, and voids; passages orans posture  92–3, 101 Osborne, Robin  19 Panathenaic procession  24 Panofsky, Erwin  2, 9 passages 115–43; see also bi-disks;  doors and windows; gaps, holes, and voids Pasztory, Esther  45 Paul, St  86, 86, 92, 102 Paulinus of Nola  81–3, 84, 96–7, 98 Pericles 23 Peter, St  86, 86, 92, 96, 102, 104 Pheidias  7, 21–3 Phrasikleia, kore of (Athens)  15 pilgrimage  89, 92, 97–100, 101, 102 Pindar  7, 26 Plato  7, 28 Pliska cross (Sofia)  76, 80 Plutarch 21 Pola see Pula Pola casket (Venice)  78–104, 81–7 architecture and  89–92, 94–5 burial of  80–4, 93–4 iconography 84–91 visibility and absconding on  91–3 Polyxena, as Nike  32–4 Popol Vuh 47–9 Projecta casket (London)  75, 77 Pula (anc. Pola), Croatia see Pola casket (Venice); Samagher, Croatia Quetzalcoatl  52, 63–4 Rancière, Jacques  27–8 rattlesnake see serpents and snakes Ravenna, S Vitale basilica  94–5, 94

149

relics and reliquaries  74–104 Christian theology of  95–8 pilgrimage and  98–102 Pola casket and  80–95 revelation  96, 102 Riegl, Aloïs  2 ritual offering  120, 137, 139–41 Rome, Sta Maria Maggiore basilica  88 Ruskin, John  19 Samagher, Croatia, St Hermagoras church  80, 84; see also Pula Seler, Eduard  68 serpents and snakes  47, 54–5, 61–4 coiled and knotted (Mexico City)  56 coiled (London)  43, 44, 49, 54 coiled (Teotihuacan)  62 feathered (Basel)  63, 64 with maize cob tail (Berlin)  57–9, 60 Xiuhcoatl, coiled (Washington, DC)  57, 58 see also dragons; Feathered Serpent and Flowering Tree mural (San Francisco) Shandong-Jiangsu region  139, 141 Shazitang tomb 1 (Changsha, Hunan) 127, 128 shenzuo (spirit seat)  135, 137–8, 140–1; see also Hetoimasia (empty throne of God); wei (position) Solís, Felipe  59–60 soul  118–22, 124, 126, 132, 134–41 hun- and po-souls 118–19 Stillwell, Richard  17–20, 20 Suixian, Hubei see Leigudun tomb 1 Tao Te Ching see Daode jing Taube, Karl  65–7 Tenoch 60, 61, 68 Tenochtitlan 60 Templo Mayor  52–3, 64–5 Teotihuacan 61–2 Tezcatlipoca 64 Theodosius, missorium of (Madrid)  76, 79 Tlaltecuhtli  51, 54, 63–4, 63, 64, 65–8, 66, 67 Tlatelolco 60 toltecatl (artist)  52

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INDEX

Traprain Law silver hoard (Edinburgh)  75–6, 78 Tuolanshan tombs  139 undersides and backs: Aztec  43–68, 112 Greek  16, 18–19 Pola casket  91–3, 97, 102 Vatican City: Old St Peter’s basilica  83, 90 St Peter’s basilica  89, 90 vertical-pit grave see casket grave Victricius of Rouen  96 viewership: divine  18–19, 47–51, 57, 68 human  45–6, 49, 51–4, 57, 65 overseers and functionaries as  21, 23, 52 restricted  4, 21, 24–8, 36, 51–54, 59–65, 100n theatrical 27–8 see also access, restrictions of; eyes of the heart/eyes of the soul Vigilantius 96 visibility (and invisibility)  1–5, 65, 68, 102, 104, 112 of the immaterial  95–6, 118–22, 134–41 power and  21, 28, 32–4, 68 public 45–6 temporary 45 see also access, restrictions of; burial and interment; invisibility; viewership

visual theology  95–103 Vogt, Evon  49 votive deposits  12–13, 45, 46n, 53, 55n, 92; see also burial and interment wei (position)  135, 137, 141 windows see doors and windows Writings by Master Huainan (Huainan Zi) 138–9 Xian jing see Canon of Immortality Xiuhcoatl see snakes and serpents xiuhmolpilli (bundle of years) (Mexico City)  55, 56 Xuanhua, tomb 1, mural from (Shijiazhuang, Hebei)  142 Xunzi, Discoursing on Rites (Li lun) 120 Xuzhou tombs  139 Yangguishan tombs  139 Yanshao culture  118–19 Yi li see Ceremonies and Rites Yi of Zeng, tomb of see Leigudun tomb 1 Yü, Ying-shih  118 Zhang Shiqing, tomb of see Xuanhua, tomb 1 Zhengzhou, Henan child coffin  119 Zhou dynasty: Eastern  113, 114, 118, 121, 123, 126, 137 Western 123