A Radical Turn?: Reappropriation, Fragmentation, and Variety in the Postclassical World (3rd-8th c.) (Convivium Supplementum, 10) 9788028001889, 8028001882

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Exchanges and Interactions in the Arts of Medieval Europe, Byzantium, and the Mediterranean Seminarium Kondakovianum, Series Nova Université de Lausanne • Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic • Masaryk

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CONVIVIUM SUPPLEMENTUM 2022/2 Exchanges and Interactions in the Arts of Medieval Europe, Byzantium, and the Mediterranean Seminarium Kondakovianum, Series Nova Journal of the Department of Art History of the University of Lausanne, of the Department of Art History of Masaryk University, and of the Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic This supplementary issue was produced with the support Of the Rector’s Office of Masaryk University Editor-in-chief / Ivan Foletti Executive editors / Zuzana Frantová, Natália Gachallová, Giada Lattanzio, Martin F. Lešák, Marie Okáčová, Adrien Palladino, Nicolas Samaretz Abstracts editor / Johanna Zacharias Typesetting / Berta K. Skalíková Layout design / Monika Kučerová Cover design / Petr M. Vronský, Anna Kelblová Publisher / Masarykova univerzita, Žerotínovo nám. 9, 601 77 Brno, IČO 00216224 Editorial Office / Seminář dějin umění, Filozofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity, Arna Nováka 1, 602 00 Brno Print / Tiskárna Didot, spol s r.o., Trnkova 119, 628 00 Brno E-mail / [email protected] www.earlymedievalstudies.com/convivium.html © Ústav dějin umění AV ČR , v. v. i. 2022 © Filozofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity 2022 © Faculté des Lettres, Université de Lausanne 2022 Published / November 2022 Reg. No. MK ČR E 21592 ISSN 2336-3452 (print) ISSN 2336-808X (online) ISBN 978-80-280-0188-9 (print) ISBN 978-80-280-0189-6 (online) Convivium is listed in the databases SCOPUS, ERIH, “Riviste   di classe A” indexed by ANVUR, and in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) of the Web of Science.

committees Editors — Michele Bacci ( Université de Fribourg), Klára Benešovská (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic ),  Ivan Foletti (Masaryk University, Brno), Herbert L. Kessler ( Johns Hopkins University, Masaryk University, Brno),  Serena Romano ( Université de Lausanne), Elisabetta Scirocco (Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte) Emeritus — Hans Belting (Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe) Editor - in - chief — Ivan Foletti Associate editors — Nathan Dennis (University of San Francisco), Stefanie Lenk (University of Bern), Adrien Palladino (Masaryk University, Brno) Executive editors — Zuzana Frantová, Natália Gachallová, Giada Lattanzio, Martin F. Lešák, Marie Okáčová, Adrien Palladino, Nicolas Samaretz Abstracts editor — Johanna Zacharias Advisory board — Xavier Barral i Altet ( Université de Rennes, Università di Venezia Ca’ Foscari), Nicolas Bock ( Université de Lausanne), Valentina Cantone ( Università di Padova), Jaś Elsner (University of Oxford), Clario Di Fabio ( Università di Genova), Finbarr Barry Flood (New York University), Ondřej Jakubec ( Masaryk University, Brno), Alexei Lidov (Moscow State University), Assaf Pinkus ( Tel Aviv University), Stefano Riccioni (Università di Venezia Ca’ Foscari), Jiří Roháček ( Institute of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic), Erik Thunø (Rutgers Unive­rsity), Alicia Walker ( Bryn Mawr College)

A Radical Turn? Reappropriation, Fragmentation, and Variety in the Postclassical World (3rd–8th Centuries) edited by Ivan Foletti, Marie Okáčová & Adrien Palladino

contents

A RADICAL TURN? REAPPROPRIATION, FRAGMENTATION, AND VARIETY IN THE POSTCLASSICAL WORLD (3rd–8th Centuries) introduction

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Ivan Foletti, Marie Okáčová & Adrien Palladino A Radical Turn? “Late Antique” Anxiety, Rupture, and Creative Continuity

articles 24

Ivan Foletti & Marie Okáčová An Age of Fragmentation. Evidence from Late Antique Literary, Visual, and Material Cultures

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Jana Mikulová The Variability of Late Latin Authors’ Means for Marking Direct Discourse

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Chiara Croci “Abbreviated” Depictions? Questions on the Earliest Christian Images

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Alberto Virdis Fragmentation as a Visual Principle. From Cloisonné to Early Stained Glass

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Katharina Meinecke Ornamental Surfaces. A “Global Trend” in Late Antique Afro-Eurasia

chronicles & debates

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Marco Aimone



Two Byzantine Capitals “with Pine Cones at Their Corners” and Their Monograms. Technical, Stylistic, and Historical Observations

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Renate Johanna Pillinger Wunder Jesu auf ausgewählten (römischen) Zwischengoldgläsern

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photographic credits

introduction

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introduction

A Radical Turn? “Late Antique” Anxiety, Rupture, and Creative Continuity Ivan Foletti, Marie Okáčová & Adrien Palladino

Shortly after the end of the 1914–1918 war, the German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) began producing a series of works he called Merz – a word coined to designate a group of collages conceived as assemblages of waste and garbage. Though other artists had already employed the technique of collage, Schwitters was one of the first to systematically incorporate residue collected in the streets of his native Hanover, which conferred his works, composed of old bills, newspaper clippings, driftwood, wheel parts, and other trash, with a particularly intimate and “popular” dimension1. In his Sternenbild, words such as Hunger, blutig, korrupt, and Reichstag clearly embodied the acute anxiety of interwar Germany [Fig. 1], torn into a “fragmentary” state of being:

1 /  Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild 25a. Das Sternenbild, 1920, oil, string, wood, sheet metal, grid, and paper on cardboard, 104.5 × 79 cm / Kunstsammlung NordrheinWestfalen (Düsseldorf)

“During the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me, and useful new ideas were not yet ready […]. Everything had collapsed, and new things had to be made from the fragments2.” 1 Graham Bader, Poisoned Abstraction: Kurt Schwitters between Revolution and Exile, New Haven / London 2021. 2 “Im Krieg waren die Dinge in schrecklichem Aufruhr. Was ich auf der Akademie gelernt hatte, nützte mir nichts, und die nützlichen neuen Ideen waren noch nicht fertig […]. Alles war zusammengebrochen und aus den Bruchstücken musste Neues gemacht werden” (Kurt Schwitters, Das literarische Werk, Friedhelm Lach ed., vol. v, Cologne 1981, p. 355). Unless indicated otherwise, translations are by the authors of the present text.

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2 / Cover of Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Princeton/Oxford 2017

For the artist, the symbolic reuse of such fragments became a way of “materializing” his relationship with the past in the aftermath of the trauma of World War i. A fragment – a piece of a no-longer-existing reality – thus becomes a means of making sense of the past within an uncertain present and future, a means of selecting which elements of the past are to be remembered. The shock that followed the 1914–1918 war can hardly be compared to the gradual transformation of the “late antique” world, even if some of the events of this period – such as the sack of Rome by the troops of Alaric in 410 – must have had a similar impact on the collective psychology of late Roman society3, arousing fears and anxieties about an uncertain future4. It is therefore not surprising that the idea of fragmentation as a prerequisite for the creative “reconstruction” of the world has been variously endorsed by past scholarship to conceptualize the period under examination and its literary, visual, and material cultures.

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Anxiety, continuity, and rupture, alongside the creative possibilities they brought along, were the themes broadly discussed by the scholars from different fields (art history, archaeology, classical philology, and theology) at the conference A Radical Turn? Subversions, Conversions, and Mutations in the Postclassical World (3rd–8th c.), organized at Masaryk University in Brno from October 18 to 19, 2021, from which this volume emerges. In the midst of a global pandemic, this event, held in person with speakers coming from across Europe, was a great occasion to reflect on how we tend to project the present onto the past. In 2017, Kyle Harper published a much-discussed volume on the causal relationship between climatic changes, epidemics, and the collapse of the Roman world [Fig. 2]5. In 2020, he proposed seeing the coronavirus pandemic as a breaking point – a radical turn – for the present6. That same year, Mischa Meier showed how the comparison between historical pandemics and the Covid-19 pandemic is a natural line of thinking for historians: “From now on, an entire generation of historians will frame the Justinian Plague, the ‘Black Death’, and, of course, the Spanish Flu against the background of Covid-19. One will be able to reflect on this fact, but one cannot escape it7.” While we are convinced

that comparing the Covid-19 pandemic with the ones evoked by Meier is ahistorical and problematic in epidemiological terms – e.g. the mortality cannot be compared –, the psychological impacts of the events may follow a very similar mechanism. Thus, the topic of the conference – questioning the radicality of the transformations of the late antique world – happened to mirror contemporary concerns and anxieties. Since the conference, the global situation has evolved even more dramatically. We are facing a clash between the “Euro-Atlantic”vision of the world and one promoted by Russia, but more broadly by major Asian players, including China. The consequences of this confrontation, embodied in the dramatic events of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 (as well as the “hidden”invasion of Armenia by Azerbaijan, largely ignored by the “Western media”, and the Chinese menacing of Taiwan), are threatening the stability and balance of the globalized world. In light of these events, we could perhaps ask ourselves – however banal it may seem – if we are, indeed, experiencing an “age of anxiety” like the one generally framed, as proposed by Eric R. Dodds, by the notion of the late antique8.

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Leaving aside for the moment the question of the extent to which Late Antiquity was indeed a period of crisis, it is undoubtable that its historiographical reception “reconstructed” this period as a cultural breaking point par excellence – a “threshold period” and a moment of intense reconfiguration of the world9. Notions such as disintegration and fragmentation and also reappropriation and creative variety have expressed and shaped our understanding of the period across centuries and research fields. This is precisely what we would like to focus on in the present introduction, moving from epistemology to visual and literary cultures with the concept of fragmentation as our guide on the journey. If such an introduction is, we believe, useful for a better understanding of the volume’s coherence, it of course by no means has the ambition to be exhaustive, focusing mainly on several breaking points in the understanding of the late antique in the past two centuries. 3 See The Sack of Rome in 410 ad: The Event, Its Context and Its Impact, Proceedings of the Conference (German Archaeological Institute at Rome, November 4–6, 2010), Johannes Lipps, Carlos Machado, Philipp von Rummel eds, Wiesbaden 2013. 4 See the review-article by Peter Van Nuffelen, “Not Much Happened: 410 and All That”, The Journal of Roman Studies, cv (2015), pp. 322–329. 5 Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Princeton/Oxford 2017. 6 Idem, “The Coronavirus Is Accelerating History Past the Breaking Point”,   Foreign Policy Magazine (April 6, 2020), https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/06/coronavirus-is-accelerating-history-past-the-breaking-point/ [last accessed on 17 October 2022]. 7 “Eine ganze Historikergeneration wird von nun an die Justinianische Pest, den ‘Schwarzen Tod’ und selbstverständlich auch die Spanische Grippe vor dem Hintergrund von Covid-19 framen. Man wird über diesen Sachverhalt reflektieren können, aber man wird ihm nicht entkommen”(Mischa Meier,“Die Justinianische Pest – im Spiegel der Covid-19-Pandemie betrachtet”,  in h-Soz-Kult [2020/11/27], www.hsozkult.de/debate/id/diskussionen-5077 [last accessed on 17 October 2022]). See also Idem, Das andere Zeitalter Justinians. Kontingenzerfahrung und Kontingenzbewältigung im 6. Jh. n. Chr., Göttingen 2003. 8 Eric R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine, Cambridge 1965. 9 See already Alexander Demandt, Der Fall Roms. Die Auflösung des römischen Reiches im Urteil der Nachwelt, Munich 2014 [1984]. The literature on the historiography of Late Antiquity has been growing exponentially in recent years; see, e.g., The New Late Antiquity: A Gallery of Intellectual Portraits, Clifford Ando, Marco Formisano eds, Heidelberg 2021; Arnaldo Marcone, Tarda antichità. Profile storico e prospettive storiografiche, Rome 2020; Mario Mazza, “‘Spätantike’. Da Burckhardt a Usener e Reitzenstein – e oltre”,  Rivista di Diritto Romano, xix (2019), pp. 149–165; Richard Brilliant, “‘Late Antiquity’: A Protean Term”, Acta ad Archaeologiam et Artium Historiam Pertinentia, xxv (2012), pp. 29–56; Edward James,“The Rise and Function of the Concept ‘Late Antiquity’”,  Journal of Late Antiquity, i/1 (2008), pp. 20–30; Polymnia Athanassiadi,“Antiquité tardive. Construction et déconstruction d’un modèle historiographique”,  Antiquité Tardive, xiv (2006), pp. 311–324; Andrea Giardina, “Tardoantico: appunti sul dibatto attuale”,  Studi storici, xlv/1 (2004), pp. 41–46; and Wolf Liebeschuetz, “The Birth of Late Antiquity”,  Antiquité Tardive, xii (2004), pp. 253–261.

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Late antique fragmentation in modern scholarly and literary discourse Fragmentation is meant here in its broadest sense: an umbrella term encompassing various manifestations of cultural, social, and geopolitical disintegration that accompanied the end of the Western Roman Empire. The concepts of fragmentation and heterogeneity, introduced into the scholarly discourse notably with the birth of postmodern theories, have indeed proven to be particularly useful tools for understanding late antique art not as a product of decadence, but rather as an expression of creative reappropriation of the past10. The ensuing rehabilitation of the period has brought to the fore the capacity of late antique art and culture to prefigure some of the characteristics and concerns of postmodernism. Within literary studies, it was, for example, late antique awareness of the materiality and atomistic nature of language and the signification process itself that was identified as corresponding to (post-)structuralist concerns about the (elusive) significance of language as a means of communication. This subject has been recently examined by Jesús Hernández Lobato, who characterized Late Antiquity as a real “linguistic turn” from classical antiquity and whose perspective is indebted to current trends in reading late antique literary production as a mirror of and a potential source of inspiration for postmodern thinking11. For visual culture, the idea that some of the aesthetic trends in Late Antiquity correspond to the concerns of postmodernism and the avant-garde has been explored, especially regarding the irruption of a new visual idiom and the emergence of more “abstract”, “conceptual”, and “symbolic” forms of expression12. Similarly, from the perspective of a “long Late Antiquity” with its ever-wider contours, the concept of the fragmentation of the Roman Empire has been helpful to account for the multiplicity of voices and actors involved in the complex transformation of the ancient world13. This perspective, partly indebted to Peter Brown’s groundbreaking framework, was explored notably by Jaś Elsner, who promoted a much-needed decolonizing and cross-cultural approach to the late antique world (and, more generally, within the field of art history)14. In the same direction, recent studies have highlighted the essential role of visual culture in the transformation of Late Antiquity15. These and similar preoccupations teach us as much about the late antique world as about what generations of researchers have projected onto the past. The broad concept of fragmentation – which has obviously been applied to not only Late Antiquity but also other “threshold periods” – is therefore to be understood within its changing historiographical actualizations16. As Gérard Nauroy has pointed out, one of the great moments of a renewed interest in Late Antiquity after the Enlightenment must be identified under the impulse of fin de siècle writers17. Feelings of ennui, disillusionment, and melancholy, as in Paul Verlaine’s famous verses, projected onto the past are based precisely on the prejudices that have circulated about the period since at least the fifteenth century: the decadence, indolence, and languor of the last Romans at the sunset of their empire18. On the other hand, decomposition and fragmentation were also seen as positive impulses opposing the ideal of classicism. This is notably the case with the caustic pen of Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) and his À Rebours (1884), probably the most famous of the nineteenth-century decadent novels [Fig. 3]. Through his protagonist, Jean des Esseintes, the archetype of a solitary aesthete who delights in decadence, Huysmans describes in eloquent terms the effect of the progressive “decomposition” of the Latin language:

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“Then the Latin language, which arrived at its supreme maturity under Petronius, began to decay; Christian literature replaced it, bringing new words with new ideas, unused constructions, strange verbs, adjectives with subtle meanings, abstract words that were previously rare in the Roman

introduction

3 / Joris-Karl Huysmans, 1898

language and that Tertullian had been one of the first to adopt into use. […] that special flavor that in the fourth century, and particularly during the following centuries, the odor of Christianity would give the pagan tongue, decomposed like old venison, crumbling at the same time that the old world civilization collapsed and the Empires, putrefied by the sanies of the centuries, succumbed to the thrusts of the barbarians19.” 10 Décadence. “Decline and Fall” or “Other Antiquity”?, Marco Formisano, Therese Fuhrer eds, Heidelberg 2014. 11 Jesús Hernández Lobato, “Late Antique Foundations of Postmodern Theory: A Critical Overview”, in Reading Late Antiquity, Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed, Mats Malm eds, Heidelberg 2018, pp. 51–70; cf. Jesús Hernández Lobato, “Conceptual Poetry: Rethinking Optatian from Contemporary Art”, in Morphogrammata / The Lettered Art of Optatian: Figuring Cultural Transformations in the Age of Constantine, Michael Squire, Johannes Wienand eds, Paderborn 2017, pp. 461–493; and also Simon Goldhill, Preposterous Poetics: The Politics and Aesthetics of Form in Late Antiquity, Cambridge 2020. 12 See, e.g., Sarah Bassett, “Late Antique Art and Modernist Vision”,  in Envisioning Worlds in Late Antique Art: New Perspectives on Abstraction and Symbolism in Late Roman and Early Byzantine Visual Culture (c. 300 – 600), Cecilia Olovsdotter ed., Berlin/Boston 2019, pp. 5–28. 13 Actually, the concept of fragmentation has sometimes been used to define a field of study itself: Andrea Giardina, “Esplosione di tardoantico”,  Studi storici, xl (1999), pp. 157–180. 14 See, e.g., Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity: Histories of Art and Religion from India to Ireland, Jaś Elsner ed., Cambridge 2020; Idem, “Art, Religion and Narrative: A Comparison of Early Christian and Early Buddhist Indian Art”,  Codex Aquilarensis, xxxvii (2021), pp. 537–553; and Idem, “Other Worlds: Utopias in the Art of Late Ancient Eurasia”, West 86th, xxviii/1 (2021), pp. 19–42. 15 A Globalised Visual Culture? Towards a Geography of Late Antique Art, Fabio Guidetti, Katharina Meinecke eds, Oxford/ Philadelphia 2020; Means of Christian Conversion in Late Antiquity: Objects, Bodies, and Rituals, Klára Doležalová, Ivan Foletti, Katarína Kravčíková, Pavla Tichá eds, Brno/Turnhout 2022 (= Convivium, supplementum iii [2021]). 16 For the idea of the “threshold periods”, see Epochenschwelle und Epochenbewusstsein, Reinhart Herzog, Reinhart Koselleck eds, Munich 1987. 17 Gérard Nauroy,“L’homme de l’Antiquité tardive au miroir de nos fins de siècle”, Mémoires de l’Académie nationale de Metz, vii/9 (1996), pp. 161–176; cf. Étienne Wolff, “Quelques jalons dans l’histoire de la réception de Sidoine Apollinaire”, in Décadence (n. 10), pp. 249–262, sp. pp. 258–260; and Scott McGill, “Reading against the Grain: Late Antique Literature in Huysmans’ À Rebours”, in Reading Late Antiquity (n. 11), pp. 85–104. 18 Paul Verlaine, “Langueur”,  in Idem, Jadis et Naguère. Poésies, Paris 1884, p. 104; regarding the prejudices about the period that circulated from the fifteenth century, see Santo Mazzarino, La fine del mondo antico, Milan 1959. 19 “[…] la langue latine, arrivée à sa maturité suprême sous Pétrone, allait commencer à se dissoudre; la littérature chrétienne prenait place, apportant avec des idées neuves, des mots nouveaux, des constructions inemployées, des verbes inconnus, des adjectifs aux sens alambiqués, des mots abstraits, rares jusqu’alors dans la langue romaine, et dont Tertullien avait, l’un des premiers, adopté l’usage. […] ce fumet spécial qu’au quatrième siècle, et surtout pendant les siècles qui vont suivre, l’odeur du christianisme donnera à la langue païenne, décomposée comme une venaison, s’émiettant en même temps que s’effritera la civilisation du vieux monde, en même temps que s’écrouleront sous la poussée des Barbares, les Empires putréfiés par la sanie des siècles” (Joris-Karl Huysmans, À Rebours, Paris 1884, pp. 44–45).

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And a little further on, continuing to follow the “meaty” metaphor common among decadent poets: “The interest that des Esseintes felt for the Latin language did not pause during this period that found it drooping, thoroughly putrid, losing its members and dropping its pus, and barely preserving through all the corruption of its body those still firm elements that the Christians detached to marinate in the brine of their new language20.”

The idea of a creative decomposition that allows the birth of a new idiom can also be found, a few years later, in the writings of Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915). In his Latin mystique published in 1892 and prefaced by Huysmans himself, Gourmont praised the aesthetic ideal of the late Roman Empire, comparing late Latin poetry to symbolism and underlining the effectiveness of the stylistic decomposition found in late antique authors: “It is at the precise time when one neglects it that the Latin language starts to offer here and there the seductions of stylistic decomposition, to express itself not any more in the immutable jargon of rhetoricians, but according to the personal temperament of Orientals or barbarians foreign to Roman discipline – until the victory of popular idioms relinquished it to the museum of oratory instruments21.”

This time, the process of late antique decomposition, as Gourmont pointed out, seems to be linked with what we would call today intercultural exchanges: the personal temperaments of Orientals and barbarians, foreigners with diverse cultural backgrounds, are portrayed as a decisive factor in the transformation of what the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had, since Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) at the latest, constructed as the unsurpassable ideal of Greco-Roman visual and literary culture. This ideal was embodied, throughout the nineteenth century, in neoclassicism22. Against this doxa, the idea that the fragmentation of the empire conveniently offered a new space for communities and voices previously marginal in the Roman world was gaining ground. For Huysmans and Gourmont, this fresh wind blowing over the Roman Empire was undoubtedly an alternative, at least rhetorically, to the academicism that dominated the French Third Republic. Late Antiquity thus became almost a symbol of possible liberation, aesthetic, intellectual, and political, from the dominant structure23. Late antique fragmentation and the birth of modern “nations” and new art forms In historical and historiographical terms, the fragmentation of the Roman world was also notably conceptualized as giving rise to the birth of modern nations24. This phenomenon can be observed not only in those states that once formed the heart of the Roman Empire – such as Italy and to a certain extent France – but also in states built in territories formerly dominated by nomadic peoples who participated in the political transformation of the late antique world. In Italy, especially from the years of the Risorgimento onward, with an acceleration in the two Fascist decades, Constantine’s reign logically became a mirror of “authentic Italian-ness”25. In the Germanophone milieu, perception of his reign was more nuanced, oscillating between the myth of continuity with Greece and Rome and the emancipation provoked by the Völkerwanderung26. In his influential Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur given in Vienna in 1808 and published from 1809 to 1811, which had a considerable impact on contemporary thinking, August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) expressed, among other thoughts, his ideas about the birth of Romanticism in European culture. He described how those who adopted this intellectual framework 16

“[…] gave to the peculiar spirit of modern art, as contrasted with antique or classical, the name ‘romantic’. The term is certainly not inappropriate; the word is derived from romance – the name

originally given to the languages which were formed from the mixture of the Latin and the old Teutonic dialects, in the same manner as modern civilization [Bildung of Europe] is the fruit of the heterogeneous union of the peculiarities of the northern nations and the fragments of antiquity

introduction

[Bruchstücke des Alterthumes]27.”

As with the decadents, the heterogeneity provoked by the “fall of Rome” is here seen as a creative and to some extent liberating energy that allows the formation of new languages and also identities that will later become “nations”. August’s younger brother, Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), even saw in the fragmentation of the Roman Empire under the impulse of the Germanic people the true origins of the birth of modern Europe, thus reversing the negative perception of “barbarian invasions”predominant in Italy and France throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries28. Of course, these German authors’ belief that the Germanic peoples played the decisive role in the dynamics accompanying the transformation of the ancient world is not surprising: these were the very thinkers, from Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) to the Schlegel brothers, whose writings were instrumental in the birth of the modern German nation as such29. The role played by the instrumentalization of Late Antiquity as a period of “fertile disintegration” and the role of new Northern Germanic peoples in the dynamic formation of modern “nations” are, in this sense, fundamental30. There is no need to enter into the disastrous developments of this ideology during the interwar period and the Second World War31. Following this relationship established in the nineteenth century between the end of the Roman Empire and the birth of new peoples, it is not surprising that the idea of radical transformations at all cultural levels in Late Antiquity was a central topic for art historians as influential as Alois Riegl (1858–1905), Julius von Schlosser (1866–1938), and Max Dvořák (1874–1921). In different ways, they all focused precisely on the transformative 20 “L’intérêt que portait des Esseintes à la langue latine ne faiblissait pas, maintenant que complètement pourrie, elle pendait, perdant ses membres, coulant son pus, gardant à peine toute la corruption de son corps, quelques parties fermes que les chrétiens détachaient afin de les mariner dans la saumure de leur nouvelle langue” (Huysmans, À Rebours [n. 19], p. 49). 21 “C’est à l’époque précise où on la délaisse que la langue latine commence à offrir ça et là les séductions de la décomposition stylistique, à s’exprimer non plus en un immuable jargon de rhéteur, mais selon le tempérament personnel d’orientaux ou de barbares étrangers à la discipline romaine, – jusqu’à ce que la victoire des idiomes populaires la relègue au musée des instruments oratoires” (Remy de Gourmont, Le Latin Mystique. Les poètes de l’antiphonaire et la symbolique au Moyen Âge, Paris 1892, p. 12). 22 See, e.g., Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, New Haven 1994. 23 Valérie Grandjean,“Remy de Gourmont contre la ‘Décadence’ et contre la ‘Renaissance’: un symboliste sceptique dans le débat nationaliste à la veille de 1914”,  in L’histoire littéraire des écrivains. Paroles vives, Marie Blaise, Sylvie Triaire, Alain Vaillant eds, Montpellier 2009, pp. 211–226. 24 On this broad subject, see sp. Éric Michaud, The Barbarian Invasions: A Genealogy of the History of Art, Cambridge, ma / London 2019 [2015]. 25 See, e.g., Giovanni Belardelli,“Il mito fascista della romanità”, in Il classico nella Roma contemporanea. Mito, modelli, memoria, Atti del Convegno (Roma, 18–20 ottobre 2000), vol. ii, Fernanda Roscetti ed., Rome 2002, pp. 325–358; and Emilio Gentile, Fascismo di pietra, Rome/Bari 2007. 26 See Michaud, The Barbarian Invasions (n. 24), pp. 95–120. 27 August W. Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, A. J. W. Morrison, John Black transls, London 1846, pp. 21–22; the original is quoted in, e.g., Michaud, The Barbarian Invasions (n. 24), p. 246, n. 4: “Die, welche dieß annahmen, haben für den eigenthümlichen Geist der modernen Kunst, im Gegensatz mit der antike oder classischen, den Nahmen romantisch erfunden. Allerdings nicht unpassend: das Wort kommt her von romance, der Benennung der Volkssprachen, welche sich durch die Vermischung des Lateinischen mit den Mundarten des Altdeutschen gebildet hatten, gerade wie die neuere Bildung aus den fremdartigen Bestandtheilen der nordischen Stammesart und der Bruchstücke des Alterthumes zusammen geschmolzen ist.” 28 See chiefly Michaud, The Barbarian Invasions (n. 24), pp. 97–99. 29 Ibidem, passim; cf. also Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe, Princeton, nj, 2002. 30 Walter Goffart, “None of Them Were Germans: Northern Barbarians in Late Antiquity”,  in Idem, Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire, Philadelphia 2006, pp. 187–229; cf. also Klaus von See, Barbar, Germane, Arier. Die Suche nach der Identität der Deutschen, Heidelberg 1994. 31 Von See, Barbar,Germane, Arier (n. 30), passim.

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introduction

4 / Cover of Alois Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunst-Industrie nach den Funden in ÖsterreichUngarn, Vienna 1901 5 / Cover of Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie, Munich 1908

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power of the late antique, with a special interest in the transition between classical antiquity and the Middle Ages32. In 1902, a year after the publication of his Spätrömische KunstIndustrie [Fig. 4], Alois Riegl argued that “the problem of Late Antiquity is […] the most important and decisive in the history of mankind up to now”33. For these art historians, some of whom flourished during the progressive disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – to which they were often loyally bound – it was the transformative power of Late Antiquity that was responsible for the emergence of a new visual and aesthetic culture34. In a broader context, the birth of a new aesthetic paradigm for these authors had a psychologizing dimension, which obviously corresponded with the emergence of psychoanalysis in those days. Such a perspective had far-ranging implications for understanding late antique art; contemporary interest in interior life as a mirror of moments of personal crisis and/or transformative experiences was an ideal platform onto which the transition period of the third to the eight centuries could meaningfully be projected. This period thus came to be considered as an eloquent example of how societies could be reconfigured in cultural, religious, aesthetic, and spiritual terms following a crisis. The question of the visual transformation that took place from the third to the eight centuries has therefore become central for reasons conditioned by these authors’ own concerns: on the one hand, from the nineteenth century onward, there was a considerable need to rethink the role of “Germans”in the creative fragmentation of the ancient world; on the other hand, the Viennese authors at the end of the nineteenth century were naturally eager to rethink the place of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Europe. In both cases, Late Antiquity provided an ideal instrument and “historical” parallel to satisfy these needs.

Toward “medieval” aesthetics

introduction

In the same period, the transformation of the ancient world and the accompanying phenomenon of fragmentation felt across different cultural domains were often associated with abstraction. These links were notably made by Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965), one of the most prominent representatives of the psychological approach to artistic forms. A student of Heinrich Wölfflin and Alois Riegl, Worringer introduced in his most famous work Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1908) a globalizing psychological model to explain the two main directions of the development of Western visual culture [Fig. 5]35. His arguments immediately resonated with modern art concepts and contemporary concerns around abstract versus naturalistic art, contributing to debates about modernism and the avant-garde36. For Worringer, abstraction in art comes from heightened sensitivity and a psychological desire to transcend nature as opposed to Einfühlung, empathy, at ease with the faithful representation of nature. This opposition, in his view, also manifested “ethnically”,  in the difference between the northern, abstract, art forms and the southern European, more mimetic, forms, as well as religiously, with a distinction between those religions more inclined to transcendence and those based rather on immanence. Worringer argued that certain peoples were more predisposed to producing certain forms of art than others were. The predominance of stylization, geometrical forms, and fragmentary patterns – the general drive toward abstraction – would then be the result of mankind’s feelings of alienation toward the world: “Now what are the psychic presuppositions for the urge to abstraction? We must seek them in these peoples’ feeling about the world, in their psychic attitude toward the cosmos. Whereas the precondition for the urge to empathy is a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world, the urge to abstraction is the outcome of a greater inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world; in a religious respect it corresponds to a strongly transcendental tinge in all notions. We might describe this state as an immense spiritual dread of space37.”

Such alienation and insecurity toward the world would be found especially in “primitive” peoples, but also, for example, according to Worringer, in “Byzantine” and “Gothic” art. 32 Julius von Schlosser,“Heidnische Elemente in der christlichen Kunst des Altertums”, in Idem, Präludien. Vorträge und Aufsätze, Berlin 1927 [1894], pp. 29–35; Idem, “Zur Genesis der mittelalterlichen Kunstanschauung”, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung. Ergänzungs-Band, vi (1901), pp. 760–791; Alois Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunst-Industrie nach den Funden in Österreich-Ungarn, Vienna 1901; Max Dvořák, “Les Aliscans”, in Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte. Franz Wickhoff gewidmet von einem Kreise von Freuden und Schülern, Vienna 1903, pp. 11–23. 33 “Das spätantike Problem ist […] das wichtigste und entscheidendste in der ganzen bisherigen Geschichte der Menschheit” (Alois Riegl, “Spätrömisch oder orientalisch”, Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung, xciii/xciv [23 & 24 April 1902], pp. 153–156, 162–165, cit. p. 153; reprinted in Maske und Kothurn, lviii [2012], pp. 11–26); see Georg Vasold, “Bemerkungen zu Alois Riegls Artikel ‘Spätrömisch oder orientalisch’”,  in Maske und Kothurn, lviii (2012), pp. 27–68. 34 Margaret Olin, “Art History and Ideology: Alois Riegl and Josef Strzygowski”,  in Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture, Penny Schine Gold, Benjamin C. Bax eds, Amsterdam 2000, pp. 151–170; Georg Vasold, “Der Blick in den tragischen Spiegel. Zur kunsthistorischen Erforschung der Spätantike in Wien um 1900”, in The Nineteenth-Century Process of ‘Musealization’ in Hungary and Europe, Ernő Marosi, Gábor Klaniczay eds, Budapest 2006, pp. 91–112; Jaś Elsner,“The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901”, Art History, xxv/3 (2002), pp. 358–379; and Idem, “The Viennese Invention of Late Antiquity: Between Politics and Religion in the Forms of Late Roman Art”,  in Empires of Faith (n. 14), pp. 110–127. 35 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, Chicago 1997 [1908]; cf. Hundert Jahre “Abstraktion und Einfühlung”. Konstellationen um Wilhelm Worringer, Norberto Gramaccini, Johannes Rößler eds, Paderborn 2012. 36 Neil H. Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, University Park, PA, 1995; Rhys W. Williams,“Wilhelm Worringer and the Historical Avant-Garde”, in Avant-Garde / Neo-Avant-Garde, Dietrich Scheunemann ed., Amsterdam / New York 2005, pp. 49–62. 37 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (n. 35), p. 15.

19

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6 / Cover of André Grabar, Les origines de l’esthétique médiévale, Paris 1992 [1945]

20

It is thus not surprising that “abstract” forms of art would become more and more dominant in the later Roman world, a moment when the “happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world” would have been fractured. Furthermore, the rise of a more transcendental relationship to the divine, together with the success of monotheistic Christianity, might have been a reaction to the progressive disintegration of the Roman social order38. These phenomena would have, in turn, pushed visual culture toward a more abstract and conceptual mode of representation. Worringer’s theory is particularly important for our perspective because it unites ethnic predispositions, psychological and religious aspects, and visual culture, relating them to broader cultural phenomena, including a tendency of late antique art to move toward the transcendental and spiritual. This perspective had a lasting impact on later reconsiderations of the arts of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages when faithful imitation of nature was suddenly no longer at the center of aesthetic appreciation. Indeed, similar ideas, although stemming from a different point of view, underpin André Grabar’s (1896–1990) influential 1945 article on the origins of medieval aesthetics39. In this text, Grabar proposed viewing the visual transformation of the late antique world in relation to a more transcendental, fragmented, and abstract aesthetic. For Grabar – who used the thoughts of the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus (ca 204/205–270) as a fil rouge – the fragmented vision becomes a way of seeing beyond the appearances of the physical world toward a more spiritual one [Fig. 6]40. Such a vision will be at the roots of the thoughts proposed by such influential figures as Kurt Weitzmann (1904–1993) and Ernst Kitzinger (1912–2003), who contributed in a decisive way to the broad and still open question of the birth of “medieval aesthetics”. Throughout the historiography that we have sketched, a more “positive” way of looking at the “fall of Rome” and the transformation of late antique culture thus permitted not only (re)constructing a more nuanced view of the period, but also highlighting many of the phenomena that would become inherent to medieval culture – from the poetics of “ruin” to spiritual seeing41.

Conclusion

introduction

The papers included in the present volume are also indebted to such a development in historiographical thinking about Late Antiquity. Ivan Foletti and Marie Okáčová open the volume with a fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue on various manifestations of creative fragmentation in both the literary and visual cultures of Late Antiquity. Jana Mikulová offers a close examination of the means of marking direct discourse, highlighting how late Latin authors composed their texts in both rupture and continuity with the classical style. Chiara Croci revisits and challenges the premises of the long-lasting debate on “abbreviated” or “signitive” images as a new visual strategy for early Christian art, while Alberto Virdis proposes a radically new narrative on the birth of stained glass from late antique visual forms. Finally, Katharina Meinecke goes beyond the boundaries of Mediterranean Late Antiquity to examine the ways in which the spread of ornaments across different media provoked cross-cultural dialogue across Afro-Eurasia. The volume is closed by two chronicles, one by Marco Aimone on two Byzantine capitals that bring new data on architectural sculpture in the sixth century and one by Renate J. Pillinger that casts new light on a series of early Christian gold glasses and their iconography. Through the present research, we would thus like to go beyond historiographical myths, while following recent trends in late antique studies. In the humanities, Late Antiquity has been systematically conceptualized as a profound moment of fragmentation, which very often resonated directly with the concerns of individual scholars that were for various reasons projected onto the past. Whether or not we agree that there was indeed an “aesthetics” of Late Antiquity, a question that several of the papers in this volume try to address, the instrumentalization of the period in terms of transformative fragmentation became a means of making sense of various moments in history by reinterpreting the heritage of the late antique past. More than anything, perhaps, the idea of fragmentation as a creative and memory-building mechanism responds to our psychological need, throughout the ages, to make sense of the past to understand the present42. 38 Bassett, “Late Antique Art” (n. 12), pp. 17–19; see also James Trilling, “Medieval Art without Style? Plato’s Loophole and a Modern Detour”,  Gesta, xxxiv/1 (1995), pp. 57–62. 39 André Grabar,“Plotin et les origines de l’esthétique médiévale”, Cahiers archéologiques, i (1945), pp. 15–34. Grabar’s framework was indebted to his Russian formation followed by his emigration to a French milieu; see Adrien Palladino, “Transforming Medieval Art from Saint Petersburg to Paris: André Nikolajevič Grabar’s Fate and Scholarship between 1917 and 1945”, in Transformed by Emigration: Welcoming Russian Intellectuals, Scientists and Artists 1917–1945, Ivan Foletti, Karolina Foletti, Adrien Palladino eds, Brno/Turnhout 2020 (= Convivium, supplementum [2020]), pp. 122–143. 40 Adrien Palladino, “André Grabar, Plotinus, and the Potency of Late Antique Images”,  in André Grabar, Plotinus and the Origins of Medieval Aesthetics, Adrien Palladino ed. and transl., Brno/Rome 2018, pp. 13–54 (with further references). 41 See, e.g., Roy M. Liuzza, “The Tower of Babel: The Wanderer and the Ruins of History”,  Studies in the Literary Imagination, xxxvi/1 (2003), pp. 1–35; regarding spiritual seeing, see Herbert L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art, Philadelphia 2000. 42 See Olof Heilo,“Postscript: The Meaning of Ruins”, in Spoliation as Translation: Medieval Worlds in the Eastern Mediterranean, Ivana Jevtić, Ingela Nilsson eds, Brno/Turnhout 2021 (= Convivium, supplementum ii [2021]), pp. 194–199.

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articles

introduction

Abstract – An Age of Fragmentation. Evidence from Late Antique Literary, Visual, and Material Cultures – Certain aesthetic phenomena of late antique (third to seventh centuries) seem to run parallel in literary, visual, and material cultures, attesting to an apparently coherent cultural transformation triggered off by the penetration of Christianity, especially in the Latin West. This study focuses on various manifestations of “cumulative aesthetics” that seem particularly characteristic of the period, such as cultural spoliation, fragmentation patterns, and the poetics of detail. Additional consideration is given to the changing role of audiences and the general movement toward “open artifacts”, as conceived by Umberto Eco. Accepting these practices as significant semantic strategies common in multiple media to reappropriate the past, the “radical” transformation of late antique society emerges as possible only through the continuity of and contiguity with classical heritage. The latter had first to be dismantled into parts before being reassembled into a new, coherent whole within the newly established prism of Christianity. This “unity in diversity” motif seems to be a dominant communication strategy in late antique visual and literary discourse, both encouraging and authorizing aesthetic experiments with the cultural heritage of the past and consistent with official imperial court propaganda. Keywords – cento, colored marble, cumulative aesthetics, fragmentation, open work, poetics of detail, Ravenna, (re)appropriation, spoliation, Sant’Agnese fuori le mura, Santa Pudenziana, varietas, visual poetry Ivan Foletti Masaryk University, Brno [email protected] Marie Okáčová Masaryk University, Brno 24 [email protected]

An Age of Fragmentation Evidence from Late Antique Literary, Visual, and Material Cultures Ivan Foletti & Marie Okáčová

“opusculum de inconexis continuum, de diversis unum, de seriis ludicrum, de alieno nostrum” Auson. Epist. ad Paulum, praef. 12

In the period we now commonly call Late Antiquity, both texts and images witnessed significant or even radical aesthetic changes. The origins of some of them can be traced back to previous centuries, while many continued well into the so-called Middle Ages, which is reflected in the time span (from the third to seventh centuries) covered by this paper and roughly corresponding to the – by now very well established – concept

of a “long Late Antiquity”1. The common backdrop to these developments seems to be, despite attempts to relativize its direct impact, the general spread of Christianity accelerated by Constantine’s official support. The present paper – born 1

See, e.g., Averil Cameron,“The ‘Long’ Late Antiquity: A Late Twentieth-Century Model”, in Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome, Timothy P. Wiseman ed., Oxford / New York 2002, pp. 165–191.

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from an encounter between a classical philolo- both encouraged and authorized aesthetic expergist and an art historian – aims to examine the iments with the heritage of the past. period’s changing cultural climate, with a focus on those phenomena of contemporary aesthetics De alieno nostrum: the practice of spoliation that seem, as will be argued, to run in parallel in different cultural spheres. The main hypothesis One of the most widespread and conspicuous of this shared research is that the visual and liter- ways in which late antique art faced and arguary evidence in the Latin West between the third ably coped with the hermeneutic gap between the and seventh centuries speaks to a radical but also past and the present was spoliation, that is, the gradual and coherent cultural transformation. reuse of previous building material to construct While the individual practices to be discussed new artifacts, whether they were sculptures, colin this paper have been more or less broadly ac- umns, entire monuments, or (secondary) literary knowledged and examined in previous scholar- texts. Art history research up to ca 1940 promotship, parallel treatments of the developments in ed a more or less pragmatic understanding of literary and other cultural domains are rather oc- “recycled visuality”, i.e. the reuse of preexisting casional and/or only superficial, even though the fragments due to material and/or technical neinterface between the literary and visual arts of cessity. This approach stemmed from a negative Late Antiquity was identified and studied already bias toward the allegedly decadent culture of in Michael Roberts’ classic 1989 book The Jeweled Late Antiquity. Such a perception was based on Style and more than twenty years later extensively the thinking of Renaissance artists and scholars explored in Jesús Hernández Lobato’s substantial such as Raffaello Sanzio and Giorgio Vasari, who monograph Vel Apolline muto2. This shared piece were highly critical of the aesthetic qualities of the of research thus continues along the paths opened fourth-century reliefs on the iconic monument by Roberts and Hernández Lobato, bringing addi- of late antique spoliation, the Arch of Constantional examples and contextualized insights and tine5. From the second half of the twentieth cenoffering a truly interdisciplinary dialogue on late tury onwards, however, a more conceptual and antique culture. aesthetic motivation behind the spoliation came We have decided to focus on the most signif- to be acknowledged with pioneering studies by icant aspects of the concept of “cumulative aes- Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann6. In literary studthetics”3, namely the following three phenomena: ies, for similar reasons, it was only in the second cultural spoliation, fragmentation patterning, and half of the twentieth century with the birth of the poetics of detail4. The changing role of art re- the theory of intertextuality and reception aescipients and the general movement toward “open thetics that extensive spoliation of previous texts artifacts”, as conceived by Umberto Eco in his 1962 was acknowledged as a legitimate compositional book Opera aperta, will also be considered. By ex- principle, with the range of authorial intentions amining these practices as symptomatic semantic in reemploying bits and pieces of previous works strategies, we wish to show how late antique cul- almost as broad as the variety of new contexts into ture reappropriated past cultural heritage, wheth- which these fragments were inserted. er material or immaterial, across different media. An extreme manifestation of what we may deWe aim to propose that the radical transformation scribe as the literary technique of spoliation can of late antique society was possible only through be seen in late antique centos, patchwork poems the continuity of and contiguity with the classical composed entirely of preexisting building blocks, past. It seems that the latter had to be, to a cer- disconnected quotations from Homer, Virgil, or tain extent, dismantled into pieces to be recreated another canonical author7. These quotation units, in a new whole alongside the newly established once woven into a new textual network, become prism. This “unity in diversity” leitmotif appears organic parts of new, original works, which are to have been a dominant communication strategy to various degrees thematically distant from the at the late antique imperial court, a strategy that source poetry while retaining its original semantic

overtones8. The point of such an intellectual play consists in the semantic changes undergone by individual quotes in new contexts. In this manner, most classical poetry of the past may yield quite unexpected – and for the reader potentially discomforting – meanings. The sixteen Virgilian centos surviving from Late Antiquity were composed during the third– sixth centuries, presumably in North Africa, and range in genre and theme from everyday topics, mythological epyllion, and tragedy to (in places obscene) wedding songs and biblical epics. Each cento text is a true patchwork of quotes taken typically from disparate episodes and scenes from all three major works by Virgil, with the Aeneid representing the predominant source. For a conceptual description of the spoliation principle of the cento, we need to turn to one of the paramount representatives of the late antique literary elites and a figure closely linked to the imperial court – Decimus Magnus Ausonius. Flourishing in the second half of the fourth century, this Roman poet, rhetoric teacher, and author of the obscene Cento Nuptialis from Burdigala (modern Bordeaux) characterized the cento using a conspicuous number of antonyms (Epist. ad Paulum, praef. 12):

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“a little work, continuous, though made of disjointed tags; one, though of various scraps; absurd, though of grave materials; mine, though the elements are another’s”9.

According to Ausonius, the recontextualization of source material in the patchwork texts was intended to ultimately render the work continuous, united, playful, and one’s own. In other words, it is not so much the building material but rather its context-based meaning that makes all the difference; a single fragment may, depending 2 Michael Roberts, The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity, Ithaca, ny / London 1989; Jesús Hernández Lobato, Vel Apolline muto. Estética y poética de la Antigüedad tardía, Bern 2012. For brief but nonetheless insightful observations on the parallel trends in late antique art and literature in existing scholarship, see nn. 7, 66 below. 3 Regarding this phenomenon in late antique art, see Jaś Elsner, “Late Antique Art: The Problem of the Concept and the Cumulative Aesthetic”, in Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire, Simon Swain, Mark Edwards eds, Oxford 2004, pp. 271–309. 4 For a brief but concise discussion of these and several other related notions of late antique poetics/aesthetics, accompanied by several illustrative examples, see The Poetics of

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Late Latin Literature, Jaś Elsner, Jesús Hernández Lobato eds, New York 2017, pp. 6–16; a much more extensive treatment of the topic is provided by Hernández Lobato, Vel Apolline muto (n. 2), pp. 257–449 et passim. Raffaello Sanzio, Tutti gli scritti, Ettore Camesasca ed., Milan 1956, p. 55; Manuela M. Morresi, “Il tardoantico sottoposto a censura. Le rappresentazioni dell’arco di Costantino tra Quattro e Cinquecento”, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, ii/1 (2010), pp. 45–66, 366–374; Antonio Thiery, “Il Medioevo nell’Introduzione e nel Proemio delle Vite”, in Il Vasari storiografo e artista, Atti del congresso internazionale nel iv centenario della morte (Arezzo-Firenze, 2–8 settembre 1974), Florence 1976, pp. 351–381. Friedrich W. Deichmann, “Säule und Ordnung in der frühchristlichen Architektur”, Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Römische Abteilung, lv (1940), pp. 114–130. For the following trends, see, e.g., Salvatore Settis, “Continuità, distanza, conoscenza. Tre usi dell’antico”, in Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, vol. iii: Dalla tradizione all‘archeologia, Idem ed., Turin 1986, pp. 373–486; Beat Brenk, “Spolia from Constantine to Charlemagne: Aesthetics versus Ideology”, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, xli (1987), pp. 103–109; Jaś Elsner, “From the Culture of Spolia to the Cult of Relics: The Arch of Constantine and the Genesis of Late Antique Forms”, Papers of the British School at Rome, lxviii (2000), pp. 149–184; Mary J. Carruthers, “Varietas: A Word of Many Colours”, Poetica, xli/1–2 (2009), pp. 11–32, sp. pp. 20–21; Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine, Richard Brilliant, Dale Kinney eds, Farnham 2011. For recent discussions of the cento, see Scott McGill, Virgil Recomposed: The Mythological and Secular Centos in Antiquity, Oxford / New York 2005; Martin Bažil, Centones Christiani. Métamorphoses d’une forme intertextuelle dans la poésie latine chrétienne de l’Antiquité tardive, Paris 2009; Marco Formisano, Cristiana Sogno, “Petite Poésie Portable: The Latin Cento in Its Late Antique Context”, in Condensing Texts – Condensed Texts, Marietta Horster, Christiane Reitz eds, Stuttgart 2010, pp. 375–392; Hernández Lobato, Vel Apolline muto (n. 2), pp. 262–317; Aaron Pelttari, The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity, Ithaca, ny / London 2014, pp. 96–112; Marie Okáčová, Centones Vergiliani. Klasická poezie “pod kaleidoskopem” [Centones Vergiliani: Classical Poetry “in the Kaleidoscope”], Prague 2016; specifically for the Homeric centos, see sp. Mark D. Usher, Homeric Stitchings: The Homeric Centos of the Empress Eudocia, Lanham / Boulder / New York / Oxford 1998; and Brian P. Sowers, In Her Own Words: The Life and Poetry of Aelia Eudocia, Washington, dc, 2020. Regarding the parallelism between the drive for spoliation in late antique centos and the broader cultural milieu, see, e.g., Elsner, “Late Antique Art” (n. 3), p. 18. The name for this mosaic-like poetic form is based on a very fitting metaphor, which compares literary centos to a kind of second-hand textile made out of pieces of old garments stitched together. Regarding the primary uses of the Latin cento (Gr. κέντρων), see Filippo Ermini, Il centone di Proba e la poesia centonaria latina, Rome 1909, pp. 19–22. Cf., e.g., Sidonius Apollinaris’ use of the noun pannus (“a piece of cloth, rag”) in Carm. 22, ep. 6, to describe poetic composition as a sort of texture consisting of exquisite details (regarding this metaphor, see Hernández Lobato, Vel Apolline muto [n. 2], pp. 367–368). “opusculum de inconexis continuum, de diversis unum, de seriis ludicrum, de alieno nostrum” (Ausonius is quoted and referenced according to Decimus Magnus Ausonius, Sämtliche Werke, vol.  ii: Trierer Werke, Paul Dräger ed., transl., and comm., Trier 2011; translation is by McGill, Virgil Recomposed [n. 7], p. 3).

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on authorial intentions and skills, give birth to very different artifacts with completely different aesthetic identities10. One of the most famous and glaring examples of such a reappropriation of classical heritage by the emerging Christian community is the Christian centos composed of verses from Homer or Virgil. In these texts, not only do the epic heroes par excellence such as Achilles or Aeneas undergo an almost miraculous metamorphosis to become the protagonists of biblical stories, but also, and still more importantly, the classical past appears to be reconciled with the present, through the Christian prism. Such literary experiments – pursued also by such high-ranking figures as the Greek Eastern Roman Empress Eudocia (r. 421–450) and the Roman noblewoman Faltonia Betitia Proba (ca 306/315 – ca 353/366) – were for obvious hermeneutic reasons seen as controversial and even compared to heretical practices by several Church Fathers, such as Tertullian (Praescr. 39.3–7)11, Jerome (Epist. 53.7)12, Irenaeus, and Clement of Alexandria13. Moreover, the so-called Gelasian Decree (Decretum Gelasianum de Libris Recipiendis et Non Recipiendis) includes Proba’s Virgilian retelling of the Bible among the apocryphal works. However, Proba’s cento was not only an influential source of inspiration for other centonists, but also quite a popular read well into the Middle Ages14. The significance of this intellectual play for the elites in terms of the cultural transformation of the classical past into the medieval future can well be illustrated by Proba’s famous metatextual statement in line 23 of her cento: “Vergilium cecinisse loquar pia munera Christi” (“I will declare that Virgil sang about the pious feats of Christ”)15. Proba’s intention, as we may infer, is not so much to infuse Virgil’s words with Christian meanings but rather to reveal or activate the hidden Christian content of his lines that was always already there16. Thus, if Virgil was a proto-Christian author, there may be no need for a reconciliation between the cultural tradition he represents and the Christian one. In other words, rather than a clash of traditions, Proba’s poem – similarly to roughly contemporary Christological interpretations of Virgil’s Eclogue 4 – seems to accentuate perfect continuity and complementarity between the past and the present as

well as between the classical canon and the newly emerging Christian literature. Her cento aims not so much to bestow Christian identities upon pagan heroes as to draw fruitful and semantically functional parallels between the two seemingly incompatible worlds. In this way, the past prefigures and authorizes the present without necessarily evoking notions of rupture and discontinuity17. A question arises as to whether the same or similar meanings can be uncovered in spoliation as applied in contemporary visual production. In the realm of material culture, examples of systematic reuse of previous material are numerous. Perhaps the best known is that of the Arch of Constantine in Rome, but the practice continued in later centuries until the end of the Middle Ages [Fig. 1]18. Recently, Lex Bosman argued that in the early fourth 10 Cf. William G. Roy, “Aesthetic Identity, Race, and American Folk Music”, Qualitative Sociology, xxv/3 (2002), p. 459: “Aesthetic identity is the cultural alignment of artistic genres to social groups by which groups come to feel that genres represent ‘our’ or ‘their’ art, music, and literature.” 11 “Vides hodie ex virgilio fabulam in totum aliam componi, materia secundum versus et versibus secundum materiam concinnatis. Denique hosidius geta medeam tragoediam ex virgilio plenissime exsuxit. Meus quidam propinquus ex eodem poeta inter cetera stili sui otia pinacem cebetis explicuit. Homerocentones etiam vocari solent qui de carminibus homeri propria opera more centonario ex multis hinc inde compositis in unum sarciunt corpus. Et utique fecundior divina litteratura ad facultatem cuiusque materiae. Nec periclitor dicere, ipsas quoque scripturas sic esse ex dei voluntate dispositas, ut haereticis materias subministrarent cum legam oportere haereses esse quae sine scripturis esse non possunt.” “You see in our own day, composed out of Virgil, a story of a wholly different character, the subject-matter being arranged according to the verse, and the verse according to the subject-matter. In short, Hosidius Geta has most completely pilfered his tragedy of Medea from Virgil. A near relative of my own, among some leisure productions of his pen, has composed out of the same poet The Table of Cebes. On the same principle, those poetasters are commonly called Homerocentones, ‘collectors of Homeric odds and ends,’ who stitch into one piece, patchwork fashion, works of their own from the lines of Homer, out of many scraps put together from this passage and from that (in miscellaneous confusion). Now, unquestionably, the Divine Scriptures are more fruitful in resources of all kinds for this sort of facility. Nor do I risk contradiction in saying that the very Scriptures were even arranged by the will of God in such a manner as to furnish materials for heretics, inasmuch as I read that ‘there must be heresies, which there cannot be without the Scriptures’” (Tertullian, The Prescription Against Heretics, Peter Holmes transl., Whitefish 2010, pp. 43–44). 12 “sola scripturarum ars est, quam sibi omnes passim vindicent: scribimus indocti doctique poemata passim. hanc garrula anus, hanc delirus senex, hanc soloecista verbosus, hanc universi praesumunt, lacerant, docent, antequam discant. […] taceo de meis similibus, qui si forte ad scripturas sanctas post saeculares litteras venerint et sermone conposito aurem populi mulserint, quicquid dixerint, hoc legem dei putant nec scire dignantur, quid prophetae, quid apostoli

1 / Arch of Constantine, Rome, 312–315 senserint, sed ad sensum suum incongrua aptant testimonia, quasi grande sit et non vitiosissimum dicendi genus depravare sententias et ad voluntatem suam scripturam trahere repugnantem. quasi non legerimus homerocentonas et vergiliocentonas ac non sic etiam maronem sine christo possimus dicere christianum, quia scripserit: iam redit et virgo, redeunt saturnia regna, iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto, et patrem loquentem ad filium: nate, meae vires, mea magna potentia solus, et post verba salvatoris in cruce: talia perstabat memorans fixusque manebat. puerilia sunt haec et circulatorum ludo similia, docere, quod ignores, immo, et cum clitomacho loquar, nec hoc quidem scire, quod nescias.” “The art of interpreting the scriptures is the only one of which all men everywhere claim to be masters. To quote Horace again Taught or untaught we all write poetry. The chatty old woman, the doting old man, and the wordy sophist, one and all take in hand the Scriptures, rend them in pieces and teach them before they have learned them. […] I say nothing of persons who, like myself have been familiar with secular literature before they have come to the study of the holy scriptures. Such men when they charm the popular ear by the finish of their style suppose every word they say to be a law of God. They [i.e., the heretics] do not deign to notice what Prophets and apostles have intended but they adapt conflicting passages to suit their own meaning, as if it were a grand way of teaching – and not rather the faultiest of all – to misrepresent a writer’s views and to force the scriptures reluctantly to do their will. They forget that we have read centos from Homer and Virgil; but we never think of calling the Christless Maro a Christian because of his lines:– Now comes the Virgin back and Saturn’s reign, / Now from high heaven comes a Child newborn [= Verg. Ecl. 4.6–7]. Another line might be addressed by the Father to the Son:– Hail, only Son, my Might and Majesty [= Verg. Aen. 1.664]. And yet another might follow the Saviour’s words on the cross:– Such words he spake and there transfixed remained [= Verg. Aen. 2.650]. But all this is puerile, and resembles the sleight-of-hand of a mountebank. It is idle to try to teach what you do not know, and – if I may speak with some warmth – is worse still to be ignorant of your ignorance” (Saint Jerome, The Letters of Saint Jerome, William H. Fremantle transl., North Haven, ct, 2016, p. 162). The garrula anus mentioned at the beginning of the quote has for a long time been understood as a reference to Proba; for

arguments against this broadly accepted thesis, see Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed, Proba the Prophet: The Christian Virgilian Cento of Faltonia Betitia Proba, Leiden/Boston 2015, pp. 57–58. 13 Regarding the Latin Church Fathers and their reservations about the cento, see, e.g., Scott McGill, “Virgil, Christianity, and the Cento Probae”,in Texts and Culture in Late Antiquity: Inheritance, Authority, and Change, J. H. D. Scourfield ed., Swansea 2007, pp. 173–193; and Okáčová, Centones Vergiliani (n. 7), pp. 32–35; regarding the Greek authors, see, e.g., Alain Le Boulluec, “Exégèse et polémique antignostique chez Irénée et Clément d’Alexandrie. L’exemple du centon”, in Studia patristica, vol. xvii/2, Elizabeth A. Livingston ed., Oxford 1982, pp. 707–713. 14 Schottenius Cullhed, Proba the Prophet (n. 12), sp. pp. 56–67; cf. Eadem,“Proba and Jerome”, in Décadence: “Decline and Fall” or “Other Antiquity”?, Marco Formisano, Therese Fuhrer eds, Heidelberg 2014, pp. 199–222. 15 Text taken from “Probae Cento. Accedunt Tres Centones a Poetis Christianis Compositi”, in Poetae Christiani Minores, Pars i (csel xvi), Karl Schenkl ed., Vienna 1888, pp. 511–639; translation by Schottenius Cullhed, Proba the Prophet (n. 12), p. 193. 16 See Stephen Hinds, “The Self-Conscious Cento”, in Décadence (n. 14), pp. 171–197, sp. p. 187: “What Proba writes is not ‘I shall make pagan Virgil sing the word of God’ but ‘I shall say that Virgil always already sang the word of God’. Proba is buying into the idea of proto-Christian Virgil: the goal of her cento is not to give a new intent to Virgil’s poetry, but, through an edit, to clarify the intent that was already immanent in Virgil’s poetry.” 17 Cf. the brilliant reading of the sixteen-line Virgilian cento on Narcissus by Jaś Elsner,“Late Narcissus: Classicism and Culture in a Late Roman Cento”,in The Poetics (n. 4), pp. 176–204, as an “interrogation of the predicament of late Roman culture in relation to its past” (ibidem, p. 202). 18 See, e.g., Patrizio Pensabene, Clementina Panella,“Reimpiego e progettazione architettonica nei monumenti tardo-antichi di Roma”, Rendiconti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia, lxvi (1993–1994), pp. 111–283; Patrizo Pensabene, “Progetto unitario e reimpiego nell’arco di Costantino”, in Arco di Costantino. Tra archeologia e archeometria, Idem, Clementina Panella eds, Rome 1999, pp. 28–31; and Elsner, “From the Culture of Spolia” (n. 6), pp. 149–184.

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century and Constantinian buildings, the use of by the Arch of Constantine and – many centuries spolia was – similarly as the use of disparate blocks later – the church of San Lorenzo fuori le mura, of colored marble within a single monument – not the choice of material to be dismantled and reused an entire novelty19. As in the literary centos, mate- was by no means accidental22. As with centos, it rerial spoliation was a way of expressing continuity veals the creator’s cultural background. In addition, with the past, which became a real cultural trend the knowledge and interpretive capacity of the after Constantine. Indeed, the spoliated fragments “reader” play an important role since references could indicate a real “dynastic” structure with to the spoliated material can be understood only material references, in the case of the Arch of Con- by a truly cultured person, a connoisseur. stantine, to the greatest emperors in history20. In this sense, one of the most impressive exIt is also essential to observe that in technolog- amples of spoliation from the late antique period ical terms, spoliation is not a particularly simple is the famous Baptistery of the Arians in Ravenna, procedure. Deichmann, speaking about the Tempi- erected by Theodoric the Great (r. 471–526), king of etto del Clitunno near Spoleto, observed that build- the Ostrogoths, after 493, which was built entirely ing a monument out of recycled materials was out of spoliated bricks [Fig. 3]23. This particular much more complicated than constructing it out of building practice was not unusual in Roman times architectural elements produced ad hoc would be and had, of course, an economic motivation24. At [Fig. 2]21. Consequently, the reuse of previous build- the same time, the fact that it was almost invisible ing blocks cannot be understood, as previously that all of the used fragments were spoliated does postulated, as evidence of technical decadence. On not necessarily preclude an underlying conceptual the contrary, it is an intellectual decision, similar to decision. Indeed, for fourth- and fifth-century Britwhat we may see behind the poetic compositions ain, Robin Fleming argued for a third category for mentioned above. As demonstrated, for example, recycling of Roman building material, somewhere

2 / Tempietto del Clitunno, Pissignano, 5th–7th centuries CE 3 / Exterior view of the Baptistery of the Arians, Ravenna, 493–526

between pragmatic reuse and ideological spolia, in ritual situations25. Although there is no direct evidence for such a reuse of brick with the Baptistery of the Arians, it seems plausible to suppose such an underlying motivation, which may be further understood within the context of the personal biography of King Theodoric. A man with a double cultural identity – a “barbarian” who was educated as a Roman prince at the court of Constantinople – Theodoric may have wanted to demonstrate with his building concept that he was a successor to the Roman imperial authorities26. Even if they were not easily visible, the spoliated bricks were therefore probably used as signs of continuity, materializing the king’s desire to demonstrate his sense of belonging to the previous imperial tradition. This interpretation is supported also by visual and material evidence; the original mosaic and stucco 19 See, e.g., Lex Bosman,“Constantine’s Spolia: A Set of Columns for San Giovanni in Laterano and the Arch of Constantine in Rome”, in The Basilica of Saint John Lateran to 1600, Idem, Ian P. Haynes, Paolo Liverani eds, Cambridge 2020, pp. 168–196. 20 From the extensive literature on this topic, see, e.g., a particu-

larly illuminating book by Federico Zeri, L’Arco di Costantino. Divagazioni sull’antico, Milan 2004. 21 Friedrich W. Deichmann, “Die Entstehungszeit von Salvatorkirche und Clitumnus-tempel bei Spoleto”, Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Römische Abteilung, lviii (1943), pp. 106–148. 22 Daniela Mondini, San Lorenzo fuori le mura. Storia del complesso monumentale nel Medioevo, Rome 2016. 23 Regarding this building, see, e.g., Giuseppe Gerola, “Il restauro del Battistero Ariano di Ravenna”, in Studien zur Kunst des Ostens. Josef Strzygowski zum sechzigsten Geburtstage von seinen Freunden und Schülern, Heinrich Gluck ed., Vienna 1923, pp. 112–129; Maria Grazia Breschi, La cattedrale e il battistero degli Ariani a Ravenna, Ravenna 1965, pp. 41–47; Friedrich W. Deichmann, Ravenna. Hauptstadt des spätantiken Abendlandes, vol. ii/3, Wiesbaden/Stuttgart 1969–1989, pp. 262–263; Emanuela Penni Iacco, L’arianesimo nei mosaici di Ravenna, Ravenna 2011; Maria Cristina Carile, “Architetture e decoro del complesso vescovile ariano: ipotesi ricostruttive e modelli di riferimento”, in Il patrimonio culturale tra conoscenza, tutela e valorizzazione. Il caso della ‘Piazzetta degli Ariani’ di Ravenna, Giuseppe Garzia, Alessandro Iannucci, Mariangela Vandini eds, Bologna 2015, pp. 97–127. 24 Enrico Cirelli,“Spolia e riuso di materiali tra la tarda antichità e l’alto medioevo a Ravenna”, Hortus Artium Medievalium, xvii (2011), pp. 209–218. 25 Robin Fleming,“The Ritual Recycling of Roman Building Material in Late 4th- and Early 5th-Century Britain”, Post-Classical Archaeologies, vi (2016), pp. 7–30, sp. pp. 7–8. 26 From the extensive literature, see sp. the latest synthetic contributions: Claudio Azzara, “Teoderico”, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. xcv, Rome 2019; Theoderich der Große und das gotische Königreich in Italien, Hans-Ulrich Wiemer ed., Berlin 2020.

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decorations of the Baptistery of the Arians explicitly refer to the Orthodox Baptistery in Ravenna [Figs 4–5] and can therefore be considered a sort of “conceptual spolia”27. A desire for continuity thus manifested itself in not only the selection of the material to be used, but also the visual choices. As shown above, verses and objects as well as concepts and images are elements that were consciously and systematically reused in the late antique world. This practice was, of course, not a complete innovation, but what is striking is the pervasive, systematic, and conceptual way in which spoliation penetrated the worlds of literature and material and visual cultures. A unique manifestation of this technique put into practice in different media at once can be found in the church and the apsidal mosaic of the early seventh-century Sant’Agnese fuori le mura in Rome [Fig. 6]28. Pope Honorius i (625–638),

27 Regarding the continuity between the designs of the two baptisteries, see, e.g., Carile, “Architetture e decoro” (n. 23), pp. 110–112; and Ivan Foletti, “De la liminalité à la présence. Les coupoles milanaise, leurs décorations et la naissance du moyen âge”, Études de lettres, cccvii/2 (2018), pp. 125–144. The notion of “spolia concettuale”was first proposed by Serena Romano in Maria Andaloro, Serena Romano, “L’immagine nell’abside”, in Arte e iconografia a Roma, da Costantino a Cola di Rienzo, Eaedem eds, Milan 2000, pp. 93–132, sp. p. 115. 28 Regarding the building and its decorations, see, e.g., Richard Krautheimer, Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum Romae (iv–ix sec.), vol. i, Vatican City 1937, pp. 14–38; Amato P. Frutaz, Il complesso monumentale di Sant’Agnese, Vatican City 1960; La basilica costantiniana di Sant’Agnese. Lavori archeologici e di restauro, Marina Magnani Cianetti, Carlo Pavolini eds, Milan 2004; La pittura medievale a Roma 312–1431. Atlante, vol. i: Suburbio, Vaticano, Rione Monti, Maria Andaloro ed., Milan 2006, pp. 67–76 (with further references); Erik Thunø, The Apse Mosaic in Early Medieval Rome: Time, Network, and Repetition, New York 2015; Antonella Ballardini, “Habeas corpus: Agnese nella basilica di via Nomentana”, in Di Bisanzio dirai ciò che è passato, ciò che passa e che sarà, vol. i, Silvia Pedone, Andrea Paribeni eds, Rome 2018, pp. 253–279; Dennis Trout, “Pictures with Words: Reading the Apse Mosaic of S. Agnese f.l.m. (Rome)”, Studies in Iconography, xl (2019), pp. 1–26; Gabriele Ferraù, Sant’Agnese fuori le mura. Il complesso monumentale sulla via Nomentana, Castiglione di Sicilia 2020.

4 / Cupola of the Baptistery of the Arians, Ravenna, 493–526 5 / Cupola of the Orthodox Baptistery, Ravenna, 451–468 6 / Apse of Sant’Agnese fuori le mura, Rome, 625–638

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the building’s conceptor, is probably the person responsible for the exceptionally refined material spoliation that gave rise to the monument29. At the same time, it has been suggested that he may have been the author of the Latin poem, an ekphrastic epigram consisting of six elegiac couplets with a distinct Virgilian and Ovidian flavor, framing the lower part of the apsidal conch, which was erected above a tomb with Agnes’ corporeal remains30. For the present study, we leave aside parallels between the mosaic representation of St Agnes – standing in a rigid position between Honorius i to her right and another bishop, usually identified as either Pope Symmachus (498–514) or Gregory the Great (r. 590–604), to her left – and her portrayal in the most authoritative and popular version of her story in the medieval world, the pseudo-Ambrosian Passio Sanctae Agnetis (bhl 156)31; this line of inspiration has already been acknowledged and commented upon32. We would therefore like to focus instead on the intriguing relationship between the visual composition of the mosaic and the accompanying, fully “meta-visual” epigram (ilcv 01769a)33: “Golden rises an image out of cut stones / and the daylight is at once embraced and confined. / You would suppose Aurora was rising above from snow-white springs / moistening the fields with dew as the clouds are swept away. Or it is such a light that Iris brings forth among the stars / and a purple peacock, itself sparkling with color. / He who was able to fix the limits of day and night, / that one has driven Chaos away from the tombs of martyrs. Turning upwards, everyone at first glance discerns / these consecrated gifts the bishop Honorius has given. / His image is marked out by his clothing and his deed [i.e., the model of the church in his hands], / he shines forth also in countenance, bearing a glorious heart34.”

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So far, scholars have either ignored the significance of this poem or, upon closer examination, expressed their bewilderment at the classicizing diction of the verse, its invocation of pagan deities (Aurora, Iris, and Chaos), and its apparent lack of close correspondence and/or clear references to the surrounding visual imagery35. In our view, however, the poem, divided into three panels

corresponding to the three figures depicted above it and interacting with the visual plane in several respects, is not as eccentric as it may at first seem. Its gold letters shining against the dark blue background correspond to the upper dark blue band interspersed with shining stars (cf. line 5 of the poem), thus forming a kind of textual-visual frame for the central image crafted on a golden background. There may be a similar dialogue between Agnes’ earthly past and her heavenly future, evoked by symbols of her martyrdom, namely a sword and fire, around her feet and the heavenly sign at the vault’s apex, respectively. While the epigram proceeds from a direct reference to the golden image situated above it to a couple of comparisons of its radiance to images strongly evocative of pagan myths to a reference to God’s separation of day and night and, finally, to the characteristics of Bishop Honorius depicted on the mosaic, its overarching topic appears to always be the same: (divine) light and its various manifestations. Characters from the classical epic and bucolic poetry, Christian God, Honorius, and their textual/visual representations all evoke notions of (perpetual) light, which seems to be at the core of the entire scene. In other words, just as heaven and earth are here put into dialogue, the pagan and the Christian seem to meet in a celebration of the lux perpetua. This is the sense in which the image might have been read by contemporary viewers, who might have been much less discomforted by the classicizing tone and register of the accompanying poem than scholars today are36. Actually, the invoked pagan deities do not necessarily represent religious beliefs incompatible with the Christian prism but may rather have been meant (together with the classicizing language itself) as references to the treasure of the past and its still revered tradition. Moreover, along the upper margin of the apsidal arch was originally another inscription, probably also commissioned by Honorius, which juxtaposed the shining glory of the temple to that of Agnes’ deeds (ilcv 01769a):

virginis avla micat variis decorata metallis / sed plvs namqve nitet meritis fvlgentior amplis (emphasis added).

“The virgin’s temple glitters, adorned with various cut stones, / but it shines even more brightly with generous merits37.”

The two hexameters are quite in line with the epigram’s preoccupation with the notions of light; moreover, they clearly and extensively allude to the opening two lines of a similar inscription that describes the illuminating capacity of the apsidal mosaic in the Basilica of Santi Cosma e Damiano (Pope Felix iv: 526–530 [ilcv 01784]):

avla dei claris radiat speciosa metallis / in qva plvs fidei lvx pretiosa micat (emphasis added)38. “With bright stones splendidly shines the temple of God, / in which the precious light of faith flashes even more radiantly39.”

In this sense, the inscriptions in the Sant’Agnese fuori le mura represent a pastiche of previous – classical and Christian – textual, epigraphic, and visual imagery40. To conclude, the entire basilica, constructed on the tomb of St Agnes, may serve as a unique manifestation of tradition and continuity that breaks down boundaries between heaven and earth, and also between pagan past and Christian present and, not least, textual and visual representation. In this case, the practice of spoliation pervades all possible media; the church itself is composed of spoliated columns and marble and the image in the apse can be seen as a sort of “intellectual spolium” since in many respects it refers to previous Roman visual compositions. Not least, the verses in the apse are composed, almost in a cento-like fashion, of numerous references to the most classical authors and of “spoliated” notions of previous Christian imagery. De diversis unum: the phenomenon of fragmentation Another feature that gained prominence in Late Antiquity and that appears to have been shared by both literature and visual culture is the pheno­menon 29 Ivan Foletti, Martin F. Lešák, “Hidden Treasure and Precious Pearl: Sant’Agnese fuori le mura, Its Apse Mosaic, and the Experience of Liturgy”, in From Words to Space: Textual Sources for Reconstructing and Understanding Medieval Sacred Spaces, Sible de Blaauw, Elisabetta Scirocco eds, Rome 2022 (forthcoming). 30 See, e.g., Ivan Foletti, Martin F. Lešák, “Zrození pozdně an-

tické avantgardy ve sv. Anežce za hradbami: factor, kočovníci, liturgie a Max Dvořák” [The Birth of the Late Antique Avant-Garde in Sant’Agnese fuori le mura: Factor, Nomads, Liturgy, and Max Dvořák], in Od dějin umění k uměleckému dílu, Jan Galeta et al. eds, Brno 2021, pp. 35–46. Regarding the seven surviving Honorian inscriptions consisting altogether of seventy six lines of verse, see recently Dennis Trout, “(Re-) Founding Christian Rome: The Honorian Project of the Early Seventh Century”, in Urban Developments in Late Antique and Medieval Rome: Revising the Narrative of Renewal, Gregor Kalas, Ann Dijk eds, Amsterdam 2021, pp. 149–175, sp. pp. 161–170. 31 For a literary analysis of this text, together with an account of other earlier versions of the legend, see, e.g., Christine Phillips, Materials for the Study of the Cult of Saint Agnes of Rome in Anglo-Saxon England: Texts and Interpretations, PhD thesis (University of York, supervisors: Gabriella Corona, Mary Garrison), York 2008, sp. pp. 16–67, https://etheses.whiterose. ac.uk/14131/1/507789.pdf [last accessed on 30 October 2022]. 32 See recently sp. Trout,“Pictures with Words”(n. 28), pp. 12–14. 33 Regarding the self-referentiality of inscriptions accompanying early medieval mosaics in Rome, see Thunø, The Apse Mosaic (n. 28), pp.  27–28. Regarding the interplay between the textual and visual planes in late antique church inscriptions from the Mediterranean (ca 300–800), see sp. Sean V. Leatherbury, Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity: Between Reading and Seeing, London / New York 2020; cf. also Raphael Schwitter, “Funkelnde Buchstaben, leuchtende Verse: Die Materialität der Inschrift und ihre Reflexion in den Carmina Latina Epigraphica”, in Antike Texte und ihre Materialität. Alltägliche Präsenz, mediale Semantik, literarische Reflexion, Cornelia Ritter-Schmalz, Raphael Schwitter eds, Berlin/Boston 2019, pp. 119–137. 34 avrea concisis svrgit pictvra metallis / et conplexa simvl clavditvr ipsa dies / fontibvs e niveis credas avrora svbire / correptas nvbes roribvs arva rigans // vel qvalem inter sidera lvcem proferet irim / pvrpvrevsqve pavo ipse colore nitens / qvi potvit noctis vel lvcis reddere finem / martyrvm e bvstis hinc reppvlit ille chaos // svrsvm versa nvtv qvod cvnctis cernitvr vno / praesvl honorivs haec vota dicata dedit / vestibvs et factis signantvr illivs ora / lvcet aspectv lvcida corda gerens. The translation follows Trout, “Pictures with Words” (n. 28), p. 15, with some modifications. 35 See ibidem, p. 14: “Two things are immediately striking about the six elegiac couplets that circle the base of the basilica’s apse conch: they delight in classical imagery and they show no appreciable interest in Agnes’s tale.” Cf. ibidem, p. 15: “Little in the history of Christian monumental verse at Rome would have prepared readers for this cascade of classical, epic and bucolic poetry.” 36 Cf. ibidem, p. 17: “In any case, the epigram’s readers were confronted with a hermeneutical challenge that inevitably transformed their reading of the images before them.” 37 Cf. Thunø, The Apse Mosaic (n. 28), pp. 25–26, including an English translation of the inscription, which has been modified here. 38 Lexical allusions to the inscription in Sant’Agnese are marked in bold, further semantic parallels are indicated by underlining. 39 Translation by Thunø, The Apse Mosaic (n. 28), p. 15, with modifications; for strikingly similar inscriptions in Santa Prassede, Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, and Santa Maria in Domnica (Pope Paschal i: 817–824), see ibidem, pp. 209–212. 40 Cf., e.g., Ivan Foletti,“Maranatha: Space, Liturgy, and Image in the Basilica of Saints Cosmas and Damian on the Roman Forum”, in The Fifth Century in Rome: Art, Liturgy, Patronage, Idem, Manuela Gianandrea eds, Rome 2017, pp. 161–179 (including earlier references).

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of fragmentation, which is, of course, in many of its occurrences closely linked to spoliation. Fragmentation as a compositional principle for artifacts, the aesthetic identity of which consists of a puzzle-like structure, is once again most clearly represented by late antique patchwork poems. It is definitely not by chance that Ausonius compared ludic centos to the ancient game similar to modern jigsaw puzzles known as (o)stomachion, a game with 14 pieces in various geometrical shapes that can be variously recomposed – similarly to the shaped pieces used in opus sectile – to give rise to various objects (Epist. ad Paulum, praef. 22): “And so this little work, the Cento, is handled in the same way as the game described, so as to harmonize different meanings, to make pieces arbitrarily connected seem naturally related, to let foreign elements show no chink of light between, to prevent the far-fetched from proclaiming the force which united them, the closely packed from bulging unduly, the loosely knit from gaping41.”

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While in modern jigsaw puzzles the final figure is typically predetermined, the ancient variant placed no limits on the player’s creativity except for their own skills. The same is true for centos based on the fragmentation of a preexisting corpus of texts (a kind of poetic langue) and subsequent reshuffling of selected fragments into new poetic creations (paroles). In this sense, the work of a centonist bears comparison with that of a mosaicist. In contrast to the latter, however, the former endows the individual tesserae with new meanings that can be fully understood only when confronted with their original contexts and this semantic tension works at the level of both the entire work and the individual pieces. What is common to both artistic forms, on the other hand, is that they openly acknowledge their fragmented nature while striving for aesthetic unity or, to use the aforementioned Ausonian metaphor, they both acknowledge the chinks of light shining through the respective artifacts but aim to surpass them for the sake of creating a new and original work42. In addition, the fragmentary composition as such attracts attention to the artifact’s mode of origin, presenting it as a conceptual rather than a mimetic creation. Bearing in mind this conceptual similarity between centos and mosaics – as well as the general

popularity of “fragmented media” in the period under examination –, it may not be surprising that it was sometime between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, probably around the seventh century, that a new artistic medium and technique was born: stained glass43. While stained glass, opus sectile, and mosaics seem to be fitting parallels to literary fragmentation in the realm of material culture, the reality is more complex. In the late antique world, individual tesserae were not – in contrast to the fragments employed in patchwork texts – bearers of specific meanings; however, a semantic mechanism similar to the one in literary centos can be found in contemporary visual and material cultures. The famous Basilica of Santa Pudenziana, including its outstanding mosaic, was in all probability completed during the pontificate of Innocence i (402–417) as a conscious combination of visual and material elements from the past loaded with significant meanings44. The building itself was largely recomposed from preexisting Roman structures45, which was probably not a random decision: the church was constructed in a location believed to have belonged to the ancient domus Pudentiae where the Apostle Peter would have been hosted46. The huge fragments of the original building such as walls, columns, and capitals, reused to construct the new church with a completely different function, thus gained a new meaning. A similar re-semantization can be traced also in the composition of the apse mosaic. In this opus musivum from the very beginning of the fifth century, elements belonging to the imperial culture, divine representation, and even philosophical images were used to contribute to constructing the image of Christ [Fig. 7]. Imperial motifs – such as the hierarchical structure of the figures in the apse, with Christ as the most prominent figure – were recognized as early as 1936 by André Grabar47. Explicit references to philosophical and divine iconographies were revealed at the end of the twentieth century by Thomas Mathews48. The individual elements were certainly recognizable to an average Roman, but it is only their combination that makes the overall message comprehensible: the Christian God has the power of an emperor, the authority of an ancient god, and the wisdom of a philosopher.

This semantic mechanism becomes even more explicit if we focus on the face of Christ, who appears as a twin of the pagan god Serapis49. What seems essential is how a seemingly minor element – the composition of the face – may have a decisive 41 “hoc ergo centonis opusculum ut ille ludus tractatur, pari modo sensus diversi ut congruant, adoptiva quae sunt ut cognata videantur, aliena ne interluceant, arcessita ne vim redarguant, densa ne supra modum protuberent, hiulca ne pateant.” Regarding the ludic character of the cento in terms of both production and reception, see recently Anna-Lena Körfer,“Lector ludens: Spiel und Rätsel in Optatians Panegyrik”,in Morphogrammata / The Lettered Art of Optatian: Figuring Cultural Transformations in the Age of Constantine, Michael Squire, Johannes Wienand eds, Paderborn 2017, pp. 191–225, who found parallels to not only other late antique texts but also concrete ancient board games. 42 Cf. the article by Katharina Meinecke in this volume, pp. 98–117, sp. p. 103. 43 Regarding this subject, see the article by Alberto Virdis in this volume, pp. 78–97.

44 The literature on the church and its decorations is impressive; see, e.g., Maria Andaloro, “Il mosaico di Santa Pudenziana”, in L’orizzonte tardoantico e le nuove immagini, 312–468. La pittura medievale a Roma, 312–1431, Corpus, vol. i, Eadem ed., Milan 2006, pp. 114–124 (with further references); Claudia Angelelli, La basilica titolare di S. Pudenziana. Nuove ricerche, Vatican City 2010; Matteo Braconi, Il mosaico del catino absidale di S. Pudenziana. La storia, i restauri, le interpretazioni, Todi 2016; Ivan Foletti, “God from God: Christ as the Translation of Jupiter Serapis in the Mosaic of Santa Pudenziana”, in The Fifth Century in Rome (n. 40), pp. 11–29. 45 Angelelli, La basilica titolare di S. Pudenziana (n. 44), pp. 239–261, sp. p. 261.  46 Ibidem, pp. 11–12, 40. 47 André Grabar, L’Empereur dans l’art byzantin, Paris 1936, pp. 207–209. 48 Thomas F. Mathews, Scontro di Dei. Una reinterpretazione dell’arte paleocristiana, Milan 2005 [Princeton 1993], pp. 57–60. 49 Regarding the reasons for the employment of such a “fragment”, see Ivan Foletti, “Dio da dio. La maschera di Cristo, Giove Serapide e il mosaico di Santa Pudenziana a Roma”, Convivium, ii/1 (2015), pp. 60–73; Idem, Katharina Meinecke, “From Serapis to Christ to the Caliph: Faces as Re-Appropriation of the Past”, in Imagining the Divine: Exploring Art in Religions of Late Antiquity across Eurasia, Jaś Elsner, Rachel Wood eds, London 2021, pp. 116–132.

7 / Enthroned Christ, apse of Santa Pudenziana, Rome, 402–410

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impact on the meaning of the whole. Serapis was in fact an enemy of Christ, but also a “pagan demon”, to quote Augustine, capable of prophesying the victory of Christ50. Using his face in Rome around the year 400 meant re-semanticizing the entire composition, making it a paradoxically inclusive representation of the triumph of Christianity; taking on the face of his defeated enemy, the figure of Christ implies that his aspiration is to become the God of everyone, including Serapis’ followers.

8 / Marble revetment variety in Hagia Sophia, Constantinople (Istanbul), 532–537

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Other and perhaps even more eloquent examples of the same mechanism can be found in the fourth-century Roman Constantinian basilicas up to the famous Hagia Sophia of Justinian i (r. 527–565). These buildings were constructed using colored marble of very different proveniences from all over the empire for their decoration. As recently proven by Bosman, it is very likely that Old St Peter’s was decorated with marble columns in very different colors, all of which were certainly not spolia51. Considering the use of colored marble in the Basilica of St John Lateran and also the aforementioned Arch of Constantine, Bosman concluded that such a use of colored stones – documented also for previous centuries – should be seen as one of the attributes of imperial splendor52. What is missing in his very insightful paper, however, is the reason behind such an aesthetic turn. We believe that a partial answer can be found in the splendid imperial construction of the aforementioned Hagia Sophia. There is a unique written source thematizing the use of disparate materials for the construction of this church, namely the ekphrastic panegyric by Paul the Silentiary († 575–580), composed on the occasion of the reconstruction of its dome in 562–56353. Commissioned probably by Justinian himself and chanted during the rite of the church’s second consecration, the text says that the colored marble fragments used in the church come from all over the empire and their cosmopolitan origin is recognizable [Fig. 8]54. Their combination thus represents a visual manifesto of the unity of the empire. While we obviously have to be careful about taking a panegyric as a reliable historical source, it is quite likely that in this case the marble fragments, each bearing a specific “geographical” meaning, became constituent elements of political

representation. Moreover, it seems plausible to adopt a similar perspective in examining previous Constantinian monuments, or even older ones. The combination of various marble from different destinations – no matter whether they were spoliated as in Rome or simply intentionally brought from specific places – should then probably be seen as a significant feature of contemporary imperial representation. Each of the fragments had a specific, geographical meaning and all of them together symbolized the empire’s unity and far-reaching power. In this way, marble fragments – similarly as elements of visual imagery and pieces of previous literature – were skillfully combined to shape and enrich the semantic value of newly created artifacts. Although this phenomenon was most probably perceptible only to contemporary intellectuals and connoisseurs, the example of the Hagia Sophia seems to show that the imperial court was concerned about making this communication strategy comprehensible to a larger public, in this case by commissioning an ekphrastic poem to be performed at the opening dedication ceremony. Multiplex et varium: the poetics of detail Fragmentation as a compositional principle is closely related to yet another typical feature of late antique aesthetics, namely its preoccupation with detail55. Manifestations of this concern can be found across the domain of literature, starting with the revival of the genre of epigram with figures such as Ausonius and Claudius Claudianus56; the origin of great collections of “literary miniatures”, especially the Anthologia Palatina, compiled in the tenth century, and the Anthologia Latina, compiled only in modern times out of various sources; the compilation of various lexicographies, encyclopaedias (Aulus Gellius, Macrobius, and, of course, the Etymologiae of Isidor of Sevilla), and exegetical works, such as the commentaries on Virgil by Servius and Aelius Donatus; and continuing to the unparalleled fondness of contemporary authors for (ekphrastic) catalogues and lists in general and their obvious concern with placing their works into proper intertextual frameworks, as seen in their extensive use of

quotes from and allusions to classical literature as spolia to be re-semanticized in the new contexts. Thus, the classical canon and style were constantly being reaffirmed while at the same time challenged and surpassed by the gradually emerging style of late antique authors, with typical features including ornamental details, artificial sophistication, and ambiguity57. However diverse the listed examples of late antique literature obviously are, together they seem to reveal the tendency to focus on minor topics and forms, in other words, to “zoom in” on particularities rather than focusing on undivided wholes. The authors’ passion for itemized accounts, which was quite in keeping with the prominence of genealogical lists in the Bible and the generally felt tendency and need to preserve the cultural heritage of the classical past, could ultimately take the form of asyndetic heaping of words, each a kind of independent aesthetic entity representing a piece of decomposed and somewhat evasive “reality”, to be recomposed into a meaningful whole by the artifact’s recipients58. Excellent examples of this practice can be found in the poetry of Sidonius Apollinaris 50 Saint Augustin, Astuce des démons, 1, 1; 6, 11, in Mélanges doctrinaux, Gustave Bardy, Jérôme-André Beckaert, Joseph Boutet eds and transls, Paris 1952, pp. 654–655, 662–663. 51 Bosman, “Constantine’s Spolia” (n. 19), pp. 67–74. 52 Ibidem, pp. 75–77. 53 Three Political Voices from the Age of Justinian: Agapetus, ‘Advice to the Emperor’; ‘Dialogue on Political Science’; Paul the Silentiary, ‘Description of Hagia Sophia’, Peter N. Bell ed., Liverpool 2009, p. 14. 54 Cyril Mango, The Art of Byzantine Empire (312–1453): Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs, nj, 1972, pp. 81–91. 55 Regarding the late antique aesthetics of detail, see Hernández Lobato, Vel Apolline muto (n. 2), pp. 318–449, to whom much of the following account of concrete manifestations in contemporary literature is indebted. 56 Hernández Lobato (ibidem, p. 344) spoke about “the epigrammatization of the literary culture of Late Antiquity”,which he sees in terms of both the form and content (minor, occasional topics) of contemporary compositions. 57 Regarding the complicated relationship of late antique Latin (both Christian and non-Christian) poetry with the classical tradition, see recently Philip Hardie, Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry, Oakland, ca, 2019; for Greek Christian poetry, see The Genres of Late Antique Christian Poetry: Between Modulations and Transpositions, Fotini Hadjittofi, Anna Lefteratou eds, Berlin/Boston 2020. Regarding obscuritas as a characteristic of late antique literary discourse, specifically that of contemporary epistolography, see Raphael Schwitter, Umbrosa Lux. Obscuritas in der lateinischen Epistolographie der Spätantike, Stuttgart 2015. 58 This practice is what Hernández Lobato, Vel Apolline muto (n. 2), pp. 384–389, called congeries.

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9 / Optatian, Carm. 26

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and Dracontius59. A catalogue could also be used the reader. This atomization of language is fully as a conceptual framework for entire works, which accomplished in the visual poetry of Publilius was typically the case with Ausonius’ composi- Optatianus Porfyrius (usually referred to simtions such as the Ordo Urbium Nobilium, Parentalia, ply as Optatian), a fourth-century poet, probaCommemoratio Professorum Burdigalensium, and Epi- bly a native of Africa65, whose creations exploit taphia (cf. the famous fish catalogue in the Mosella, the materiality of words/letters for visual effects 85–149)60. In other words, the preferred way of while containing numerous allusions to previwriting in Late Antiquity appears to have been ous works of literature66. Both his carmina figurata, what Charlet described as a “mode of fragmented poems with textual layouts imitating certain obcomposition which breaks the whole up into small jects (Carm. 20: a water-organ, 26: an altar [Fig. 9], independent pictures”61, and what Hernández 27: panpipes), and carmina cancellata, intextual Lobato characterized as a poetics of multiplex et grid poems that in principle resemble modern varium as opposed to the classical ideal of simplex crossword puzzles, fully realize the graphic and et unum62. combinatory possibilities of these elementary What this concern with detail ultimately building blocks of (literary) language67. It is inboils down to is the newly established aesthet- deed a single letter that makes all the difference ic significance of a word per se as the primary in Optatian’s creations, not only for the visual and elementary particle of literary composition63. patterning but also in terms of the semantic paths This is actually one of the attributes of what Mi- – by far not all running traditionally from left to chael Roberts famously described as the “jew- right along the horizontal axis – that the readeled style” of late antique poetry64. As a matter of er can follow in individual texts. In the colored fact, not only a word but even a letter on a page versus intexti of the grid poems, a single letter may acquire a special significance as the ulti- frequently belongs to several intersecting lines mate material of literature, through which the and thus several semantic planes; in three pieces author in one way or another communicates with (Carm. 16, 19 [Fig. 10], and 23), individual letters

even work within two distinct languages, namely Latin and Greek, with the Latin A standing either for the Greek alpha or delta, C for sigma, H for eta, etc. This multiplicity and variety of semantic paths in Optatian’s texts does not, however, seem to create confusing disorder but rather a complex network of stratified and more or less semantically convergent meanings68. 59 See, e.g., Sidonius Apollinaris’ description of the labors of Heracles in Carm. 9.94–100, his condensed account of the passion of Christ in Carm. 16.48–50, the list of pagan gods in Carm. 7.28–36 (cf. Carm. 9.170–177), or the cumulation of verbal forms in Carm. 7.257; and Dracontius’ list of the components of the universe followed by a list of various aspects of human existence in Laud. Dei, 1.5–19. 60 Regarding the popularity of catalogues and lists with Ausonius, see, e.g., S. Georgia Nugent, “Ausonius’ ‘Late-Antique’ Poetics and ‘Post-Modern’ Literary Theory”, Ramus, ix/1 (1990), pp. 26–50, sp. p. 28. For many other examples of catalogues in late antique literature, see Hernández Lobato, Vel Apolline muto (n. 2), pp. 398–399. 61 Jean Louis Charlet, “Aesthetic Trends in Late Latin Poetry (325–410)”, Philologus, cxxxii/1–2 (1988), pp. 74–85, sp. p. 78. 62 Hernández Lobato, Vel Apolline muto (n. 2), p. 371. Regarding the changing aesthetic notions of varietas from classical antiquity with its emphasis on the dignitas of individual elements to the medieval taste for (possibly shocking) mixtura and diversitas as sources of harmony, see Carruthers, “Varietas” (n. 6), pp. 11–32. 63 See Hernández Lobato, Vel Apolline muto (n. 2), pp. 381–383, who even spoke about “verbal fetishism”, i.e. the use of exo-

tic loan words and neologisms, which can be observed, for example, in the poetry of Sidonius Apollinaris and Ausonius and the writings of the Church Fathers such as Augustine and Jerome. 64 Roberts, The Jeweled Style (n. 2). 65 Regarding Optatian’s turbulent life and promising political career, suddenly interrupted by his exile under the reign of Constantine, see recently, e.g., Johannes Wienand,“Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius: The Man and His Book”, in Morphogrammata (n. 41), pp. 121–163. 66 Cf. Michael Squire, “Patterns of Significance: Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius and the Figurations of Meaning”, in Images and Texts: Papers in Honour of Professor Eric Handley cbe fba, Richard Green, Mike Edwards eds, London 2015 (= Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, supplementum cxxix [2015]), pp. 87–121, sp. p. 119: “If Optatian’s quite literally ‘intertextual’ poems extend the concerns of late antique centones, his various poetic ‘recyclings’ are also in line with Constantine’s own materialist redeployments of monumental spolia (most famously in his eponymous triumphal arch at Rome).” 67 For a brief account of the parallelism between Optatian’s preoccupation with geometrical patterning and symmetry and the characteristics of the visual art of the period, see Marie Okáčová, “Text, Image, and Music: Performative Aspects of Optatian’s Visual Poetry”, Hermes, cl (2022), (forthcoming). 68 On this characteristic of late antique textuality, see sp. Martin Bažil, “V tom lese zůstaneš sám. ‘Krize interpretace’ a vznik ‘křesťanského textu’ v latinské literatuře od poloviny 3. do třetí čtvrtiny 4. století. Část i.”[You Will Stay Alone in the Woods: ‘Crisis of Interpretation’ and the Origin of ‘Christian Text’ in the Latin Literature between the 250’s and 370’s, Part  i], Auriga, lviii/1 (2016), pp. 5–26; and Idem,“Elementorum varius textus. Atomistisches und Anagrammatisches in Optatians Textbegriff”, in Morphogrammata (n. 41), pp. 341–368.

10 / Optatian, Carm. 19

41

42

In short, what we see with Optatian is a certain de-automatization of language, no longer taken simply as a transparent means of representing extra-linguistic reality but rather as an aesthetic object in its own right69. Needless to say, texts like those by Optatian are not to be consumed by readers as finished products; rather, they need to be reconstructed by the recipients, who thus become active creators of their meanings. In this way, readers are drawn into the mechanisms of language’s workings, which represent the rules of this literary and meta-literary game.

Again, parallels with contemporary visual culture are not hard to find. The fifth century saw the emergence of new narrative patterns of church decorations with individual episodes presented – similarly to individual letters and words in Optatian’s poems – as seemingly autonomous atoms of monumental narrative cycles, such as the Old Testament cycle of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, the Christological cycle of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, and the cycle on the door of Santa Sabina in Rome, which combines episodes of the Old and the New Testaments70. In the latter

11 / Christ at Gethsemane, narrative cycle, right wall of the nave, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, 6th century 12 / Miracles of Christ, panel from the wooden door of Santa Sabina, Rome, 421–440

two cases, the composition does not follow a classical narrative scheme [Figs 11–12]; the sequence 69 Regarding the “linguistic turn” of Late Antiquity and its manifestation in the “poetics of silence”, see Jesús Hernández Lobato, “To Speak or Not to Speak: The Birth of a ‘Poetics of Silence’”, in The Poetics (n. 4), pp. 278–310; and Idem, “Late Antique Foundations of Postmodern Theory: A Critical Overview,” in Reading Late Antiquity, Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed, Mats Malm eds, Heidelberg 2018, pp. 51–70. For “echoes” of (post-)structuralist views on language in Optatian’s poetry, see Marie Okáčová, “The Aural-Visual ‘Symbiosis’ in the Poetry of Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius (Towards the Disentanglement of the Mystery of Late-Ancient Expansive GridVerse)”, in Laetae segetes. Griechische und lateinische Studien an

der Masaryk Universität und Universität Wien, Jana Nechutová, Irena Radová eds, Brno 2006, pp. 41–50, sp. pp. 44–47; and Marie Okáčová, “Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius: Characteristic Features of Late Ancient Figurative Poetics”, Graeco-Latina Brunensia, xii (2007), pp. 57–71, sp. pp. 64–66. 70 Regarding these richly studied monuments, see, e.g., the following synthetic publications with further references: Raffaella Menna, “I mosaici di Santa Maria Maggiore”, in L’orizzonte tardoantico (n. 44), pp. 312–330; Ivan Foletti, Manuela Gianandrea, Zona liminare. Il nartece di Santa Sabina a Roma, la sua porta e l’iniziazione cristiana, Rome 2015; Bertrand Billot, “Le cycle christologique de Saint-Apollinaire-le-Neuf de Ravenne: narrativité et function”, in Histoires chrétiennes en images: espace, temps et structure de la narration. Byzance et Moyen Âge occidental, Sulamith Brodbeck, Anne-Orange Poilpré, Isabelle Marchesin, Ioanna Rapti eds, Paris 2021, pp. 153–167.

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13 / Joshua stops the course of the sun and moon, Santa Maria Maggiore, nave, Rome, 5th century

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of the episodes does not reveal a chronological, allegorical, or strictly typological order. Their significance seems rather to be sought in a broader cultural context, namely that of the initiatory rhetoric – a pre-baptismal one in the case of Santa Sabina and probably a post-initiatory one in the case of Sant’Apollinare. It is thus only during the pre- or post-initiatory rituals, under the guidance of a bishop, that a semantically united whole emerges from what may appear to the uninitiated as a product of free association of visual concepts. For the monumental cycle in Santa Maria Maggiore, where a broad chronological order is respected, a “political” superstructure has recently been proposed as a clue for interpretation

[Fig. 13]71. Highlighting the military victories of

the Israelites in the Old Testament, with a direct intervention by God, the composition may be understood as a refutation of pagans’ claim that the Sack of Rome in 410 was a punishment for abandoning the traditional Roman pantheon; Christian intellectuals might have wanted to argue for God’s victorious presence throughout history and, as claimed by Augustine especially in the De Civitate Dei (i–ii), beyond the tangible world. While the local elites were quite probably able to decipher these subtle political references, “larger” audiences might again have needed an explanation by a performer, whether a cleric or a bishop72.

A similar interpretation can be offered for other church decorations that were probably designed as visual accompaniments to liturgical performances such as the processions of 25 male and 25 female saints at Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna [Fig. 14]. Added onto the walls of the nave as part of the damnatio memoriae against King Theodoric – images of the king’s family members had to be erased from the walls –, these two processions represent standing martyrs with anonymous faces whose identities are recognizable exclusively thanks to inscriptions bearing their names and placed above their heads73. Text and image are thus combined to present a catalogue-like series of unified figures to the viewer

71 Ivan Foletti, “Quand l’histoire devient prétexte: les cycles narratifs à Milan et Rome au ve siècle”, in Histoires chrétiennes en images (n. 70), pp. 135–152; cf. Idem, “Singing Doors: Images, Space, and Sound in the Santa Sabina Narthex”, in Icons of Sound Voice, Architecture, and Imagination in Medieval Art, Bissera Pentcheva ed., New York 2020, pp. 19–35; Klára Doležalová,“Walking in the Footsteps of Christ: Christological Cycles of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo and the Rite of Christian Initiation”, in Bildmedien der Taufe im Spannungsfeld von Ort, Ritual und Gemeinschaft, Kirsten L. Bierbaum, Susanne Wittekind eds, Cologne 2022 (forthcoming). 72 This may also have been due to the cycle’s difficult visibility. Regarding this issue, see, e.g., Beat Brenk, “Visibility and (Partial) Invisibility of Early Christian Images”, in Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Giselle de Nie, Karl F. Morrison, Marco Mostert eds, Turnhout 2005, pp. 139–183. 73 Arthur Urbano,“Donation, Dedication, and Damnatio Memoriae: The Catholic Reconciliation of Ravenna and the Church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo”, Journal of Early Christian Studies, xiii/1 (2005), pp. 71–110.

14 / Procession of male martyrs, right wall of the nave, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, 6th century

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as an earthly mirror of heavenly reality – women on the left and men on the right as in a Sunday Assembly. Actually, mantric reading of the saints’ names as part of a litany was one of the constitutive elements of liturgy, documented for the first time in the Traditio Apostolica in the third century74 and further developed by Pope Gelasius i (492–496)75. Each name evoked – for both the clerks and common believers attending the assembly – a story of martyrdom with a particular meaning for the entire composition, which narrated a story of heavenly people, all going in a single direction, toward heavenly order and peace. However conceptually different the textual and visual compositions under examination necessarily seem to be, the attention paid to the individual components makes their recipients all the more aware of the artifacts’ internal structuring principles, which they are thus implicitly asked to contemplate. Whether individual letters, words, or images, the recipient is left to reflect on their significance for the given whole and thus to acknowledge their material/visual presence in terms of representing an absent/extra-linguistic entity. Conclusion Even though this overview of aesthetic trends perceivable in different media of late antique culture in no way aspires to be comprehensive, we believe that the examined phenomena are essential for understanding late antique aesthetics and also highly symptomatic for this period and its complicated relation to the classical past. Above all, the aesthetic features shared among different cultural spheres seem to confirm that there was indeed a specific culture for the period under examination, whether it is called “postclassical”, “late antique”, or “premedieval”. It was a culture with a self-assertive identity that stemmed from reappropriating selected segments of the past and incorporating them into the newly formatted cultural reality. In this sense, the period under examination played a decisive role in preselecting which fragments of the classical material, visual,

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and literary cultures were to be handed down to successive generations and how these were to be remembered. The entire memory-building process was apparently linked to the gradual social and political changes of the period; individuals were no longer directly involved in the public life of the disintegrating empire, which might also have contributed to their need for selective appropriation of the idealized past76. In other words, the changing political, social, and cultural milieu and persistent tension between the past and the present simply seems to have made individuals contemplate the world differently, namely in terms of its constituent parts. Since there was no easy way to reconcile the pagan and the Christian, it might have been necessary to dissect – or, to use a Derridean term, deconstruct – contemporary reality and cope with its segments individually. On the one hand, this led to increased awareness of the materiality of culture and the modes of composition for individual artifacts, and, consequently, to a certain de-automatization of their referential functions. On the other hand, the same aesthetic processes created different demands on the recipients of the artifacts77, which were not unfrequently conceived as open works and so required active participation from readers/viewers in the (re)construction of their meaning and significance78. 74 The dating and origin of this text has been subject to debate, oscillating between early third-century Rome (Hippolyte de Rome, Tradition apostolique de Saint Hippolyte, Essai de reconstitution, Bernard Botte ed., Münster 1989) and a more composite origin with fragments composed during the third and fourth centuries (Paul F. Brandshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy, New York 2002, pp. 80–83; and Idem, Maxwell E. Johnson, Edwards Phillips, Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary, Minneapolis 2002). 75 Regarding this pope’s work, see, e.g., Raiko Brato, “gelasio i, papa, santo”, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. lii, Rome 1999. 76 Regarding the complex social process as determining the ontology of ancient ruins, see recently Martin Devecka, Broken Cities: A Historical Sociology of Ruins, Baltimore 2020. Cf. also Hernández Lobato, Vel Apolline muto (n. 2), p. 376–381. 77 New modes of composition quite naturally required new modes of reception (cf. ibidem, pp. 357–360). 78 This change in the late antique aesthetics was most thoroughly studied by Pelttari, The Space That Remains (n. 7).

summary Fenomén fragmentace v literární, vizuální a materiální kultuře pozdní antiky

Článek přináší interdisciplinární pohled na pozdně antickou estetiku jako přelomový fenomén mezi klasickou minulostí a středověkou budoucností. Autoři se zaměřují na projevy tzv. kumulativní estetiky, s nimiž se setkáváme napříč různými kulturními oblastmi, konkrétně v literatuře, vizuální kultuře i architektuře. Za klíčové techniky, s jejichž pomocí se pozdní antika vyrovnávala se změnou prizmatu, tedy masivním nástupem křesťanství, pokládají principy spoliace (de alieno nostrum), fragmentarizace (de diversis unum) a tzv. poetiku detailu (multiplex et varium). Paralelní projevy těchto estetických principů v různých kulturních kontextech se zaměřením na latinský Západ ukazují, že kulturní transformace ve sledovaném období byla relativně koherentním a kontinuálním procesem. Pozdně antické mozaikové básně z Vergiliových či Homérových veršů (centones), Ausoniova „katalogická“ tvorba nebo Optatianova mistrovská vizuální poezie, doslova protkaná odkazy na klasická literární díla, stejně jako analogické fenomény tehdejší materiální kultury, jsou

skvělými doklady experimentální kreativity pozdně antických tvůrců, s níž dokázali přetavit vybrané segmenty minulosti v dokonale organickou součást nově se rodící křesťanské kultury. Zdánlivě radikální přerod pozdně antické společnosti probíhal přirozeným a postupným přenášením prvků klasické kultury do nových významových souvislostí, což se dělo v souladu s politikou císařského dvora, mnohdy dokonce přímo pod jeho taktovkou. Tento otevřený a kreativní přístup k minulosti s sebou přinesl nejen posun směrem k „otevřené“, tedy významově pluralitní estetice, ale i změnu v nárocích kladených na recipienty takovýchto děl. Spíše než jako transparentní, mimetické odrazy „reality“ jsou totiž díla nově utvářena především jako konceptuální, mnohovrstevnaté obrazy, jejichž meta-sémantická rovina je přinejmenším stejně tak důležitá jako ta primární, zobrazovací a narativní. Pozdně antická tvorba nám mnohdy záměrně odhaluje principy svého vzniku, původ své materie i použité nástroje a techniky, a tak obnažuje i svůj vztah k minulosti.

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inqu it Abstract – The Variability of Late Latin Authors’ Means for Marking Direct Discourse – Texts from the Late Latin period (ca 200–813 ce) display a change in choices of markers – verbal, nonverbal, and zero – in direct discourse. This article considers the uniformity of the changes that have emerged and the role of individual authors’ decisions, examining a sample of texts from classical antiquity (first century bce) to the end of the eighth century ce . Frequency was counted as the proportion of a specific marker appearing among all the markers in a given text. Later texts show greater variation because new markers were added to old ones, changing the frequency of individual markers. Significant differences also emerge within an individual author’s work. Closer examination reveals that some authors were inventive in combining old and new traits, creating new properties that are at one time continuous and discontinuous. Keywords – direct discourse, inquit, late Latin, Macrobius, markers, quotation Jana Mikulová  Masaryk University, Brno 48 [email protected]

t

The Variability of Late Latin Authors’ Means for Marking Direct Discourse Jana Mikulová

Introduction The history of Latin in the first centuries ce has been narrated as the story of a continuous decline and “corruption” of classical Latin and the growing influence of the everyday language of ordinary people, which resulted in the birth of Romance languages. Such approaches have their roots in the Renaissance, as demonstrated by Eskhult1, who described the development of thinking about Vulgar Latin and the relation of vernacular Romance languages to classical Latin. A closer look at surviving texts suggests that the story was more exciting and complicated. In addition, the concept of decline has negative connotations, which poses obstacles for analyzing late Latin texts and appreciating their qualities. This article will focus on one of these qualities, namely the variability of

means used for marking direct discourse (hereinafter markers or quotative markers). Preliminaries The use of quotative markers was examined in the texts listed below [Tab. 1]2, used for the analysis 1

2

Josef Eskhult, “Vulgar Latin as an Emergent Concept in the Italian Renaissance (1435–1601): Its Ancient and Medieval Prehistory and Its Emergence and Development in Renaissance Linguistic Thought”, Journal of Latin Linguistics, xvii/2 (2018), pp. 191–230. Editions available in the Brepolis databases were used: Library of Latin Texts. Series a, Paul Tombeur ed., Turnhout 2019, http://clt.brepolis.net/llta/pages/QuickSearch.aspx [last accessed on 3 January 2022]; and Library of Latin Texts. Series b, Paul Tombeur ed., Turnhout 2019, http://clt.brepolis.net/lltb/ pages/QuickSearch.aspx [last accessed on 3 January 2022].

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Table 1/ Texts

Author

selected for

Cicero, Marcus Tullius De oratore (On the Ideal Orator) 1

analysis, part 1

Work

Abbreviation

Century

Cic.

1st bce

De finibus bonorum et malorum (On Moral Ends) 1, 2

Fin.

Pro P. Quinctio (For P. Quinctius)

Quinct.

In C. Verrem orationes sex (Against Verres) 2.1

Verr.

In M. Antonium orationes Philippicae (Philippics) 1, 2

Phil.

Epistulae ad Atticum (Letters to Atticus) 1.16; 2.12; 3.9; 4.2; 5.1, 21; 6.2, 3; 7.11; 8.3, 11, 14, 16; 9.5, 18; 10.1; 11.6; 13.33a, 38, 42; 15.9, 11; 16.15

Att.

Livius, Titus (Livy)

Ab urbe condita (From the Foundation of the Liv. City) 1, 2

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus

Epistulae morales ad Lucilium (Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius) 9, 21, 24, 65, 82, 85, 87, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 101, 113, 117, 122

Sen.

De beneficiis (On Benefits) 6, 7

Ep.

1st   bce  –  1st ce 1st ce

Ben.

Petronius

Satyrica (Satyricon) 1–78

Petr.

Apuleius, Lucius

Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass or Metamorphoses) 1, 2, 5, 6

Apul.

Anonymous

1st ce Met.

2nd ce

Passio sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis (The Passion of Sts Perpetua and Felicity)

Pass. Perp.

3rd ce

Anonymous

Itinerarium Egeriae (Peregrinatio Aetheriae) ad loca sancta (The Pilgrimage of Egeria)

Itin. Eger.

4th ce

Ammianus Marcellinus

Rerum gestarum libri (History) 14, 21

Amm.

Sulpicius Severus

Vita sancti Martini Turonensis (Life of St Martin)

Sulp. Sev.

Mart.

4th ce

Hieronymus, Sofronius Eusebius (Jerome)

Vita sancti Hilarionis (Life of St Hilarion)

Hier.

Hilar.

4th ce

Hieronymus, Sofronius Eusebius (Jerome)

Vulgata, Evangelium secundum Mattheum Hier. (Vulgate, The Gospel According to Matthew) 1–16

Vulg. Matt.

4th ce – 5 th ce

Augustinus Confessiones (Confessions) 1, 2, 8, 9 Hipponensis, Aurelius (Augustine)

August. conf.

4th ce – 5th ce

Macrobius, Ambrosius Theodosius

Saturnalia (Saturnalia) 1

Macr.

Sat.

5 th ce

Gregorius Turonensis (Gregory of Tours)

Historiarum libri x (The History of the Franks) 1, 2

Greg. Tur.

Franc.

6th ce

Liber vitae Patrum (Life of the Fathers) 1–10

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de Orat.

Fredegarius Scholasticus (Fredegar)

Chronicarum libri iv (Chronicle of Fredegar) 4, 2.57–62 (i.e. the most original parts)

Anonymous

Vita Amati (Life of St Amatus)

4th ce

vit. patr. 7 th ce

Fredeg.

vit. Amat.

7 th ce

Author

Work

Anonymous

Vita Arnulfi (Life of St Arnulfus)

vit. Arnulf. 7 ce

Anonymous

Vitas sanctorum patrum Emeretensium (The Lives of the Fathers of Mérida)

vit. patr. Emer.

7 th ce

Anonymous

Vita Memorii (Life of St Memorius)

vit. Memor.

8th ce

Anonymous

Vita Goaris conf. Rhenani (Life of St Goar)

vit. Goar.

8th ce

Period

Abbreviation

Authors and works

Century th

Quotations Words

Quotations per 1,000 words

Classical Latin ca 90 bce – 14 ce

Cic., Liv.

488

120,875

4.0

Postclassical Latin

ca 14–200 ce

Sen., Petr., Apul.

679

79,823

8.5

ca 200–500 ce

Pass. Perp., Itin. Eger., Amm., Sulp. Sev., Hier., 608 Vulg. Matt., August., Macr.

104,700

5.8

ca 500–813 ce

Greg. Tur., Fredeg., vit. Amat., vit. Arnulf., vit. patr. Emer., vit. Memor., vit. Goar.

74,846

7.9

Late Latin i

Late Latin ii

of the change in the marking direct discourse by Mikulová3. The corpus includes narrative and, marginally, argumentative texts from classical times up to the beginning of the ninth century. The sample includes the best masters of language but also texts that are sometimes difficult to understand because of their disrupted sentence structures and mistakes in orthography and word forms (such as Fredegar’s chronicle and the Vita Memorii). To consider changes in marking direct discourse, the examined texts were grouped by the author into four periods according to their date of origin [Tab. 2]4. However, the period of late Latin

589

Table 1/ Texts selected for analysis, part 2

Table 2/ Periodization of Latin

has not been delimited unanimously. According to Cuzzolin and Haverling5, late Latin began around 200 ce and was over around 600 ce, when the territories in the Roman Empire became more isolated and the educational system was collapsing. In contrast, Wright posed the end of late Latin as the period of the Carolingian Renaissance 3 Jana Mikulová, Evolution of Direct Discourse Marking from Classical to Late Latin, Leiden/Boston 2022, pp. 3–5. 4 Ibidem, p. 5. 5 Pierluigi Cuzzolin, Gerd Haverling, “Syntax, Sociolinguistics, and Literary Genres”, in New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax, vol. i: Syntax of the Sentence, Philip Baldi, Pierluigi Cuzzolin eds, Berlin / New York 2009, pp. 19–64, sp. p. 20.

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because until this period Latin was diversified and different from its classical predecessor but still perceived as one language used in both formal and informal situations6. The symbolic end of late Latin is considered to be the year 813, when the Council of Tours required priests to deliver sermons in rustica Romana lingua (“simple Roman language”) in order that “all the people could more easily understand what is said”7. According to Wright8, ordinary uneducated people stopped understanding the language of church services because the Carolingian reform of pronunciation prescribed the pronunciation of one letter equalling one sound when reading sacred texts instead of the usual pronunciation of that time. Therefore, if someone did not know the graphical form of these words, he or she understood badly or did not understand at all and was lost. In the present work, the two approaches described above are combined and so the late i and the late ii periods are distinguished. In the late periods, Latin was changing in its sounds, word forms, sentence and clause structures, and vocabulary. Detailed knowledge of this process is complicated or even impossible to come by for various reasons: • we do not have direct access to spoken language; • we do not have a sufficient number of written records of spoken language, and, in addition, writing never reflects speaking exactly; • grammarians rarely commented on spoken language in detail because their main task was to teach correct writing and speaking in public; • authors tried to meet the old standards and models – from Quintilian onwards, the most prestigious model was Cicero’s language usage.

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Despite these difficulties, it is possible to observe evidence of changes in different late Latin texts, such as confusions of letters and changes in some case forms, verbal forms, and syntactic structures. In addition, we have some comments and recommendations from grammarians on what forms and structures should be used or avoided. Thus, it is possible to trace some evolutional tendencies that would fully manifest in Romance languages. Late texts did not often show fully-fledged new forms but rather an increase in the diversity of

means. The emergence of new forms and their coexistence with old forms have been described in grammaticalization studies, within which this phenomenon has sometimes been called “layering”9. For example, within the same period and the same text, various manners of expressing an action in the future could be used without any significant difference in meaning10. Another reason for using diverse expressions could be the effort to meet the ideal of varietas (“variety”), appreciated by the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, who influenced late Latin authors11. Another important factor for late Latin was the arrival of Christianity, which brought new words and concepts and a new model of writing, namely biblical language. This language contains calques of words and structures from Greek and Hebrew and is much simpler than the classical model in many aspects. Educated people of that time must have considered it primitive, but its simplicity could have made it more accessible to ordinary people. On the other hand, as Christianity is a missionary religion, good comprehension of sermons and texts was appreciated. These issues were reflected by such eminent Christian authors as Augustine and Jerome. Augustine, in his famous passage on the use of the form ossum (“bone”) instead of the classical os (“bone”)12, argued that the non-classical ossum should be preferred because “it is better that the grammarians admonish us than that the people do not understand us”13. Similarly, Jerome commented on the use of the masculine cubitus (“elbow”) besides the neuter cubitum (“elbow”) since his aim “is not to avoid grammatical mistakes, but to explain unclear places in the Holy Scriptures using whatever expressions”14. Jerome also reflected the tension between the “pagan” and “Christian” models as a conflict of conscience. He portrayed it as a dream in which he was charged in court of being a Ciceronian, not a Christian, because he was reading classical authors15. In sum, he felt he should renounce the culture of paganism, but as a highly educated person, he could not throw away the elaborate classical literature and change it for the simple style of the Bible. This confluence of language and social factors created tension and conflict that could be described as a quadrangle: first, the necessity to use comprehensible language;

second, the desire to use excellent language; third, the conflict between the “pagan” Ciceronian model and the Christian biblical model; fourth, the unintentional use of new features developed by language changes. These factors also seem to have played a role in the choice of quotative markers. Marking of direct discourse The delimitation of direct discourse and its differentiation from other modalities of represented discourse has been discussed by many scholars but without generally accepted results. An analysis of this issue goes beyond the aims and scope of this paper. For more detail, see works based on the analysis of modern languages16 and works focusing on Latin17. In the present paper, direct discourse is characterized by the presence of two deictic centers (the current and the represented, i.e. original, speaker) and corresponding deictic elements (e.g. pronouns), the presence of two speech situations, syntactical independence and its own illocutionary force, compatibility with certain expressions (e.g. interjections, some particles), and seeming verbatim representation of an utterance produced in another speech situation. Direct discourse in Latin could be marked by verbal markers, nominal markers (nouns and pronouns), and so-called zero marking, which means that direct discourse could start without any explicit marker (this type is sometimes called “free direct discourse”). In all periods, the most frequent markers were verbal markers and, of these, verbs with the meaning “to say”, which mark 72 % of quotations in the present corpus. Thus, the examination of verbal markers provides insight into the choice of markers and change in authors’ preferences over time. [Fig. 1] compares the frequency of several verbs over time18. The frequency is counted as the percentage of quotations marked by the Roger Wright, A Sociophilological Study of Late Latin, Turnhout 2002, pp. 15–17. 7 “Et ut easdem omelias quisque aperte transferre studeat in rusticam Romanam linguam aut Thiotiscam, quo facilius cuncti possint intellegere quae dicuntur” (Concilium Turonense 2, 1, 18). “(We decided for) everyone to try to overtly translate these sermons into simple Roman language or a Germanic language so that all people can more easily understand what is said.” (Unless indicated otherwise, the translation is by the author of the present paper.) 6

8 Roger Wright, Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France, Liverpool 1982, pp. 119–121. 9 Paul J. Hopper, Elizabeth Closs Traughott, Grammaticalization, Cambridge 1993, pp. 124–126. 10 See Suzanne Fleischman, The Future in Thought and Language, London 1982, p. 50. 11 See Mary J. Carruthers, “Varietas: A Word of Many Colours”, Poetica, xli/1–2 (2009), pp. 11–32, sp. p. 13, n. 5. 12 Aug. in psalm. 10, 138. 13 Augustine uses the same example and argument in his work De doctrina Christiana (3, 3): “Unde plerumque loquendi consuetudo vulgaris utilior est significandis rebus quam integritas litterata. Mallem quippe cum barbarismo dici: ‘non est absconditum a te ossum meum’,  quam ut ideo esset minus apertum, quia magis Latinum est.” “So the colloquial manner of speaking is often more effective than the propriety of literary language when it comes to signifying things. Indeed, I would prefer the sentence non est absconditum a te ossum meum, which includes a barbarism, to one which because it is better Latin is less clear” (Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, Roger P. H. Green ed. and transl., Oxford 1995, p. 139). 14 Hier. Ezek. 12. 15 “Interrogatus condicionem Christianum me esse respondi: et ille, qui residebat, ‘Mentiris,’ ait, ‘Ciceronianus es, non Christianus; ubi thesaurus tuus, ibi et cor tuum’” (Hier. ep. 22, 54, 30). “I was asked to state my condition and replied that I was a Christian. But He who presided said: ‘Thou liest; thou are a Ciceronian, not a Christian. For where thy treasure is there will thy heart be also’”(Jerome, Selected Letters, Frederick A. Wright transl., Cambridge 1933, p. 127). 16 For example Meir Sternberg, “Point of View and the Indirections of Direct Discourse”, Language and Style, xv (1982), pp. 67–117; Florian Coulmas, “Reported Speech”, in Direct and Indirect Discourse, Idem ed., Berlin / New York 1986, pp. 1–28; Lieven Vandelanotte, “Deixis and Grounding in Speech and Thought Representation”,  Journal of Pragmatics, xxxvi (2004), pp. 489–520; Idem, Speech and Thought Representation in English, Berlin / New York 2009; Evelien Keizer, “The Interpersonal Level in English: Reported Speech”,  Linguistics, xlvii/4 (2009), pp. 845–866; Tom Güldemann, Quotative Indexes in African Languages: A Synchronic and Diachronic Survey, Berlin / New York 2008. 17 For example Lyliane Sznajder, “Segments introducteurs de discours direct et repérages énonciatifs en latin biblique: éléments pour une étude diastratique et diachronique”, Revue de Linguistique Latine du Centre Alfred Ernout De Lingua Latina, x/2 (2015), http://www.paris-sorbonne.fr/IMG/pdf/dll11 sznajder.pdf [last accessed on 3 January 2022]; Eadem, “Discours indirect et dépendance syntaxique”, in De lingua Latina novae quaestiones, Actes du xe colloque international de linguistique latine (Paris-Sèvres, 19–23 avril 1999), Claude Moussy ed., Louvain 2001, pp. 609–626; Hannah Rosén, “About Non-direct Discourse: Another Look at Its Parameters in Latin”, Journal of Latin Linguistics, xii/2 (2013), pp. 231–263; Maryse Gayno, “Les modalités dʼinsertion du discour direct en latin tardif: bornage et redondance”, Revue de Linguistique Latine du Centre Alfred Ernout De Lingua Latina, x/2 (2015), http://www.paris-sorbonne.fr/img/ pdf/DLL_11_M-Gayno.pdf [last accessed on 3 January 2022]; Agustín Ramos Guerreira, “Formas y funciones en inquam”, in Actas del xiii Congreso español de Estudios clásicos, Jesús de la Villa et al. eds, Madrid 2015, pp. 791–799; Suzanne Maria Adema, Speech and Thought in Latin War Narratives: Words of Warriors, Leiden 2017; Jana Mikulová, “Verbs Introducing Direct Discourse in Late Latin Texts”,  Graeco-Latina Brunensia, xx/2 (2015), pp. 123–143; Eadem, “Some Remarks on Dicens in Late Latin Texts”, Indogermanische Forschungen, cxxii/1 (2017), pp. 1–28. 18 For an overview of the frequency of individual verbs, see Mikulová, Evolution of Direct Discourse Marking (n. 3), p. 119.

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60

1 / Trends in the use of verbal quotative markers

50 40 30 20 10 0

Postclass. 57

Late i 15

Late ii 9

1

5

15

27

% dico

7

8

29

25

% dicens

0

0

13

20

% dicere

7

8

41

45

% loquor

1

0

2

2

% single others

9

18

19

16

% inquit % ait

Class. 58

given verb out of all quotations found in a sample of a text. For example, if 100 quotations appeared in a text and 50 of them were marked by one verb (e.g. inquit), the frequency was 50 %. The defective verb inquit (“to say”) (1) was the most frequent quotative verb (i.e. verb for marking quotations) in classical Latin but decreased considerably in the late periods19. Already in classical times, it showed signs of routinization or, in other words, signs of an incipient stage of grammaticalization20. 1. “At illa audientibus nobis ‘Ego ipsa sum,’ inquit, ‘hic hospita.’” (Cic. Att. 5.1.3) “Pomponia however answered in our hearing, ‘I am a guest myself here21.’”

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The verb ait22 (“to say”) (2), (3) already appeared as a marker of direct discourse in classical Latin and increased in the postclassical period.

2. “‘Ipse est,’ ait, ‘nec ullus alius.’” (Apul. met. 2.13) “‘That’s him,’” said (Milo), ‘the very man23.’”

3. “Et ille ait: ‘Dic, filia, quod vis, et dicam tibi, si scio.’” (Itin. Eger. 20) “[…] and he said, ‘Say, daughter, what you wish, and I will tell you, if I know24.’”

Dico (“to say”) (4) – dico is the label for all verbal forms except dicens (“saying”) – is considered the most usual quotative verb in spoken communication, and it was often used in biblical translations25. Its frequency grew considerably from the postclassical to the late periods. 4. “Et dixit: ‘Video.’ Et ego dixi ei: ‘Numquid alio nomine vocare potest quam quod est?’” (Pass. Perp. 3.1–2) “‘I see it,’ he said. And I said to him, ‘Can it be called by another name other than what it is26?’”

A completely new verbal form used as a quotative marker is dicens (“saying”) (5), (6) which appeared under the biblical influence in Christian texts and spread in late Latin texts. It is a calque of a Greek participle meaning “saying”. The Greek participle is a calque of the Hebrew final infinitive “(in order) to say” that functions as a marker of quotations in the Hebrew Bible27. The survey of pre-Christian texts in the databases clearly showed a correlation between the expansion of dicens and Christianity since dicens as a marker is almost absent in the immense pre-Christian literary production28. Although dicens did not develop into a quotative particle that would be obligatory, it shows some signs of having entered the grammaticalization process. One of them is the combination with another verb of speech in the reporting clause (6), as was noted by Fruyt29. She considered this case to be a clear example of grammaticalization. However, the situation is likely to have been more complicated and nuanced30. 5. “Et post paululum obdormiens, apparuit ei vir beatus, dicens: ‘Quis es tu, qui nomen Niceti invocas?’” (Greg. Tur. vit. patr. 8.7) “Shortly afterwards, as he slept, the blessed man appeared to him, and said, ‘Who are you, who call the name of Nicetius31?’” 6. “Nam hic est locus Choreb, ubi […] ei locutus est deus dicens: ‘Quid tu hic Helias?’” (Itin. Eger. 4) “For this place is Horeb, where […] God spoke to him, saying, ‘What [are] you [doing] here, Elijah32?’”

The line of dicere in [Fig. 1] displays the spread of dico and dicens together. It thus shows the most significant increase. In contrast to the verbs meaning “to say” commented on so far, the verb loquor (“to speak, to say”) and its compounds were much less frequent in all periods. The last line in [Fig. 1] represents the frequency of all remaining verbs considered together and shows that the growth in the late periods was not so precipitous as in the case of ait, dico, and dicens. Not only preferences for individual verbs but also the position of verbs vis-à-vis quotations changed. The verb inquit was usually inserted into a quotation, as in example (1), whereas all the

remaining verbs usually appeared before quotations, i.e. in anteposition, see examples (3), (4), (5), and (6). However, the evident preference for anteposition in the late periods cannot be explained as a mere consequence of the decrease in inquit. First, there are cases of inserted ait already in the postclassical period (2), which shows that this verb was perfectly compatible with mid-position. Second, the mid-position of inquit could be one of the reasons for its decrease because we better perceive markers that precede a word or a sentence than those that follow it. Third, a preceding element is better perceived because the perception of speech is linear33. The preference for anteposition might have also been supported by the spread of silent reading instead of reading aloud. As a silent reader could rely on neither intonation nor quotation marks, which were not used at that time, an anteposed verb might have functioned 19 Inquit means “s/he says/said”. This form, being the most frequent, is used as the label for all forms of this verb. 20 See, e.g., J. Révay, “Petroniana”, Classical Philology, xxviii/1 (1923), pp. 69–71, sp. p. 70; Bruno Rochette, “Les éléments hors structure dans la Cena Trimalchionis (26,7–78,8). Remarques sur la structure de la phrase de Pétrone”,  in Eléments “asyntaxiques” ou hors structure dans l’énoncé Latin, Actes du Colloque international de Clermont-Ferrand (Université Blaise-Pascal, 16 et 17 Septembre 2005), Colette Bodelot ed., Clermont-Ferrand 2007, pp. 265–294, sp. pp. 280–281; Mikulová, “Verbs Introducing Direct Discourse” (n. 17), p. 141. 21 Marcus Tullius Cicero, Letters to Atticus, vol. ii, D. R. Shackleton Bailey ed. and transl., Cambridge 1999, p. 27. 22 Ait means “s/he says/said”.This form, being the most frequent, is used as the label for all forms of this verb. 23 Apuleius, The Golden Ass or Metamorphoses, Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Edward J. Kenney, London 1998, p. 21. 24 Egeria, The Pilgrimage of Egeria: A New Translation of The Itinerarium Egeriae with Introduction and Commentary, Anne McGowan, Paul F. Bradshaw transls, Collegeville 2018, p. 143. 25 See Sznajder, “Segments introducteurs” (n. 17), pp. 6–9. 26 The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, Thomas J. Heffernan ed. and transl., Oxford / New York 2012. 27 See Sznajder, “Segments introducteurs” (n. 17), p. 19. 28 See Mikulová, “Some Remarks” (n. 17), p. 2. 29 Michèle Fruyt, “Grammaticalisation in Latin”, in New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax, vol. iv: Complex Sentences, Grammaticalization, Typology, Philip Baldi, Pierluigi Cuzzolin eds, Berlin 2009, pp. 661–864, sp. pp. 693–694. 30 For more details, see Mikulová, “Some Remarks” (n. 17). 31 Gregory of Tours, Life of the Fathers, Translated with introduction and notes by Edward James, Liverpool 1991, p. 58. 32 Egeria, The Pilgrimage of Egeria (n. 24), p. 109. 33 Noelia Estévez Rionegro,“El estilo directo en el español oral a partir de una muestra de Archivo de Textos Hispánicos de la Universidad de Santiago”, Oralia, xxi/2 (2018), pp. 361–374, sp. p. 367.

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 

     

  

Quotations in total

Itin. Eger. Pass. Perp.

Amm.

Hier. Sulp. Sev.

Vulg.

Aug.

Macr.

Fredeg. Greg.Tur.

vit. Arnulf. vit. Amat.

    

          

Quotations in total

      

Quotations marked by inquit

as a signal of upcoming direct discourse more effectively than an inserted verb could. It is, however, a mere hypothesis that would have to be proved by a closer examination or an experiment. The issue of the change in position shows that an explanation for changes is neither easy nor unambiguous. Latin texts and authors differed within a single period and genre. The choice of quotative marker was also not clearly associated with quotes from an authority, the social class of the speaking characters, or the marking of dialogues. This holds true for the present corpus, but not for individual texts, in some of which such tendencies can be observed34. Role of individual authors

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

                   

Quotations marked by inquit      Percentage of inquit

vit. Memor.

Petron. Sen. vit. Goar.

Apul.



vit. patr. Emer.



Cic. Liv.

Number of instances

 Percentage in a given author

  

2 / Trends in the use of inquit in selected texts

The change of preferences in choosing markers need not hold for all authors in a given period. An example is provided by [Fig. 2]35, which displays the use of the verb inquit by authors (or texts) ordered chronologically from the classical period to the late ii period. The first column shows the number of all quotations found in the sample for a given author or text. The second column





  

   

 

Percentage of inquit

displays the number of quotations marked by inquit. The line represents the percentage of quotations marked by inquit in the given author or text. Note that some of the peaks should not be given too much weight because of the low number of quotations in the sample (see, for example, Ammianus, Sulpicius Severus, and the Vita Amati). Although the frequency of inquit decreased in the late periods, there are individual differences. One of the most interesting authors in the sample is Macrobius from the fourth century, who used inquit less often than Cicero and other classical and postclassical authors but still more often than late authors. A closer examination of his text shows that he imitated the Ciceronian style. In addition to inquit, Macrobius used the same type of framing structures, for example, tum ille/x […] inquit (“then he/x said”). Compare examples (7), (8), (9), and (10): 7. “Tum ille, ‘non sum,’ inquit, ‘nescius, Scaevola, ista inter Graecos dici et disceptari solere […].’” (Cic. de orat. 1.45) “To this, Crassus made the following reply: ‘I am not unaware, Scaevola, that the Greeks commonly raise such argument in their discussions36.’”

8. “Tum ille, ‘declinante,’ inquit, ‘in vesperum die quem Saturnale festum erat insecuturum, […].’” (Macr. Sat. 1.2.15) “Then Postumianus said, ‘It was getting on toward evening, on the day before the Saturnalia […]37.’”

9. “Tum Scaevola ‘quid est, Cotta?’ inquit ‘quid tacetis? Nihilne vobis in mentem venit, quod praeterea a Crasso requiratis?’” (Cic. de orat. 1.160) “Then Scaevola spoke, ‘What it is, Cotta? Why are the both of you silent? Can’t you think of anything else that you want ask to Crassus38?’”

10. “Tum Vettius ‘peropportune adfuistis,’ inquit, ‘adsertorem quaerenti.’” (Macr. Sat. 1.6.5) “Then Vettius said, ‘You’ve come just when I need someone to take my side […]39.’”

Despite the decrease in zero marking in the late periods, Macrobius followed Cicero in employing it for marking subsequent dialogical turns (see, e.g., Cic. fin. 2, 78–84; Macr. Sat. 1, 2, 3–1, 2, 14). However, he was not a simple imitator, although he clearly drew on the style of Cicero´s philosophical dialogues. First, he sometimes chose synonyms, for example, tunc ille (“then he”) (11), which is found in Livy and Apuleius, but not in Cicero.

13. “Postremo potentiam solis ad omnium potestatum summitatem referri indicant theologi, qui in sacris hoc brevissima precatione demonstrant dicentes ‘Ἥλιε παντοκράτορ, κόσμου πνεῦμα, κόσμου δύναμις, κόσμου φῶς.’” (Macr. Sat. 1.23.21) “Finally, those who discourse on the gods show that the sun’s power is reckoned as the totality of all powers, a point they make plain in their rites by this very brief prayer: ‘Sun, the ruler of all, breath of the universe, power of the universe, light of the universe42.’”

In addition, he employed the structure ut ait x to mark direct discourse. In contrast, in Cicero’s writings, this structure marks the so-called mixed or hybrid speech (i.e. a quote incorporated into the syntactical structure of a clause). It can also have the form of a parenthetical clause and can be omitted without any impact on the grammaticality of the sentence. 14. “Eundem deum praestantem salubribus causis Οὔλιον appellant id est sanitatis auctorem ut ait Homerus: ‘οὖλέ τε καὶ μάλα χαῖρε.’” (Macr. Sat. 1.17.21) “They call the same god who presides over the sources of health Oulios, or ‘author of well-being,’ as Homer says: ‘Health to you, and much joy43.’” 15. “Ex ea difficultate illae ‘fallaciloquae,’ ut ait Accius, ‘malitiae’ natae sunt.” (Cic. fin. 4.25.68) “Here, then, is the difficulty which led to this ‘false-

11. “Tunc Evangelus: ‘hoc quidem,’ inquit, ‘iam ferre non possum quod Praetextatus noster in ingenii sui pompam et ostentationem loquendi vel paulo ante honori alicuius dei adsignari voluit quod servi cum dominis vescerentur […].’” (Macr. Sat. 1.11.1) “Then Evangelus said, ‘really cannot stand this: in the showy pageant of his wit and eloquence our friend Praetextatus a little while ago tried to chalk up to some god’s honor the custom of slaves dining with their masters […]40.’”

Second, he also used verbal markers typical of late Latin, including ait and rarely dicens, although it is unknown whether he was Christian. 12. “Avienus, ‘non adsumam mihi,’ ait, ‘ut unam aliquam de Vergilianis virtutibus audeam praedicare, […].’” (Macr. Sat. 1.24.20) “Avienus said, ‘I’ll not claim to be so bold as to single out any one of Virgil’s virtues […]41.’”

speaking trickery,’ to quote Accius44.”

These examples indicate that Macrobius was a creative author that combined features of the classical and late styles. A similar picture can be found in works by Gregory of Tours from the sixth 34 For example, the social role of a character seems to have played a role in The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. 35 This figure was taken from Mikulová, Evolution of Direct Discourse Marking (n. 3), p. 41. 36 Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Ideal Orator, James M. May, Jakob Wisse transls, New York 2001, p. 68. 37 Macrobius, Saturnalia, vol. i, Robert A. Kaster ed. and transl., Cambridge 2011, p. 19. 38 Cicero, On the Ideal Orator (n. 36), p. 93. 39 Macrobius, Saturnalia (n. 37), p. 55. 40 Ibidem, p. 111. 41 Ibidem, p. 315. 42 Ibidem, p. 307. 43 Ibidem, p. 219. 44 Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Moral Ends, Julia Annas ed., Raphael Woolf transl., Cambridge 2004, p. 112.

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century. In contrast to Macrobius, Gregory used “higher” and “lower” genres and the issue of the more late elements. Still, some framing structures comprehensibility of texts for ordinary people. in his works can be related to the classical model, see (16). Conclusion 16. “Et ille: ‘Orate,’ inquid, ‘fideliter; Dominus enim liberavit vos hodie!’” (Greg. Tur. Franc. 2.7) “And he said, ‘Pray faithfully, the Lord will liberate you today.’”

This mixture of old and new traits is combined with a range of deviations from classical standards in orthography (see inquid in example [16]), word forms, and sentence structures, which provide evidence for the development of Latin and the ongoing language change. The complexity of such late texts indicates that the development was continuous and discontinuous at the same time. The authors may have been aware of their choices much more than has been supposed. Obviously, they differ in their ability to compose texts and handle Latin, which is related to their level of education. A higher level of education is usually accompanied by the ability to adapt language to communicative purposes and audiences. A good example is provided by Augustine, who is represented in the present corpus by a sample from his Confessiones. In this book, he preferred late markers to the very classical inquit. However, he used this verb frequently in other works, such as the Enarrationes in Psalmos and De Civitate Dei. His choices of markers can be related to the difference between

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The present examination has shown that the use of quotative markers changed over time. In the late periods, some markers became less frequent and others more frequent and the usual position of a marker was before a quotation. The late periods are characterized by higher variability in markers and differences among individual authors. The choice of markers reflects the cultural development of late antique and the influence of Christianity. Apart from other things, the new religion brought biblical language as a new model of writing that competed with the prestigious classical model and the need to produce texts comprehensible for ordinary people. Thus, late authors had to cope with language development, the classical ideal, the biblical model, and the ability of their audiences to understand their texts. The examples of Macrobius, Gregory of Tours, and Augustine show that the authors were creative in combining different elements and producing complex texts with allusions to different cultural backgrounds. In sum, the late period seems to be a melting pot with a pool of possibilities in a creative environment. Precisely in this period, it was acceptable to merge the old and the new and create a new quality that is continuous and discontinuous at the same time.

summary Variabilita prostředků pro uvozování přímé řeči u pozdně latinských autorů

V pozdně latinských textech z období přibližně od roku 200 do roku 813 n. l. je patrná změna ve volbě prostředků uvozujících přímou řeč. Tento článek se zabývá tím, zda se jedná o plošnou změnu a jak významná je role autorů jakožto individualit. Výzkum byl prováděn na vzorku textů z období od 1. stol. př. n. l. až do konce 8. stol. n. l. Uvozující prostředky byly rozděleny do tří skupin. Do první byly zařazeny slovesné, do druhé neslovesné a do poslední nulové prostředky, tedy přímé řeči bez uvození. K bližšímu zkoumání byly vybrány výrazy slovesné, a to zejména slovesa s významem „říct”, protože ta jsou nejvíce zastoupena v celém sledovaném období. Jejich četnost byla vypočítána v procentech jako podíl přímých řečí uvozených daným slovesem z celkového počtu přímých řečí v daném textu. V pozdně latinských textech došlo k úbytku slovesa inquit („říct“), které je typické pro klasickou latinu, kdežto sloveso dico („říct“) se naopak používalo častěji. Sloveso ait („říct“), které se v klasické latině používalo pro uvození nepřímé řeči nebo ve vsuvce „jak říká / řekl x“, začalo uvozovat i přímou řeč. Kromě toho se pod vlivem překladů biblických textů nově objevilo dicens („říkající, řka“). V porovnání se slovesy „říct“ byly změny v četnosti ostatních sloves méně významné. Na rozdíl od klasické latiny se

uvozující slovesa častěji kladla před přímou řeč, než se vkládala přímo do ní. Celkově se pozdní texty vyznačují větší variabilitou, protože přibyly nové uvozující výrazy, aniž by se přestaly používat ty staré. Třebaže jsou tyto vývojové tendence zřejmé, rozdíly mezi jednotlivými autory jsou velké. Četnost slovesa inquit např. osciluje od nuly až po běžně používaný uvozující výraz, jako je tomu u Macrobia ze 4. stol. n. l., u něhož se objevuje ve 45 % případů. Při bližším zkoumání jeho textu je zřejmé, že napodobuje Ciceronovy filozofické dialogy, ale zároveň do svých textů začleňuje výrazy typické pro pozdní latinu nebo doložené v (po)klasickém období, ovšem ne u Cicerona. Ačkoliv byl tedy Macrobius velmi vzdělaný člověk, který se chtěl řídit klasickým modelem, neváhal sáhnout po neklasických nebo méně obvyklých výrazech, a vytvořit tak text obsahující různorodé prvky a odkazy na různé kulturní okruhy. Stejně postupoval i Řehoř z Tours, i když jeho texty obsahují více odchylek od klasického pravopisu i gramatiky. Zdá se tedy, že pozdně antické období bylo jakýmsi „tavicím kotlíkem“, pro nějž bylo příznačné kreativní zacházení s existujícími možnostmi. Právě v tomto období bylo možné vytvořit novou kvalitu, která vykazuje zároveň znaky kontinuity i diskontinuity.

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Abstract – “Abbreviated” Depictions? Questions on the Earliest Christian Images – The first Christian visual expressions are unquestionably characterized by their immediate character. Many of the Old and New Testament images appearing in third-century funerary spaces are in fact reduced to identification of the protagonist and some minimal attributes. Scholars have therefore referred to these images as “signitive” or “abbreviated” depictions. This essay, considering various typologies of objects, the contexts of their creation, and their relation to testamentary narrative cycles, offers insights into the origins of this figurative visual language. The images are shown to result from accumulations of single elements that form networks of salvific concepts, the semantic potential of which was enhanced and oriented according to an associative logic. Indeed, they are not abbreviations of elaborate narrative cycles; in some cases, they reflect visual strategies developed in narrative cycles that enhanced the sense of “signitive” images and served as bridges linking them. Keywords – “abbreviated representations”, catacombs, early Christian art, narrative, Nüppengläser, sarcophagi, “signitive” art Chiara Croci  University of Lausanne 60 [email protected]

“Abbreviated” Depictions? Questions on the Earliest Christian Images Chiara Croci

Ciao Gabri If there ever was an issue destined to remain unresolved, it is the birth of “Christian art” – a tricky question starting from its very definition1. This paper aims to provide some insight on the matter by addressing a type of images which spread starting from the third century, especially in funerary painting and sculpture [Figs 1–2]. Designated as “signitive” images and considered to be abbreviated versions of Old and New Testament narrative cycles2, these images are not “non-narrative”, but

feature a specific way of “recounting”, the origins and scope of which deserve to be investigated. 1 Recently, The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Art, Robin M. Jensen, Mark D. Ellison eds, London 2018, has offered initial insight on the problem and the main bibliography. 2 The concept of these images as signs was first formulated by Vladimir Weidlé, The Baptism of Art: Notes on the Religion of the Catacomb Paintings, London 1950; and later developed especially by André Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins, Princeton, nj, 1968; and Ernst Kitzinger, “Christian Imagery: Growth and Impact”, in Age of Spirituality: A Symposium, Kurt Weitzmann ed., New York 1980, pp. 141–163.

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1 / Sarcophagus, ca 300 / Museo Civico (Velletri)

The problem

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Our reflection begins in the early third century, of “abbreviated images” assumes a sketchedwhen “Christian” subjects appeared in the visual out character for the earliest Christian visual culture of the Roman world. It has been rightly expressions, which are thus seen as resulting pointed out that their spread took place alongside from the contraction of more extensive narrathe previous figurative culture but underestimat- tive cycles8. Yet, apart from speculation about ing the novelty of the images that went on to oc- lost hypothetical models, it is important to stress cupy the spaces of “the first Christians” would be that no concrete traces of painted cycles of the unwise3. Completely new were the subjects largely two testaments exist before those attested in the linked to biblical history as well as the principles Barberini watercolors in Old St Peter’s, which underpinning these early images, made up es- were probably coeval to those created during pecially of biblical characters, made in a concise the last quarter of the fourth century in the Baway, without any apparent narrative intent4. These silica Ambrosiana, Milan, known through tituli9. images were therefore considered to be “abbrevi- Even the early existence of book illustrations of ated” representations, as can be seen in the exhi- these cycles and their alleged role as a model bition Age of Spirituality, held in 1977–1978 at the for those produced on a monumental scale later Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York – a real remains a matter of speculation. It is only from turning point for interpreting early Christian art the fifth and sixth centuries that we have examin a broader perspective – where materials of the ples of illuminated manuscripts of the Old and “Christian realm” were divided into “abbreviated” New Testaments, respectively10. Given the points and “narrative” representations5. The legitimacy of contact between Christian and Judaic visual of this differentiation and the criteria for an image cultures, it is of course worth remembering that to be considered “narrative”are challenged by the the synagogue of Dura Europos had Old Tesvery fact that fundamentally identical objects have tament narrative cycles by the first third of the sometimes been placed in the first and sometimes third century11. However, the link between the in the second category6. This brings us to the heart earliest “signitive” images and the testamentary of a crucial issue in medieval visual culture, that cycles remains unquestionably problematic. It is, the breakdown between imago and historiae7. should be approached in light of the fact that, in Obviously, every image tells a story, even both Roman art and earlier cultures – from arif it features a single protagonist. The distinc- chaic Greece to the Egyptian and Indian worlds, tion between narrative and non-narrative im- “monoscenic” or “cyclical” models can be found ages may thus be misleading. The very concept in works of the same period, even to show the

same stories, and without the more concise solution that inescapably depended on longer cycles12. 3

4

5

6 7

8

9

For a reading of early Christian art as a continuation of the figurative culture of the Roman world, Jaś Elsner’s studies are very persuasive; see sp. Jaś Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity, Cambridge 1995; Idem, Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire ad 100–450, Oxford 1998; as well as the volumes linked to the exhibition held in 2017–2018 at the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford: Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions, Jaś Elsner, Stefanie Lenk eds, London 2018; and Imagining the Divine: Exploring Art in Religions of Late Antiquity across Eurasia, Jaś Elsner, Rachel Wood eds, London 2021. For the topic addressed in this paper, see also Jaś Elsner, “Visual Epitome in Late Antique Art”, in Epitomic Writing in Late Antiquity and Beyond: Forms of Unabridged Writing, Paolo Felice Sacchi, Marco Formisano eds, London 2022, pp. 202–229. For a socio-cultural perspective on the issue, see Gisella Cantino Wataghin, “Biblia pauperum? A proposito dell’arte dei primi cristiani”, Antiquité tardive, ix (2001), pp. 279–294. A revolutionary approach to the issue was developed by Thomas F. Mathews, The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art, Princeton, nj, 1993, which provoked a lively critical debate, summarized in the introduction to the Italian edition by Eugenio Russo (Milan 2005). See also the almost coeval Paul C. Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art, New York / Oxford 1994. A problematized reflection, which brings out the innovative features of the earliest “Christian” expression, can be found in Jean-Michel Spieser, Images du Christ. Des catacombes aux lendemains de l’iconoclasme, Geneva 2015. For this reason, it has been referred to as “signitive art” (n. 2). On the issue, see also the numerous contributions of Fabrizio Bisconti, sp. “Simboli e racconti. Cicli, narrazioni, abbreviazioni e sintesi nell’arte cristiana antica”,  in Studi in onore di Fabiola Ardizzone. Quaderni digitali di Archeologia Postclassica xiii, Rosa M. Carra Bonacasa, Emma Vitale eds, Palermo 2018, pp. 49–70. For a theoretical point of view on the poietic principle of these images, see Genealogia dell’immagine cristiana. Studi sul cristianesimo antico e le sue raffigurazioni, Daniele Guastini ed., Florence 2014. Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century, exhibition catalogue (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1978), Kurt Weitzmann ed., New York 1979, pp. 396–512. See, e.g., ibidem, nos 379, 415. On the gap between “signitive” images and historiae in early Christian Art, see Gisella Cantino-Wataghin, “The Early Christians, between Imagines, Historiae and Pictura”,Antiquité tardive, xix (2011), pp. 13–34. Regarding the division between imago and historiae in medieval art in general, see Belting’s founding reflections – Hans Belting, Bild und Kult. Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst, Munich 1990 – as well as Herbert L. Kessler’s studies, including his “Façade, Face, and Frontal Photo of St. Peter’s”, Codex Aquilarensis, xxxi (2015), pp. 69–92. Against the apparent simplicity of these early images, see Spieser, Images du Christ (n. 3), pp. 15–16, who emphasizes its metaphorical and non-narrative character (ibidem, pp. 33, 162–163). On the origin of the narrative cycles of the two testaments in early Christian art, see recent contributions by Serena Romano, “San Pietro, San Paolo, e la narrazione cristiana. Riflessioni su una possibile storia”, in Les stratégies de la narration dans la peinture médiévale. La représentation de l’Ancien Testament aux ixe–xiie siècles, Marcello Angheben ed., Turn-

hout 2020, pp. 127–141; and Ivan Foletti, “Quand l’histoire devient prétexte. Les cycles narratifs à Milan et Rome au ve siècle”, in Histoires chrétiennes en images. Espace, temps et structure de la narration, Sulamith Brodbeck et al. eds, Paris 2022, pp. 135–152, who defends the priority of the Milanese example. On the characteristics of the narrative cycles attested between the fourth and sixth centuries, see Jean-Michel Spieser, “Les cycles paléochrétiens dits narratifs”, in Les stratégies de la narration (n. 9), pp. 27–46. 10 The early but unproven circulation of illuminated books with testamentary narrative cycles is supported especially in the studies by Kurt Weitzmann. Besides his Illustrations in Roll and Codex: A Study of the Origin and Method of Text Illustration, Princeton, nj, 1947, see also his “Book Illustrations of the 4th Century: Tradition and Innovation”, in Akten des vii. Internationalen Kongresses für Christliche Archäologie, vol. i, Vatican City 1969, pp. 257–281. Weitzmann’s thesis provides the basis for the intersection between monumental cycles and miniatures by Ernst Kitzinger, “The Role of Miniature Painting in Mural Decoration”, in The Place of Book: Illumination in Byzantine Art, Kurt Weitzmann et al. eds, Princeton, nj, 1975, pp. 99–142. Kitzinger also posits the existence of iconographic bookguides, on the basis of which the monumental cycles would have been carried out. A recent contribution to this problem is offered by Dimitri Cascianelli, “La tempesta sedata del papiro di Ossirinco del Museo Archeologico di Firenze (psi viii 920). Dall’illustrazione alle altre arti”, in Arti minori e arti maggiori. Relazioni e interazioni tra Tarda Antichità e Alto Medioevo, Fabrizio Bisconti, Matteo Braconi, Mariarita Sgarlata eds, Todi 2019, pp. 275–300, who interpreted the Oxyrhynchus papyrus as a fragment of an “iconographic guide”. 11 On the paintings of the synagogue of Dura Europos, see Herbert L. Kessler, Kurt Weitzmann, The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue and Christian Art, Washington, dc, 1990; for a historiographical perspective on the issue under discussion, see Margaret Olin, “‘Early Christian Synagogues’ and ‘Jewish Art Historians’: The Discovery of the Synagogue of Dura-Europos”,  Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, xxvii (2000), pp. 7–28. On the dialogue between Christian and Jewish visual cultures, see n. 1, and sp. the volumes Imagining the Divine (n. 3). See also the essays in the volume Jewish Art in Its Late Antique Context, Uzi Leibner, Catherine Hezser eds, Tübingen 2016. 12 This is an inexhaustible question, at least for the purposes of this paper. A starting point for such a discussion can be found in the proceedings of the symposium Narration in Ancient Art (Archeological Institute of America, Chicago, 28. 12. 1955), collected in the issue lxi/1 (1957) of the American Journal of Archaeology, especially in the contribution of Kurt Weitzmann, “Narration in Early Christendom”, in ibidem, pp. 83–91. On narration in Roman art, the main reference remains Richard Brilliant, Visual Narratives: Storytelling in Etruscan and Roman Art, Ithaca/London 1984, who tends to consider “mono-scenic” images as deriving from larger narrative cycles. The opposite development, in which isolated images precede the emergence of more extensive narrative cycles, can be seen in Greek art. See, e.g., Jocelyn Penny Small, “Time in Space: Narrative in Classical Art”, The Art Bulletin, lxxxi/4 (1999), pp. 562–575. Simultaneous development of different “narrative” modes (monophonic, synoptic, confused, continuous narration) characterizes early Buddhist art: Vidya Dehejia, “On Modes of Visual Narration in Early Buddhist Art”,  The Art Bulletin, lxxii/3 (1990), pp. 374–392. See also the comparative approach to the narrative systems of early Christian and early Buddhist art by Jaś Elsner, “Art, Religion and Narrative: A Comparison of Early Christian and Early Buddhist Indian Art”,  Codex Aquilarensis, xxxvii (2021), pp. 537–553.

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2 / Callisto Catacomb, Cubicolo dei Sacramenti A2, Rome, first half of the 3rd century

Understanding “signitive” images as abbreviated depictions assumes a hierarchical relationship between text and image, as well as between narrative cycles and non-narrative images, and this is a prejudice that needs to be overcome if we want to think rationally about the nature of the earliest Christian visual expression13.

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Starting in the first decades of the third century, a series of biblical figures – Jonah, Noah, Daniel, the three young Hebrews in the fiery furnace, Adam and Eve, Susanna, and Isaac [Figs 2–3] – can be found in funerary spaces16, together with images from Roman figurative tradition that were repurposed, such as the Good Shepherd, Orpheus, and the orant17. Some of these tended to stand The earliest Christian images: out, in the earliest attestations, in a micro-cyclical themes and places form: the case of Jonah is the most striking since it systematically takes the form of a narrative charApart from issues that remain unresolved due acterized by at least two moments in the story to loss and destruction, what has emerged from – Jonah being swallowed and then ejected by the centuries-old Christian archeological tradition sea monster – and often a third moment, with allows us to place the spread of the earliest Chris- Jonah lying under a pergola as a manifestation tian images in the first decades of the third centu- of the salvation achieved [Fig. 1]18. The sacrifice ry [Fig. 2]14. The place where these developments of Isaac can be added to this, where the frontal can best be followed is Rome, mainly in funerary representation of the praying protagonists, with contexts (catacombs and sarcophagi), although the donkey that would be sacrificed in Isaac’s similar figurative systems were found on objects place, the altar, and the bundle of wood, attested from other spheres as well [Fig. 8]. Any attempt at in one of the most ancient areas of the Roman providing an overview would be extremely risky, catacombs with this type of image – the Cubicudue to the amount of material, its continuous lum of the Sacraments of the Catacomb of Callisto, spread, and the difficulty of precise dating of from the 230s – would be followed by versions certain objects and contexts. However, it is at least including references to other moments of the acworth trying to outline an indicative profile15. count [Fig. 4]19. The other figures mentioned, on the

3 / Catacomb of Via Anapo, Rome, 4th century 4 / Catacomb of Callisto, Cubicolo dei Sacramenti A2, detail of Fig. 2

other hand, almost always appear as “snapshots”, where spatial and temporal connotations are absent or reduced to a minimum. The protagonist, often an orant, to emphasize the role of prayer in obtaining salvation, is isolated and accompanied by a few elements that identify him as a figure saved by divine intervention. Noah is depicted in the ark, often associated with a dove [Fig. 5]20, Daniel among the lions21, the three Hebrews in the fiery furnace22, and Susanna flanked by the elders23. These figures are linked to the New Testament ones, following a similar principle: we find, for example, Peter striking a rock to get water, following a scheme so closely that, without additions 13 A critical discussion of the question can be found in John Lowden,“The Beginnings of Biblical Illustration”, in Imaging the Early Medieval Bible, John W. Williams ed., University Park 1999, pp. 9–59, who argues that narrative cycles on a monumental scale developed before the illuminated ones. 14 In addition to the references in n. 1, see Lezioni di archeologia cristiana, Fabrizio Bisconti ed., Vatican City 2014. 15 On the distribution of the images under consideration in the catacombs, on sarcophagi, and on gold-glass from the third and fourth centuries, see the useful summaries by Jutta Dresken-Weiland, Immagine e parola. Alle origini dell’iconografia cristiana, Vatican City 2012 [2010]; and Eadem, “Funerary Iconography and Its Signification in Christianization Context of the Early Christian World”,  Antiquité Tardive, xix (2011), pp. 63–78.

16 I will not go into details about the depiction of the mystical tower narrated in The Shepherd of Hermes, a text from the first half of the second century, visible in cubicle a1 of the Catacombs of San Gennaro in Naples, together with scenes of Jonah and Adam and Eve. On this subject, see Umberto M. Fasola, Le catacombe di San Gennaro a Capodimonte, Rome 1974, pp. 26–29. 17 Spieser, Images du Christ (n. 3), pp. 48–98. 18 On the iconography of Jonah, see Nicoletta Bonansea, Simbolo e narrazione: linee di sviluppo formali e ideologiche dell’iconografia di Giona tra iii e vi secolo, Spoleto 2013. 19 See below, pp. 72–73. 20 On the development of the iconography of Noah on the ark, see Luca Avellis, “Note sull’iconografia di Noè nell’arca (iii–vi sec.)”,  Vetera Christianorum, xlv/2 (2008), pp. 193–219. For the perspective of this paper, the coin from Apamea, dated 225–235 and associated with a Jewish context, is noteworthy (Age of Spirituality [n. 5], no. 350): the depiction of Noah on the ark has a narrative component related to an image of the protagonist with his wife. 21 See Raffaella Giuliani, “L’iconografia di Daniele fra i leoni ‘allargata’. Rapporti fra le arti minori, la pittura ipogeica e la scultura funeraria”, in Arti minori e arti maggiori (n. 10), pp. 253–273. 22 In this case, too, alongside the more common isolated depiction of the three figures in the furnace, possibly with the angel as a manifestation of divine intervention, there are singular cases in which the depiction is preceded by their rejection of the idol in front of Nebuchadnezzar (Carlo Carletti, “Sull’iconografia dei tre giovani ebrei di Babilonia di fronte a Nabuchodonosor”, Antichità Altoadriatiche, vi [1974], pp. 17–30), indicating a narrative component, or at least a clearly bipartite structure. 23 The story of Susanna is another episode attested in the form of a short cycle, as in the Greek chapel of Priscilla from the third century.

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5 / Catacomb of Priscilla, Cappella Greca, Rome, first half of the 3rd century 6 / Catacomb of Domitilla, Rome, 4th century

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like the tree, guards, or soldiers, its distinction from the similar miracle performed by Moses is not obvious24. Christ’s baptism, recognizable by the descending dove, is also evoked by a single figure laying hands on a second, smaller one25. The instantaneous aspect also marks the earliest occurrences of the paralytic with his bed26 and the Samaritan woman with her basin of water27. These paradigmatic figures would be depicted, especially from the fourth century on, together with Christ [Figs 7–8], whose presence shifts the image’s emphasis from a redeeming expression to the illustration of a miracle. The figures involved in the miracles tended to multiply, especially on the sarcophagi of the Constantinian era, where we find the bleeding woman, the blind man, and Lazarus, along with other miracles, such as the wedding at Cana and the multiplication of the loaves and fishes [Figs 6–7]28. As convincingly demonstrated by Spieser, the proliferation of these scenes responds to a desire to evoke miraculous events to legitimize Christ in a crucial phase for the establishment of Christianity29. In fact, this trend goes hand in hand with the emergence of iconographic details intended to visually emphasize divine intervention amid the protagonists of these events: we see, for example, an arm preventing Abraham from sacrificing Isaac, the addition of a Creation

scene to the more succinct representation of the proto-parents, and the angel intervening in support of Daniel [Fig. 7]30. Despite these developments, the earliest Christian images are generally devoid of narrative purpose in the sense that they lack spatio-temporal indications. They are characterized by a strong visual immediacy and share a genetic feature, systematically deriving from the association of a single figure with a certain attribute (the ark, the bed, the furnace, the lions, the basin of water, etc.). Christ can then be introduced as a saving character, or as an aid in identifying the scope of the other main figures. The fact that this system, based on salvific exempla, can be found even outside strictly funerary contexts – for example, on everyday objects [Fig. 8]31 – is noteworthy because it indicates the transversal diffusion of these images and their communication of a very visible and accessible language32. This is confirmed by the reuse in funerary contexts of objects such as 24 On the miracle of Moses striking the rock, see Dresken-Weiland, Immagine e parola (n. 15), pp. 109–127; and recently Dimitri Cascianelli, “Il ritorno di Mosè. Per una rilettura delle presunte scene petrine del sarcofago di Giona”, Rivista di Archeologia Cristiana, xciii (2017), pp. 137–166; Idem, “Il miraculum fontis in un frammentario coperchio di sarcofago di S. Sebastiano appena restaurato. Altre riflessioni sull’iconografia del miracolo della fonte”, Rivista di

Archeologia Cristiana, xcv (2019), pp. 75–98. An interesting case of the miracle of Moses, in which a depiction of the deceased may be hidden among the figures of the Israelites, was recently published by Pamela Bonnekoh, Dieter Korol, “Eine aussergewöhnliche Darstellung des Wasserwunders des Moses in der Katakombe S. Gennaro in Neapel”,  in Imaginum Orbis. Bilderwelten zwischen Antike und Byzanz, Markos Giannoulis, Markus Löx, Alexis Oepen eds, Wiesbaden 2021, pp. 125–137. 25 On the origins of this scene and its significance, see Spieser, Images du Christ (n. 3), pp. 99–163. 26 On the healing of the paralytic, see an overview in Dresken-Weiland, Immagine e parola (n. 15), pp. 203–209; and, with insight on how these types of images work, Giovanna Ferri,“Ecce sanus factus es, iam noli peccare. Spunti e riflessioni sull’iconografia del miracolo della guarigione del paralitico nella pittura cimiteriale cristiana delle origini”, Vetera Christianorum, lii (2015), pp. 85–108. 27 See, e.g., Raffaella Bucolo,“La Samaritana al pozzo nel cubicolo a3 della Catacomba di S. Callisto tra funzione iconografica e interpretazione patristica”, Rivista di archeologia cristiana, lxxxv (2009), pp. 107–123. 28 On these scenes, see Lee M. Jefferson, Christ the Miracle Worker in Early Christian Art, Minneapolis 2014; and, with a focus on their initiatory implications, Robin M. Jensen, “Conversion to Jesus as a Healer God: Visual and Textual Evidence”,  in Means of Christian Conversion in Late Antiquity: Objects, Bodies, and Rituals, Klára Doležalová, Ivan Foletti, Katarína Kravčíková, Pavla Tichá eds, Brno/Turnhout 2021 (= Convivium, supplementum iii [2021]), pp. 63–77. 29 Spieser, Images du Christ (n. 3), pp. 190–210. 30 Ibidem, pp. 220–229. 31 See, e.g., Age of spirituality (n. 5), nos 369, 377–80, 382, 389, 393, 395, 400–404, and, in summary, the contributions of Walker, Spier, Herrmann, and van den Hoek in The Routledge Handbook (n. 1). 32 On the accessibility of Christian images, see, for example, Maria Andaloro,“Il sistema-immagine nello spazio cristiano”, in Genealogia dell’immagine cristiana (n. 4), pp. 170–188.

7 / Sarcophagus, first third of the 4th century / Museo Pio Cristiano (Rome) 8 / Gold Glass, second half of the 4th century / Ashmolean Museum of Art (Oxford)

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glass and bowl bottoms that, when included in the mortar used to seal tombs, could have provided visual and semantic depth to the type of images under examination33. Visual association, semantic multiplication

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Another aspect common to testamentary “snapshots” is the fact that they are freely associated in the various contexts where they occur. Daniel may appear next to Noah, Susanna, or the miracle at Cana, just as the paralytic may stand by Jonah or Isaac, or the Good Shepherd, of course; there is no sense of clashing. This is due to the very nature of these images: the fact that they were signs of divine intervention, models of salvation that the Christian could project himself into, made them virtually interchangeable. The catechetical approach used to explain this phenomenon at the beginning of the twentieth century has been discarded34. Anyway, the widespread diffusion of these images, in contexts linked to various types and levels of patronage, often private, prevents them from being interpreted in a univocal way. They are groups of images linked by their salvific nature, whose general significance could be adjusted

and individualized according to their placement. Associations generally go beyond the boundary between Old and New Testament figures: devoid of a specific typological purpose, they, nevertheless, imply a unified conception of both Testaments, which would underlie the development of the biblical narrative on a monumental scale starting in the second half of the fourth century35. The “snapshots” could be separated by frames or simulated architecture [Figs 2–3, 6] or be accumulated in a single space and in an apparently random order [Figs 1, 9]. However, we can note a tendency to arrange them in a hierarchical way36. They can be arranged in a centripetal manner around a central element, as on the vaults of catacombs or on the bottoms of cups or glasses [Figs 8, 10–11], or organized in a horizontal frieze dominated by a central figure; this is often the case with sarcophagi [Figs 1, 7]. The central element might be the Good Shepherd, an orant, a pattern valued in a specific context – such as the sacrifice of Isaac on the Podgorica bowl [Fig. 10]37, or the deceased/owner himself [Figs 8, 11]. Even the arrangement of these ensembles, i.e. the ordering of the individual elements, is flexible due to the features outlined so far, and hence the autonomous value of each

“snapshot” as well. This autonomy is particularly evident when the scenes occur in isolation, as on the bottoms of cups or spoons which, as elements of a set used individually, reflect the same principles underlying the images under examination38. “Abbreviated” depictions? The potential autonomy of the images under consideration confirms them as figurative units, intended to express immediate concepts, in line with the musical principle of “staccato”, to borrow a telling metaphor from Mathews39. Understanding these images as an abbreviation of elaborate narrative cycles implies their association to a code of expression different from the one they originated from. Before recalling the story of which they are necessarily part, the single “snapshots” present concepts which, when combined, may have recalled a broader system of references belonging to early Christian culture. This was a culture that relied on the concise and allusive rhetoric of the sermo humilis, which contributed to the emergence 33 The relationship between the primary function and reuse of gold-glass is still problematic, as shown by the

recent study by Monica Hellström, “Baptism and Roman Gold-Glasses: Salvation and Social Dynamics”, in A Globalised Visual Culture?, Fabio Guidetti, Katharina Meinecke eds, Oxford/Philadelphia 2020, pp. 179–209; and Chiara Croci, “Reused from Banquet to Grave: Gold Glass, a ‘Popular’ Medium in Late Antiquity?”, Eikón/ Imago, xi (2022), pp. 47–55. On this class of objects, see the study by Daniel T. Howells, A Catalogue of the Late Antique Gold Glass in the British Museum, Liz James, Chris Entwistle eds, London 2015. 34 See Bisconti,“Simboli e racconti”(n. 4), for a historiographic reading, and more generally, Idem, “La pittura delle catacombe e l’arte paleocristiana delle basiliche”, in L’Orizzonte Tardoantico e le nuove immagini, 312–468, Maria Andaloro ed., Milan 2006, pp. 207–214. 35 On the issue of typology in early Christian iconography, see Sabine Schrenk, Typos und Antitypos in der frühchristlichen Kunst, Münster 1995. 36 On their distribution, see Verena Fugger, “Positionsfavorisierend und positionsflexibel. Zur räumlichen Anordnung von Bildern in der frühchristlichen Grabmalerei”,  Mitteilungen zur Christlichen Archäologie, xxii (2016), pp. 85–110. Important insights on this question can also be found in Barbara Mazzei, “La pittura e la scultura funerarie. Tangenze e divergenze nel processo di formazione del repertorio paleocristiano”, Antiquité tardive, xix (2011), pp. 79–94. 37 Stefanie Nagel, “Die Schale von Podgorica. Bemerkungen zu einem außergewöhnlichen christlichen Glas der Spätantike”, Bonner Jahrbücher, ccxiii (2013), pp. 165–198. 38 For gold-glass bottoms with a single scene, see, e.g., Charles R. Morey, The Gold-Glass Collection of the Vatican Library, Guy Ferrari ed, Vatican City 1959, no. 285; for spoons, see the ones from Cassian d’Isonzo published by Raffaele Garrucci, Storia dell’arte cristiana nei primi otto secoli della chiesa, vol. vi, Prato 1880, pl. 462. 39 Mathews, The Clash of Gods (n. 3), p. 13, n. 18.

9 / Catacomb di Vigna Massimo, Rome, 4th century 10 / Podgorica cup, second half of the 4th century / Hermitage (St Petersburg) 11 / Catacomb of Domitilla, Vault of Cubiculum 69, Rome, second half of the 4th century

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12 / Cup of Cologne, mid-4th century / 70 British Museum (London)

of such a direct language that used visual associations to reinforce and clarify the significance of the main concepts40. Based on individual figures endowed with broad semantic potential, this system of communication was then enhanced and reorientated from time to time through the selection and distribution of individual visual elements. Since these images are initially attested in narrow spaces, were subject to more or less extensive interventions, and were entrusted to artisans who were not always the most skilled – at least in the case of the catacombs, it is necessary to consider the impact of the technical and productive conditions of their conception41. The little-studied Nüppengläser allows to tackle this question since the very principles of “signitive” images are developed in these objects in a way depending, at least partially, on technical conditions. Gold-glasses, considerably smaller than cup bottoms (ca 3 cm in diameter, compared to 8–12 cm)42, are fused by the dozen in a transparent glass layer to form the walls of larger vessels. Due to the fragility of these cups, no intact examples survive, but a double fragment found in the excavations of the St Severin necropolis in Cologne gives a clear idea of this type of object [Fig. 12]43. The cup bears a collection of patterns commonly found in the catacombs and on sarcophagi from the third century onwards. Due to the small size of the decorated glass medallions, a net of “snapshots” emerges from single elements, harking back to the deepest roots of the system of visual associations at the basis of the earliest Christian images. Daniel, for example, occupies an entire medallion, while a lion is found in a medallion to his left; another lion should have flanked the Prophet on his right. Also, the three Hebrews in the fiery furnace must have each occupied one medallion. A similar solution is used for the episode of Susanna: the woman may at first glance resemble a common orant, but the presence of loose glass-medallions featuring a naked man pointing a finger in the collections [Fig. 13] suggests that she was flanked by the elders. The story of Jonah, on the other hand, maintains its cyclical nature: it is depicted in three episodes on three medallions in a part of a cup. The sacrifice of Isaac is displayed in a single one, as are Adam and Eve flanking the tree, although items preserved in

collections prove that a single glass-medallion may have been devoted to each element – Adam, Eve, and the tree with the snake [Fig. 14]. In the collections, there are also examples with the paralytic

13 / Diminutive medallion, mid-4th century / Musei Vaticani (Rome)

40 On the sermo humilis in late antique culture, see especially the first chapter of the book by Erich Auerbach, Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter, Bern 1958. On early Christian images as a figurative version of the sermo humilis, see the introduction by Daniele Guastini to Genealogia dell’immagine cristiana (n. 4), pp. 7–36; and Daniele Guastini, Immagini cristiane e cultura antica, Lavis 2021, pp. 406–451. 41 On workshops of Roman catacombs, see Norbert Zimmermann, Werkstattgruppen römischer Katakombenmalerei, Münster 2002. 42 For a full-size illustration of this type of object, see Morey, The Gold-Glass Collection (n. 38). 43 Bernd Päffgen,“Die Ausgrabungen in St. Severin zu Köln und ihre Bedeutung für die Christliche Archäologie im Rheinland”,  in Neue Forschungen zu den Anfängen des Christentums im Rheinland, Sebastian Ristow ed., Münster 2004, pp. 173–186, sp. pp. 175–177: doubts have been raised as to whether these ancient gold-glasses were remelted to create a modern cup; however, the hypothesis has been rejected by Howells, A Catalogue (n. 33), pp. 90–101.

14 / Gold Glass, mid-4th century / Corning Museum (New York)

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and Lazarus alone, or with Noah on the ark, with the dove occupying another medallion [Fig. 15]. There are also several medallions dominated by a young man with a rod, such as the one at the top of the Cologne cup [Fig. 12]. It is not surprising that, in museum collections, the latter has often been exhibited together with Lazarus, the paralytic, or other beneficiaries of miracles44. In the St Severin bowl, however, the action of the young man with the staff does not seem to be directed towards a specific figure since he flanks Daniel. Howells proposed a reconstruction of the bowl in which the young man would repeat himself, thus representing a generic idea of logos, matching any salvific exemplum, even from the Old Testament45. On the basis of the Cologne example, as well as material preserved in collections, we can imagine a variable function of this figure. The young man could be associated with either Lazarus or the paralytic, giving shape to a miracle and reinforcing the concept of the salvation achieved, or he could represent a more general sign of divine intervention. What is noteworthy in this discussion is that we are faced with a figurative system in which the elements that the salvific pattern of the earliest Christian images is based on are sometimes clearly dissociated. The protagonists are isolated from their “attributes”, as if to provide a greater number of tesserae capable of composing even more complex mosaics46. The reuse of these medallions in the mortar of graves confirms their potential autonomous meanings, independent of the association between elements on a cup. Orant figures, such as Susanna, would have assumed a role similar to that of Agnes, dominating a glass bottom still preserved in a loculus of the Panfilo catacomb47. Similarly, “attributes” like the lion or the dove, when dissociated from Daniel and Noah, could acquire new meanings, in line with the spread of zoomorphic metaphors in early Christian visual language48. The Nüppengläser then show how individual signifiers, produced as independent entities, could acquire additional meanings, once cast together in the bowl. This brings us back to the concept of Christian “signitive” images, i.e. images born from the accumulation of single elements able to form networks

of salvific concepts, according to a principle in line with the “cumulative” logic described by Jaś Elsner regarding the aesthetics of Late Antiquity49. Intersections What we are dealing with are, therefore, images created through accumulation, not reduction. It is misleading, as said above, to consider them as the abbreviation of extended narrative cycles. Still, although depicting the highlights of a story in sequence was not the main concern of these images, a reflection on their points of contact with the cyclical testamentary narrative is necessary. The two systems – the “signitive” and the cyclical one – were fundamentally based on different codes of expression and their intentions rarely coincided, but it would be too simplistic to consider them as totally separate phenomena. The strategies applied to depict narrative cycles in the late Roman world represent a reference in the conception of “signitive” images. Starting from a logic free from the aim of building consequential stories, in some cases the visual strategies attested in narrative cycles were developed to enhance the sense of “signitive”images and build bridges between them. For example, the arrangement of narrative friezes widespread in bas reliefs in Roman art is often used on the front of sarcophagi. This composition makes it possible to build series of patterns which, despite their non-sequential order, appear as a coherent whole, marked by the paratactical recurrence of one of the main characters. The frieze-solution emphasizes the plurality of Christ’s saving power [Fig. 7]. There are other visual strategies borrowed from narrative representations in order to associate two distinct images. On some sarcophagi, Noah and Jonah find themselves sharing the same mirror of water, as if they represented two moments in the same story. In this way, a common feature of the two stories – death prevented by divine intervention – is stressed, joining the two protagonists in an exemplary diptych [Fig. 16]. It is not surprising to find these intersections more frequently as we get closer to the earliest testamentary cycles attested on a monumental scale. A soi-disant narrative purpose can be observed, for instance, in certain

cubicula in the via Latina catacomb (mid-fourth century). We find a two-step representation of the sacrifice of Isaac: Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac is accompanied, in a separate frame below, by the servant with the donkey, to show the premise of the episode [Fig. 17]. As already mentioned, what we see here is a singular episode, with some narrative components from the very beginning, perhaps due to its belonging to the Old Testament and its early inclusion in the Jewish cycle of Doura Europos50. The example is therefore not sufficient to turn “signitive” images into an opposite of extensive cyclical representations. The fact that these images essentially derive from different sources is confirmed by developments on a monumental scale during the second half of the fourth century. Compositional solutions attested in narrative cycles are developed not to create a story, but to associate paradigmatic “snapshots” and encourage a comparative view of them. The mosaics on the domes of the mausoleum of Santa Costanza, Rome (mid-fourth century, known from seventeenth-century evidence), and those in the villa of Centcelles (second half of the fourth century) provide macroscopic examples of this process. The fluvius argenteus in the first case and a cynegetic frieze in the second are placed at the base of the dome, acting as a dynamic element linking the biblical models depicted in the upper frames51. More specifically, a solution found on a monumental scale for the Old Testament cycles of the naves of Santa Maria Maggiore (432–440), which 44 The only illustrations giving an idea of this arrangement are those published in the post available at https://asimsky. livejournal.com/7005.html [last accessed on 2 May 2022]. 45 Howells, A Catalogue (n. 33), pp. 90–101, fig. 19. 46 The complexity achieved by the figurative system on Nüppengläser is shown by a small medallion in the Corning Museum of Glass, New York (inv. 66.1.205; Howells, A Catalogue [n. 33], p. 100, pl. 76), with a fish representing Christ under the gourd tree, probably referencing the Prophet Jonah. 47 Fabrizio Bisconti, “Vetri dorati e arte monumentale”, Rendiconti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia, lxxiv (2001–2002), pp. 177–193, fig. 9. 48 On this question, see Dimitri Cascianelli, “La nascita del fenomeno iconografico delle ‘sostituzioni zoomorfe’: una questione aperta”, in Costantino e i costantinidi. L’innovazione costantiniana, le sue radici e i suoi sviluppi, Atti del xvi Congresso Internazionale di Archeologia Cristiana (Roma, 22–28 settembre 2013), vol. ii, Olof Brandt, Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, Gabriele Castiglia eds, Vatican City 2016, pp. 2171–2186, and, with insights concerning the allegorical meaning of the lion, Dimitri Cascianelli, “L’affresco

15 / Diminutive medallion, mid-4th century / Musei Vaticani (Rome) 16 / Sarcophagus, first half of the 4th century / Museo Pio Cristiano (Rome)

dell’Agnus Dei nel cimitero di Panfilo: puntualizzazioni iconografiche”, Vetera Christianorum, liii (2016), pp. 47–66. 49 Jaś Elsner,“Late Antique Art: The Problem of the Concept and the Cumulative Aesthetic”, in Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire, Simon Swain, Mark Edwards eds, Oxford 2004, pp. 271–309. 50 The iconographic variety of the episode has been explained as resulting from the contraction of a more extended cycle; see Bisconti, “Simboli e racconti” (n. 4), p. 60. On the sacrifice of Isaac, see the overview by Dresken-Weiland, Immagine e parola (n. 15), pp. 228ff. For a cross-examination of the Jewish versus Christian iconographic tradition, see Ruth Clemens, “The Parallel Lives of Early Jewish and Christian Texts and Art: The Case of Isaac the Martyr”,  in New Approaches to the Study of Biblical Interpretation in Judaism of the Second Temple Period and in Early Christianity, Gary A. Anderson et al. eds, Leiden 2013, pp. 207–240. 51 On Santa Costanza, see Simone Piazza, “Il fluvius argenteus, scene dell’antico e del nuovo testamento nella cupola”, in L’orizzonte tardoantico (n. 34), pp. 72–78; on Centcelles, see Katharina Lorenz,“Die Mosaikkuppel von Centcelles. Bilderzählung im Raum”,  in Der Kuppelbau von Centcelles. Neue Forschungen zu einem enigmatischen Denkmal von Weltrang, Achim Arbeiter, Dieter Korol eds, Tübingen 2015, pp. 317–324.

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was probably inspired by miniatures, can be found in the dome of the baptistery of Naples. This example takes us to around the year 400, to the threshold of the emergence of the first narrative cycles of the two testaments in the basilicas, which gradually superseded the images under examination52. The solution we find in Naples responds once again to an association-based intent. The scene of the miraculous catch of fish and, in all likelihood, that of Peter being rescued from the water are depicted in two separate registers, one above the other, within one of the eight sectors of the dome. The two images are presented in the same setting and, if the upper episode was indeed completed by Christ on the right-hand shore, as suggested by the most common iconographic trends of the scene, they would have been arranged as a chiasm, contributing to the narrative allure of the whole. However, this composition was not intended to suggest a cyclical development, but rather to facilitate the conceptual association of the two Christological interventions, emphasizing their shared baptismal implication [Fig. 18]53. This practice is even more obvious on the panel with the Samaritan woman and the servants in the miracle at Cana, a composition which brings us back to the formative logic of the “signitive” images, already observed in the Nüppengläser [Fig. 19]. The arrangement is similar to a narrative frieze, where the transition from

17 / Catacomb of Via Latina, Rome, mid-4th century

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52 Spieser, Images du Christ (n. 3), p. 162. Solutions depending on association-based intent will be further developed in specific contexts, like the doors of Santa Sabina, for which a catechumenal purpose has been proposed by Ivan Foletti, Manuela Gianandrea, Zona liminare. Il nartece di Santa Sabina a Roma, la sua porta e l’iniziazione cristiana, Rome 2015, pp. 95–199. Another interesting case on monumental scale, chronologically close to that of Santa Sabina, is displayed on the stucco reliefs in the lower area of the Orthodox Baptistery in Ravenna. Among other paradigms discussed in this article, we find the story of Jonah packed into a single image, where the protagonist is both swallowed and ejected by the sea monster; see Friedrich W. Deichmann, Frühchristliche Bauten und Mosaiken von Ravenna, Wiesbaden 1958, fig. 85. 53 Chiara Croci, Tessere per un nuovo inizio. Il battistero paleocristiano di Napoli e i suoi mosaici, Naples 2019, pp. 37–40. In addition, a similar compositional solution is found in the scenes of Jonah in Centcelles. This choice reflects the cyclical nature of the story, but the fact that the two frames with images of Jonas are interspersed by Thecla in prayer suggests that “symbolic”intentions prevailed over the narrative. On this part of the Centcelles dome, see Denis Mohr, “Die Jonas-Darstellungen auf den Bildfeldern B6 und B8 in Centcelles”, in Der Kuppelbau von Centcelles (n. 51), pp. 205–210.

18 / Miraculous catch of fish and Peter being rescued from the water, Baptistery of San Giovanni in Fonte, Naples, ca 400 19 / The Samaritan at well and the miracle at Cana, Baptistery of San Giovanni in Fonte, Naples, ca 400

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one episode to another occurs through two figures standing back-to-back54. Christ is portrayed on the left, turned towards the Samaritan woman in the middle of the scene, who turns her back to one of the two servants, intent on pouring water overflowing from six jars placed on the floor. The composition has been described as a “conflated narrative”,  with Christ shown only once, but conceptually involved in both miracles. However, this explanation is not sufficient when considering the logic underlying these images. Christ is presented in a sort of dialogue with the Samaritan woman, who is the real focus of the panel: displaying the vessel, she emphasizes the role of water as a regenerative element. The aim is not to recount Christ’s actions at the wedding in Cana, rather, the transformed water is the protagonist here, which plays the same role as the healed paralytic or the saved Noah in the earliest Christian images. This compositional solution, like that of the narrative frieze, succeeds in stressing the relationship between two images able to convey the healing and transformative power of water from a baptismal perspective. Based on individual visual elements whose semantic potential was enhanced and oriented according to an associative logic, the “signitive” images pertain to a system of visual communication that is fundamentally distinct from the one behind cyclical testamentary narrative. In their ability to vary the point or protagonist to focus on, these images reveal an underlying thought that was not alien to the principles of Greco-Roman narrative, but also their radical novelty in late antique visual culture. 54 Croci, Tessere per un nuovo inizio (n. 53), p. 43.

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summary „Redukovaná“ zobrazení? K problematice prvních křesťanských obrazů

Pokud je pro pozdně antickou vizuální kulturu charakteristický nějaký inovativní prvek, pak je to bezpochyby vznik prvních křesťanských obrazů. Třebaže tato tematicky zcela nová díla navazují na řecko-římskou figurální kulturu, v kontextu doby svého vzniku vynikají svou bezprostředností. Obrazy objevující se ve 3. stol. n. l. v pohřebních prostorách jsou totiž často redukovány na hlavní postavu a několik málo jejích atributů. Badatelé je proto označují jako „symbolická“ nebo „redukovaná“ zobrazení. Autorka článku podává přehled hlavních kontextů výskytu těchto obrazů, na nichž pak ilustruje nejběžnější témata a jejich vzájemné souvislosti. Na základě konkrétního typu předmětu, tzv. Nüppengläser, uvažuje o vlivu materiální kultury a výrobních podmínek na vývoj tohoto typu zobrazení. Ve snaze o lepší pochopení povahy zkoumaných obrazů se rovněž zabývá souvislostmi mezi touto tvorbou a starozákonními a novozákonními narativními cykly, doloženými od konce 4. stol. n. l.

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Abstract – Fragmentation as a Visual Principle. From Cloisonné to Early Stained Glass – From archaeological and literary study, the origins of stained glass can be placed at a hitherto unspecified time between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The absence of early medieval stained-glass windows in situ has recently been offset by a greater number of archaeological finds of stained-glass fragments dating, for the most part, to the seventh and eighth centuries ce . Precursors have often been identified in glass opus sectile compositions, imitating the marble sectilia widely seen in the Roman world. As an emerging medium, however – though possibly inspired by Mediterranean practices – stained glass surpassed its models. The new medium had to come up with a new aesthetic, one rooted in anticlassical traditions and expressed in artistic media such as enamels and cloisonné jewelry-making, that enhanced light and color. The article examines the emergence of stained glass in relation to the interactions of classical and anticlassical traditions, the diffusion of old and new media and techniques in a (no longer?) globalized late antique world. Parallels can also be drawn with literary writings by Sidonius Apollinaris, Gregory of Tours, and Venantius Fortunatus, as well as with the so-called Hisperic aesthetics and literature and early medieval theology and exegesis. Keywords – cloisonné jewelry, early medieval aesthetics, early medieval art, exegesis, fragmentation, late antique art, late antique Latin literature, mosaic, opus sectile, stained glass, theology, transmediality Alberto Virdis Masaryk University, Brno [email protected] 78

Fragmentation as a Visual Principle From Cloisonné to Early Stained Glass Alberto Virdis

Although still today associated with the very idea of the Middle Ages, stained glass is deeply rooted in the centuries spanning Late Antiquity and the early medieval times and appears as one of the new emerging media which helped shape the artistic production in the long postclassical period. A long historiographical tradition reasonably considered stained glass mainly a product of the advanced Middle Ages because the earliest stained-glass windows in situ, those in the clerestory of Augsburg Cathedral, were held to date to the late eleventh century1 and only a few enigmatic erratic fragments predating the eleventh century were known2. In the last thirty years, new *

This article was written under the auspices of the project “MSCAfellow4@MUNI”(No. CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/20_079/0017045), funded from Operational Programme Research, Development and Education. I am grateful to the two anonymous peer-reviewers for their inspiring comments and suggestions, which helped improve and clarify the manuscript.

1 Rüdiger Becksmann has reassessed the dating of the Augsburg windows, offering a new chronology, soon after 1132; see Rüdiger Becksmann, “Die Augsburger Propheten und die Anfänge der monumentalen Glasmalerei im Mittelalter”, in Der Augsburger Dom im Mittelalter, Martin Kaufhold ed., Augsburg 2006, pp. 74–97, sp. p. 94. An earlier chronology (end eleventh / early twelfth century) was proposed by Albert Boeckler, “Die romanischen Fenster der Augsburger Domes und die Stilwende vom 11. zum 12. Jahrhundert”, Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft, x (1943), pp. 153–182; see also Gottfried Frenzel, Gerda Hinkes, “Die Prophetenfenster des Domes zu Augsburg. Vorbericht über den Erhaltungszustand und Vorschläge zur Konservierung”, Jahrbuch der bayerischen Denkmalpflege, xxviii (1970/1971), pp. 83–100. 2 For example from Séry-lès-Mézières (ninth century, now lost), Schwarzach (tenth century), Lorsch (long believed to date from the ninth century, but recently dated around 1090), or an isolated and enigmatic round glass from San Vitale in Ravenna (long believed to date to the sixth century, but recently reassessed and dated to the ninth/tenth century). See Sylvie Balcon-Berry, “Origines et évolution du vitrail: l’apport de l’archéologie”, in Vitrail: ve–xxie siècle, Michel Hérold, Véronique David eds, Paris 2014, pp. 21–30, sp. pp. 21, 26; for the Ravenna disk, see Francesca Dell’Acqua,“Enhancing Luxury through Stained Glass, from Asia Minor to Italy”, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, lix (2005), pp. 193–211, sp. pp. 205–207.

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archaeological finds and new research on written sources and extant material examples have completely rewritten the scenario, showing that stained glass had a more ancient tradition with roots in late antique practice before flourishing in the early Middle Ages. However, and this is the raison d’être of this article, the late antique origins of the aesthetics of stained glass remain still underexplored. Issues related to the new media, techniques, and the dramatic changes in the artistic production of Late Antiquity have been addressed, among many other scholars, by Jaś Elsner, who has often questioned the very notion of a late antique art, given the great diversity of its visual production which encompasses different styles, subject-matters, and media. Elsner has detected some specific features characterizing the artistic production of Late Antiquity by tracing a path that leads from the sumptuous arts of the fourth and fifth centuries and objects carved in precious or semi-precious stones or glass – featuring deep undercutting, elaboration of relief surfaces with a three-dimensional depth, and a great richness in texture and shadow – to the large-scale monumental stone sculpture of the sixth century (seen in the carving of capitals, pillars, arches, etc.)3. In this respect, for instance, vessels like the “Rubens vase” or the “Lycurgus cup” – a dichroic glass vase carved in high relief – have been adduced as good examples of objects showing deep undercutting in high relief, and basket capitals from Hagia Sophia or San Vitale in Ravenna or the Venetian Pilastri Acritani, formerly in Constantinople, show traditional skills previously used for miniature objects, which were later employed for larger-scale artifacts. This “miniature-taste” was often combined with a great use of spolia, which can be witnessed, for instance, in objects such as the gold and jewels-encrusted Gospel covers given by Pope Gregory the Great to the Lombard Queen Theodolinda in 603, incorporating six Roman cameos. The combination of those two important features, miniature taste and spolia, is considered by Elsner to be one of the most important innovations in the aesthetics developed in Late Antiquity:

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“The cumulative aesthetic of late antique art allowed these pieces both to be themselves and to become parts of a new whole. This enabled the new work

to make a delicate gesture of continuity with earlier eras whereby the past could be respected in the integrity of its original pieces but transformed through a new framing4.”

Furthermore, Late Antiquity also witnessed the birth of new artistic products and techniques: in fact, it was a golden age for silverware, ivory carving, and wall mosaics, as well as for marble or glass opus sectile veneers for both monumental interiors and private houses5. Although the number of surviving pieces produced using these techniques may be a matter of pure chance (especially in the case of objects in ivory or silver), it is also undeniable, according to Elsner, that these new creations “reflect changes in production, in taste, in consumption and use, in collecting”6. Material evidence for ancient and late antique window glass These aesthetic principles also underlie one of the truly new media introduced in late antique and early medieval art, namely, stained-glass windows. It may appear unusual to correlate Late Antiquity with stained glass; nevertheless, both the longknown fragmentary evidence mentioned above and many written sources attest to the existence of this art long before the earliest examples preserved in situ7. Furthermore, when the German monk Theophilus, around 1120, wrote on the art and techniques of stained glass in the second book of his handbook for artists De diversis artibus, he indirectly revealed that this technique already had an important past behind it8. In the last twenty years, more evidence dating from the fifth to eighth centuries has emerged from archaeological excavations: these are isolated fragments of colored flat window glass, dating as early as the fifth century. The use of glass panes for glazing windows can be traced back to the advanced first century ce, as testified by finds in Pompeii and Herculaneum, where they started to be used in the calidaria and tepidaria of Roman thermal baths to maintain a warm temperature. Between the first and fourth centuries, glass became the most used material for glazing windows in both private and public buildings; it also served to let air into rooms (in the case of the small windows with opening

shutters, found in the Thermae Suburbanae in Herculaneum) and to better illuminate interiors, with vitrum becoming very soon a synonym for transparency and brightness, as testified by Seneca the Younger and Pliny the Elder9. Although glass was used to glaze windows in imperial times in Rome, several steps separate Roman glass windows from their supposed early medieval and medieval heirs. One of the main features of medieval stained-glass windows is their rich polychromy: Roman windows, with few exceptions, used colorless glass, or, more often, sheets with a greenish or sometimes bluish hue10. As an alternative to glass, lapis specularis, a variety of gypsum (selenite rock) cut into thin, almost transparent slabs, was widely used for windowpanes. By the fifth century, many Christian basilicas in the city of Rome had large window screens consisting of transennae made of stucco or wood, featuring geometrical grids of various kinds with motifs such as lozenges, cancellum, rotae, peltae or superimposed arches [Figs 1–3]11. In the years between 1914 3 Jaś Elsner,“Late Antique Art: The Problem of the Concept and the Cumulative Aesthetic”, in Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire, Simon Swain, Mark Edwards eds, Oxford 2004, pp. 271–309. 4 Ibidem, p. 304. 5 Ibidem, p. 281, n. 40; see also Federico Guidobaldi, “La lussuosa aula presso Porta Marina a Ostia. La decorazione in opus sectile dell’aula”, in Aurea Roma. Dalla città pagana alla città cristiana, Serena Ensoli, Giulio La Rocca eds, Rome 2001, pp. 251–622; and Marina Sapelli,“La basilica di Giunio Basso”,  in ibidem, pp. 137–139. 6 Elsner, “Late Antique Art” (n. 3), p. 281. 7 Regarding the written sources on stained glass in the early Middle Ages, see Francesca Dell’Acqua, Illuminando colorat. La vetrata tra l´età tardo imperiale e l´alto Medioevo: le fonti, l´archeologia, Spoleto 2003. 8 Enrico Castelnuovo, Vetrate medievali, Turin 1994, p. 211. 9 Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, xc, 25; Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, xiv, 3, 17. Regarding the use of glass in Roman imperial buildings, see Francesca dell’Acqua, “Le finestre invetriate nell’antichità romana”, in Vitrum. Il vetro fra arte e scienza nel mondo romano, Marco Beretta, Giovanni Di Pasquale eds, Florence 2004, pp. 109–119. 10 Ibidem, p. 111. Roman glass was normally not transparent, as observed by David Whitehouse,“Window Glass between the First and the Eighth Centuries”, in Il colore nel Medioevo. Arte, simbolo, tecnica. La vetrata in occidente dal iv all’xi secolo, Atti delle Giornate di Studi (Lucca, 23–24–25 settembre 1999), Francesca Dell’Acqua, Romano Silva eds, Lucca 2001, pp. 31–43, sp. p. 35. 11 The gypsum for the stucco was likely extracted from the same lapis specularis quarries for economic reasons; see Simona Pannuzi,“Illuminazione naturale e spazi finestrati nelle chiese paleocristiane ed altomedioevali: le transenne di finestra in stucco”, Hortus Artium Medievalium, xxvi (2020), pp. 45–59.

1 / Window-transennae 8a and 8b, from Santa Sabina, Rome, stucco and lapis specularis, 5th – late 8th century (?) / Museo Domenicano di Santa Sabina all’Aventino (Rome) 2 / Window-transennae 7a and 7b, from Santa Sabina, Rome, stucco and lapis specularis, 5th – late 8th century (?) / Museo Domenicano di Santa Sabina all’Aventino (Rome)

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3 / Window–transennae, stucco and lapis specularis, bell tower, Santa Prassede, Rome, early medieval

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and 1919, the discovery of several of these transennae by Antonio Muñoz during restoration works in the church of Santa Sabina on the Aventine hill in Rome provided an important material testimony to the ancient fenestration system in use in churches, although the exact date of these finds remains controversial: fifth century according to Krautheimer, late eighth century according to Muñoz, who dated them to the time of renovations undertaken by Pope Leo iii12. In any case, other indirect evidence, such as coeval pictorial representation in ivory and mosaics like the Trivulzio ivory in Milan, the mosaics in Santa Maria Maggiore and Sant’Agnese fuori le mura in Rome, as well as other material finds from Poreč (episcopal palace) and Ravenna (Sant’Apollinare in Classe), indirectly confirm that the window system from Santa Sabina was in use also in other late antique basilicas in Rome and elsewhere in the Italian peninsula13. The windows at Santa Sabina appear to be very different from early medieval ones. A recent study by Federico Guidobaldi and Roberta Flaminio revealed that between the sixth and eighth centuries, the width of windows in Roman churches diminished, and, correspondingly, the window screens had a more

4 / “Mosaic window” panes, from St John the Baptist’s, Müstair, colored glass, early 9th century

occlusive effect, reducing the amount of light passing into the naves of the churches. The mosaic windows The late antique system of fenestration, featuring the recurrent use of stucco grids with small openings filled with lapis specularis or thin monochrome glass panes, likely gave rise to a similar window system used in early medieval Europe from as early as the fifth century: the so-called mosaic windows. This kind of window was made up of geometrically shaped pieces of colored glass placed within a screen formed of stucco, wood, or stone to create a mosaic-like, aniconic, geometrical layout14. No glazed windows of this type are preserved in situ: the extant material evidence comes from archaeological excavations, mostly conducted in the last thirty years15. This kind of window shares with the Roman early Christian windows the arrangement of the glass parts in geometrical layouts (although in diverse patterns), but in addition features a critical innovation characteristic of later medieval stained-glass windows: the introduction of colored glass.

Mosaic windows are considered to be the middle links that complete the chain connecting late antique glass windows to their medieval successors16. Some glass finds, excavated mainly in small castra or civitates located in strategic sites in the Alpine region and dated between the fourth and seventh centuries, supply material evidence for this. The most important finds showing these features are those from Sous-les-Scex, in present day Switzerland (diocese of Sion, Canton Valais), dated between the fifth and sixth centuries: the glass fragments are mainly colored (cobalt blue, opaque red, greenish-brown) and they share a similar fabrication technique with Roman glass windows17. Other finds, such as those from the French sites of Rezé (Nantes), Tours, or those from the French monastic church of Balma (Baume-les-Messieurs, Jura, France), or the later fragments from St John the Baptist´s at Müstair (Graubünden, Switzerland), attest to a continuing diffusion of mosaic windows in the eighth and ninth centuries [Fig. 4]. The finds from Baume-les-Messieurs, especially, indicate a geometrical composition, with a layout directly related to Roman sectilia wall decoration [Fig. 5]18. In most of these cases, no lead

12 Antonio Muñoz, Il restauro della Basilica di Santa Sabina, Rome 1938, pp. 31–32; Richard Krautheimer, Spencer Corbett, Wolfgang Frankl, Corpus basilicarum Christianarum Romae, vol. iv, Vatican City 1970, pp. 86–87. 13 Roberta Flaminio, Federico Guidobaldi, “Il sistema di illuminazione naturale degli edifici altomedievali e medievali a Roma: finestrati e transenne lucifere”, Hortus Artium Medievalium, xxvi (2020), pp. 27–44, sp. pp. 31–33. 14 Balcon-Berry,“Origines et évolution”(n. 2); Cordula M. Kessler, Sophie Wolf, Stefan Trümpler, “Die frühesten Zeugen ornamentaler Glasmalerei aus der Schweiz. Die frühmittelalterlichen Fensterglasfunde von Sion, Sous-le-Scex”, Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, lxii/1 (2005), pp. 1–30. 15 Vitrail, verre et archéologie entre le ve et le xiie siècle, Sylvie Balcon-Berry, Françoise Perrot, Christian Sapin eds, Paris 2009. However, archaeological campaigns which led to important discoveries in the field of early stained glass, such as those made in Jarrow and San Vincenzo al Volturno began already in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. See nn. 40, 43 below. 16 Dell’Acqua, Illuminando colorat (n. 7), p. 31; Eadem, “Entre fantaisie et archéologie: la connaissance des vitraux médiévaux au cours des deux derniers siècles”, in Vitrail, verre et archéologie (n. 15), pp. 15–20. 17 This is the so-called casting technique, involving sheets of glass cut into pieces, trimmed into various geometrical shapes and subsequently assembled and set in regular grids within wooden, stone, or stucco frames; see Kessler/Wolf/ Trümpler, “Die frühesten Zeugen” (n. 14). 18 Sébastien Bully et al., “Le ‘Monastère de Reculées’ au haut Moyen Âge: avancées de la recherche archéologique sur Balma (Baume-les-Messieurs, Jura)”, in La mémoire des pierres, Sylvie Balcon-Berry, Brigitte Boissavit-Camus, Pascale Chevalier eds, Turnhout 2016, pp. 237–250.

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5 / “Mosaic window” panes, from St Peter’s Abbey, Baume-lesMessieurs, colored glass, 8th century 6 / Fragment of a glass pane with anthropomorphic decoration, from Sainte-Reine, Alise-Sainte-Reine, colored glass painted, late 7th – early 8th century

cames have been found. This points to a likely setting of the excavated colored glass fragments in a mosaic-grid layout, with a wooden or stucco frame as window screen19. Furthermore, the fragments from Müstair indirectly attest that the mosaic-window fenestration system was still in use both when the lead cames technique started to be adopted in Merovingian Gaul – that is, at least since the second half of the seventh century20 – and when the grisaille technique for painting on glass was invented, that is, by the late seventh / early eighth century, the date of a fragment from Burgundy found in the excavation of the funerary Merovingian basilica of Alésia (Alise-SainteReine, Côte-d’Or) [Fig. 6]21. To summarize, in the period between the fifth and ninth centuries, several fenestration systems and various kinds of window glass were simultaneously in use in Western European buildings22. It was, in fact, only during the late ninth or perhaps the tenth century that windows featuring both lead cames and grisaille glass painting completely supplanted the older mosaic-glass windows23. The current reconstruction traces all the earliest glass windows back to a common prototype. Despite the technical similarities in glass composition between some early medieval glass fragments and the highly developed techniques of Roman glassmaking, I believe that the material evidence, the literary sources, and especially art historical analysis can challenge the current narrative. It can thus be proposed that late Roman windows, from which the mosaic window derived, and early medieval figural stained-glass windows featuring lead cames (and glass painting, later) followed different models and had different underlying visual principles from those that have been proposed so far. From opus sectile to stained glass?

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Narratives aiming to create a straight line connecting Roman antecedents to medieval outcomes usually identify opus sectile glass panels which covered the walls of some patrician Roman houses or public civic basilicas as the forerunners of figural stained glass. Francesca Dell’Acqua formulated this suggestive reconstruction on the origin

of stained-glass art, basing on an earlier hypothesis by Beat Brenk and David Whitehouse24, which, in turn, drew on a tentative supposition formulated decades before by the chemist Robert Brill while analyzing the glass opus sectile panels found in submarine contexts at Kenchreai, the eastern port of Corinth25. The panels from KenchreaiCorinth, dated to the second half of the fourth century (365–375) and considered to be imports from Egypt26, were probably designed to decorate the walls of a temple of Isis, although they were never installed because of an earthquake27. They show variously interpreted seascapes, classical ornamental motifs, and large single figures. Robert Brill, taking into consideration the different uses of opus sectile and stained glass (parietal encrustation vs screening window openings), did not develop further his first intuition, considering it only a casual similarity, largely because of the lapse of time separating the former from the latter, which, in 1976, when the volume on the Kenchreai finds was published, was still held to be a medieval innovation. More recently, Francesca Dell’Acqua has reconsidered Brill’s intuition in the light of more recent discoveries that have made it clear that stained glass was already widely used in the early medieval age, thus reducing the chronological divide that separates the two artistic forms28. Despite this recent proposition, a deeper analysis of the visual layout of late antique figural opus sectile panels and the earliest stained-glass windows shows the great distance that separates the two art forms and invites a consideration of alternative models and possible reconstructions. Besides the panels from Kenchreai, among the most important instances of Roman glass opus sectile are those from the Basilica of Junius Bassus in Rome and the decoration of a private patrician domus near Porta Marina in Ostia, all dating to the fourth century [Fig. 9], to which a few other 19 A possible exception is represented by a fragment excavated in the cloister of Saint-Martin in Tours, which, according to James Motteau, “belongs to a construction level of the second basilica around 470, but it is then necessary to wait until the end of the 8th or 9th century to find them [the lead cames] in significant quantity” (James Motteau, “Le verre à vitre dans la Vallée de la Loire moyenne dans le Haut Moyen Âge”, in De transparentes spéculations. Vitres de l’Antiquité et du Haut Moyen Age [Occident-Orient], exhibition catalogue

[Bavay, Forum Antique 2005], Danièle Foy ed., Bavay 2005, pp. 98–101, sp. p. 101: unless indicated otherwise, the translation is by the author of the present paper). This isolated witness invites caution in antedating the use of lead cames in window glass, which can be attested with certainty only from the seventh century, with the fragments from NotreDame-de-Bondeville, near Rouen (see below). 20 Balcon-Berry, “Origines et évolution” (n. 2), pp. 24–25. 21 Initially, the fragment from Alésia was tentatively dated to the tenth century by Patrice Wahlen, who excavated the basilica in 1985; see Patrice Wahlen, “À propos d’un verre peint trouvé à Alésia”, in Vitrail, verre et archéologie (n. 15), pp. 63–64. More recently, Francesca Dell’Acqua has proposed an earlier dating to the period between the reigns of Pepin and Charlemagne, based on the parallels she found with the figures of an illuminated manuscript (Paris, bnf, lat. 4404); see Dell’Acqua, “Entre fantaisie et archéologie” (n. 16), p. 18; Eadem, “Early History of Stained Glass”, in Investigation in Medieval Stained Glass, Elizabeth Carson Pastan, Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz eds, Leiden 2019, pp. 23–35, sp. p. 28. Sylvie Balcon-Berry compared the Alésia fragment to the figure of the Evangelist Luke in an illuminated manuscript from Flavigny, a village close to Alise-Saint-Reine, dated to the eighth century (Autun, Bibliothèque municipale, s. 2 [3], f. 187v); see Balcon-Berry, “Origines et évolution” (n. 2), p. 25. The other early medieval fragments showing traces of glass painting all come from French contexts. For instance, a blue fragment showing traces of what seems to be painted drapery has been found in the excavations of the abbey church of Sainte-Marie de Hamage (Nord, France) and can be securely dated between 700 and ca 820; other fragments of glass panes from the aforementioned site of Baume-les-Messieurs (Jura, France), dating to the eighth century, show traces of glass painting. Regarding these fragments, see respectively Étienne Louis, “Deux sites mérovingiens à vitraux du Nord de la France”, in Vitrail, verre et archéologie (n. 15), pp. 141–152, sp. pp. 145–147; Line Van Wersch et al., “Analyses of Early Medieval Stained Window Glass from the Monastery of Baume-lesMessieurs”, Archaeometry, lviii/6 (2016), pp. 1–17. 22 Mosaic windows were used in not only ecclesiastical buildings but also secular houses. In some private aristocratic houses in Serris (Seine-et-Marne, France), fragments of colored glass dating to the seventh and eighth centuries have been found; see François Gentili, “Verre architectural des habitats ruraux du haut Moyen Âge en Ile-de-France”, in Vitrail, verre et archéologie (n. 15), pp. 133–140; Balcon-Berry, “Origines et évolution” (n. 2), p. 25. 23 Jean-Yves Langlois, “Vitrail mosaïque de l’église mérovingienne de Notre-Dame-de-Bondeville”, in Vitrail, verre et archéologie (n. 15), pp. 96–119, sp. pp. 108–109. However, evidence of stained glass from tenth and eleventh centuries is also very limited, so it is difficult to specify the changes that the art of stained glass went through during these centuries. 24 See the proceedings of the roundtable in La vetrata in occidente (n. 10), pp. 281–287, sp. pp. 281–282; Francesca Dell’Acqua, “Entre fantaisie et archéologie”(n. 16), pp. 17–18; Eadem,“Early History” (n. 21), p. 26. 25 Kenchreai: Eastern Port of Corinth, vol. ii: The Panels of Opus Sectile in Glass, Leila Ibrahim, Robert Scranton, Robert H. Brill eds, Leiden 1976, p. 228. 26 Bente Kiilerich, Hjalmar Torp, “From Alexandria to Kenchreai? The Puzzle of the Glass Sectile Panels”, in Across the Mediterranean – Along the Nile, Tamás A. Bács, Ádám Bollók, Tivadar Vida eds, Budapest 2018, pp. 643–658, sp. p. 654. 27 Ibrahim/Scranton/Brill, Kenchreai (n. 25), pp. 266–269. 28 Dell’Acqua, Illuminando colorat (n. 7), p. 19.

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7 / Fishes and sea animals, from a domus in Corinth, glass opus sectile, ca 300 / Archaeological Museum (Corinth) 8 / Fishes and sea animals, from a Roman house in Rimini, glass opus sectile, 257–258 / Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici dell’ Emilia Romagna, (Bologna), inv. 184584 9 / Lion biting an antelope, from the Aula near Porta Marina at Ostia, marble opus sectile, last quarter of the 4th century / Museo nazionale dell’Alto Medioevo (Rome)

earlier Mediterranean examples dating to the second half of the third century, from Corinth and Rimini, can be added [Figs 7–8]. All these examples show a naturalistic rendering of the subjects depicted; indeed, they seem more cognate to the visual rendering of earlier Roman floor mosaics (for instance those from Zliten, Libya, ca 200 ce) than to the fragmented visuality of early medieval stained-glass windows [Fig. 10]. One of the characteristic features of these examples of late antique opus sectile is the naturalistic rendering of the images displayed. The care used in the close juxtaposition of the single pieces of marble (or glass) that create the figures enhances the visual continuity of the figural ensemble, uninterrupted by any dividing element. This effect is perfectly legible, for instance, in the reconstruction of the Aula from Porta Marina: the wildlife scene of a lion catching an antelope, for instance, reveals the careful rendering of the anatomic details of the two beasts, extremely clear in the feline’s claws grasping its prey [Fig. 11]. The visual effect of the Porta Marina panels differs from that of early medieval figural stained-glass windows. The latter are characterized by a figural ensemble made up of separated colored glass pieces connected by means of lead stripes which unite the glass parts to create an image and at the same time emphasize its internal division within the window space. Furthermore, late antique opus sectile is conceptually very distant from not only early medieval figural stained glass but also early Christian windows because of the absence of figuration and colors in the latter. Therefore, I believe it to be mistaken for late Roman opus sectile wall panels to be taken as the forerunners of medieval stained-glass windows. Written sources for late antique window glass Even the written sources, which are often drawn on with the intent of proving the presence of stainedglass windows in late Roman buildings, indirectly support this thesis. Indeed, late antique written sources in Latin only attest to the use of colorless glass or lapis specularis in the earliest Christian basilicas of Rome; the presence of polychrome glass windows is far from being demonstrated.

10 / Fishes, sea animals, and geometric motifs, from the Villa Dar Buc Ammera near Zliten, Libya, floor mosaic, ca 200 ce / Archaeological Museum (Tripoli)

The often cited sources include Lactantius, who, in his Libri de Opificio Dei (viii, 11, 303–304), drew a metaphorical parallel, referring to glass windows with these words: “it is very true and very evident that it is the mind which by means of the eyes sees through to the things placed opposite, as if through windows covered with translucent glass or transparent stone”29. Jerome, about a century later, in the Commentarium in Ezechielem (ca 414; xii, 41), commented similarly on a passage of Ezechiel on Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, remarking on the peculiarity of its windows, screened with wooden shutters rather than with lapis specularis or glass30. In the early

fifth century, Prudentius in his Peristephanon (xii, 53–54) described the Roman Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls in a way that led many scholars to argue that the basilica might have had stainedglass windows: “then he [the emperor] covered 29 “verius et manifestius est mentem esse quae per oculos ea quae sunt opposita transpiciat quasi per fenestras perlucente vitro aut speculari lapide obductas” (English translation: Lactanctius, Libri de Opificio Dei, M. F. McDonald ed. and transl., Washington, dc, 1965, p. 27). This and the following sources have been collected and commented on in the fundamental study by Dell’Acqua, Illuminando colorat (n. 7), pp. 100–125. 30 “Fenestrae quoque erant factae in modum retis, instar cancellorum, ut non speculari lapide nec vitro, sed lignis interassilibus et vermiculatis clauderentur: pro quibus in Hebraico obliquas fenestras habet […].”

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the curves of the arches with splendid glass of different hues, like meadows that are bright with flowers in the spring”31. This passage has been cited since 1852 until recent times as secure evidence for stained-glass windows in St Paul’s, probably non-figural but surely colored32. In my view, however, not even this reference can be used as secure evidence for stained glass in St Paul’s, as it is never clearly mentioned. The glass (hyalus) which covered the curves of the arches may refer to a decoration in glass opus sectile panels. Above the windows, in fact, ran a frieze, visible in Angelo Uggeri’s 1823 engravings of the interior of the basilica, which, although often referred to as being painted in fresco, has also been compared to the glass sectilia panels of Kenchreai-Corinth in two different studies by Herbert Kessler and Nicola Camerlenghi33. It cannot be ruled out that polychrome glass opus sectile was laid above and also between the windows in St Paul’s, and that this is what Prudentius is referring to. Window glass and Merovingian Gaul: literary sources and material evidence That stained-glass windows do not derive from Mediterranean Roman basilical models but that they are, on the contrary, a creation of the period from the fifth to seventh centuries, with a likely geographical origin in Merovingian Gaul, has become increasingly evident from archaeological discoveries over the past few decades. The territory of Merovingian Gaul offers most of the material evidence for polychrome flat glass dating to between the fifth and seventh–eighth centuries in Western Europe: almost all the recent archaeological finds of late antique colored window glass, in fact, come from this area. The provenance of these early finds is centered on an area that covers the Alpine region (Sous-les Scex, Baume-les-Messieurs) and spans northbound to Normandy34. That flat window glass was commonly employed in ecclesiastical buildings in Merovingian Gaul is also confirmed by coeval written sources dating from the sixth to seventh centuries, although it is difficult to ascertain whether they refer to polychrome windows or not. For instance,

Gregory of Tours in the Libri in Gloria Confessorum (xciv), in his account of a miracle at the tomb of St Albinus in Angers in the sixth century, writes: “[…] the gift of his merit demonstrates that miracles are revealed at his tomb. The day of his festival had come. A paralyzed man who was lame in all his limbs was carried on a wagon and sat before the glass [windows] in the apse where the holy limbs were buried35.”

11 / Lion biting an antelope (detail of [Fig. 9]), from the Aula near Porta Marina at Ostia, marble opus sectile, last quarter of the 4th century / Museo Nazionale dell’Alto Medioevo (Rome)

Venantius Fortunatus, in the early seventh century, wrote a poem in elegiac couplets praising the glass windows of the church of Saint-Vincent in Paris (Carm. ii, 10, 11–20): “[…] the hall rises splendidly, with marble columns, and because it remains pure, a greater charm dwells there. It receives first the rays of the sun from the round glass windows and, thanks to the hand of the artist, has enclosed the day within it. At dawn a faint light pervades the ceiling and with its rays it shines even without the sun. The devout King Childebert, in his singular love, gave his people these gifts that will never perish. All enraptured by love for divine worship, he increased the inexhaustible riches of the church36.”

The poet praises the church’s splendor by resorting to the metaphor of the church glowing inside with daylight, captured by the (stained?) glass windows. Mention is also made of King Childebert, who chose the church of Saint-Vincent as his burial place, a sign of the close ties between Venantius 31 “tum camiros hyalo insigni varie cucurrit arcus: sic prata vernis floribus renident”; in this passage, hyalo refers to glass and camiros means “arcuate”; see the classical Latin camurus, meaning “curved, arcuate” (English translation: Prudentius, Peristephanon, H. J. Thomson ed. and transl., Cambridge, ma / London 1953, pp. 326–327). 32 Touissant Bernard Emeric-David, Histoire de la peinture au Moyen Age, Paris 1852, p. 39; Dell’Acqua, Illuminando colorat (n. 7), pp. 102–103. 33 Nicola Camerlenghi, St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, Cambridge 2018, p. 65; Herbert L. Kessler, Old St. Peter’s and Church Decoration in Medieval Italy, Spoleto 2002, p. 51. Both Kessler and Camerlenghi draw on the earlier study by Günter Jakubetz, Die verlorenen Mittelschiff-Malereien von Alt.-St. Paul in Rom, PhD thesis (Universität Wien), Vienna 1976. 34 Vitrail, verre et archéologie (n. 15). 35 “Aderat igitur dies solemnitatis, in quo paralyticus membris omnibus debilis, evectus plaustro, antre vitriam absidae, qua sancta concluduntur membra, sedebat […]” (English translation: Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors, Raymond Van Dam transl., Liverpool 2004, p. 72). 36 “Splendida marmoreis attollitur aula columnis / et quia pura manet, gratia maior inest. / Prima capit radios vitreis oculata fenestris / in artificisque manu clausit arce diem. / Cursibus Aurorae vaga lux laquearia conplet / atque suis radiis et sine sole micat. / Haec pius egregio rex Childebertus amore dona suo populo non moritura dedit. / Totus in affectu divini cultus adhaerens / ecclesiae iuges amplificavit opes […].”

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and the elite of the Merovingian society at the time. Similarly, in another poem in praise of the Basilica of Sts Peter and Paul in Nantes, he writes of the windows (Carm. iii, 7, 45–50): “[…] if a passerby in transit during the night looks at it, he thinks that the earth also has its own stars. Equipped with large windows, it welcomes the sun’s rays from all sides and inside you can enjoy the light that from the exterior you admire. When the darkness returns, let me say, the world belongs to the night, the basilica holds back the day37.”

The presence of glass windows in seventh-century Merovingian France is also attested by other authors such as Audoin (St Ouen), describing the church of Saint-Sulpice in Bourges in the Vita Sancti Eligii, and the anonymous author of the Vita Sancti Filiberti, writing about the monastery of Jumiéges. The latter is a witness to the use of glass windows in not only ecclesiastical buildings but also monastic dormitories. The lead cames The evidence offered by the written sources is supported by material finds and further technical considerations: the numerous finds of flat window glass from the area of Merovingian France are also matched by just as many finds of lead cames dating as early as the second half of the seventh century. The lead cames technique consists in connecting the single glass panes in a flexible matrix of lead, consisting of cames (calami) with a characteristic h-shaped section, to house the glass pieces. The technique is attested by finds from Merovingian Gaul and Anglo-Saxon England. Of special importance are those unearthed in Notre-Dame-de-Bondeville near Rouen (Normandy, France), dating to the second half of the seventh century [Fig. 12]38. Here, in the years 1999–2000, during the excavation of the eastern part of an early medieval church, many fragments of colored flat glass were found; some of them still set in the original lead cames. Bondeville’s cames show such a complete mastery of this leading process that the origins of the technique have been considered older than these fragments, antedating the second half of the seventh century39.

From the few extant examples of colored glass fragments still joined by lead cames (and dating before the diffusion of grisaille painting), it is clear that the cames not only served to connect the panes of glass, but also helped create the figures’ details and even shape the letters of inscriptions. Among the finds from Notre-Dame-de-Bondeville, one consists of a fragment of blue glass held by a curvilinear came which, in turn, hosts in its center a little disc of brown glass circled by its own lead came. The earliest preserved example of figural stained glass set in its original lead cames is the small window fragment with a figure of Christ from the archaeological excavation of the monastic site of San Vincenzo al Volturno (central Italy), dated to the first half of the ninth century40. This shows the upper part of a frontal figure, with a cruciform halo and a face formed of a single colorless piece of glass. Lead cames create the Greek letter alpha – part of the two-letter monogram Α and ω (the latter not preserved) flanking the halo – as well as other details such as Christ’s hair and fingers, and beads embellishing the halo [Fig. 13]41. Similarly, the use of lead cames in the famous reconstructed windows from Jarrow (Northumbria, uk) points in the same direction: here, in the excavation of the twinned Anglo-Saxon monasteries at Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, several polychrome glass quarries emerged. An oft-cited passage from Bede the Venerable records that when the church at Monkwearmouth was nearly complete, in 674, the founder Benedict Biscop sent to Gaul for glaziers to glaze the windows of the church, the porticoes, and refectories since that art was at that time unknown in Britain42. The excavated fragments possibly date to the late seventh / early eighth century and find comparisons with the recent finds from Normandy, such as those from Bondeville43, reinforcing the information provided by Bede about the importation of this craft skill from Gaul into Britain. The original setting of the glass quarries is still a matter of discussion; Rosemary Cramp has long since suggested a reconstruction of fragments from Jarrow to form a round window, a rectangular and a squared window with aniconic designs, and an arched window with the standing figure of a saint [Fig. 14]44. Some of

these windowpanes may have had lead grilles superimposed on the glass rather than lead cames joining the glass pieces together. They were probably held in a wooden frame45. The visual ensemble of these few surviving instances of early figural stained-glass windows, dating to the period between the seventh and ninth centuries, unpainted but featuring lead cames, is characterized by the emphatic presence of the lead strips that unite the colored glass elements, but also with their dark contours set them in chromatic contrast. The lead cames assumed a fundamental role in the definition of images because they helped create the glass figure and define its details while enhancing, at the same time, its internal division and emphasizing its inherent characteristic of being composed of separate parts. 37 “Si nocte inspiciat hanc praetereundo viator / et terram stellas credit habere suas. / Tota rapit radios patulis oculata fenestris / et quod mireris hic foris intus habes. / Tempore quo redeunt tenebrae, mihi dicere fas sit, / mundus habet noctem, detinet aula diem.” 38 Balcon-Berry, “Origines et évolution” (n. 2), pp. 24–25. 39 Langlois,“Vitrail mosaïque”(n. 23), p. 109, who, on the grounds of a single find of a lead came excavated in the cloister of Saint-Martin in Tours, affirms that the practice of using lead cames began as early as the fifth century (ibidem, p. 108), but the isolation of this case invites a more cautious consideration of the question, as stated above (n. 19). Lead cames were later ubiquitously adopted in the medieval stained-glass windows; see Madeline H. Caviness, Stained Glass Windows, Turnhout 1996, pp. 45–57, sp. pp. 55–56; and Enrico Castelnuovo, Vetrate medievali, Turin 1994, p. 67. 40 Dell’Acqua, “Early History” (n. 21), p. 28. 41 Francesca Dell’Acqua has published extensively on San Vincenzo al Volturno; see, e.g., Francesca Dell’Acqua,“NinthCentury Window Glass from the Monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno (Molise, Italy)”, Journal of Glass Studies, xxxix (1997), pp. 33–41; Eadem, “The Christ from San Vincenzo al Volturno: Another Instance of ‘Christ’s Dazzling Face’”,  in The Single Stained-Glass Panel, Papers of the xxivth International Colloquium of the Corpus Vitrearum (Zürich, 30th June – 4th July 2008), Bern 2010, pp. 11–22; Eadem, Iconophilia: Politics, Religion, Preaching and the Use of Images in Rome, c. 680 – 880, London / New York 2020, pp. 156–182. 42 However, we also know that by the mid-eighth century the abbot of Wearmouth had again to send to the continent (this time to Mainz) for glassworkers who could make glass vessels since, as he said, his community was entirely ignorant of the art; see Rosemary Cramp, Wearmouth and Jarrow Monastic Sites, vol. i, Swindon 2006, Appendix a3.7, p. 369. It is possible, however, that there were trained craftsmen on site at Wearmouth (whether Gauls or English pupils) for a generation, although by the mid-eighth century the art of glass making had been lost. 43 Cramp, Wearmouth and Jarrow (n. 42), vol. ii, p. 81. 44 Eadem, “Window Glass from the Monastic Site of Jarrow: Problems of Interpretation”, Journal of Glass Studies, xvii (1975), pp. 88–96. 45 Eadem, Wearmouth and Jarrow (n. 42), vol. ii, p. 77.

12 / Colored window panes and lead cames, from Notre-Dame-deBondeville, colored glass and lead, second half of the 7 th century / Musée départemental des Antiquités de Seine-Maritime (Rouen) 13 / Bust of Christ, from San Vincenzo al Volturno, colored glass and lead cames, first half of the 9th century / Museo Archeologico (Venafro)

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From cloisonné to stained glass?

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14 / Figure of Christ or an Apostle, from St Paul’s, Jarrow, stained glass window reconstructed with scattered glass panes, late 7th – early 8th century / Bede Museum (Jarrow, uk), jarbw: 1995.200

This feature is shared by another art technique that can be considered as a possible inspiring model for stained glass: polychrome cloisonné jewelry. Widely used for brooches, pins, liturgical vessels, and other small objects, this technique is characterized by the use of colored materials: gems, inlays of red garnets or other semi-precious stones, colored glass, or vitreous enamels were normally used to fill the small cells created by thin precious metal walls which at the same time separate the colored materials and together create a figure, be it a geometric pattern, a vegetable, or an animal form46. These objects were diffused in Merovingian Gaul since the fifth century in the parures of the Frankish kings, such as those found in the grave of King Childeric in Tournai (481), in the tomb of Queen Aregund in Saint-Denis (ca 570), or the “Cross of St Eloy” in the treasure of Saint-Denis (first half of the seventh century), to mention but a few [Fig. 15]. Over the seventh century, the setting of the cloisons changed, becoming more dynamic and sometimes closer to organic forms, as can be seen in works such as the reliquary from Saint-Maurice d’Agaune, the round brooches from Queen Aregund’s tomb, or another from Marilles, Belgium

(560–610) [Fig. 16]47. These cloisonné objects show a fragmented visuality in displaying simple figures like the symbol of the cross or aniconic motifs. It is well established that cloisonné jewelry did not have its beginnings in Merovingian Gaul: its origins lead very far back in time and space (from the second / third century ce Roman Syria, Caucasus, Black Sea, and Persia). For these reasons, it is not a technique that can be assigned an ethnic label such as “barbarian” or “Germanic”; nevertheless, cloisonné objects found a special diffusion in the many workshops of Merovingian Gaul where this technique reached its apogee in the seventh century and influenced craft practice in contemporary Lombard Italy, Anglo-Saxon Britain, and Scandinavia48. What cloisonné jewelry and the earliest stainedglass windows have in common is a shared visual principle that encompassed fragmented images. The final figuration, be it an abstract decoration on a brooch or a human figure in a window, was the result of the combination of separated fragments, with large dividing elements in the lead cames of the window glass and the thin metal walls of the works in cloisonné. These single units – the cells filled with colored materials or

the colored glass panes – create an image whose dominant feature is its fragmented composition. That fragmentation is a key-feature of the visuality of stained-glass images is indirectly confirmed by the post-medieval outcomes of this art. Contemporary examples such as the abstract decoration of the stained-glass windows made by the French artist Pierre Soulages between 1987 and 1994 in the Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy in Conques point in this direction: the windows emphasize the fragmentariness of the individual parts in order to create a dynamic movement enhanced by the natural light filtering through the church. However, when stained-glass windows started to be employed like any other pictorial support, from the sixteenth century onwards, introducing chiaroscuro 46 Regarding early medieval enamels, see Günther Haseloff, Email im frühen Mittelalter, Marburg 1990. 47 Piotr Skubiszewski, L’Art du haut Moyen Âge. L’Art européen du vie au ixe siècle, Paris 1998. 48 Marco Aimone,“Nuovi dati sull’oreficeria a cloisonné in Italia fra v e vi secolo, ricerche stilistiche, indagini tecniche, questioni cronologiche”, Archeologia medievale, xxviii (2011), pp. 459–506; Idem, “Le cloisonné”, in Les Temps Mérovingiens. Trois siècles d’art et de culture (451–751), exhibition catalogue (Musée de Cluny, 26 Octobre 2016 – 13 Février 2017), Isabelle Bardiès-Fronty, Charlotte Denoël, Inès Villela-Petit eds, Paris 2016, pp. 210–215, sp. p. 211.

15 / Fragment of the Cross of St Eloy, from Saint-Denis, gold and colored glass cloisonné, first half of the 7th century / Bibliothèque National de France, Département de Monnaies, médailles et antiques (Paris), inv. 56-324 16 / Merovingian disk brooch, from Marilles, gold and colored glass, ca 560–610 ce / Musée Art & Histoire (Brussels), inv. B000787-007

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17 / Pietro Angelo Sesini and Corrado Mochis after cartoons by Giovanni da Monte, Glories of the Virgin, stainedglass window, Cathedral of the Nativity of St Mary, Milan, 16th century

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effects and linear perspective, the window spaces image, as the modal values and the relationships came to be treated as large, continuous painted between the tesserae”49. Therefore, the final imsurfaces, so that stained-glass art lost its original age was characterized by a fragmented visuality, character, leading to (temporary) decline [Fig. 17]. with the interstices playing a role similar to that Perhaps a similar course can be traced in mo- of the lead cames in stained-glass windows: they saic decoration in post-medieval times. A related separated the single tesserae and, at the same time, engagement with new pictorial effects can be seen helped create the final image. in the mosaic lunettes in the façade of the Basilica of San Marco in Venice. There, the mosaic tesserae An early medieval aesthetics are laid in the later mosaics so as to imitate the of fragmentation? effects of brushstrokes on a canvas [Fig. 18]; the visual effect obtained was thus opposite to the one In the light of this analysis of the visual and technisought after in late antique and medieval mosaic cal aspects of some late antique and early medieval decoration, where emphasis was laid on the dis- art techniques, is it finally possible to postulate an tance between the tesserae and the visual fragmen- “aesthetic of fragmentation” underlying the rapid tariness of the figures. growth of these artistic forms, in particular the art In late antique and medieval mosaic decora- of stained glass? An aesthetic of fragmentation as tion, the gaps between the tesserae and the plas- such has never been expressly theorized. Howter on which they lie became an integral part of ever, in 1946, the Belgian historian of aesthetics the image; the interstices were often deliberately Edgar De Bruyne, in an analysis of early mediewide and the tesserae had irregular and variable val literary and figural production in seventh- / size and shape. Maria Andaloro pointed out the eighth-century Gaul, Britain, and Ireland, focused importance of the interstices between the mosaic on the topic of fragmentation in what he called the tesserae, which become part of the formal elabora- “Hisperic aesthetics”50. tion of the image: “it is not so much the size of the The adjective “Hisperic”, derived from the Lattesserae that plays a substantial role in defining the in Hispericus, i.e. “western”, comes from the work

Hisperica Famina, a series of poetic compositions by an anonymous author, containing descriptions of objects, events, and natural phenomena51. This literary work is characterized, from a linguistic and stylistic point of view, by so many divergences from the norms of classical Latin as to have become a symbol, in De Bruyne’s view, of an entire anticlassical literary production that flourished in the northwestern corner of Europe between the sixth and eighth centuries. According to De Bruyne, all these divergences from the codified rules of classical Latin find their roots in the antithesis set by Quintilian between the Attic and Asian styles in the literature of his times, with the Attic representing the classical canon, measured and concise, and the Asian standing for the “barbaric” canon. The latter was considered to be full of bizarre neologisms, obscure words, wordplays, unnecessary adjectives, alliterations, and a clear lack of good taste and measure. This Asian style influenced the literary production of many late antique writers, especially those coming from the Roman provinces of Africa – Tertullian, Martianus Capella, and Fulgentius – and Gallia – Sidonius Apollinaris, Venantius Fortunatus, and the anonymous author known as Aethicus Ister52. In his

analysis, De Bruyne considered the coeval literature and visual arts in parallel, especially seventh- / eighth-century manuscript illuminations from Merovingian Gaul and the British Isles. Works such as the manuscripts illuminated in the scriptoria of Corbie or Laon, for instance, display as their main visual feature an accumulation of elements, an overabundance of figures composed of enclosed, isolated parts juxtaposed and interlaced. This “fragmented chaos”, which De Bruyne did not hesitate to label as “baroque”, can find comparisons in many coeval cloisonné jewels and objects produced in Merovingian Gaul or Anglo-Saxon Britain. 49 Maria Andaloro, “Attorno al mosaico-frammento. Dalla tessera all’immagine”, in Fragmenta Picta. Affreschi e mosaici staccati del Medioevo romano, exhibition catalogue (Roma, Museo Nazionale di Castel Sant’Angelo 1989), Eadem ed., Rome 1989, pp. 37–44, sp.  pp.  37–39. On the same subject, see also Cesare Brandi, “Note sulle tecniche nei mosaici parietali in relazione al restauro e alle datazioni”, Bollettino icr, xxv–xxvi (1956), pp. 3–9, sp. pp. 3–4. 50 Edgar De Bruyne, Études d’esthétique medievale, 3 vols, Bruges 1946 (repr. 2 vols, Paris 1988). 51 Ibidem, vol. i, pp. 108–161. On the Hisperica Famina, see also Umberto Eco, “Vorwort”, in The Lindisfarne Gospel, facsimile edition, Lucerne 2002–2003, pp. i–xvi (repr. as “Il Libro di Lindisfarne”, in Scritti sul pensiero medievale, Milan 2012, pp. 1133–1144). 52 On Aethicus Ister, see Michael W. Herren, The Cosmography of Aethicus Ister, Turnhout 2011.

18 / Luigi Gaetano, after sketches by Maffeo Verona, Descent from the Cross, mosaic lunette, St Mark, Venice, 1617–1618

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More recently, Jesús Hernández Lobato has addressed the aesthetics of fragmentation in late antique literature and visual arts. To his mind, the whole cosmic vision of Late Antiquity “is dominated by the dissecting idea of the ‘part’ over the whole”53; the strategies of fractionation and detail constitute the most characteristic compositional methods of the literature of that period. In this respect, “fragment” and “detail” can be seen as two specific aesthetic strategies at work in late antique literature and visual arts. However, the instances of fragmentation do not pertain only to the domain of literature or the visual arts: early medieval theology and biblical exegesis offer, in this respect, other interesting points of comparison. In the late ninth century, the Irish monk and theologian John Scotus Eriugena, drawing from pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s metaphysics of light, expressed the thought that the simplicity of the Divine Eloquence, coming to us, arrives in a fragmentary state (Expositiones in Hierarchiam Coelestem, i, 331–335): “For what is simpler than the Word of God? […] What is more manifold than this same Word, seeing that he is diffused throughout all the things that were made in him and through him, and he is portioned out in a whole variety of ways to those who have a strong understanding, so as to allow them to savor him54?”

In the Periphyseon (iv, 749c), Eriugena applied the concept of “fragmentation in oneness” to biblical exegesis, stating that Scriptures do not discourage us from using a whole gamut of senses, which are as numerous as the many colors of a peacock’s tail: “For there are many ways, indeed an infinite number, of interpreting the Scriptures, just as in one and the same feather of a peacock and even in a single small portion of the feather, we see a marvelously beautiful variety of innumerable colors55.”

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The interpretation of the Scriptures is seen here as indefinite, being as it is in the image of the infinity of its divine Author. The Eriugenian approach to exegesis brings up the metaphor of the unity of the divine light fragmented into a variety of colors, widely used in connection to the metaphysics of light that he takes from the Areopagite’s thought56. This is an approach which shows tangencies with the aesthetics of fragmentation that can be detected, as has been argued, in coeval early medieval

literature and visual arts and that, of course, deserves further investigation beyond the limits of the present article. Conclusion To sum up, I would like to come back to Jaś Elsner’s reflections on late antique art. The cumulative aesthetic, which Elsner considers one of the most important principles at work in late antique art, can be detected, among many other instances, in artworks combining traditional skills used for miniature objects with ones employed for larger-scale artifacts. This principle fully applies to stained glass, given the possibility that this art technique may derive from small cloisonné polychrome objects rather than from late Roman large opus sectile wall decoration. Furthermore, early medieval churches did not usually feature very large windows; therefore, the derivation of stained glass from cloisonné jewelry, rendered on a larger scale, as proposed above, would not entail an overly wide change in scale between the two art forms. A particular predilection for fragmented images as well as the typical inclination of the early Middle Ages for saturated and luminous colors, characteristic of both art forms, probably underlies this specific development57, which constituted the basis for the creation of one of the most original artistic innovations of medieval Europe. 53 Jesús Hernández Lobato, Vel Apolline muto. Estética y poética de la Antigüedad tardía, Bern 2012, pp. 257–317. 54 Jean Barbet ed., Turnhout 1975, p. 10. See also Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, Mark Sebanc transl., Grand Rapids / Edinburgh 1998, p. 77. 55 Eriugena, Periphyseon, John J. O’Meara ed., Inglis P. Sheldon-Williams transl., Montreal 1987, p. 390. For a discussion of this concept in Eriugena’s exegesis, see de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis (n. 54), p. 77. 56 Regarding the vast literature, see Werner Beierwaltes, “Negati affirmatio. Welt als Metapher. Zur Grundlegung einer mittelalterlichen Ästhetik durch Johannes Scotus Eriugena”, Philosophisches Jahrbuch, lxxxiii (1976), pp. 237–265; Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence, New York 1993; and Pseudo-Dionysius and Christian Visual Culture, c. 500 – 900, Francesca Dell’Acqua, Ernesto S. Mainoldi eds, Cham 2020. 57 On this topic, see Michelangelo Cagiano de Azevedo, “Policromia e polimateria nelle opere d’arte della tarda antichità e dell’alto medioevo”, Felix Ravenna, ci (1970), pp. 223–259; and Umberto Eco, Arte e bellezza nell’estetica medievale, Milan 1987, pp. 55–59.

summary Fragmentace jako vizuální princip Od cloisonné k prvním mozaikám

Hlavním cílem článku je prověřit hypotézu, podle níž umění vitráží, ať už z estetického či technického hlediska, vychází ze způsobu zpracování šperků technikou cloisonné. Na základě archeologických nálezů a literárních pramenů lze počátky vitráží klást do dosud blíže neurčené doby mezi pozdní antikou a raným středověkem. Principy estetiky vitráží však zůstávají de facto neprozkoumané. Raně středověké vitráže se bohužel nedochovaly in situ, v poslední době však byly učiněny poměrně četné archeologické nálezy fragmentů datovaných většinou do 7. a 8. stol. n. l., které pocházejí z rozsáhlého území západní Evropy, od severní Anglie až po střední Itálii a merovejskou a karolínskou Galii. Existuje předpoklad, že vitráže mají svůj původ v římské pozdně antické technice opus sectile. Tuto hypotézu však nepodporuje žádný materiální důkaz ani přesvědčivá rekonstrukce celého procesu. Dosud nejasný původ umění vitráží jak z teoreticko-estetického, tak i technického hlediska tedy stále představuje velkou mezeru v našem poznání. Autor článku navrhuje hledat odpověď v jiných technikách, které mají své kořeny v práci se sklem, především v technice cloisonné. Právě ta totiž na rozdíl od opus sectile pracuje při koncipování obrazu s vizuálním členěním prostoru a barev stejně jako vitráže. Článek podává přehled pozdně římských a raně středověkých způsobů používání okenního skla, od prvních důkazů z pozdního císařství a příkladů z  raně křesťanských římských bazilik,

charakterizovaných tabulemi z bezbarvého skla zasazenými do štuku nebo tenkými deskami z tzv. zrcadlového kamene (lapis specularis) vsazenými do geometrických mřížek, až po tzv. mozaiková okna, doložená v alpské oblasti, kde bylo poprvé použito barevné sklo. Pozdější zásadní novinkou bylo použití olověných pásků (tyček) ke spojení skleněných tabulek, které vedlo ke vzniku vitráží s figurálními zobrazeními, jak ukazuje např. Kristova tvář ze San Vincenzo al Volturno, a malba na sklo pomocí tzv. grisaille techniky. Zdá se tedy, že změny, jimiž používání okenního skla prošlo, mají blíže ke kovotepeckým technikám, konkrétně k tzv. cloisonné technice používané při výrobě šperků, která – stejně jako vitráže – pracuje s členěným prostorem vyplněným barevnými skleněnými tabulkami. V neposlední řadě autor zkoumá vznik vitráží v souvislosti s interakcí mezi klasickými a antiklasickými tradicemi a šířením starých i nových médií a technik v pozdně antickém světě. Věnuje se také paralelám s literární technikou v dílech pozdně antické a raně středověké Galie (zejména u Sidonia Apollinara, Řehoře z Tours a Venantia Fortunata) a také s tzv. hisperickou estetikou rozvíjenou na Britských ostrovech. Tato díla, k nimž bychom mohli připojit další příklady biblické exegeze a křesťanské teologické tvorby, odhalují principy „fragmentace“ pozdně antické a raně středověké estetiky, pro niž jsou detail a fragment dvě esenciální charakteristiky literárního diskurzu i uměleckých artefaktů.

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Abstract – Ornamental Surfaces. A “Global Trend” in Late Antique Afro-Eurasia – Case studies from different regions of Afro-Eurasia enable examination of three developments in the use of geometrical ornament in architectural spaces and on portable artifacts during the so-called “long Late Antiquity” (ca 300–800). First, ornaments were “spoliated” from larger geometrical patterns and then reassembled in new architectural settings, such as mosaic floors and walls, as well as on the surfaces of small-scale objects. By creating an impression of ornamental abundance, geometrical embellishments contributed to the concept of varietas and the “cumulative aesthetics” that were characteristic of late antique literature, art, and architecture. Second, geometrical ornament became increasingly independent from its medium and thus from the function-related principles of classical Greco-Roman architectural decoration, which is exemplified by a selection of basket capitals with grid decoration. And third, grid and medallion patterns demonstrate that geometrical ornament and the way in which it is distributed on surfaces was possibly inspired by textile models. Keywords – architectural decoration, geometrical ornament, Late Antiquity, medallion pattern, spolia, textiles, visual culture Katharina Meinecke  Leipzig University 98 [email protected]

Ornamental Surfaces A “Global Trend” in Late Antique Afro-Eurasia Katharina Meinecke

In the “long Late Antiquity” (ca 300–800), geometrical ornament becomes increasingly popular, covering floors, walls, textiles, and small-scale artifacts. This paper wants to show that in this period, geometrical ornaments were used in architectural contexts and on portable artifacts in a way that often revealed an altered conception of surfaces and the distribution of decoration. This was not limited to the Mediterranean but occurred

in different contexts and regions of Afro-Eurasia, which is why I refer to this development * I would like to thank Marie Okáčová, Ivan Foletti, and the participants of the conference A Radical Turn? Subversions, Conversions, and Mutations in the Postclassical World (3rd– 8th c.), Brno, 18–19 October 2021 for two days of fruitful discussions that contributed a lot to this paper, Anna Lefteratou for helpful references and for sharing her work with me, and Jaś Elsner for his most inspiring feedback and stimulating suggestions for further thought.

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1 / Euphrasian Basilica, Poreč, 6th century (note the three archivolts in the back decorated with stucco ornaments cut from a larger pattern)

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as a “trend” of late antique visual culture. This paper is not meant as an exhaustive catalogue of geometrical embellishments in Late Antiquity. Rather, it presents a selection of observations and case studies, often linking contexts which are usually not considered together, in order to demonstrate the wide scope of the phenomenon. First, the practice of spoliation, i.e. the juxtaposition of geometrical ornaments taken from known repertoires, creating an impression of abundance which reflects and contributes to the late antique concept of varietas, will be examined. The second part will discuss the increasing independence of geometrical embellishments from their medium. In the final section, a possible motivation for this altered conception of surfaces will be considered

by linking architectural decoration to portable artifacts and especially to textiles globally circulating in Late Antiquity. Ornament as spoliation In Late Antiquity, geometrical ornaments usually do not occur alone. Frequently, a plethora of ornamentation in varied materials and of multiple kinds seem to overflow within one and the same context, especially in architectural settings. If we look at churches around the Mediterranean, their parapets and chancel screens were decorated with geometrical designs, with each panel often having a different decorative scheme1. A great variety of mostly geometrical ornaments frequently

made of stucco covered the soffits of the arcades separating the aisles from the nave, as in San Vitale in Ravenna and in the Euphrasian Basilica in Poreč (both sixth century) [Fig. 1]2. Marble veneers on the walls were arranged in such a way that their natural veins created geometrical patterns3. Mosaic floors were adorned with a rich variety of geometrical ornaments which often served to frame a range of figural motifs. Frequently, these patterns were juxtaposed in individual compartments, creating the effect of a patchwork quilt, both in the west and the east of the Mediterranean, for example in the Basilica of Aquileia (first half of the fourth century)4 or in the church of Khalde in modern Lebanon (mid-fifth century). In the latter, not only were the central nave and aisles subdivided into several panels with partly figural and partly geometrical decoration, but the spaces between the columns as well as narrow rectangular panels inserted in front of the arcades were each filled with a different geometrical pattern5. In the Coptic churches of late antique Egypt, stone friezes with geometrical decorations were applied to the walls6. While Greco-Roman corniches running along walls are profiled7, these friezes are flat without a profile. They thus lack the three-dimensional material qualities commonly associated with Greco-Roman architectural ornament8. In addition, these geometrical patterns on the Coptic friezes do not embellish any loads or load bearing members in the architectural structure. All in all, they created the impression of a mere decoration rather than an integral structural component. This is even more obvious in the lunettes above the doors of the South Church at Bawit (sixth century), one of which is completely filled with a recurrent pattern of interlocked octagons and crosses sparing only a semicircular compartment at the center with a figural scene9. In the Egyptian churches, panels with geometrical ornaments could also be set into the walls vertically to fill the spaces in between aediculae, which is well attested in the painted decoration of the Dayr Anba Bishay, the “Red Monastery” near Sohag in Egypt (late fifth – early seventh century)10. The juxtaposition of different kinds of geometrical ornament was by no means limited to late antique churches. Inside the so-called “palace” in the

Umayyad “desert castle” Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi (ca 730 ce) near Palmyra, balustrades and window grills, each with a different geometrical pattern, adorned the interior11. This decoration was made On chancel screens and parapets, see, e.g., Thilo Ulbert, Studien zur dekorativen Reliefplastik des östlichen Mittelmeerraums (Schrankenplatten des 4.–10. Jahrhunderts), Munich 1969. 2 Mab van Lohuizen-Mulder, “Stuccos in Ravenna, Poreč and Cividale of Coptic Manufacture”, BABesch, lxv (1990), pp. 139–156, sp. pp. 144–145. 3 Finbarr Barry Flood, “‘God’s Wonder’: Marble as Medium and the Natural Image in Mosques and Modernism”, West 86th, xxiii/2 (2016), pp. 168–219; Mattia Guidetti, “Churches and Mosques: Aesthetics and Transfer of Marble in Early Islam”, in The Aesthetics of Marble from Late Antiquity to the Present, Dario Gamboni, Gerhard Wolf, Jessica N. Richardson eds, Munich 2021, pp. 62–75 (both with comparisons from Umayyad mosques such as the Dome of the Rock and the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus). 4 It has been suggested that the differently ornamented compartments on the mosaic floor in the South Hall marked the seating areas of different groups within the congregation: Franz Glaser, Erwin Pochmarski, Aquileia. Der archäologische Führer, Darmstadt/Mainz 2012, pp. 64–68, fig. 23; Heinz Kähler, Die Stiftermosaiken in der Konstantinischen Südkirche von Aquileia, Cologne 1962; Beat Brenk,“Spolia from Constantine to Charlemagne: Aesthetics versus Ideology”, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, xli (1987), pp. 103–109, sp. p. 105. 5 Maurice H. Chéhab, Mosaïques du Liban, Paris 1957, pp. 107–116, pl. 62–66; Janine Balty, “Les mosaïques de Syrie au ve siècle et leur répertoire”, Byzantion, liv/2 (1984), pp. 437–468, sp. p. 455, pl. xv,1. 6 See, e.g., Arne Effenberger, Hans-Georg Severin, Das Mu­se­um für Spätantike und Byzantinische Kunst, Mainz 1992, pp. 176–177, nos  90–91 (probably from Bawit, sixth century, Berlin, Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst, inv. 6144–6145); Nabil Selim Atalla, Coptic Art, vol. ii: Sculpture-Architecture, Cairo 1989, pp. 84–85, no. 7154, p. 102, no. 7121, p. 108, no. 23789 (from Bawit and Oxyrhynchus); Dominique Bénazeth, Baouit. Une église copte au Louvre, Paris 2002, p. 25, fig. 20, p. 35, fig. 28 (from Bawit). 7 See, e.g., the painted corniches on Roman wall paintings of the second style, as in the so-called houses of Augustus and Livia (Harald Mielsch, Römische Wandmalerei, Darmstadt 2001, p. 57, fig. 56, p. 59, fig. 59). The late antique so-called Fassadengesimse attested in northern Syria from the fifth century ce onward, which are sometimes richly decorated with ornaments in Greco-Roman tradition, also have a profile and thus seem closer to their Greco-Roman forerunners; on Fassadengesimse in general, see Christine Strube, Baudekoration im Nordsyrischen Kalksteinmassiv, vol. i: Kapitell-, Tür- und Gesimsformen der Kirchen des 4. und 5. Jahrhunderts n. Chr., Mainz 1993, pp. 134–135. 8 See the subchapter “Ornament and a new concept of surfaces” below. 9 Bénazeth, Baouit (n. 6), p. 46, fig. 36. 10 William Lyster, “Artistic Working Practice and the Second-Phase Ornamental Program”, in The Red Monastery Church: Beauty and Asceticism in Upper Egypt, Elizabeth S. Bolman ed., New Haven 2016, pp. 97–117; Elizabeth S. Bolman, “Figural Styles, Egypt, and the Early Byzantine World”, in ibidem, pp. 151–163, sp. p. 163. 11 Daniel Schlumberger, Qasr el-Heir el-Gharbi, Paris  1986, pp. 15–16, pl. 69, 72–81. 1

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of stucco and carved as latticework, possibly inspired by church parapets and chancel screens. Geometrically set marble veneer is imitated in wall painting inside the “palace”12. In addition, the building’s facade was richly decorated with stucco panels on the wall around the entrance and on its flanking towers [Fig. 2]. The lower part of each of the towers was covered with three juxtaposed panels with geometrical patterns: hexagons, a grid of lozenges, and overlapping stylized leaf-shapes with three lobes [Fig. 3]13. These stucco panels concealed the entire wall which, at least in this section, does not display any architectural structure. This type of extensive flat stucco decoration has been associated with models from Sasanian architecture, where walls and archivolts were often covered with stucco panels embellished with either figural or geometrical ornament, which, placed side by side, created a continuous pattern. Although there are technical and stylistic differences between the Sasanian and Umayyad stucco decorations, their overall impression of small, repetitive patterns concealing the entire wall is quite similar14. In all these architectural examples, the geometrical ornaments within the rectangular or semicircular compartments and continuous friezes made of stucco, stone, wall painting, or mosaic are not complete in themselves. Instead, each of them seems to have been cut out from a larger pattern. In the lunette from Bawit, the pattern even seems to continue underneath the figural panel even though the carved figures and geometrical shapes are on the same level of the relief. In this sense, the geometrical ornaments contained within these decorative panels are a kind of spolia. Not only are they chosen from an ample repertoire of available designs, but they are also literally extracted from a larger pattern which could, in the imagination of the viewer, continue endlessly beyond the borders of the visible space. Just as architectural spolia were extracted from their original context and repurposed in a new one, the geometrical ornaments were fragments that were separated by the frames enclosing them from each other in their individual panels and from an originally larger continuous pattern. As fragments, the geometrical ornaments were reassembled within their architectural context to

create new combinations and innovative visual impressions15. After a closer look, the virtually infinite patterns in one and the same space offered myriads of details to attract the beholder’s attention, while in the big picture, they contributed to an overall impression of ornamental abundance. This mode of viewing seems to echo the effects articulated by Procopius in his mid-sixth-century description of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople in the De Aedificiis (1.1.48–49)16. As Beat Brenk pointed out for the mosaic floor in the Basilica of Aquileia17, the abundance created by the spoliated geometrical ornaments contributed to the same late antique concept of varietas as their spoliated architectural counterparts18. They were part of the same “cumulative aesthetic” which was characteristic not only of late antique visual but also literary culture19. Maria Fabricius Hansen, Jaś Elsner, as well as Ivan Foletti and Marie Okáčová in this volume, and others elsewhere, have pointed out the similarities between building with spolia and late antique literature, especially the so-called centones. These poetic compositions, which were popular from the late third to the seventh century, consist of lines copied more or less verbatim from earlier poetry (especially the canonical works of Homer in Greek and Virgil in Latin), sometimes combined with newly written phrases20. Both architectural spolia and late antique centos display principles of fragmentation and re-assemblage, of which the juxtaposed fragments of geometrical ornament are yet another late antique manifestation. Cento literally means “patchwork”21, and this is exactly the impression created by the ornamental panels, as they are assembled like pieces of fabric sewn together into a larger design, especially on the late antique mosaic church floors. For centos, Michael Roberts remarks in his frequently cited metaphor that the seams between the lines were not only meant to be seen, but that they were even “positively advertised”22. The same has been observed in 12 Schlumberger, Qasr el-Heir el-Gharbi (n. 11), pl. 57a, c. 13 Ibidem, pp.  14–15, pl. 58– 60; Katharina Meinecke, “Umayyad Visual Culture and Its Models”, in The Umayyad World, Andrew Marsham ed., London 2021, pp. 103–129, sp. pp. 114–115. 14 On Sasanian stucco, see Jens Kröger, Sasanidischer Stuckdekor. Ein Beitrag zum Reliefdekor aus Stuck in sasanidischer und

frühislamischer Zeit nach den Ausgrabungen von 1928/9 und 1931/2 in der sasanidischen Metropole Ktesiphon (Iraq) und unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Stuckfunde von Taht-i Sulaiman (Iran), aus Nizamabad (Iran) sowie zahlreicher anderer Fundorte, Mainz 1982. An especially good comparison for the overall impression is a late Sasanian example with octagons from Maʿarid v in the Ctesiphon area (sixth century ce): ibidem, pp. 110–111, pl. 46,1–2. For reconstructions of the architectural settings of the stucco panels, see ibidem, pp. 78–79, figs 37–38, p. 128, fig. 70, p. 153, fig. 86. Technical and stylistic differences between Sasanian and Umayyad stucco have been observed by Robert W. Hamilton, “Carved Plaster in Umayyad Architecture”, Iraq, xv/1 (1953), pp. 43–55, sp. p. 51; and Rina Talgam, The Stylistic Origins of Umayyad Sculpture and Architectural Decoration, Wiesbaden 2004, pp. 55, 59, 62–64. 15 Cf., e.g., Maria Fabricius Hansen, The Eloquence of Appropriation: Prolegomena to an Understanding of Spolia in Early Christian Rome, Rome 2003, pp. 167– 168; Brenk, “Spolia from Constantine” (n. 4), pp. 105–106. For further literature on spolia in general, see n. 23 below. 16 “All these details, fitted together with incredible skill in midair and floating off from each other and resting only on the parts next to them, produce a single and most extraordinary harmony in the work, and yet do not permit the spectator to linger much over the study of any one of them, but each detail attracts the eye and draws it on irresistibly to itself. So the vision constantly shifts suddenly, for the beholder is utterly unable to select which particular detail he should admire more than all the others” (Procopius, History of the Wars, vol. vii, H. B. Dewing transl., London 1940). Compare discussion in Jaś Elsner, “Late Antique Art: The Problem of the Concept and the Cumulative Aesthetic”, in Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire, Simon Swain, Mark Edwards eds, Oxford 2006, pp. 271–309, sp. pp. 301–309. 17 Brenk, “Spolia from Constantine” (n. 4), p. 105. 18 On spolia and varietas, see especially ibidem, pp. 105–106; Fabricius Hansen, The Eloquence of Appropriation (n. 15), pp. 173–178. 19 Elsner, “Late Antique Art” (n. 16). 20 Fabricius Hansen, The Eloquence of Appropriation (n. 15), pp. 168–178; Elsner, “Late Antique Art” (n. 16), p. 293; Idem, ”Late Narcissus: Classicism and Culture in a Late Roman Cento”, in The Poetics of Late Latin Literature, Jaś Elsner, Jesús Hernandez Lobato, eds, New York 2017, pp. 176–205, sp. pp. 178–179, 201–203. On centos in general, see, e.g., Marie Okáčová,“Centones: Recycled Art or the Embodiment of Absolute Intertextuality?”, in Kakanien Revisited (2009), http:// www.kakanien.ac.at/beitr/graeca_latina/MOkacova1.pdf [last accessed on 20 February 2022]; Elsner, “Late Narcissus” (n. 20), pp. 177–182; Anna Lefteratou, “From Citation to Cento: The Homeric Centos and the Imperial and Late Antique Quotation Habit”, Byzantion, lxxxix (2019), pp. 331–358 (all with references to further literature). 21 Michael Roberts, The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity, Ithaka, ny /London 1989, pp. 57–58. 22 Ibidem, p. 3. Cf. Patricia Cox Miller, “‘Differential Networks’: Relics and Other Fragments in Late Antiquity”, Journal of Early Christian Studies, vi/1 (1998), pp. 113–138, sp. p. 114; Elsner, “Late Antique Art” (n. 16), p. 308. On the contrary, Idem, “Late Narcissus” (n. 20), p. 179, points out that in some cases, through small alterations, the original poetic units were hidden within the new poem in a way similar to how the reworking of the portraits on the Arch of Constantine sewed together the reused reliefs of different dates and origins.

2 / Reconstructed façade of the “palace” at Qasr al-Hayr alGharbi, ca 730 / National Museum (Damascus) 3 / Detail of the panels with geometrical ornaments on the left tower of the “palace” at Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi, ca 730 / National Museum (Damascus)

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4 / Basket capital with grid decoration, St Polyeuctus, Istanbul, 524–527 5 / Capital with grid decoration and investiture scene from Isfahan, late 6th/ early 7th century/ Iran-e Bastan Museum (Tehran) 6 / Basket capital, 2nd century/ Museo Nazionale Romano, Museo delle Terme (Rome), inv. 891

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architectural spolia23, and it definitely also applies to spoliated ornament. Through the frames enclosing the panels and the cut-out nature of the patterns, the seams between the geometrical ornaments are made visible. The final unity in this abundance of ornament had to be created by the viewer, just as it must have been created by the reader of the centos. Ornament and a new concept of surfaces The geometrical ornaments applied to walls were not only characterized by their spolia-like fragmentation and reassemblage, but also by their seemingly “non-architectural” distribution within architectural settings. In classical Greco-Roman architecture, architectural ornament was mostly limited to loads and load-bearing members which gave the building its structure, such as capitals, pilasters, horizontal friezes, archivolts, doorframes, and niches. Wall surfaces – with some prominent exceptions such as the enclosure of the Ara Pacis in Rome (13–9 bce), which through its rich, although less geometrical relief decoration created a similar impression of abundance– were commonly left blank24 . The distribution of geometrical ornament in Late Antiquity in many cases seems less motivated by architectural features. Examples are the Sasanian and Umayyad stucco decorations which concealed the entire wall beneath them, masking its architectural structure. Likewise, late antique Egyptian friezes and painted ornamental panels do not conform to the function-related “rules” governing ornament and architectural elements of classical architecture. In a certain sense, they themselves structured a wall’s surface, filling spaces which previously had been left empty. Because of their lack of profile, they have a stronger decorative and less distinctively architectonic character. This altered use of ornament reveals a change in the conception of surfaces, which will be further discussed below for capitals as additional examples. A group of basket capitals found at different locations in late antique Afro-Eurasia stand out through their grid decoration. On a capital from the Church of St Polyeuctus in Constantinople, built by Anicia Juliana between 524 and 527, the

entire surface is covered with a heavily undercut grid pattern [Fig. 4]25. It consists of bands decorated with pearls or gemstones, with large square elements inserted at the crossing points. This kind of grid pattern is also attested on a Sasanian capital from Isfahan (probably late sixth / early seventh century) [Fig. 5]26. This capital, which has often been discussed together with the capital from St Polyeuctus, has a similar cubic form and is decorated with a grid on two of its four sides. The grid is created by broad bands decorated with a frieze of three-pointed leaves, and the crossing points are accentuated by inserted squares. The remaining two sides of the capital depict an investiture scene with a Sasanian king on one side and a badly mutilated god handing over the beribboned diadem on the opposite side. Despite their obvious similarities in overall form and grid decoration, there are several decisive differences between the Byzantine and the Sasanian capitals. The grid pattern on the Constantinopolitan piece covers the capital’s entire surface, while on the capital from Isfahan, only two unconnected sides are decorated with the grid. The geometrical decoration on this piece thus creates the impression of being cut out from a larger continuous pattern, as we saw on the “spoliated” geometrical panels above27. The grid on the St Polyeuctus capital is masterly undercut, transforming it into a three-dimensional coating, while the decoration on the capital from Isfahan is flat. Finally, the filling of the grid pattern’s spaces varies on the two capitals. While at St Polyeuctus, the lozenges are filled with eight-pointed crosses or stars, the Sasanian piece contains large rosettes with four petals. Due to its flatness and the rosettes in the spaces, the pattern on the Sasanian capital seems more similar to a much earlier basket capital in Rome of unknown provenance, dated tentatively to the second century ce [Fig. 6]28. In contrast to the late antique capitals, this earlier piece actually imitates a basket. The lower part consists of 23 There has been a long and still ongoing discussion on the purpose of building with architectural spolia; for some selected contributions and perspectives, see Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann, Die Spolien in der spätantiken Architektur, Munich 1975; Jaś Elsner, “From the Culture of Spolia to the Cult of

24 25

26

27

28

Relics: The Arch of Constantine and the Genesis of Late Antique Forms”, Papers of the British School at Rome, lxviii (2000), pp. 149–184; Paolo Liverani, “Reimpiego senza ideologia. La lettura antica degli spolia dell’arco di Costantino all’età carolingia”, Römische Mitteilungen, xi (2004), pp. 383–434; Arnold Esch, Wiederverwendung von Antike im Mittelalter. Die Sicht des Archäologen und die Sicht des Historikers, Berlin / New York 2005; Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine, Richard Brilliant, Dale Kinney eds, Farnham/Burlington 2011; Spoliation as Translation: Medieval Worlds of the Eastern Mediterranean, Ivana Jevtić, Ingela Nilsson eds, Brno/Turnhout 2021 (= Convivium, supplemetum ii [2021]). There is abundant literature on this monument; for an introduction, see Orietta Rossini, Ara Pacis, Rome 2006. Christine Strube, Polyeuktoskirche und Hagia Sophia. Umbildung und Auflösung antiker Formen, Entstehung des Kämpferkapitells, Munich 1984, pp. 79–80; Richard M. Harrison, Excavations at Saraçhane in Istanbul, vol. i: The Excavations, Structures, Architectural Decoration, Small Finds, Coins, Bones and Molluscs, Princeton 1986, p. 128, no. 3bi; Idem, Ein Tempel für Byzanz. Die Entdeckung und Ausgrabung von Anicia Julianas Palastkirche in Istanbul, Stuttgart/Zürich 1990, p. 115, fig. 149; Gunnar Brands, “Persien und Byzanz – eine Annäherung”, in Austausch und Inspiration. Kulturkontakte als Impuls architektonischer Innovationen, Felix Pirson, Ulrike Wulf-Rheidt eds, Mainz 2008, pp. 244–256, sp. p. 248; Richard Brüx, “Anhang: Zur sasanidischen Ornamentik in der frühbyzantinischen Kunst. Sichtung nach Motivrepertoire, historischem Umfeld und Vermittlungswegen unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Polyeuktoskirche in Konstantinopel”, in Idem, Faltkapitelle. Untersuchungen zur Bauskulptur Konstantinopels, mit einem Anhang zur Polyeuktoskirche in Istanbul, Langenweißbach 2008, pp. 1–72, sp. p. 19, no. 3bi. Tehran, Iran-e Bastan Museum: Eugen von Mercklin, Antike Figuralkapitelle, Berlin 1962, p. 34, no. 99b, pl. 28, figs 159–160. There has been a long discussion whether the Sasanian capital served as a model for the capitals at St Polyeuctus or vice versa; today, the latter is mostly accepted – see Heinz Luschey, “Zur Datierung der sasanidischen Kapitelle aus Bisutun und des Monuments von Taq-i-Bostan”, Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran, i (1968), pp. 129–142, sp. p. 141, pl. 52,5–6; Strube, Polyeuktoskirche und Hagia Sophia (n. 25), pp. 79–80; Matteo Compareti, “Iconographical Notes on Some Recent Studies on Sasanian Religious Art”, Annali di Ca‘ Foscari, xlv/3 (2006), pp. 163–200, sp. p. 171; Brands,“Persien und Byzanz” (n. 25), pp. 248–249. This cropping is neither the result of secondary reworking of the capital nor due to post-antique mutilations but was intentionally carved this way. This becomes evident when comparing the piece to other contemporary capitals from Isfahan and Kermanshah which display the same distribution of an investiture scene on two opposite sides and geometrical patterns other than a grid or stylized plant motifs on the other two; see Luschey,“Datierung der sasanidischen Kapitelle”(n. 26), pl. 51, 52,4; and Compareti,“Iconographical Notes” (n. 26), pp. 165, 169, 172, figs 8, 10–11, 17–18. Rome, Museo Nazionale Romano, Museo delle Terme, inv. 891: von Mercklin, Antike Figuralkapitelle (n. 26), p. 280, no. 668, pl. 162, fig. 1289; Carla Martini, “10. Capitello a cesto (inv. n. 891)”, in Museo Nazionale Romano, vol. i/2, Antonio Giuliano ed., Rome 1981, pp. 99–100; arachne.dainst.org/ entity/1117213 [last accessed on 20 February 2022]. There is a similar capital in the Magazzino ex Ponteggi, Museo Gregoriano Profano ex Lateranense, inv. 9554: von Mercklin, Antike Figuralkapitelle (n. 26), p. 280, no. 669, pl. 162, fig. 1290, arachne. dainst.org/entity/1125811 [last accessed on 20 February 2022].

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7 / Fragment of a woolen tapestry from Egypt, first third of the 5th century / Dumbarton Oaks, Byzantine Collection (Washington, dc), acc. no. bz.1946.16

wickerwork, while the upper part is more loosely woven, and the flowers, which we shall imagine inside the basket, are peeking through the spaces in a stylized manner. Therefore, even though this earlier capital from Rome is already completely covered with a geometrical pattern, its decoration is not simply an ornament overlying the surface, but an imitation of a three-dimensional object29. This crucial difference makes the change in the design of architectural sculpture and the altered approach to the decoration of surfaces on the two later pieces even more obvious. The decoration of the capital from the Church of St Polyeuctus no longer stresses its load-bearing function as in the classical architectural orders. Instead, the differences between flat architectural sculpture, like friezes or pilasters, and architectural sculpture in the round, such as capitals, are completely dissolved. Christine Strube described this as a “Gleichschaltung von Kapitell und Wand”, a consolidation or equalizing of wall and capital30. This equalizing process also applied to the late antique decorative panels and flat friezes on the walls discussed above, which seem less motivated by architectural structure and thus do not emphasize the architectonic properties of architectural ornament as much as in earlier monuments. Instead, they merely add further embellishment to the wall surfaces. The geometrical decoration thus enabled a fusion between surface and architectural structure. In these late antique examples discussed above, geometrical pattern and wall seem to become one. Textile connections of ornament

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The geometrical decoration on the St Polyeuctus basket capital [Fig. 4] also manifests another change in the visual production of Late Antiquity, the preference for “exquisite miniatures” whose aesthetic and technical characteristics, such as undercutting, were, in a second step, transferred to a monumental scale in stone carving31. Jaś Elsner compared the undercut acanthus decoration of Justinian basket capitals at Hagia Sophia with glass cage cups32. This comparison is even more striking for the St Polyeuctus capital with its undercut grid decoration because of the repetitive, regular geometrical pattern of adjacent circles that overlie

the cup’s body on most diatreta. Thanks to their overall shapes, glass cups and basket capitals are remarkably similar. However, glass diatreta are not the only portable luxury artifacts comparable to the capital from St Polyeuctus. Similar decorations are also found on textiles. The grid on a fragment of a woolen tapestry from Egypt (perhaps first third of the fifth century ce) is especially similar to the one on the capital [Fig. 7]33. Although the spaces are filled with a greater variety of motifs – a female head and a duck with head turned backwards are preserved –, the bands making up the grid, which are decorated with representations of pearls and gemstones, and the crossing points accentuated by round medallions with swirly rosettes create a very similar impression as on the Constantinopolitan basket capital. The grid was a frequent textile design which circulated – or was at least widely known – across both the Byzantine and the Persian realms in Late Antiquity. This becomes evident not only from numerous textile fragments, such as the one just discussed, but also from contemporary depictions. On the famous mosaic of female musicians from Mariamin in Syria (late fourth/early fifth century), the tablecloth underneath the organ is adorned with a grid pattern whose spaces are filled with simple rosettes, with the crossing points being accentuated with circles34. An attestation from Sasanian Iran is found among the garments depicted in the hunting scenes in the Great Ayvan 29 Nevertheless, the link between basket and capital seems to have continued in Late Antiquity: Jaś Elsner, “Beyond Eusebius: Prefatory Images and the Early Book”, in Canones: The Art of Harmony: The Canon Tables of the Four Gospels, Alessandro Bausi, Bruno Reudenbach, Hanna Wimmer eds, Berlin/ Boston 2020, pp. 99–132, sp. p. 110, 124, fig. 25, has suggested that outlines of capitals left over from a previous design were changed into fruit baskets in an illumination of the Ethiopic Garima i Gospels (possibly sixth century) in the Monastery of Abba Garima near Aksum in Ethiopia. 30 Strube, Polyeuktoskirche und Hagia Sophia (n. 25), p. 80. 31 Elsner, “Late Antique Art” (n. 16), pp. 283, 287, 293–303. 32 Ibidem, p. 302. On cage cups, see, e.g., Cornelius Steckner, “Diatrete als Lichtgefäße”, in Rosemarie Lierke, Antike Glastöpferei. Ein vergessenes Kapitel der Glasgeschichte, Mainz 1999, pp. 110–129. 33 Dumbarton Oaks, Museum, acc. no. bz.1946.16, https://www. doaks.org/resources/textiles/catalogue/BZ.1946.16 [last accessed on 24 February 2022]. 34 Balty, “Les mosaïques de Syrie” (n. 5), p. 455; Bente Kiilerich, “The Mosaic of the Female Musicians from Mariamin”,  Acta ad Archaeologiam et Artium Historiam Pertinentia, xxii (2010), pp. 87–107.

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8 / Ernst Herzfeld’s drawing of an oarsman wearing a garment decorated with a grid pattern in the top part and medallions with boars’ heads in the lower part, from the boar hunt relief in the Great Ayvan at Taq-e Bostan, late 6th/early 7th century / Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives (Washington, dc), Ernst Herzfeld Papers fsa.a.06, Gift of Ernst 108 Herzfeld, 1946, fsa.a.06 05.0307

at Taq-e Bostan, which can probably be dated to the time of King Khosrow ii (late sixth/early seventh century)35. One of the oarsmen in the relief panel picturing a boar hunt wears a tunic decorated with an elaborate grid pattern whose partition lines consist of a frieze of hearts, a typical form of Sasanian ornament [Fig. 8]36. It is impossible to prove whether these grid patterns relied on common models, as this is a design which comes to mind naturally and may have developed independently at different locations. Yet its frequent depictions – in addition to actually attested textiles – reveal its popularity as a textile design in both the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires. Textile models seem even more likely for a Byzantine corner capital kept in the Bardo Museum in Tunis [Figs 9–10]. Not much is known about this capital except that it comes from Younga/ Iunca in modern Tunisia, where it probably belonged to the site of “Basilica i”37. The exact date of the capital has yet to be determined; judging from its style and ornamentation, it is, however, most unlikely that it originated from an earlier Roman building. One of its sides is again decorated with a grid pattern which consists of undecorated bands with six-lobed rosettes at the crossing points [Fig. 9]. The decoration inside the spaces is organized in horizontal rows: individual birds, antithetically facing each other, alternate with spaces which are divided in two by a horizontal band, each filled with a pine cone framed by two leaves. While the decoration ends exactly with such a half lozenge on the top and the bottom of the capital, the pattern is abruptly cropped on its diagonal side, similar to the grid on the Sasanian capital [Fig. 5]38. The grid decoration also shares some striking similarities with the design on the oarsman’s tunic in the Sasanian relief at Taq-e Bostan [Fig. 8]. In both cases, the spaces are filled with antithetical birds, and the crossing points of the grid are accentuated by rosettes. The second side of the capital from Iunca shows a different design consisting of medallions enclosing eagles with open wings, in between which leaves and rosettes are arranged geometrically [Fig. 10]. Like the grid on the other face of the capital, the medallions and plant ornament are cropped at the sides; in fact, only

35 The dating of the Great Ayvan at Taq-e Bostan is highly disputed, although today the attribution to Khosrow ii is widely accepted: Matthew P. Canepa, “Sasanian Rock Reliefs”, in The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran, Daniel T. Potts ed., Oxford 2013, pp. 856–877, sp. pp. 871–875. For an overview of the dates suggested so far, see Katsumi Tanabe,“The Identification of the King of Kings in the Upper Register of the Larger Grotto, Taq-i Bustan: Ardashir iii Restated”, in Ērān und Anērān: Webfestschrift Marshak 2003, http://www. transoxiana.org/Eran/Articles/tanabe.html [last accessed on 16 February 2022]. 36 On the frieze of hearts, see Kröger, Sasanidischer Stuckdekor (n. 14), p. 231. 37 Tunis, Bardo Museum. I wish to thank Taher Ghalia for information on this capital. On the site of “Basilica i” at Iunca, see Pierre Garrigue, “Une basilique byzantine à Junca en Byzacène”,  Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire, lxv (1953), pp. 173–196. 38 Again, this cropping is intentional, as the other side of the capital is adorned with a different pattern; see [Fig. 10].

9 / Byzantine corner capital from Younga/Iunca, right side with grid decoration / Bardo Museum (Tunis) 10 / Byzantine corner capital from Younga/Iunca, left side with medallion pattern / Bardo Museum (Tunis)

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11 / Woven Wool from an unrecorded site in Egypt, 6th century / Victoria and Albert Museum (London), acc. no. t.89-1937

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one of the medallions is complete. On both the capital’s faces, the geometrical ornaments are cut from a larger continuous pattern in the manner of ornamental spolia discussed above. Like the grid, the repetitive pattern of medallions encircling single figures is frequently found as a textile design in late antique Afro-Eurasia. Most likely, this pattern was either of Sasanian or Central Asian origin, as silk textiles with medallion designs were mostly produced in the frontier region between the Sasanian Empire and China39. Depictions of textiles with this design attest to their circulation among the highest elites of late antique Afro-Eurasia. This is especially evident for roundels encircling a single bird40. In the famous mosaic at San Vitale in Ravenna, the Roman Emperor Justinian i (r. 527–565) is dressed in a chlamys with an inset decorated with medallions encircling green birds, which may be identified as either parrots or ducks, while a hunter in the boar hunt relief in the Great Ayvan at Taq-e Bostan wears a garment adorned with roundels enclosing ducks alternating with medallions with lily-like flowers41. A Chinese silk painting (seventh century) shows the ambassador of Tibet wearing a caftan decorated with pearl roundels with birds – perhaps ducks – during a hearing at the court of the Chinese emperor42. In addition to these representations, a great number of textiles with medallion patterns made of silk and other materials have survived, some showing more or less duck-like birds [Fig. 11]. Their dating is disputed, and many are probably of post-Sasanian origin43. The capital from Iunca displays eagles instead of ducks, yet the alternation of medallions enclosing birds with stylized plant motifs finds parallels on other monuments adorned with medallions with ducks, which will be discussed below44; this suggests that they may rely on similar models. The available textile comparisons and the striking parallels in characteristic details make it quite probable that both the grid patterns on the Byzantine and Sasanian capitals and the medallion motif on the capital from Iunca were influenced by textile designs. Capitals are only one example of the grid and the medallion motifs’ possible transfer from textiles onto different media. In architectural contexts,

the grid pattern was often – but not exclusively – transferred to mosaic floors. Janine Balty explained the increased popularity of mosaics with grid patterns in churches in the Near East from the fifth century onwards by the improved diplomatic relations between Byzantium and Sasanian Persia that resulted in a higher influx of Sasanian textiles through diplomatic gift exchange45. An increase in ordinary trade might also have caused a higher availability of such textiles in the Near East. In architectural contexts, some examples for the roundel pattern are found in wall paintings. Medallions encircling ducks are attested in the largest of the Buddhist caves in Kizil in northwestern China (sixth–seventh century), where they adorned a podium for statues46. In this context, the patterns may reflect textiles which the monks received as gifts from wealthy donors47. In the Umayyad world, roundels with a so-called senmurv48, a hybrid mythological creature – half dog, half peacock – which was associated with the Iranian concept of xwarrah or royal glory, adorned the walls in the residences at Hallabat near Amman, Khirbat al-Mafjar near Jericho, and again in Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi, where they were painted either as a continuous pattern or single medallions. This medallion motif with the senmurv was most likely appropriated from the Sasanian Empire, where it is again attested among the textiles depicted in the Great Ayvan at Taq-e Bostan. These roundels are so similar to actual textiles and their Sasanian depictions that it is difficult to imagine a different origin for this design49. In a smaller format, both the medallion and the grid motif often adorned late antique tableware. A tin-plated bronze vase, which was found in or near Bonn in Germany and has been associated with the Merovingians (last third of the sixth century – second quarter of the seventh century) but was most likely imported from the Byzantine-Mediterranean region, is decorated with exactly these two ornaments in three engraved friezes [Fig. 12]50. The central frieze consists of roundels with ducks alternating with acanthus or palmette-like leaves that are very similar to the capital from Iunca, where vegetal motifs are set in between the medallions. The two outer friezes depict a grid pattern with small medallions

39 On silk production and trade in this region, see Angela Sheng, “Innovations in Textile Techniques on China’s Northwest Frontier, 500–700 ad”, Asia Major, xi/2 (1998), pp. 117–160, sp. p. 125. On the origin of the motif, see Mariachiara Gasparini, Transcending Patterns: Silk Road Cultural and Artistic Interactions through Central Asian Textile Images, Honolulu 2020, pp. 26, 45–90. At least some literary sources from both the Byzantine realm and China identify textiles with medallion patterns as Persian; this, of course, says nothing about their provenance: Katharina Meinecke,“Circulating Images: Late Antiquity’s Cross-Cultural Visual Koine”, in A Globalised Visual Culture? Towards a Geography of Late Antique Art, Fabio Guidetti, Katharina Meinecke eds, Oxford/Philadelphia 2020, pp. 321–339, sp. pp. 324–325; Matteo Compareti, “Ancient Iranian Decorative Textiles: New Evidence from Archaeological Investigations and Private Collections”, The Silk Road, xiii (2015), pp. 36–44, sp. p. 41; Sidonius Apollinaris, Epistulae 9.8, cited in John W. Stephenson, “Veiling the Late Roman House”, Textile History, xlv/1 (2014), pp. 3–31, sp. p. 4. 40 On the circulation of this pattern in late antique Afro-Eurasia, see Meinecke, “Circulating Images” (n. 39), pp. 324–328. 41 Ibidem, pp. 325–326. 42 Beijing, The Palace Museum, Song dynasty (960–1279), copy after a painting by Yan Liben (ca 600–673): Mariachiara Gasparini,“Sino-Iranian Textile Patterns in Trans-Himalayan Areas”, The Silk Road, xiv (2016), pp. 84–96, sp. p. 85, fig. 5, https://en.dpm.org.cn/collections/collections/2009-10-16/130. html [last accessed on 22 February 2022]. 43 For some examples of textiles with medallions enclosing birds, see Prudence O. Harper, The Royal Hunter: Art in the Sasanian Empire, New York 1978, pp. 134–135, no. 59; Heleanor B. Feltham, “Lions, Silks and Silver: The Influence of Sasanian Persia”,  Sino-Platonic Papers, ccvi (2010), pp. 1–51, sp. p. 13, fig. 7; Gasparini, “Sino-Iranian Textile Patterns” (n. 42), p. 84, fig. 1; London, Victoria and Albert Museum, acc. no. t.89-1937, https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/o258307/woven-wool/ [last accessed on 22 February 2022]. On the medallion motif on textiles, see Michael W. Meister, “The Pearl Roundel in Chinese Textile Design”, Ars Orientalis, viii (1970), pp. 255–267; Gasparini, “Sino-Iranian Textile Patterns” (n. 42); Eadem, Transcending Patterns (n. 39). It is impossible to rule out the possibility that the medallion patterns with birds developed independently in different places, yet the fact that ducks are so frequent in these depictions make a common model quite likely. 44 Regarding the wall painting from Kizil, see n. 46; regarding the bronze vase from Bonn, see n. 50. 45 Balty, “Les mosaïques de Syrie” (n. 5), pp. 455–456, 467. 46 Meinecke,“Circulating Images” (n. 39), pp. 326–327, pl. 12.1; Sheng, “Innovations in Textile Techniques” (n. 39), p. 148; Gasparini, “Sino-Iranian Textile Patterns” (n. 42), pp. 86–87; Eadem, Transcending Patterns (n. 39), p. 55. 47 Sheng, “Innovations in Textile Techniques” (n. 39), p. 137; Gasparini, Transcending Patterns (n. 39), p. 32. 48 Compareti, “Ancient Iranian Decorative Textiles” (n. 39), pp. 36–38, points out that the depicted creature is not the senmurv of Zoroastrian mythology and should thus rather be called “pseudo-senmurv” or “pseudo-simurgh”. 49 On the Umayyad examples and their origin, see Meinecke, “Umayyad Visual Culture” (n. 13), pp. 108–109. 50 Bonn, lvr-Landesmuseum, inv. 0o.13127: Ulrike Müssemeier, Die merowingerzeitlichen Funde aus der Stadt Bonn und ihrem Umland, Darmstadt 2012, pp. 264, 414, pls 112–113; Kianoosh Rezania, “Das Sasanidische Reich und der Aufstieg des Islam (300–800)”,  in Europa in Bewegung. Lebenswelten im frühen Mittelalter, Maria Bormpoudaki et al. eds, Darmstadt 2018, pp. 48–55, sp. p. 53; Meinecke,“Circulating Images” (n. 39), p. 327.

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12 / Bronze vase with geometrical ornaments, last third of the 6th century – second quarter of the 7th century / lvr-LandesMuseum (Bonn), inv. 0o.13127

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at the crossing points, the lozenges filled with lily-like flowers. As on the capital from Iunca, all three friezes are spoliated extractions from larger patterns which find their closest parallels on textiles. Regarding the grid pattern, a very similar design is attested on a decorative textile band from Egypt (sixth–seventh century) made of wool and linen. The crossing points are accentuated by small circles, and the spaces are filled with birds, stylized flowers, and four-lobed rosettes51. While the stylized flowers are similar to those on the vase from Bonn, the birds are reminiscent of the design on the capital from Iunca. In contrast to classical Hellenistic-Roman bronze vessels whose shape is often emphasized through fluting on the lower part, on the late antique vase from Bonn, the geometrical ornaments cover the surface independently of its shape, which is similar to what we see on the capitals. This decorative principle becomes even more evident on a silver situla (seventh century) from Vrap in modern Albania [Fig. 13]. It was part of a treasure which was probably assembled in the eighth century and has been interpreted as belonging to an Avar chief or – less likely – a silversmith52. The bowl of the bucket is entirely covered with a grid whose partition lines consist of pearls with medallions inserted at the crossing points. The spaces are filled with repetitive figural motifs, different types of birds, vessels, bird cages, flowers, and perhaps fruits arranged in diagonal rows. The motifs in the lozenges are reminiscent of actual textiles with grid designs such as a pair of curtains from Egypt (sixth–seventh century), which display a similar repertoire of motifs – birds, fruits bowls, and rosettes – arranged in horizontal rows inside the lozenges53. In addition, many floor mosaics in late antique churches display similar grid designs with the same repertoire of motifs in the spaces. They too may have been influenced by textile patterns, as proposed by Janine Balty54. The way that the grid pattern covers the situla whole bowl is very similar to the basket capital from St Polyeuctus [Fig. 4]. In a certain sense, it is one of the “exquisite miniatures” described by Jaś Elsner, and the capital from the Church of St Polyeuctus could be seen as its monumental version. The silver bucket does not display the

same virtuoso technical qualities and, above all, lacks the sophisticated undercutting which transfers the two-dimensional design from textiles or mosaics into a three-dimensional one and links the capital to the cage cups. Yet the way the geometrical ornament is distributed on the situla attests to the same altered conception of surfaces as on the capital, albeit in much smaller dimensions. The perception of the artifact’s surface thus creates a link between the different textures of textiles, luxury objects, and architectural decoration – it becomes “intertextural” –, while the capitals, friezes, and ornamental wall panels allude to both textiles and exquisite miniatures. The medallion pattern is not limited to vessels made of precious materials, as is exemplified by a variation of the motif which features boar heads. Actual textiles with this pattern have been found in the cemetery of Astana in modern China (mid-seventh century)55, and an especially 51 New York, Cooper Union Museum, acc. no. 1902-1-142, Gift of John Pierpont Morgan, http://cprhw.tt/o/2AVv4/ [last accessed on 24 February 2022]. 52 New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, acc. no. 17.190.1707, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917, https://www. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/464115 [last accessed on 24 February 2022]. On the treasure, see Éva Garam, “The Vrap Treasure”, in From Attila to Charlemagne: Arts of the Early Medieval Period in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Katharine Reynolds Brown, Dafydd Kidd, Charles T. Little eds, New York 2000, pp. 170–179; Csanád Bálint, “Some Avar and Balkan Connections of the Vrap Treasure”, in ibidem, pp. 180–187. See also the skeptical view on the Avar interpretation by Csanád Bálint, Der Schatz von Nagyszentmiklós. Archäologische Studien zur frühmittelalterlichen Metallgefäßkunst des Orients, Byzanz’ und der Steppe, Budapest 2010, pp. 274–298. Many of the artifacts from the treasure are of provincial Byzantine origin. The situla bears Byzantine stamps which can be dated to the seventh century but differ from the official stamps in use at that time; see ibidem, pp. 274, 276. 53 London, British Museum, inv. ea29771: Egypt: Faith after the Pharaohs, exhibition catalogue (London, British Museum 2015), Cäcilia Fluck, Gisela Helmecke, Elizabeth R. O’Connell eds, London 2015, pp. 106–107; Cäcilia Fluck, “The Use of Textiles in Early Christian Churches – Evidence from Egypt (Fourth to Seventh Centuries)”, in Church Building in Cyprus (Fourth to Seventh Centuries): A Mirror of Intercultural Contacts in the Eastern Mediterranean, Marietta Horster, Doria Nicolaou, Sabine Rogge eds, Münster / New York 2018, pp. 247–266, sp. p. 253, fig. 5. 54 See n. 45. For similar mosaic floors see, e.g., Michele Piccirillo, The Mosaics of Jordan, Amman 1993, pp. 106, 118, 130, 251. 55 Meister,“The Pearl Roundel”(n. 43), p. 264, pl. 10, figs 30–31; Gasparini,“Sino-Iranian Textile Patterns”(n. 42), p. 88; Eadem, Transcending Patterns (n. 39), p. 54. On this motif in general, see Matteo Compareti, “The Wild Boar Head Motif among the Paintings in Cave 420 at Dunhuang”, Journal of the Silk Road Studies, vi (2021), pp. 284–302.

13 / Silver situla from Vrap, 7th century / The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), acc. no. 17.190.1707, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 14 / Silk Textile with embroidered boar’s head roundels, probably from Iran, Afghanistan, or China, 7th century / The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), acc. no. 2004.260

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precious silk fabric with embroidered boar-head roundels of unknown provenance, perhaps from Iran, Afghanistan, or China, is preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (seventh century) [Fig. 14]56. The boar head motif might have originated in the Sasanian realm where the wild boar was associated with the victory god Verethragna57. Textiles decorated with medallions enclosing boar heads were known at the Sasanian court, as they are again among the textile patterns depicted in the Great Ayvan at Taq-e Bostan [Fig. 8]. This textile design also adorns the robe of one of the envoys in the wall paintings of the so-called “Hall of Ambassadors” (mid-seventh century) in Afrasiab, ancient Samarkand in present-day Uzbekistan, which shows foreign embassies to a local governor. Three of the preserved figures who stand out through their opulently patterned robes have been interpreted as Iranians, Sogdians, or envoys from Bactria or Tocharistan58. One of them wears a garment decorated with a continuous medallion pattern with boar heads. The same motif is found on ceramic cups from opposite ends of the Silk Road. One is from Qala Ahangaran in Afghanistan (sixth–tenth century)59, while the other is from the west of the former Roman Empire, where it was found in an Avar grave (seventh–eighth century) in the Székkutas-Kápolnadűlő necropolis in Northern Hungary60. Both vessels, although slightly different in shape, have in common that they have only one handle and that the medallions with the boar heads – adjoining on the Afghan, separated on the Avar piece – occupy the full height of the vessel’s body. Since the dating of the cup from Afghanistan is much debated, it is unclear whether these similarities are merely coincidental or whether the Avar cup copied similar models from Central Asia or vice versa. What seems evident, however, is that there are similarities between these cups and textiles with comparable designs which might have inspired the depictions on the vessels. This selection of examples shows that especially the medallion motif was a truly global one by late antique standards. It is attested from the west of the former Roman Empire, across North Africa, Byzantium, and the Near East, all the way to the eastern end of the Silk Road. Naturally, the

exact link between the examples under discussion, the list of which is by no means exhaustive, is unclear and is not the topic of this paper, but they do reveal the popularity of this pattern in different regions and cultural contexts of the late antique world. This may be due to the fact that the textiles to which this pattern alludes were especially prestigious. Originally, textiles with this design were made of silk, and the Sasanians, together with the Chinese, tightly controlled the silk market until the sixth century. Therefore, silk textiles were not available to everyone, which is why their patterns were imitated in other fabrics, such as wool and linen, around Afro-Eurasia in Late Antiquity61. In addition, silk textiles were often used in diplomatic gift exchanges between late antique empires, making them even more prestigious and associating them with the highest elites of the time62. Textiles, often patterned, were omnipresent in domestic and religious spaces. In late Roman houses, representative rooms were furnished with cushions and carpets, tapestries covered the walls (among other things, to help preserve warmth), textiles were used to subdivide rooms, and curtains closed doorways and the spaces between columns, for example in the peristyle of the house. In the apsidal halls of late Roman villas, curtains framed the enthroned patron during audiences for his clientes, just as they surrounded the Roman emperor’s throne in the palace in Constantinople63. In churches, textiles served as altar cloths and coverings for chalices and other liturgical vessels, cushions were placed on seats and benches, curtains closed the spaces between the columns which separated the aisles from the nave, as well as niches and the entrance to the sanctuary, while hangings covered the walls64. We can imagine that these precious textiles were not exhibited on a daily basis and that not every church or house was equipped with the same amount of wall hangings, curtains, and draperies. This may be the reason why the permanent decoration preserved on the walls inside the Church of the Priest Wa’il (late sixth century) at Umm ar-Rasas in modern Jordan repeats exactly the same grid pattern known from actual textile hangings like the above-mentioned curtains from Egypt65. Small oil-shale fragments and random tesserae

pressed into the plaster covering the walls of the church form a grid pattern with simple motifs inside the lozenges, such as fluted bowls, crosses, spades, and stylized plants66. This decoration may have imitated actual textile wall hangings which were either reserved for special occasions or not available. When grids and medallions were transferred to a new medium, it was probably desirable that the textile patterns remained recognizable as such. This was independent of the material value of the medium which could be wall painting or marble architectural decoration, as well as metal or ceramic vessels. Ellen Swift proposed that the vessels with geometrical ornaments were meant to allude to curtains and drapes with corresponding designs with which they visually interacted in domestic contexts67. In these contexts, both the vessels and the textiles served as a means of expressing the patron’s wealth and status. In religious spaces, patterned curtains, wall hangings, altar cloths, and other textiles interacted with ornamented capitals, friezes, and archivolts, as well as chancel screens and mosaic floors. Together with these permanent elements of interior decoration, textiles and portable artifacts such as vessels of different materials created an excessive, overabundant wealth of ornaments in both domestic and ecclesiastical spaces. These textile connections may provide an explanation not only for the popularity of geometrical ornament in architectural decoration and small-scale objects, but also for the way in which it is spread onto the medium’s surface. The geometrical embellishment either completely conceals what is underneath, providing a “skin” that envelopes both architectural forms and vessels and eliding their functionality, as on the St Polyeuctus capital  [Fig. 4] or the Vrap situla [Fig. 13], or the geometrical patterns seem to have been cut out from a larger piece of fabric, as on the capitals from Isfahan [Fig. 5] and Iunca [Figs 9–10], or the Egyptian friezes and panels. Conclusion The survey of ornamental examples provided in this paper has revealed that surfaces decorated

with geometrical embellishments were a truly global phenomenon of late antique visual culture due to their textile connections. In different media, this “trend” extended from the eastern end of the Silk Road all the way to the northwest of the former Roman Empire. Both the textiles themselves and the small-scale artifacts, such as metal and clay vessels, were easily portable and thus served to further disseminate the ornaments with which they were adorned along 56 New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, acc. no. 2004.260, Purchase, Sir Joseph Hotung Gift, 2004, https:// www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/72582 [last accessed on 12 June 2022]. 57 Compareti,“The Wild Boar Head Motif”(n. 55), pp. 288–289; Gasparini, Transcending Patterns (n. 39), p. 68. 58 Matteo Compareti, “Afrāsiāb ii: Wall Paintings”, in Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. i/6, London 2001, p. 577, http://www. iranicaonline.org/articles/afrasiab-ii-wall-paintings-2 [last accessed on 2 March 2022]; Gasparini, “Sino-Iranian Textile Patterns” (n. 42), pp. 87–88. 59 Hokuto, Hirayama Collection: Compareti, “The Wild Boar Head Motif” (n. 55), pp. 295–296, fig. 14. 60 Katalin B. Nagy, A Székkutas-Kápolnadűlői Avar Temető, Szeged 2003, pp. 26–27, 112, fig. 39, pp. 317–318; Awaren in Europa. Schätze eines asiatischen Reitervolkes 6.– 8. Jh., exhibition catalogue (Frankfurt am Main, Museum für Frühgeschichte; Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum 1985), Walter Meier-Arendt ed., Frankfurt am Main 1985, p. 81, fig. 85. 61 Only under Justinian did Byzantium gain the capacity to produce silk on its own. On silk and its imitations, see Meinecke, “Circulating Images”(n. 39), pp. 331–332; Matthew P. Canepa, The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran, Berkeley / Los Angeles / London 2009, pp. 205–208; Idem, “Textiles and Elite Tastes between the Mediterranean, Iran and Asia at the End of Antiquity”, in Global Textile Encounters, Marie-Louise Nosch, Zhao Feng, Lotika Varadarajan eds, Oxford/Havertown, pa, 2014, pp. 1–14, sp. p. 2; Feltham, “Lions, Silks and Silver” (n. 43), pp. 16–18. 62 Meinecke,“Circulating Images”(n. 39), pp. 331–332. On textile ornaments and elite identity, see also Canepa, “Textiles and Elite Tastes” (n. 61). 63 For an overview of textiles in the domestic context, see Stephenson, “Veiling the Late Roman House” (n. 39), pp. 5–6, 9, 11, 18–21. 64 For an overview of textiles in churches, see Fluck, “The Use of Textiles” (n. 53). 65 See n. 53. 66 Michele Piccirillo, ”La chiesa del Prete Waʾil a Umm al-Rasas – Kastron Mefaa in Giordania”, in Early Christianity in Context: Monuments and Documents, Jerusalem, Frédéric Manns, Eugenio Alliata eds, pp. 313–334, sp. pp. 316–318, figs 9, 12; Basema Hamarneh,“The Visual Dimension of Sacred Space: Wall Mosaics in the Byzantine Churches of Jordan: A Reassesment”, in xii Colloquio AIEMA (Venezia, 11–15 settembre 2012), Atti, Giordana Trovabene ed., Verona 2015, pp. 239–248, sp. p. 5, fig. 7, p. 7. 67 Ellen Swift, “Decorated Vessels: The Function of Decoration in Late Antiquity”,  in Objects in Context, Objects in Use: Material Spatiality in Late Antiquity, Luke Lavan, Ellen Swift, Toon Putzeys eds, Leiden/Boston 2007, pp. 385–409, sp. pp. 403, 405.

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the trade and travel routes across Afro-Eurasia. In the examples discussed above, three intertwined developments in the use of geometrical decoration become evident. First, ornaments were spoliated from larger patterns and contexts, juxtaposed, and reassembled in architectural settings where they created an impression of ornamental abundance. Second, ornaments were no longer bound by previously functional architectural principles of Greco-Roman practice, as they became increasingly independent of the medium and detached from architectonic characteristics; they were, so to say, de-architecturalized. This reveals an altered conception of surfaces which was not limited to architectural decoration but can be found with equal richness in small-scale luxury artifacts. The patterns’ new distribution also contributed to the impression of ornamental abundance, as geometrical patterns could now be applied to surfaces in an extent which hardly seemed possible before. Last but not least, the links between some of these ornaments, such as grids and especially medallion patterns and textiles, are so close that it is hard not to assume their interdependence. These textile models possibly influenced the new distribution of ornament, too. Covering the surface with ornament was like putting up a textile wall-hanging, veiling a vessel or capital with a piece of cloth – a textile “skin” –, or covering the floor with a patchwork quilt. This myriad of geometrical patterns competing in domestic and religious spaces contributed to and is yet another manifestation of the late antique aesthetic ideal of varietas, present in both literary and visual spoliation. Visual similarities linking fabrics, permanent decoration, and portable objects within a given context might have been set up by those who made and decorated the space, but, in a final step, had to be created by the viewer.

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summary Ornamentální výzdoba „Globální trend“ v pozdně antické Afro-Eurasii

Používání geometrických ornamentů k výzdobě architektury a přenosných artefaktů se rozšířilo v období tzv. dlouhé pozdní antiky (ca 300–800 n. l.). Autorka článku se na základě několika případových studií z různých kontextů a regionů Afro-Eurasie zabývá třemi vývojovými trendy, které odhalují změnu v pojetí a distribuci výzdoby v tomto období. V první části zkoumá ornament jako spolium, což ilustruje na architektonické výzdobě z pozdně antického Egypta, štukových nástěnných panelech z umajjovské Sýrie a mozaikových podlahách z Itálie a Libanonu, kde se na jednotlivých panelech na podlahách, stěnách i ve výzdobě interiérů mísí řada geometrických ozdob. Tyto ornamenty pocházejí z bohatého repertoáru dostupných vzorů, přičemž byly patrně převzaty z větších souvislých ornamentálních celků. V tomto smyslu se tedy jedná o spolia odpovídající pozdně antickému pojetí varietas i principům tzv. kumulativní estetiky (Jaś Elsner), což jsou koncepty charakteristické jak pro vizuální, tak i literární kulturu daného období. V druhé části autorka ukazuje, jak se geometrický ornament stával stále více nezávislým na svém médiu, a tedy i funkčních principech klasické řecko-římské architektonické výzdoby. Tento vývoj dokládají tři vybrané hlavice (jedna z římského, druhá z byzantského a třetí ze sásánovského prostředí), které mají tvar koše s mřížkovým dekorem. Zejména hlavice z chrámu sv. Polyeukta ukazuje, jak geometrická výzdoba umožnila splynutí povrchu s architektonickou strukturou.

V třetí a poslední části autorka sleduje možné textilní předlohy geometrických vzorů na architektonických ornamentech, interiérové výzdobě (např. na nástěnných malbách nebo mozaikách) a na kovových a keramických nádobách. Mřížkové a medailonové vzory byly zvláště časté na vzácných textiliích z oblasti říše Sásánovců a Střední Asie, které kolovaly v nejvyšších kruzích obyvatel pozdně antické Afro-Eurasie. Tyto textilní vzory jsou pravděpodobnými modely především pro byzantské nárožní hlavice z města Younga/Iunca v dnešním Tunisu, nástěnné malby z umajjovských rezidencí a ornamenty v buddhistické jeskyni v Kizilu, stejně jako pro některé z nádob nalezených v merovejském, avarském či středoasijském prostředí. Inspirace těchto dekorací textilními vzory by pak mohla vysvětlovat nejen oblibu geometrického ornamentu v architektuře i na drobných předmětech, ale také způsob, jakým se ornament rozprostírá na povrchu média, ať už jako „kůže“, která obepíná architektonické formy i nádoby bez ohledu na jejich funkci, nebo jako vzor, který jako by byl vystřižen z většího celku. Vzhledem k tomu, že v architektonických prostorách docházelo k neustálé interakci mezi trvalou výzdobou interiérů a mobilním vybavením, jako byly nádoby či textilie, nové rozmístění vzorů ještě umocňovalo dojem ornamentální hojnosti. V pozdní antice tak byly geometrické vzory aplikovány na povrchy v míře, která se dříve zdála být jen stěží možná.

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chronicles & debates

chronicles & debates

Two Byzantine Capitals “with Pine Cones at Their Corners” and Their Monograms Technical, Stylistic, and Historical Observations Marco Aimone

Abstract – Two Byzantine Capitals “with Pine Cones at Their Corners” and Their Monograms. Technical, Stylistic, and Historical Observations – The “basket” capital has been recognized as one of the most brilliant innovations of Byzantine architecture in the first half of the sixth century. Its numerous variations, all developed during the reigns of the emperors Justin i (518–527) and Justinian i (527–565), prove the high technical and artistic level achieved by the workshops of sculptors active in Constantinople in those decades. New data for the knowledge of the basket capitals “with pine cones at their corners” are offered by the study of two specimens in an English private collection. In particular, metrological analysis of these capitals and close examination of their surfaces made it possible to reconstruct all the working stages, from the roughing of the blocks (of Proconnesian marble) to the finishing of details. In addition, the marks left by the tools provided essential clues to identify various aspects of the organization of work on the construction site, where architectural elements of this type were finished and installed. Finally, the presence of a “cruciform” monogram in Greek letters engraved on the main face of the two capitals helps to establish their chronology and to identify the possible patron. The nature of the monogram, without a ruler’s name but mentioning the name of a likely member of the court, suggests specific historical circumstances that resulted in the wide adoption of this type of monogram as a decorative element in Byzantine architectural sculpture of the sixth century. Keywords – basket capitals, Byzantine sculpture, carving techniques, Constantinople’s workshops, island of Marmara, Justinian i, monogram, Proconnesian marble, spolia Marco Aimone Durham University 120 [email protected]

The “basket”capital was a crucial innovation in Byzantine architecture during the early sixth century. Standing out from the more complex forms of the traditional Greek and Roman orders – Ionic, Doric, Corinthian, and composite, this type of capital is composed of three elements, which are geometrically extremely simple: a narrow cylindrical necking (hypotrachelium), an abacus with a square upper face, and a central body in the shape of an upturned pyramid (kalathos). This transition from a circular form at the bottom to a square at the top offers a practical solution to the problem of the relationship between the shaft of the column (circular in section) and the springing of the arch (quadrangular in section), at the same time eliminating those decorative elements – volutes, flowers, and leaves – that serve no structural purpose and are easily damaged during the construction process1. The adoption of the basket capital represented the culmination of various attempts in late Roman architecture of the fourth and fifth centuries to improve the stability of colonnades that no longer supported solely architraves but tiers of arches, or even vaulted roofs. Other approaches to resolving this problem attempted in various parts of the Mediterranean during Late Antiquity included plain capitals in the shape of truncated inverted pyramids, dosserets inserted above Corinthian capitals, and so-called “Ionic impost capitals”2. The first known examples of basket capitals used in a datable building come from the Church of St Polyeuctus in Constantinople. This imposing building – a new “Temple of Solomon” – was built between 510 and 521 at her own expense

by the noblewoman Anicia Juliana (463–528), the last descendant of the Theodosian dynasty, to replace an earlier church3. The basilica had fallen into ruin by the eleventh century and from then onwards was systematically looted for its materials. Its spectacular decorations in Prokonnesian marble were the work of highly skilled sculptors and featured a surprisingly innovative repertoire of decorative motifs. The direct influence of Sasanian Persia has been recognized in these decorative schemes, but some scholars have gone further, suggesting that the basket form of the capitals is itself a direct imitation of Persian models4. According to this view, the decision to introduce this specific typology of capital would have been taken by the architect (who would have been extremely familiar with Persian as well as Byzantine architecture) to address the complex systems of arches and brick vaults roofing over the naves5. Other scholars have proposed an earlier chronology for several basket capitals that still survive in Istanbul, although divorced from their original context, dating the introduction of this typology to the last decades of the fifth century6. The question continues to be debated, but what seems to be clear is that the basket capital was hugely popular in Byzantine architecture, not least in Justinian’s Hagia Sophia, built between 532 and 537 with the specific intention, among others, of surpassing the size and magnificence of Anicia Juliana’s church7. Structurally, the capitals of St Polyeuctus and Hagia Sophia are composed of deceptively simple geometric forms – their richness is expressed in the decoration carved à jour, a technique that helps to create a strong chiaroscuro contrast between the highest and lowest relief. However, in Byzantium in the first half of the sixth century, basket capitals with a more complex structure were also being carved: “polylobate” capitals, decorated with geometric or vegetal motifs, were used for the first time in the Church of Sts Sergius and Bacchus, commissioned by Justinian i (527–565) between 527 and 5328. There are several variants of this type, such as capitals “with acanthus masks” and 1

Rudolf Kautzsch, Kapitellenstudien, Berlin/Leipzig 1936, pp. 182–210; William E. Betsch, The History, Production,

and Distribution of the Late-Antique Capital in Constantinople, PhD thesis (University of Pennsylvania, supervisor: Cecil L. Striker), Philadelphia 1977, pp. 243–248; Christine Strube, Polyeuktoskirche und Hagia Sophia. Umbildung und Auflösung antiker Formen, Entstehen des Kamferkapitells, Munich 1984, pp. 78–90, 102–110; Thomas Zollt, Kapitellplastik Konstantinopels vom 4. bis 6. Jahrhundert n. Chr., Bonn 1994, pp. 81–95; Simone Kraft, Das Ende der klassischen Formensprache: Neue Kapitellformen (Entwicklungen im 5./6. Jahrhundert), Heidelberg 2004, pp. 15–18; Joachim Kramer, Justinianische Kämpferkapitelle, Wiesbaden 2006; Claudia Barsanti, Andrea Paribeni, “La scultura in funzione architettonica a Costantinopoli tra v e vi secolo: aspetti tecnici, tipologici e stilistici”, Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia, xxx (2018), pp. 23–72; Philipp Niewöhner, Byzantine Ornaments in Stone: Architectural Sculpture and Liturgical Furnishings, Berlin/Boston 2021, pp. 88–117. 2 With reference to Ionic capitals described as “impost”capitals: Kraft, Das Ende der klassischen Formensprache (n. 1), pp. 18–21; Zollt, Kapitellplastik Konstantinopels (n. 1), pp. 242–337. With reference to the addition of an upturned dosseret shaped like a truncated pyramid above the capital itself: Eugenio Russo, “Il pulvino sopra il capitello a cesto”, Bizantinistica, vii (2005), pp. 23–46; Idem, “Ancora il pulvino sopra il capitello a cesto”, Bizantinistica, ix (2007), pp. 15–40. 3 For general information about the church, see Martin Harrison, A Temple for Byzantium: The Discovery and Excavation of Anicia Juliana’s Palace-Church in Istanbul, London 1989. Regarding the architectural sculptures, see Cyril Mango, Ihor Ševčenko, “Remains of the Church of St. Polyeuktos at Constantinople”, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, xv (1961), pp. 243–247; Friedrich W. Deichmann, “I pilastri acritani”,  Rendiconti della Pontificia Accademia di Archeologia, l (1977–1978), pp. 75–89; Strube, Polyeuktoskirche und Hagia Sophia (n. 1), pp. 61–80; Niewöhner, Byzantine Ornaments in Stone (n. 1), pp. 88–92; Fabian Stroth, Monogrammkapitelle. Die justinianische Bauskulptur Konstantinopels als Textträger, Wiesbaden 2021, pp. 95–114. For more information on the patron, see Carmelo Capizzi, Anicia Giuliana. La committente, Milan 1997. 4 André Grabar, “Le rayonnement de l’art sassanide dans le monde chrétien”, in La Persia nel Medioevo. Quaderni dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, clx (1971), pp. 679–707; Eugenio Russo, “La scultura di S. Polieucto e la presenza della Persia nella cultura artistica di Costantinopoli nel vi secolo”, in La Persia e Bisanzio, Convegno internazionale (Roma, 14–18 ottobre 2002), Antonio Carile ed., Rome 2004, pp. 737–826. 5 This is the view taken by Russo, “La scultura di S. Polieucto” (n. 4), pp. 740–778. 6 The question has most recently been discussed ibidem, pp. 792–817. 7 Strube, Polyeuktoskirche und Hagia Sophia (n. 1), pp. 81–101; Eugenio Russo, “Introduzione ai capitelli di S. Sofia di Costantinopoli”, Rivista dell’Istituto Nazionale d’Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte, xxxv (2012), pp. 95–172; Idem, “Sulla lavorazione dei capitelli di S. Sofia di Costantinopoli”, Bizantinistica, xviii (2017), pp. 45–114; Niewöhner, Byzantine Ornaments in Stone (n. 1), pp. 98–103. 8 For more information on capitals “with polylobate baskets”, cf. Kramer, Justinianische Kämpferkapitelle (n. 1); Eugenio Russo, “La vera origine del capitello a cesto polilobato”, Bizantinistica, viii (2006), pp. 61–84; Niewöhner, Byzantine Ornaments in Stone (n. 1), pp. 88–117; Stroth, Monogrammkapitelle (n. 3), pp. 65–94. For the Church of Sts Sergius and Bacchus, cf. most recently Jonathan Bardill, “The Date, Dedication and Design of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus in Constantinople”, Journal of Late Antiquity, x/1 (2017), pp. 62–130 (including earlier bibliography).

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“with garlands at their corners”,  although examples only survive outside of their original context. Similar to these are basket capitals “with pine cones at their corners”, many examples of which survive in various sites in the Mediterranean and in European museum collections9. Two of them, a pair distinguished by high stylistic quality and a fair condition of preservation, belong to the Wyvern Collection in the United Kingdom (inv. 1990 a–b). These have a monogram contained in a medallion on what must have been the primary face [Figs 1–2]: this is a rare feature among the other known examples10. The possibility of examining these two capitals at close quarters, thanks to the owner’s thoughtful generosity, has facilitated the collection of new data, which will help to clarify some questions related to the way they were carved, as well as to their historical context. Before presenting these new data, it may be useful to summarize the general characteristics of this type, as well as the associated problems of classification and dating. Capitals “with pine cones at their corners”: typology and chronology

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1a–c /Capital a, three faces visible / Wyvern Collection (uk)

In 1997, the archaeologist Kirsten Krumeich documented thirty examples of capitals “with pine cones at their corners”: two in Istanbul, one on the island of Burgazada (originally Antigoni, Sea of Marmara), two in Thessaloniki, one on the island of Chios, three in Cairo, six in Kairouan, twelve in Venice (Basilica of San Marco), and three in Berlin (Bode Museum, originally from Venice and acquired on the antiquities market in 1903 and 1992)11. Another six examples may be added to this list: three that have been reused in the Basilica of St Nicholas in Bari12, one reused in the Cappella Palatina of the Palazzo Reale in Palermo13, one in a private collection in Venice14, and one in Rhodes, in the Palace of the Grand Master15. These thirty-six capitals are very similar in terms of their decorative motifs: the center of each of the four faces is dominated by a large vine leaf, placed vertically and flanked by two s-shaped palm leaves; at the corners, there are four protruding and rounded pine cones, supported on smooth and slender stalks; the faces of the abacus

are covered with a row of seven-lobed palmettes; and laurel wreaths with pointed leaves facing in alternate directions – or (in a smaller number of examples) geometric rope motifs – run around the faces of the necking. The relationship between the lower, circular part of the capital and the upper, square part is visibly emphasized by the position of the decorative motifs: the pine cones on their stalks provide a link between four oval gems carved on the necking, separating the sections of the laurel wreath and the four palmettes at the corners of the abacus. The known examples can be subdivided into nine groups, based on the secondary details of the decoration16. Type 1: the vine leaves and the stalks of the pine cones are joined together by narrow curving bands; the only surviving example (Venice, Basilica of San Marco [Fig. 3]), also features a monogram on one face of the abacus, centrally placed within a medallion. Type 2: identical to the previous type but without the monogram (two examples: Cairo, Mosque of Ahmad ibn Tulun, and Bari, Basilica of St Nicholas). Type 3: identical to the preceding examples, except that the necking is undecorated (two examples in Thessaloniki: Museum of Byzantine Culture and Rotunda of St George). 9

10

11 12 13

14 15 16

Georgios A. Sotiriou, “Παλαιοχριστιανικά και Βυζαντινά κιονόκρανα μετά φύλλων αμπέλου” [Old Christian and Byzantine Capitals of Vine Leaves], Εταιρεία Βυζαντινών Σπουδών, xi (1935), pp. 449–457; Kirsten Krumeich,“Spätantike Kämpferkapitelle mit Weinblatt- und Pinienzapfen-Dekor”, Istanbuler Mitteilungen, xlvii (1997), pp. 277–314; Niewöhner, Byzantine Ornaments in Stone (n. 1), pp. 110–112. The present positioning of the capitals only allows them to be photographed on three sides. It has nevertheless been possible to examine the fourth side in both cases in order to complete the study of their surfaces. Krumeich, “Spätantike Kämpferkapitelle” (n. 9). Gioia Bertelli, “Sul reimpiego di elementi architettonici bizantini a Bari”, Vetera Christianorum, xxiv (1987), pp. 375–397, sp. pp. 382–383. Patrizio Pensabene, “Marmi architettonici della Cappella Palatina tra reimpiego e recupero dell’antico”,  in La Cappella Palatina a Palermo / The Cappella Palatina in Palermo, Beat Brenk ed., Modena 2010, pp. 137–171, sp. pp. 137–139. Sergio Bettini, La scultura bizantina, vol. i, Florence 1944, pp. 38–39. The current whereabouts of the capital is unknown. Diana Zafiropoulou, Rhodes from the 4th c. ad to Its Capture by the Ottoman Turks (1522): Palace of the Grand Master, Athens 2005, no. 8/c. Cf. Krumeich, “Spätantike Kämpferkapitelle” (n. 9), pp. 306–314. The typological classification proposed here is slightly different from that proposed by Krumeich. Cf. also Corpus der Kapitelle der Kirche von San Marco in Venedig, Friedrich W. Deichmann ed., Wiesbaden 1981.

2a–c /Capital b, three faces visible / Wyvern Collection (uk)

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Type 4: the necking is decorated with a stylized laurel wreath with oval gems (as in the following types 5–7), but the palmettes on the abacus are of two alternating shapes (two examples: Venice, San Marco). Types 5–6: in type 5, each face of the abacus is decorated with eight identical palmettes (four examples: Venice, San Marco [Fig. 4]), while in type 6, there are only six palmettes on each face of the abacus (one example in Berlin: Bode Museum; three in Venice: two in San Marco [Fig. 5] and one in a private collection; two in Kairouan: Great Mosque). Type 7: similar to types 5 and 6 (with six or eight palmettes on the faces of the abacus) but with a proportional difference between the vine leaves and the adjacent s-shaped leaves (one example in Berlin: Bode Museum; two in Venice: San Marco; one in Palermo: Cappella Palatina; two in Istanbul: Archaeological Museum and the garden of Hagia Sophia; one on the island of Burgazada: Monastery of the Metamorphosis; one on the island of Chios; one in Cairo: Mosque of Ahmad ibn Tulun; four in Kairouan: Great Mosque and city walls). Type 8: also similar to types 5–7, but the necking has rope decoration in slanting bands (one example in Venice: San Marco; one in Cairo: Museum of Islamic Art). Type 9: identical to type 6, but the necking is decorated with a motif of quadrangular bars (one example in Berlin: Bode

Museum). It is impossible to allocate the remaining capitals – the two in the Basilica of St Nicholas in Bari and the one in Rhodes – to one of these groups because they are too badly damaged. The variations noted above and the locations of these capitals, which are all made from Prokonnesian marble (quarried on the island of Marmara, originally called Prokonnesos), suggest that they were carved in different workshops in Constantinople and were intended for buildings in the capital or for export to other Mediterranean centers in Egypt, Africa Proconsularis, and southern Italy17. As for the examples that survive in Venice (or are known to have been in the city), these must have formed part of the booty brought there after the Fourth Crusade (1204), which included a formidable quantity of architectural spoils destined for the beautification of Venice’s churches, not least San Marco, and for the most sumptuous homes of the mercantile aristocracy18. The elements that the surviving examples have in common are so significant as to suggest that the various sculptors were inspired by a single model, evidently much prized in Constantinople. It has been proposed that this model was made during the reign of Emperor Justin i (518–527), as his monogram appears on the abacus of the Type 1 capital, now in San Marco [Fig. 3]19; it is a “box-type monogram” (monogramme carré in French, Kastenmonogramm in German), comparable to contemporary stamps impressed by the imperial authorities into silver objects, as well as with architectural elements that still survive in Istanbul20. The reign of Justin i covers the last years of the construction of St Polyeuctus; it is likely that this building site would have provided models that were rapidly accepted and developed by the imperial capital’s workshops and used in buildings erected in the subsequent decades. Archaeological investigations carried out, from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, on the site of the marble quarries on the island of Marmara, which supplied the blocks that would be carved into commissioned architectural elements, have shown that the activity petered out in the second half of the sixth century, as the era of flourishing construction initiated by Justinian came to an end; at that time, the large scale production of basket capitals, including those “with pine

cones at their corners” must also have ceased21. They would only become popular again many centuries later, in the Middle Byzantine period, by when the à jour technique would have been abandoned and replaced with more superficial and less complex surface carving22. 17 Regarding the export of sculpted (or partly sculpted) architectural elements in Prokonnesian marble during the sixth century, see the recent contribution by Elena Flavia Castagnino Berlinghieri, Andrea Paribeni,“Marble Production and Marble Trade along the Mediterranean Coast in Early Byzantine Age (5th–6th Centuries): Data from Quarries, Shipwrecks and Monuments”,  in soma 2011, Proceedings of the 15th Symposium on Mediterranean Archaeology (University of Catania, 3–5 March 2011), vol. ii, Pietro Maria Militello, Hakan Öniz eds, Oxford 2015, pp. 1033–1041 (including earlier bibliography). 18 Lucilla De Lachenal, Spolia. Uso e reimpiego dell’antico dal iii al xiv secolo, Milan 1995, pp. 313–322; Irene Favaretto et al., Marmi della Basilica di San Marco. Capitelli, plutei, rivestimenti, arredi, Milan 2000; Michael Greenhalgh, Marble Past, Monumental Present: Building with Antiquities in the Mediaeval Mediterranean, Leiden/Boston 2009, pp. 421–439; Lorenzo Lazzarini, “Il reimpiego del marmo proconnesio a Venezia”,  in Pietre di Venezia. Spolia in se spolia in re, Atti del Convegno internazionale (Venezia, 17–18 ottobre 2013), Monica Centanni, Luigi Sperti eds, Rome 2015, pp. 135–157. 19 Deichmann, Corpus der Kapitelle (n. 16), no. 473, where the monogram is incorrectly attributed to Justinian. 20 This date is proposed by Zollt, Kapitellplastik Konstantinopels (n. 1), p. 27, n. 39; and Krumeich, “Spätantike Kämpferkapitelle” (n. 9), pp. 284–285; a different view is taken by Russo, “La scultura di S. Polieucto” (n. 4), pp. 743–746 (with an extensive bibliography in n. 30), who attributes the monogram to Justin ii (565–578). Regarding the form of the monogram, see Victor Gardthausen, Das alte Monogramm, Stuttgart 1924, pp. 123–131; Erica Cruikshank Dodd, Byzantine Silver Stamps, Washington, dc, 1961, pp. 5–18; Walter O. Fink, Das byzantinische Monogramm. PhD thesis (University of Vienna, supervisor: Herbert Hunger), Vienna 1971, pp. 86–91; Werner Seibt, “The Use of Monograms on Byzantine Seals in the Early Middle-Ages (6th to 9th Centuries)”, Parekbolai, vi (2016), pp. 1–14. Cf. also Joachim Kramer, “Kämpferkapitelle mit den Monogrammen Kaisers Justinus ii”, in Festschrift für Klaus Wessel zum 70. Geburtstag, Marcell Restle ed., Munich 1988, pp. 175–190. 21 Nuşın Asgari,“Objets de marbre finis, semi-finis et inachevés du Proconnèse”,  in Pierre éternelle du Nil au Rhin. Carrieres et prefabrication, Marc Waelkens ed., Brussels 1990, pp. 106–126; Nuşın Asgari, “The Proconnesian Production of Architectural Elements in Late Antiquity, Based on Evidence from the Marble Quarries”,  in Constantinople and Its Hinterland, Papers from the Twenty-Seventh Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies (Oxford, April 1993), Cyril Mango, Gilbert Dagron eds, Aldershot 1995, pp. 263–288; Claudia Barsanti, Alessandra Guiglia, Andrea Paribeni, “Le officine dell’imperatore: marmora byzantina”, in Medioevo: le officine, Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi (Parma, 22–27 settembre 2009), Arturo C. Quintavalle ed., Milan 2010, pp. 118–125; Barsanti/Paribeni, “La scultura in funzione architettonica” (n. 1), pp. 45–52. For capitals specifically, see also Betsch, The History, Production, and Distribution (n. 1), pp. 249–289; Niewöhner, Byzantine Ornaments in Stone (n. 1), pp. 166–172. 22 Martin Dennert, Mittelbyzantinische Kapitelle. Studien zu Typologie und Chronologie, Bonn 1977, pp. 93–99, 202–204.

chronicles & debates

3 / Capital “with pine cones at the corners”, type 1, with Emperor Justin’s monogram, Basilica of San Marco, façade, Venice 4 / Capital “with pine cones at the corners”, type 5, Basilica of San Marco, façade, Venice 5 /Capital “with pine cones at the corners”, type 6, Basilica of San Marco, façade, Venice

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of the necking have a vertical raised ridge, which is absent in capital b. Many marks left by tools can still be seen on the surfaces of both capitals, and these are useful in helping to reconstruct the final stages of the carving process. Even the dimensions – measured at first hand – seem to relate to the procedure adopted for sculpting the two capitals. These aspects deserve to be examined in more detail. From a block of stone to a finished capital: the stages of the carving process

6 / Geometric scheme used to carve capital a in the Wyvern Collection, showing the shape of the rectangular block of marble, the outlines of the three principal elements (abacus, basket, and necking), and the grid used to carve the various decorative elements (author’s diagram)

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Unlike the basket capitals of St Polyeuctus, in the examples “with pine cones at their corners”(and in polylobate capitals in general), the simple linearity of the central body is modified with the addition of four protruding elements at the corners, in a sort of return to the more structured lines of Ionic, Corinthian, and composite capitals. Even the large capitals in the two orders of columns in Hagia Sophia’s central nave had two volutes added between the basket and the abacus, a further variation on the basket type developed in that climate of eager experimentation that permeated the art of the Byzantine capital in the first half of the sixth century. In addition, both geometric and vegetal motifs were chosen for the capitals of St Polyeuctus and Hagia Sophia, whereas the capitals “with pine cones at their corners” almost exclusively feature vegetal decorative motifs: their broad surfaces are enlivened with slender lines in extremely low relief, tracing the veins of the leaves, and with deep grooves in the rounded bodies of the pine cones, creating an overall effect that is somewhat different to the capitals in the buildings commissioned by Anicia Juliana and Justinian23. The capitals in the Wyvern Collection are related to other examples “with pine cones at their corners”, most closely to types 5 and 6. They are identical to each other except for two details: in capital a, there are six palmettes on each face of the abacus, while in capital b, there are eight of them; moreover, in capital a, the four oval gems

Capital a is 33.2 cm high (abacus 12.5 cm, basket 13.7 cm, and necking 7 cm); the face of the abacus measures 47.6 cm, the diameter of the necking 24 cm. Capital b is 31.8 cm high (abacus 12.8 cm, basket 12.3 cm, and necking 6.7 cm); the face of the abacus measures 48.8 cm, the diameter of the necking 23.8 cm. Allowing for minor differences, the ratio between the overall height and the width of the upper side is 1: 1.5, while the ratio between the face of the abacus and the diameter of the necking is 2:1. The heights of the abacus, the basket, and the necking observe a ratio of 5 to 8 to 3; each face of the abacus is divided into eight (capital a) or ten (capital b) vertical sections of identical width, occupied by the palmettes. Finally, the height of the pine cones (calculated on the vertical axis) equates to 4/16 of the overall height, and the height of the stalks beneath them to 3/16 [Fig. 6]. Clearly, the different sections of these capitals and the spaces intended for decorative apparatus were subdivided according to a simple but precise geometric scheme. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that the total height corresponds very closely to the “Byzantine foot” measuring 31.5 cm. In the Justinianic era, this was used in Constantinople and other centers of the Empire for the design of buildings; the capitals’ other important measurements are derived from its multiples and submultiples24. Allowing for a minimal (and inevitable) deviation from the theoretical measurement, each rectangular face of the quarry block, cut in the shape of a parallelepiped, must have measured 1 × 1.5 Byzantine foot (1 ποῦς × 1 πῆχυς: 31.5 cm × 47.23 cm); the height of the abacus was equivalent to 5/16 of a foot (5 δάκτυλοι or 1/2 λικάς: 9.84 cm),

the height of the basket to 1/2 of a foot (1 δικάς: 15.75 cm), and the height of the necking to 3/16 of a foot (3 δάκτυλοι, equivalent to 1½ κόνδυλοι, or to 1 ἀντίχειρ: 5.90 cm); the diameter of the necking was equal to 3/4 of a foot (1/2 πῆχυς: 23.62 cm); finally, the height of the pine cone (measured on the vertical axis) equated to 1/4 of a foot (1 παλαιστή: 7.87 cm), and its stalk to 3/16 of a foot (1 ἀντίχειρ: 5.90 cm). Measuring the blocks and dividing up their surfaces would have needed nothing more than a measuring rod, a set square, and a plumb line – the basic tools used on the construction sites of antiquity25. An indirect confirmation of the generalized use of linear measurements in the marble carving process can be found in Diocletian’s Edictum de pretiis (which appeared in 301), where this system of measurement was adopted for establishing the price of the stone26. Just as for the carving of the various decorative elements, the scheme described above would also have been used to guide the roughing-out stages. In this context, the Saraylar site, near the quarries on the island of Marmara, has unearthed many examples of unfinished Corinthian and Ionic impost, basket, and polylobate basket capitals in various stages of completion, enabling identification of the method chosen for each type27. The capitals were carved upside down in relation to their final position. The starting point was a parallelepiped, whose surface had lines lightly incised or drawn in charcoal to guide the roughing-out stage. First the necking would be carved out by removing the stone all around it; then the section corresponding to the basket would be shaped: with “stepped gradations” in the case of Corinthian and polylobate capitals, in order to preserve the areas where protruding elements would be carved, or in a basket shape with smooth surfaces in the case of simple basket capitals. The capital would then be shaped again, according to its typology, in order to give form to the various decorative elements, whose details would be refined during the final stage. This process was repeated time and again: to this end, the use of geometric schemes, simple proportional ratios, and – probably – measurements in round figures must have been of considerable help. In the specific case of the basket “with pine cones at their corners”, the geometric scheme

identified in the Wyvern Collection capitals, as well as the dimensions of the individual parts, suggest working methods that would have been similar, but not identical, to those used for capitals with polylobate baskets. The design was drawn on the sides and top face of the quarry block to show the outlines of the abacus, the basket, and the necking [Fig. 7a]; it was thus possible to “liberate” the cylinder of the necking [Fig. 7b] and then to subdivide the section corresponding to the basket in two stepped gradations, measuring the height of the pine cones and their stalks, respectively [Fig. 7c], while the area corresponding to the abacus retained its original dimensions. At this point, the two “steps” between the abacus and the necking were worked further to create the shape of the pine cones, their stalks, and the four faces of the basket [Fig. 7d]. Now the surfaces were ready for 23 Krumeich,“Spätantike Kämpferkapitelle”(n. 9), pp. 285–289. 24 Paul A. Underwood, “Some Principles of Measure in the Architecture of the Period of Justinian”, Cahiers archéologiques, iii (1948), pp. 64–74; Eric Schilbach, Byzantinische Metrologie, Munich 1970, pp. 16–36. 25 Jean-Pierre Adam, La construction romaine. Matériaux et techniques, Paris 1984, pp. 41–44. 26 Simon Corcoran, Janet DeLaine, “The Unit Measurement of Marble in Diocletian’s Prices Edict”, Journal of Roman Archaeology, vii (1994), pp. 263–273. 27 Asgari, “Objets de marbre” (n. 21). See also Nuşın Asgari, “The Stages of Workmanship of the Corinthian Capital in Proconnesus and Its Export Form”, in Classical Marble: Geochemistry, Technology, Trade, Norman Herz, Marc Waelkens eds, Dordrecht 1988, pp. 115–125; Russo, “La vera origine” (n. 8), pp. 65–68.

7a–d/  Reconstruction of the four stages of carving a capital “with pine cones at the corners” (author’s diagram)

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8 a–b /  Two details of capital a, showing the holes left by the drill during the incision of the outlines of the decorative elements on the abacus and the basket / Wyvern Collection (uk)

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the carving of the decorative motifs, the final stage of the process, whose details can be reconstructed thanks to marks left by the tools28. The monograms, the vine leaves, the s-shaped leaves on the baskets, and the palmettes on the abaci of the Wyvern capitals have flattened surfaces, marked (in the case of the vegetal motifs) with a rib in very low relief that describes the internal veins, while the pine cones at the corners and the laurel wreaths on the necking have more volume. However, the common stylistic keynote is the strong chiaroscuro effect, achieved by significantly reducing the height of the background surface or by creating deep recesses that remain in shadow, as opposed to the ornamental motifs on the front surface which the light strikes directly. Circular holes are visible on the background surfaces although some care has been taken to smooth them down; these were left by the point of a bow drill which went too deep [Fig. 8a]. Similar holes can be seen along the edges of the monograms, the vegetal motifs, and the scales of the pine cones; these were not completely eradicated in the finishing process since the contours were too rounded to be modified [Fig. 8b]. From this we may draw the conclusion that the profiles of the

decorative motifs were not simply drawn onto the surfaces of the roughed-out capital but shaped with dense rows of drilled incisions. It was only after this operation that the surfaces surrounding the decorative elements were reduced in height by means of chisels with different sized blades; the marks left by these tools – both pointed and flat chisels used in conjunction – can still be seen on the various surfaces [Fig. 9]. In the next stage, the depth of the stone segments behind the decorative motifs was worked with a chisel on the diagonal line or pierced with holes made directly into the stone [Fig. 10]; the aim was to accentuate the illusion of the vegetal elements weaving all around the body of the capital but appearing detached from it29. The final phase of the work consisted of carving the most delicate details, while a vigorous polishing gave the surfaces the smooth appearance that they still have to this day. The marks left by tools are of an identical type on both the Wyvern capitals, but a careful examination has revealed some differences in the way the tools were used. On capital a, the holes left by the drill always lean upwards (with the capital in its current position), while on capital b, they are always at right angles to the surface.

Additionally, on capital a, the marks left by a flat chisel, used to level out the background surface, are less close-packed than those visible on capital  b. This suggests that the two capitals were carved by different hands even though they used the same tools. The different number of palmettes on the abaci (six per side on capital a, eight per side on capital b) should also be considered; all the other details are identical. It is probable that two different sculptors had a model available to them, which they were required to follow closely but which included only the outlines of the decorative elements to be sculpted in the different sections without supplying an overall illustration. This would explain a qualified freedom in the execution, which seems to be confirmed by the different number of palmettes. The monograms: from box-type to cruciform The two monograms replacing vine leaves on what must have been the primary faces of the Wyvern capitals are identical, consisting of five Greek capital letters set at the extremities of the arms of a cross: n (nu) on the left, a (alpha) on the

right, o (omicron) conjoined with y (upsilon) at the top, and ω (omega) at the bottom. The interpretation seems simple: Ἰωάννου, i.e. “of Ioannes” (in the genitive), referring to the patron of these capitals and, probably, to the building for which they were made [Fig. 11]. The first example of a monogram of this cruciform type that can be dated with accuracy appears on a coin minted in Antioch from 522 onwards, which refers to the name of the reigning Emperor Justin  i, uncle of Justinian30. The first examples in an architectural context contain the name of Empress Theodora and appear on the capitals of 28 Jean-Claude Bessac, “Problems of Identification and Interpretation of Tool Marks on Ancient Marbles and Decorative Stones”, in Classical Marble (n. 27), pp. 41–53. 29 Cf. Betsch, The History, Production, and Distribution (n. 1), pp. 246–249. Regarding the artistic context in general, see Alois Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, Vienna 1927, pp. 74–82, 266–285; Ernst Kitzinger, Byzantine Art in the Making: Main Lines of Stylistic Development in Mediterranean Art, 3rd–7th Century, London 1977, pp. 78–80. 30 For more information on cruciform monograms, see Gardthausen, Das alte Monogramm (n. 20), pp. 108–140; Cruikshank Dodd, Byzantine Silver Stamps (n. 20), pp. 5–18; Fink, Das byzantinische Monogramm (n. 20), pp. 92–118; Seibt, “The Use of Monograms” (n. 20). The coin was published with a commentary by Wolfgang Hahn, Michael A. Metlich, Money of the Incipient Byzantine Empire (Anastasius i – Justinian i, 491–565), Vienna 2000, p. 37.

9/ Detail of capital b, showing the marks left by chisels with rounded blades, used to reduce height and level out the surfaces, especially in the strip below the abacus / Wyvern Collection (uk) 10/ Detail of capital a, showing the holes left by the drill that could not be eradicated during the finishing of the palm leaves to the sides of the monogram / Wyvern Collection (uk)

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11a–b / The monogram on capital a in its present condition and a reconstruction of its original appearance (author’s diagram) / Wyvern Collection (uk)

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the Church of Sts Sergius and Bacchus, founded between 527 and 532, after her husband Justinian took the throne. Other cruciform monograms related to Theodora can be seen on the capitals of Hagia Sophia, consecrated in 537 (in its first phase)31. A further example, from the same period or a little later, is carved into the shaft of a small semi-column in Prokonnesian marble, originally from Constantinople and now in the Bode Museum in Berlin; the most plausible interpretation is Ἀπιόνος (“of Apion”), possibly referring to Flavius Strategius Apion, vir clarissimus and ordinary consul in the year 53932. Also, during Justinian’s reign, cruciform monograms begin to appear on stamps impressed by state officials on silverware, therefore in a context linked to official bureaucracy33. The first known example is that of Julianus, comes

sacrarum largitionum in Constantinople at some point between 530 and 54034. It does not seem that the use of such monograms spread very quickly outside of Constantinople, not even in centers closely bound to the Byzantine capital by political, economic, cultural, and religious ties; in the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, founded around 530 and consecrated in 548, the dosserets above the columns bear the monograms of Bishop Victor (in Latin letters) and the banker Julianus argentarius (in Greek letters) in the traditional box-type form35. In Rome too, on the liturgical furniture in Prokonnesian marble in the church of San Clemente, commissioned from Byzantine craftsmen by Pope John ii (533–535), the papal monogram appears in box-type form36, as do the monograms of Bishop Honorius of Salona (528–547), carved into various architectural elements of the city’s episcopal buildings37. Worth noting are also several bricks discovered in southern Italy, which bear the stamped monograms of various bishops, again in box-type form; these can also be dated to the sixth century38. The aristocracy’s habit of condensing names into monograms is typical of Late Antiquity. These virtuoso plays on letters were put on rings (including seal rings) and personal belongings such as silver tableware and jewels, as well as architectural elements. Their purpose was to assert ownership or, in the case of buildings, to preserve the founder’s memory39. It was not strictly necessary for the monogram to be intelligible to everyone who saw it; its status was somewhere between a written document and a symbolic sign, whose value resided in the assertion its presence expressed. Anicia Juliana also commissioned various monograms, in box-type form and in Greek letters, to be carved into architectural elements in the Church of St Polyeuctus; two can be seen, for example, on the so-called “pillars of Acre”, today in the piazzetta to the right of San Marco in Venice [Fig. 12]40. There are also architectural elements surviving in Istanbul, no longer in their original context, that feature monograms of Justin i, again in box-type form41. In the same decades, there is evidence that personal monograms were also used by Germanic rulers in the West, primarily on coinage minted in their kingdoms42. In Ravenna, there

are several surviving Corinthian capitals commissioned by King Theodoric, bearing his monogram at the center of the abacus, inside a laurel wreath, and replacing a floral element [Fig. 13a–b]43. 31 Harold Swainson, “Monograms on the Capitals of S. Sergius at Constantinople”, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, iv (1895), pp. 106–108; Emmanuel S. Moutafov, “A Byzantine Monogram of a Lady on a Marble Capital from the Louvre”, Revue roumaine d’histoire de l’art, li (2014), pp. 169–175; Russo, “Introduzione ai capitelli di S. Sofia” (n. 7); Ildar Garipzanov, Graphic Signs of Authority in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, 300 – 900, Oxford 2018, pp. 167–186; Niewöhner, Byzantine Ornaments in Stone (n. 1), pp. 114–116; Stroth, Monogrammkapitelle (n. 3), pp. 19–54 (Hagia Sophia), 65–94 (Sts Sergius and Bacchus). 32 Arne Effenberger, Hans-Georg Severin, Das Museum für Spätantike und Byzantinische Kunst, Mainz 1992, p. 127, no. 45. 33 Cruikshank Dodd, Byzantine Silver Stamps (n. 20), pp. 5–18, 63–91. Cf. Garipzanov, Graphic Signs of Authority (n. 31), pp. 138–154. 34 Cruikshank Dodd, Byzantine Silver Stamps (n. 20), pp. 82–83, no. 15. 35 Friedrich W. Deichmann, Ravenna, Hauptstadt des spätantiken Abendlandes. Kommentar, vol. ii, Wiesbaden 1976, p. 100. For this and the subsequent examples, see Garipzanov, Graphic Signs of Authority (n. 31), pp. 186–195. 36 Federico Guidobaldi, Claudia Barsanti, Alessandra Guiglia Guidobaldi, San Clemente. La scultura del vi secolo, Rome 1992, pp. 72, 93–94; Federico Guidobaldi, “Origine costantinopolitana e provenienza romana di quattro capitelli del vi secolo oggi a Lione”,  Mélanges de l’École française de Rome – Antiquité, ci/1 (1989), pp. 317–364. 37 Salona i. Catalogue de la sculpture architecturale paléochrétienne de Salone, Noel Duval, Emilio Marin, Catherine Metzger eds, Rome/Split 1994, pp. 238–239. 38 Giuliano Volpe, “Il mattone di Iohannis. San Giusto (Lucera, Puglia)”, in Humana sapit. Etudes d’Antiquité tardive offertes à Lellia Cracco Ruggini, Jean-Michel Carrié, Rita Lizzi Testa eds, Turnhout 2002, pp. 79–93. 39 Wolfgang Haubrichs, “Figuren und Skripturen. Onomastische Kleinkunstwerke in Inschriften auf Ringen und anderen Objekten der Spätantike und des frühen Mittelalters”, in Ästhetische Transgressionen. Festschrift für Ulrich Ernst zum 60 Geburtstag, Michael Scheffel ed., Trier 2006, pp. 1–22; Antony Eastmond, “Monograms and the Art of Unhelpful Writing in Late Antiquity”, in Sign and Design: Script as Image in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Brigitte M. Bedos-Rezak, Jeffrey Hamburger eds, Washington, dc, 2016, pp. 219–235; Garipzanov, Graphic Signs of Authority (n. 31), pp. 160–195. 40 Their interpretation is, however, far from clear: cf. Mango/ Ševčenko, “Remains of the Church” (n. 3), p. 246; Eastmond, “Monograms and the Art” (n. 39), p. 219; Stroth, Monogrammkapitelle (n. 3), pp. 111–112. 41 Zollt, Kapitellplastik Konstantinopels (n. 1), no. 39. 42 Gardthausen, Das alte Monogramm (n. 20), pp. 155–156; Fink, Das byzantinische Monogramm (n. 20), pp. 87, 410–424; Garipzanov, Graphic Signs of Authority (n. 31), pp. 199–205. 43 The capitals come from the Ecclesia Gothorum in Ravenna, an Arian church demolished in the fifteenth century, and were reused in the Palazzetto Veneziano in Piazza del Popolo: cf. Raffaella Olivieri Farioli, Corpus della scultura paleocristiana bizantina ed altomedievale di Ravenna, vol. iii: La scultura architettonica, Rome 1969, pp. 31–32, nos 40–41; Claudia Barsanti, “Ravenna: gli arredi architettonici e liturgici negli edifici di età teodericiana”, in Rex Theodericus. Il medaglione di Morro d’Alba, Claudia Barsanti, Andrea Paribeni, Silvia Pedone eds, Rome 2008, pp. 198–200.

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12 / One of the two pilasters known as the “pillars of Acre”, Piazzetta di San Marco, Venice

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13a–b/ One of the capitals with Theodoric’s monogram and a graphic reconstruction of the monogram (author’s diagram), Piazza del Popolo, Palazzetto Veneziano, Ravenna

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In contrast to the somewhat secondary placing of Theodoric’s monograms, those of Justinian and Theodora are in clearly visible positions on the capitals of Sts Sergius and Bacchus and Hagia Sophia, in the center of the primary face; it was precisely the shape of the basket capitals that made this possible. The opportunity was probably not recognized by the sculptors of the capital with Justin i’s monogram on the façade of San Marco, but it was understood and exploited by the craftsmen working on the Justinianic construction sites. It should also be noted that Theodoric’s monograms on the Ravenna capitals include a small cross in the empty space above the letters; this is the only case in the fifth and sixth centuries in which the monogram of a “barbarian” western king incorporated the Christian symbol – an interesting forerunner of the cruciform monogram in the Byzantine setting. Among the known capitals “with pine cones at their corners”, there are only two other that have a monogram at the center of one of their

faces. One is in the Hagia Sophia Museum in Istanbul, but it was never completed; the letters of the monogram were not carved into the roundel, and the details of the decorative apparatus are also unfinished44. The other is in the Monastery of the Metamorphosis, on the island of Burgazada, and its monogram in box-type form has been interpreted as “of Theodoros the patrician” or “of Theodoros the consul”, referring to a high-ranking court official45. Although this Theodoros cannot be identified with any precision, the two potential titles indicate the most aristocratic circles of Byzantine society since they were conferred directly by the sovereign46. This shows that members of the court, when involved in building projects, begun to imitate the imperial practice of placing their own monograms on basket capitals, and the first model for this must have been the capitals of Sts Sergius and Bacchus or Hagia Sophia since none of those that survive from St Polyeuctus have carved monograms. On the basis of comparisons and archaeological data, the Wyvern Collection capitals can be dated between 530 and 550 and could be among the earliest Byzantine architectural elements with monograms of the cruciform type. Regarding the identity of Ioannes, or John, who commissioned the two capitals, his name was one of the most popular in the Byzantine world, and it is therefore practically impossible to propose any definitive identification. Moreover, there are many other monograms of exactly the same form to be found on seals dating from the sixth century onwards47. However, among high-ranking officials named John, it is worth mentioning John of Cappadocia (ca 490 – post 548), a man who was powerful and hated in equal measure, and responsible for important administrative reforms at the time of Justinian. He was a patrician, became a consul in 538, and was a praetorian prefect of the East from 532 to 541, when a plot hatched by Theodora caused his fall from grace in the eyes of the emperor48. Sources attribute him with important works to expand the praetorium of Constantinople, his city home, through the addition of new residential wings and baths. John held a prominent position at court in the years after the Nika Revolt (532), at a time when Constantinople was

experiencing a period of intense building activity; his task was to repair the widespread destruction caused by the popular riots and to support Justinian’s construction program. This meant heavy exploitation of the quarries on the island of Marmara to provide architectural elements for the city’s construction sites49. The identification of John of Cappadocia as the patron of the two capitals is hypothetical, but is not improbable; more generally, it can be assumed that they were commissioned by an important member of the imperial court, responsible for the construction, or reconstruction, of a building contributing to Justinian’s redevelopment of Constantinople.

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Conclusion: the capitals in context The study of the Wyvern Collection capitals has provided new information towards reconstructing the processes of the craftsmen who were responsible for carving them, from the roughing-out stage to the final polish, and the examination of the monograms has offered important pointers towards identification of the circumstances in which the cruciform type was first disseminated. Some further conclusions can be drawn as a result of considering these two capitals in the context of the production of marble architectural elements in Constantinople at that time. The known capitals “with pine cones at their corners” all have similar dimensions, despite differences in the proportional relationships between the various parts. The largest capital, in San Marco, 44 Zollt, Kapitellplastik Konstantinopels (n. 1), no. 220; Krumeich, “Spätantike Kämpferkapitelle” (n. 9), no. vii/e. 45 Zollt, Kapitellplastik Konstantinopels (n. 1), no. 222; Krumeich, “Spätantike Kämpferkapitelle” (n. 9), no. vii/f. 46 Arnold Hugh Martin Jones, The Later Roman Empire 284– 602: A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey, Baltimore 1964, pp. 563–606. 47 These are listed in Fink, Das byzantinische Monogramm (n. 20), nos 568–612. In most cases, the positions of the alpha and the eta are inverted in relation to their positions on the monograms discussed here. 48 The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, vol. iii: a.d. 527– 641, John Robert Martindale ed., Cambridge 1992, pp. 627–635. 49 Averil Cameron, Procopius and the Sixth Century, London / New York 1985, pp. 84–112; Cyril Mango, Le développement urbain de Constantinople (ive–viie siècles), Paris 1985, pp. 51–53; James Allan Stewart Evans, The Age of Justinian: The Circumstances of Imperial Power, London / New York 1996, pp. 119–125.

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is 43 cm high and measures 62 cm along the side of the abacus. The smallest one, on the island of Burgazada, is 28 cm high and measures 43.5 cm along the side of the abacus50. Most of the surviving examples, including the two in the Wyvern Collection, are closer to the Burgazada capital in terms of size; it has thus been assumed that they were destined for secondary spaces in a church (side naves or galleries) or as part of the enclosure of a presbytery51. Although this is quite possible, it is not unreasonable to imagine more complex scenarios. Although the use of a geometric scheme for roughing-out and dividing up the surfaces implies the need to produce a series of identical pieces simply and efficiently, the secondary differences between the capitals that survive, which can be grouped into nine types, seem to exclude a rigidly standardized production. Additionally, only four of the surviving capitals are comparable in terms of their dimensions (as well as their decorative details) to the Wyvern capitals; this suggests that this was not so much a question of serial production destined for sale on the “open market”, but rather a work process based on specific commissions linked to distinct building sites. Whoever had oversight of a building’s construction, whether an architect or a foreman, was following a plan (potentially laid out in graphic form) that would specify the number and size of the stone elements52. It was therefore possible to give the marble quarries advance information about the number and size of all the architectural elements, including capitals, required for the building in question. Once the quarry blocks had been prepared, the geometric blueprint (necessary to determine the sculpting process) would be incised, in accordance with the basic mathematical knowledge that was normally available and used in all the construction sites of the Roman and proto-Byzantine era53. This would explain the minor differences between the thirty-six examples that have been identified; the quarries sent a predetermined number of roughed-out elements to the construction site where teams of sculptors refined the details, obviously following an established model, with a limited margin of freedom. In the light of these observations, the capitals in the Wyvern

Collection could belong to a group that includes five other surviving examples: four installed in the façade of San Marco in Venice and one in a private Venetian collection [cf. Figs 1–2, 4–5]54. Since the details and the proportions are the same (although two examples have slightly larger dimensions), all these seven capitals could have come from a single building in Constantinople, with colonnades of different sizes, looted by the Venetians after the Fourth Crusade. It is of course possible that other capitals now embedded in the façades of San Marco have monograms incised on the faces that are not visible, having been hidden at the time of reuse to conceal the name of the original patron. Another interesting issue in relation to working methods is the extensive use of the drill, not only for refining details, but systematically employed to mark out the contours of the decorative elements. It is certainly true that this tool helped to simplify and speed up the work of carving; this is why the bow drill was used increasingly widely in Roman sculpture from the second century onwards, even at the cost of leaving some small holes behind that could not be removed when the surfaces were finished with chisels55. Similarly, sculptors in the workshops active in Constantinople during the fifth century made extensive use of the drill, but with aesthetic rather than practical objectives, creating almost virtuoso effects; this can be clearly seen on the composite capitals of the church of St John of Stoudios (built around 463), on which the profiles and many details of the leaves and volutes have been sketched out with close-packed rows of little puncture marks56. Equally, on two pilaster capitals in the Byzantine Museum in Athens, dated to the fifth century and originating from Thessaloniki (but probably carved in Byzantium), the acanthus leaves are almost completely detached from the background surface [Fig. 14]57. Extensive use of the drill can also be seen on sculptures produced for the Church of St Polyeuctus, even on those pieces where the demand was not for any à jour carving, but simply for a relatively high relief for the decorative motifs [Fig. 15]. Although the forms of the capitals of St John of Stoudios are inherited from the classical world,

the vegetal motifs are transformed, in their outline and detail, into almost abstract elements, already a prelude to the rigidly symmetrical forms, lacking any remaining hint of naturalism or plasticity, that can be seen in the decorative sculpture of St Polyeuctus, Sts Sergius and Bacchus, and Hagia Sophia. In some ways, the à jour technique represents a natural evolution of the drilling technique; the development of this new artistic language in the early sixth century, with the revolutionary style of the buildings created by Anicia Juliana and Justinian, was possible thanks to the established technical tradition of Constantinople’s sculpture workshops, which possessed the skills to use tools with utmost flexibility. The introduction of the cruciform monogram, and the resulting abandonment of the box-type 50 Krumeich, “Spätantike Kämpferkapitelle” (n. 9), nos iv/a, vii/f. 51 Ibidem, pp. 301–304. Cf. Niewöhner, Byzantine Ornaments in Stone (n. 1), pp. 138–139, 150–155.

52 Regarding the client base and organization of construction sites in the early Byzantine era, see Robert Ousterhouth, Master Builders of Byzantium, Princeton 1999, pp. 39–84; regarding the relationship between the construction sites and the quarries, see Barsanti/Guiglia/Paribeni, “Le officine dell’imperatore” (n. 21), pp. 118–125; Barsanti/Paribeni, “La scultura in funzione architettonica” (n. 1). 53 Adam, La construction romaine (n. 25), pp. 23–60; Ousterhouth, Master Builders of Byzantium (n. 52), pp. 58–85; Rabun Taylor, Roman Builders: A Study in Architectural Process, Cambridge 2003, pp. 21–42, 64–70. 54 Bettini, La scultura bizantina (n. 14), pp. 38–39; Deichmann, Corpus der Kapitelle (n. 16), nos 308, 310–311, 313; Krumeich, “Spätantike Kämpferkapitelle” (n. 9), nos v/a–d. 55 Rudolf Kautzsch,“Die römische Schmuckkunst in Stein vom 6. bis zum 10. Jahrhundert”, Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, iii (1939), pp. 1–73; Alessandra Melucco Vaccaro,“Le botteghe dei lapicidi: dalla lettura stilistica all’analisi delle tecniche di produzione”, in Roma nell’alto Medioevo, Atti della xlviii settimana di studio del cisam (Spoleto, 27 aprile – 1 maggio 2000), vol. i, Spoleto 2001, pp. 393–420. 56 Kautzsch, Kapitellenstudien (n. 1), pp. 135–136; Betsch, The History, Production, and Distribution (n. 1), pp. 207–221; Zollt, Kapitellplastik Konstantinopels (n. 1), no. 220. 57 Maria Sklavou-Mavroidi, Γλυπτά του Βυζαναινού Μουσείου Αθηνών. Kατάλογος [Sculptures of the Byzantine Museum of Athens: A Catalogue], Athens 1999, nos 61–62.

14/ Pilaster capital / Byzantine and Christian Museum (Athens)

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15/ Detail of one of the two pilasters known as the “pillars of Acre”, showing the holes left by the drill at the edges of the decorative motifs, Piazzetta di San Marco, Venice

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monogram, was another stylistic innovation introduced in Byzantium in the early sixth century. It has been proposed – although there is no definitive proof – that Theodora herself chose it for religious reasons linked to her personal Monophysite faith58. However, in more general terms, it seems to reflect the irreversible Christianization of eastern Roman society that came to a head in Justinian’s time, underpinned by a sort of equivalence between “being Roman” and “being (Orthodox) Christian”59. While the adoption of this new type of monogram was still only occasional in the time of Justin i, its dissemination could have been encouraged by the courtiers who were closest to the imperial couple; while Justinian’s monograms on the capitals of Hagia Sophia and Sts Sergius and Bacchus were still in the box-type form typical of the fourth and fifth centuries, a little later the comes sacrarum largitionum Julianus made this new form his own. Beginning with the reign of Justin ii (565–578), the emperors’ monograms also definitively adopted the cruciform style, as can be ascertained from the series of stamps impressed by state authorities on silverware well into the seventh century60.

This is another aspect of that vast cultural and artistic legacy handed down from the flourishing years between 500 and 550 in Constantinople to subsequent centuries in the Byzantine and, more generally, the Mediterranean world, as much through the reuse of artifacts from the period as through their imitation. The two capitals in the Wyvern Collection come from the same period. They are of course membra disiecta divorced from their original context, but they nevertheless have the capacity to shed a clear light on the circumstances in which they were designed and executed. 58 The question is explored by Eastmond, “Monograms and the Art” (n. 39), p. 229, who emphasizes that the form of the monogram was very probably just as important as the letters of the name. 59 John Meyendorff, “Justinian, the Empire and the Church”, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, xxii (1968), pp. 43–60; Fausto Goria, “Romani, cittadinanza ed estensione della legislazione imperiale nelle costituzioni di Giustiniano”, in La nozione di “romano” tra cittadinanza e universalità, Atti del ii seminario internazionale di studi storici Da Roma alla terza Roma (Roma, 21–23 aprile 1982), Naples 1984, pp. 277–342; Evans, The Age of Justinian (n. 49), pp. 65–77, 183–191. 60 Cruikshank Dodd, Byzantine Silver Stamps (n. 20), pp. 93–221; Eadem,“Byzantine Silver Stamps. Supplement i: New Stamps from the Reigns of Justin ii and Constans ii”, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, xviii (1964), pp. 239–248.

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Dvě byzantské hlavice „s borovými šiškami v rozích“ a jejich monogramy Poznámky k technice, stylu a historii

„Košová hlavice“ je již dlouho považována za jednu z nejvýraznějších inovací byzantské architektury první poloviny 6. stol., která se těšila nepřetržité oblibě po celý středověk. Četné varianty, které byly vytvořeny za vlády císařů Justina i. (518–527) a Justiniána (527–565), dokládají vysokou technickou a uměleckou úroveň, jíž v těchto desetiletích dosáhly sochařské dílny působící v Konstantinopoli. Nová data o jedné z těchto variant – hlavici „s borovými šiškami v rozích“ – přináší studium dvou jejích exemplářů ze soukromé anglické sbírky. Tyto dvě téměř totožné hlavice jsou vyrobeny z mramoru z řeckého ostrova Prokonnésos a jsou zdobeny „křížovým monogramem“ napsaným řeckými písmeny. Hlavice bylo možné s mimořádnou přesností změřit a detailně byl prozkoumán i jejich povrch. Získané údaje nám umožnily určit metody použité při stanovení jejich rozměrů a proporcí a rekonstruovat postupné fáze zpracování, od výchozího mramorového bloku až po leštění dokončených povrchů. První část článku představuje výsledky metrologické analýzy a zkoumání stop zanechaných nástroji během jednotlivých fází zpracování.

Z těchto dat lze vyvodit použití zaokrouhlených čísel k fixaci rozměrů jednotlivých částí hlavic, stanovených před zahájením hrubého opracování bloků, a rekonstruovat jednotlivé kroky procesu výroby, od postupných fází opracování až po tvarování hlavních částí hlavice. Závěrečnou fázi celého procesu představovalo tesání ozdobných detailů za hojného využití vrtáku. Druhá část článku se zaměřuje na historický kontext zkoumaných hlavic. Oba na nich dochované monogramy „křížového typu“ pravděpodobně neobsahují jméno panovníka, ale vysoce postaveného dvorského úředníka. Na základě datování hlavic do období mezi roky 530 a 550 autor předkládá hypotézy o způsobu a době rozšíření tohoto nového typu monogramu v byzantské metropoli, mimo jiné jako oblíbeného dekorativního prvku sochařské výzdoby veřejných i církevních staveb. Je dokonce možné, že zkoumané hlavice představují jeden z prvních dokladů tohoto typu monogramu, který namísto jména vládnoucího panovníka obsahuje jméno představitele konstantinopolské aristokracie, což je nesmírně cenné z hlediska identifikace jeho prvního rozšíření mimo oblast císařského dvora.

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Wunder Jesu auf ausgewählten (römischen) Zwischengoldgläsern Renate Johanna Pillinger

Abstract – The Miracles of Jesus on Selected (Roman) Gold Glasses – The Romans used “Zwischengoldgläser”, a very special type of glass in which images were rendered in gold or gold foil sandwiched between layers of glass, for representations of particular importance such as the miracles of Jesus. Because of the gold, production in this medium was extremely complicated and costly, and it was carried out almost exclusively in Rome, where works in “gold glass” were termed noble tableware. More than 800 examples are known today. After regular use, gold glass vessels found their way into or onto graves, where they were used a second, perhaps commemorative, time. Their dating is very difficult owing to a lack information about the contexts of their discovery, but it is usually placed in the fourth century ce. Of the numerous renderings of the miracles of Jesus, only five were fashioned in Roman gold glass. Several depictions of Christ with the wand can be found on these objects, each of which probably supported supplementary, second depictions of biblical figures. Some of these also appear in Old and New Testament pictorial cycles, where they can only be explained by the phenomenon of so-called “typology”. Keywords – biblical typology, gold glass, miracles of Jesus, virgatus, “Zwischengoldgläser” Schlüsselwörter – biblische Typologie, Goldglas, virgatus, Wunder Jesu, Zwischengoldgläser Renate Johanna Pillinger University of Vienna [email protected]

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Unter Zwischengoldgläsern versteht man eine spezielle Art von Gläsern1, deren Darstellungen in Goldfolie oder Goldmalerei zwischen meist zwei Glasschichten aufgebracht sind, weshalb sie im Englischen auch „sandwich glasses“ genannt werden2. Derzeit sind über 800 solcher Fabrikate bekannt. Ihre Produktion war äußerst kompli­ ziert, weshalb sie beinahe ausschließlich nur in Rom hergestellt wurden. Außerdem waren sie wohl nicht bloß wegen der Goldfolie sehr teuer, weshalb man sie als Nobelgeschirr bezeichnen kann. Umso mehr erstaunt es, dass sie etwa in der Panfilokatakombe in Rom durchwegs an Loculus-, sogenannten Armengräbern angebracht sind. Erst in Zweitverwendung gelangten sie in oder an die Gräber. Auch ihre Datierung ist mangels meist nicht vorhandenem Fundkontext sehr schwierig, meist aber in das vierte Jahrhundert n. Chr. gesetzt. Von den zahlreichen Wundern Jesu finden wir bloß fünf (das Weinwunder, die Heilung des Paralyti­ schen, wahrscheinlich die Heilung der Blutflüssi­ gen, die Brotvermehrung und die Auferweckung des Lazarus) auf römischen Zwischengoldgläsern3. Angeschlossen ist auch eine Auswahl der ein­ zelnen durchwegs auf Nuppen auftretenden Stab­ träger, die einst wohl jeweils durch eine zweite Darstellung ergänzt wurden. Fallweise treten sie auch in alt- und neutestamentlichen Bildzyklen auf, wo sie dann nur durch das Phänomen der sogenannten Typologie zu erklären sind. Weinwunder Ein sehr gut erhaltenes römisches Zwischengold­ glas in der Biblioteca e Museo Oliveriani von Pes­ aro [Abb. 1] unter Inv.-Nr. 3833 ist ein weißlicher

Glasboden mit 9.5 cm Durchmesser, der rundhe­ rum abgeschlagen und gebrochen ist, aber noch einen niedrigen intakten Standfuß aufweist4. Im kreisförmigen Rahmen steht Christus als jugend­ licher bartloser Mann mit kurzem lockigem Haar und barfuß frontal in weitärmeliger Tunika mit ro­ tem clavus und Pallium, das er mit der linken Hand hält, während er die rechte ausstreckt. Umgeben ist er von links vier und rechts drei verschieden großen Töpfen mit Deckel. Das Johannesevange­ lium spricht von sechs (!) Krügen. Die Leerräu­ me füllen kleine Büsche, Blätter und Punkte. Die umlaufende Inschrift lautet: dignitas amicorvm viv / vas im (!) pace dei zeses […] („Du Würde deiner Freunde magst leben im Frieden Gottes, wirst leben […]“)5. Beginn und Ende des Wirkens Jesu bringt ein weiteres sehr gut erhaltenes Glas im Museo Cris­ tiano des Vatikans unter Inv.-Nr. 60777 [Abb. 2]6. Dabei handelt es sich um einen grünlichen rund­ umgebrochenen Glasboden mit 9 cm Durchmesser, Zum ersten Überblick siehe Umberto Utro, „Temi biblici nella collezione di medaglioni vitrei con figure in oro del Museo Cristiano“, Bollettino dei Monumenti Musei e Gallerie Pontifice, xx (2000), s. 53–84 (Neues Testament, s. 76–84) – allerdings befasst er sich ausschließlich mit Nuppen. 2 Insgesamt vgl. Charles R. Morey, The Gold-Glass Collection of the Vatican Library, Guy Ferrari (Hrsg.), Vatikanstadt 1959; Renate Pillinger, Studien zu römischen Zwischengoldgläsern, Bd. i: Geschichte der Technik und Das Problem der Authentizität, Wien 1984 und Daniel T. Howells, A Catalogue of the Late Antique Gold Glass in the British Museum, London 2015. 3 Hierzu siehe u. a. Gerd Theißen, Annette Merz, Der historische Jesus. Ein Lehrbuch, Göttingen 2011, § 10 „Jesus als Heiler: die Wunder Jesu“, s. 256–284; Lee M. Jefferson, Christ the Miracle Worker in Early Christian Art, Minneapolis, ma, 2014 und Robin M. Jensen, „Conversion to Jesus as a Healer God: Visual and Textual Evidence“, in Means of Christian Conversion in Late Antiquity: Objects, Bodies, and Rituals, Klára Doležalová, Ivan Foletti, Katarína Kravčíková, Pavla Tichá (Hrsg.), Brno/Turnhout 2021 (= Convivium, supplementum iii [2021]), s. 62–77. 4 Näheres bei Gold-Glass Collection (Anm. 2), s. 49f., Nr. 285, wo auch die ältere Literatur verzeichnet ist. 5 Siehe dazu bei Antonio Ferrua, „‚Pie zeses‘ per i defunti. Forma futuri“, in Studi in onore del Cardinale Michele Pellegrino, Turin 1975, s. 1115–1124; Michael Donderer, „Merkwürdig­ keiten im Umgang mit griechischer und lateinischer Schrift in der Antike“, Gymnasium, cii (1995), s. 97–122 sowie Susan H. Auth, „Drink May You Live! Roman Motto Glasses in the Context of Roman Life and Death“, in Annales du 13e Congrès de l’Association Internationale pour l’Histoire du Verre, Pays Bas, 28 aout – 1 septembre 1995, Lochem 1996, s. 102–112. 6 Bei Gold-Glass Collection (Anm. 2), s. 26, Nr. 108 wieder mit der älteren Literatur. Außerdem siehe Umberto Utro, „Vetro dorato con i miracoli di Lazzaro e di Cana“, in Christiana Loca. Lo spazio cristiano nella Roma del primo millenio, Ausstellungskatalog (Roma, Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Complesso di S. Mi­ chele 2000), Bd. ii, Letizia Pani Ermini (Hrsg.), Rom 2001, s. 98.

chronicles & debates

1

1 / Weinwunder, Zwischengoldglas, ca. 350–400 / Biblioteca e Museo Oliveriani (Pesaro), Inv.-Nr. 3833 2 / Weinwunder, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Museo Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 60777

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3 / Weinwunder, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Museo Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 60760 4 / Weinwunder, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Museo Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 60670

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dessen Standring zu zwei Drittel erhalten ist. Er wurde 1756 aus der Sammlung Chigi erworben. Den äußeren Rand bilden Halbkreise, den in­ neren ein entsprechendes Zackenmuster. Beide rahmen zwei halbkreisförmige durch eine dünne horizontale Linie getrennte Register. Im unteren steht eine jugendliche bartlose männliche Figur (Christus) mit kurzem Haar wieder in Tunika und Pallium, das über den linken Arm geschlagen ist. Die ausgestreckte rechte Hand zeigt diesmal mit einem Stab7 auf einen der vier verschieden großen bauchigen, mit Deckel versehenen Töpfe links. Rechts befinden sich drei weitere, womit, wie beim vorher besprochenen Glas, sieben statt der sechs im Johannesevangelium erwähnten Gefäße dargestellt sind8. Außerdem gibt es auch wieder Blätter und Punkte. Der Stab stammt wohl aus der Tradition der nicht christlichen Ikonografie und ist Zeichen der (Zauber)Kraft. Wir finden ihn etwa bei Magiern ebenso wie bei Mose und Petrus. Zum oberen Bildfeld siehe unsere Nr. 5 (Auferwe­ ckung des Lazarus). Ein weiteres Stück im Museo Sacro des Vatikans mit Inv.-Nr. 60760 [Abb. 3] zeigt eine ganz ähnliche Darstellung auf einem grünlichen Glasboden mit 9.5 cm Durchmesser9. Er ist rundum gebrochen, mit geringen Wandungsresten und hat noch zwei Drittel des Standrings. Einen Bruch gibt es auch diagonal von rechts oben nach links unten. Die Darstellung ist durch Infiltration und Irisierung schlecht erkennbar. In einem quadratischen Rah­ men mit jeweils einem Dreieck außen an jeder Seite steht eine bartlose Gestalt (Christus) mit langen Haaren nach rechts gewandt, während das Gesicht frontal abgebildet ist. Gekleidet in Tunika und Pallium berührt sie mit einem Stab in der Rechten eines der sieben (links drei und rechts vier) Gefäße mit Deckel, während die Linke ins Pallium greift. Links des Kopfes gibt es einen Punkt, rechts eine achtblättrige Rosette. Das dritte Beispiel im Museo Sacro des Vati­ kans mit Inv.-Nr. 60670 [Abb. 4]10 ist eine soge­ nannte Goldglasnuppe mit 2.4 cm Durchmesser11. Rundum bebrochen zeigt sie in kreisförmigem Rand einen frontalen Christus kurzhaarig und bartlos in Tunika und Pallium mit einem Stab in seiner Rechten umgeben von links fünf und rechts zwei (also sieben) Krügen mit Deckel.

chronicles & debates

Innerhalb eines Bildzyklus finden wir das The­ ma auf einem Glasboden heute im Metropolitan Museum von New York unter Inv.-Nr. 16.174.2. An­ geblich wurde er 1715 in der Katakombe S. Callisto in Rom gefunden und 1916 aus der Sammlung Kircher angekauft [Abb. 5]12. Das Glas ist grünlich, hat einen Durchmesser von 10.2 cm, ist rundum bebrochen und hat auch den Standring an drei Stellen ausgebrochen. Außen verläuft ein kreis­ förmiger Rand, innen ein zentraler Kreis mit der

frontalen Büste eines Mannes in tunica contabulata und Pallium, das mit der linken Hand gehalten wird. Die rechte ist im Redegestus erhoben und 7 Zu ihm vgl. unsere Anm. 36. 8 Hier siehe unsere Anm. 14. 9 Bei The Gold-Glass Collection (Anm. 2), s. 18, Nr. 73 (die Taf. 12 ist wohl seitenverkehrt). 10 Ibidem, s. 33, Nr. 160. 11 Dabei handelt es sich um kleine Glastropfen, die auf größere Gefäße (wie unsere Abb. 34) aufgeschmolzen wurden. 12 Näheres in The Gold-Glass Collection (Anm. 2), s. 72f., Nr. 448.

5 / Wunderszenen, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Inv.-Nr. 16.174.2

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6 / Weinwunder, Detail eines Sarkophags, 4. Jh. / Museo Pio Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 173 7 / Wunderszenen, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Ashmolean Museum (Oxford), Inv.-Nr. AN 2007,35

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die umlaufende Inschrift lautet .zes.es. („du sollst leben“). Um ihn herum sind jeweils abwechselnd eine alt- und eine neutestamentliche Bibelszene angeordnet, nämlich die drei babylonischen Jüng­ linge im Feuerofen, der Paralytische, Tobias mit dem Fisch und das Weinwunder – auch die alttes­ tamentlichen Darstellungen jeweils getrennt durch einen kurzhaarigen bartlosen Mann (Christus) in Tunika und Pallium sowie mit einem Stab in der Rechten zwischen wieder sieben (jeweils drei links und vier rechts) Gefäßen mit Deckel. Dazu gibt es noch Blätter und Punkte. Damit handelt es sich bei allen genannten Glä­ sern um die Verbildlichung von Jo 2, 1–1113, d. h. das erste Zeichen (σημεῖον) für Jesu Vollmacht, das Weinwunder bei der Hochzeit zu Kana, wobei die Überfülle des Weins wohl auch auf ein Leben in Fülle weist. Gezeigt ist jeweils die übliche Kurz­ form, d. h. der fruchtbare Moment (καιρός), näm­ lich nur der Wundertäter (Jesus) mit den Krügen, die übrigens den Reinheitsvorschriften entspre­ chend Deckel aufgesetzt haben. Nicht bibelkon­ form sind die Kleidung Jesu (Tunika und Pallium – sie entsprechen der Zeit des Glases, d. h. dem vierten Jahrhundert n. Chr.), im zweiten und drit­ ten Fall der Stab (die virga thaumaturgica) sowie die

Anzahl der Krüge. Der Bibeltext spricht von sechs Krügen, während auf den Gläsern sieben darge­ stellt sind, vermutlich da die Zahl sieben in der Bibel die Vollendung, Harmonie, Fülle und Voll­ kommenheit bezeichnet14. So vollendete z. B. Gott am siebten Tag die Schöpfung oder beschreibt das Johannesevangelium sieben Wunder Jesu. Als Ver­ wendung dieser Gläser könnte man sich vielleicht Hochzeitsgeschenke vorstellen. Vergleichsbeispie­ le gibt es in der Sarkophagkunst des Museo Pio Cristiano im Vatikan reichlich. Dort auch mit sechs Krügen z. B. unter Inv.-Nr. 173 [Abb. 6]15. Heilung des Gelähmten/Paralytischen Im Metropolitan Museum von New York befindet sich unter Inv.-Nr. 16.174.2 der schon beim Wein­ wunder besprochene Zwischengoldglasboden [Abb. 5]. Der Paralytische ist dort ein bartloser junger Mann in kurzer gegürteter Ärmeltunika, der schon sein sehr detailreich gestaltetes Bett mit Kopfstütze und gedrechselten Beinen geschultert hat. Vor ihm befindet sich der Wundertäter, Jesus, mit Stab in der Rechten. Ebenfalls innerhalb eines Bibelzyklus erscheint der Paralytische auf einem ähnlich gestaltetem

chronicles & debates

8 / Heilung des Paralytischen, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Museo Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 60686

9 / Heilung des Paralytischen, Detail eines Sarkophags, 4. Jh. / Museo Pio Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 137

Glasboden des Ashmolean Museum in Oxford Vatikans unter Inv.-Nr. 60686 [Abb. 8] finden wir unter Inv.-Nr. an 2007.35 [Abb. 7]16. Es ist ein grün­ nur den Paralytischen wie oben beschrieben, al­ licher Glasboden mit 10.8 cm Durchmesser, rund­ lerdings hält er diesmal sein Bett mit beiden Hän­ um bebrochen, aber mit Wandungsresten sowie den jeweils an einem Fuß fest17. Möglicherweise teilweise weggebrochenem Standring. Auch ho­ gab es noch eine entsprechende zweite Nuppe mit rizontal verläuft ein Bruch. Außen gibt es eine einem Virgatus (siehe unsere Abb. 28–38). kreisförmige Umrandung, innen ein Zentralme­ Als literarische Quelle für die Heilung des Para­ daillon mit den Büsten einer Dame mit gewelltem lytischen sind Mt 9, 1–8 = Mk 2, 1–12 = Lk 5, 17–26 und geschmücktem Haar und Juwelenkragen in = Jo 5, 1–9 heranzuziehen. Die Aussage des Textes Tunika und Palla sowie einem rotulus in beiden kann darin erkannt werden, dass dem Glaubenden Händen und eines Mannes in Tunika und Pallium die Sünden vergeben und die Bürden des Lebens mit contabulatio und den Händen vor der Brust (ein auf Erden abgenommen werden. Vergleichsbei­ Ehepaar?). Die umlaufende Inschrift lautet pie ze spiele liefert vor allem die zeitgenössische Sar­ ses („trink, du wirst leben“). Rundherum angeord­ kophagplastik, etwa im Museo Pio Cristiano des net sind neu- und alttestamentliche Szenen: die Vatikan unter Inv.-Nr. 137 [Abb. 9], hier allerdings Auferweckung des Lazarus, Adam und Eva nach ohne Stab18. dem Sündenfall, die Bindung Isaaks, der Wasser schlagende Mose und der Paralytische. Er ist bart­ los in kurzer gegürteter Tunika, sein Bett, durch 13 Texte und in Übersetzungen zu den zitierten Bibelstellen fin­ den sich in Novum Testamentum Graece. Griechisch – deutsch, das er den Kopf streckt, von Christus abgewendet Barbara Aland (Hrsg.), 28. Aufl., Stuttgart 2013. nach links tragend. Zwischen den einzelnen (auch 14 Näheres u. a. in Manfred Lurker, Wörterbuch biblischer Bilder und Symbole, München 1973, s. 285–288. alttestamentlichen!) Szenen stehen bartlose kurz­ 15 Weiters vgl. Carlos A. Moreira Azevedo, O milagre de Caná haarige Christusfiguren in Tunika und Pallium na iconografia paleocristà, Bd. ii: Estudio interdisciplinar: exegese, patrística, liturgia, iconografia e iconologia, Porto 1986. und mit einem Stab in der Rechten. 16 Bei The Gold-Glass Collection (Anm. 2), s. 62, Nr. 366. Auf einer kleinen blauen Goldglasnuppe 17 Ibidem, s. 33, Nr. 159. mit 2 cm Durchmesser im Museo Cristiano des 18 Siehe hier auch unsere Anm. 36.

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13 / Blutflüssige, SS. Marcellino e Pietro, Rom, 4. Jh.

10 / Knieende Frau, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Museo Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 60681 11 / Knieende Frau, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Rheinisches Landesmuseum (Trier), Inv.-Nr. 16,87 12 / Knieende Frau, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / British Museum (London), Reg. No. bep 1863,0727.17

Knieende Frau Auf einer kleinen blauen Nuppe im Museo Cristi­ ano des Vatikans unter Inv.-Nr. 60681 [Abb. 10] mit 2 cm Durchmesser kniet eine nach rechts gerich­ tete Frau in Tunika und Palla samt Schleier mit ausgestreckten Armen19. Ein weiteres ebensolches Beispiel finden wir im Römischen Landesmuseum von Trier unter der Inv.-Nr. Römisches Landes­ museum 16,87 aus der Krypta von St. Maximin [Abb. 11]20. Ein drittes Beispiel in einem achtecki­ gen Rahmen befindet sich im British Museum in London unter Reg. No. bep 1863,0727.17 [Abb. 12]21. Hierbei handelt es sich um eine grüne Nuppe mit 2.5 cm Durchmesser aus der Sammlung Matarozzi, die 1863 von Mosca erworben wurde.

Ikonografische Parallelen dazu haben wir in der Katakombe SS. Marcellino e Pietro in Rom [Abb. 13]22, in der Malerei aus dem sog. Lu­ kasgrab von Ephesos [Abb. 14]23, heute in der 19 Bei Gold-Glass Collection of the Vatican Library (Anm. 2), s. 33, Nr. 165. 20 Näheres in Reinhard Schindler, Führer durch das Landesmuseum Trier, Trier 1980, s. 84. 21 Bei The Gold-Glass Collection (Anm. 2), s. 56, Nr. 334 und Howells, A Catalogue (Anm. 2), s. 110f., Nr. 27. 22 Siehe Johannes G. Deckers, Hans Reinhard Seeliger, Gabriele Mietke, Die Katakombe „SS. Marcellino e Pietro“, 2 Bde, Müns­ ter 1987. 23 Bei Andreas Pülz, Das sog. Lukasgrab in Ephesos. Eine Fallstudie zur Adaption antiker Monumente in byzantinischer Zeit, Wien 2010, s. 107–109 und Taf. 57.

14 / Christus segnet eine Frau, Fragment von einer Wand in der Unterkirche des sog. Lukasgrabes, Ephesos, 5–6. Jh. / Kunsthistorisches Museum (Wien), Antikensammlung, Inv.-Nr. v 2057 145

Antikensammlung des Kunsthistorisches Muse­ um in Wien und auf dem Elfenbeinkästchen von Brescia [Abb. 15]. Gedeutet werden können die drei Goldglasnuppen folglich als Blutflüssige nach Mt 9, 20–22 = Mk 5, 25–34 = Lk 8, 43–4824, als Kana­ anäerin nach Mt 15, 21–28 = Mk 7, 24–30, als Ma­ ria (Schwester des Lazarus wie etwa [Abb. 26]) und als Maria Magdalena nach Jo 20, 11–18. In jedem Fall ist eine zweite Nuppe (eines Virgatus) hinzuzudenken25. Brotvermehrung

15 / Maria Magdalena, Detail der sog. Lipsanothek von Brescia, um 370–390 / Museo di Santa Giulia (Brescia) 16 / Brotvermehrung, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Museo Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 60750

Einzigartig ist ein grünlicher Zwischengoldglas­ boden mit 9.7 cm Durchmesser im Museo Cristi­ ano des Vatikan unter Inv.-Nr. 60750 [Abb. 16]26. Er ist rundum und rechts unten bebrochen und zeigt innerhalb eines quadratischen, von vier Schrift­ rollen umgebenen Rahmens rechts eine jugendli­ che bartlose Gestalt (Christus) mit kurzem Haar in Tunika und Pallium. Er steht frontal mit dem Kopf im Profil. Die linke Hand ist vom Gewand verhüllt, die rechte zeigt mit einem verlängerten Zeigefinger auf sieben in drei Reihen übereinan­ der angeordnete Körbe mit kreuzgekerbten Broten. Links steht eine identisch (!) gestaltete Figur mit erhobener Rechter (im Redegestus). Zwischen den Köpfen befindet sich eine Tabula mit je einer Vo­ lute links und rechts sowie einem Christogramm zwischen zwei Sternen27. Außerdem füllen noch drei Rosetten den Hintergrund. Ein weiteres Zwischengoldglas mit dem Brot­ wunder gibt es noch in situ in der Panfilokata­ kombe in Rom [Abb. 17]28, das die Verf. aber leider trotz mehrmaliger Suche dort nicht mehr auf­ finden konnte. Es ist ein weißlicher Glasboden mit 6.2 cm Durchmesser, der allseits bebrochen innerhalb eines runden Rahmens einen kurzhaa­ rigen, bartlosen Christus in Tunika und Pallium nach rechts zeigt, der mit einem Stab auf sieben Körbe mit Broten in vertikaler Anordnung weist. Im Hintergrund gibt es Punkte und links die In­ schrift piez eisis. Dargestellt ist die Brotvermeh­ rung plus Zeuge (?) wie in den Mosaiken von S. Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna (etwa [Abb. 27]) nach Mt 15, 32–38 = Mk 8, 5–9 (der Speisung der 4000 mit sieben Körben übriggebliebener Brote). Dieses Ereignis ist Vorbild für das Sakrament der

Eucharistie. Vergleichsbeispiele liefern wieder Katakomben und Sarkophage (z. B. im Museo Pio Cristiano des Vatikans unter Inv.-Nr. 173 [Abb. 18]) reichlich (mit jeweils verschiedener Anzahl an Körben! – vgl. auch die verschiedene Anzahl der Krüge beim Weinwunder!). Auferweckung des Lazarus29 Eine besondersartige Darstellung befindet sich heute im Museo Cristiano unter Inv.-Nr. 60705 [Abb. 19]30. Dabei handelt es sich um einen grünen Glasboden mit 10 cm Durchmesser, der rundum bebrochen ist und einen niedrigen, großteils eben­ falls weggebrochenen Standring besitzt. Er besteht aus drei Glasschichten, wobei die Darstellung versehentlich an der Unterseite der zweiten an­ gebracht wurde, sodass sie nur von außen richtig betrachtet werden kann. Auch Silberfolie wurde verwendet, z. B. bei dem relativ breiten kreisför­ migen Rahmen. Rechts im Bild steht ein bartlos­ er kurzhaariger Mann (Christus) in Tunika und Pallium und Sandalen in Dreiviertelansicht nach links. Das Pallium ist mit silbernen Clavi verziert. Die linke Hand befindet sich unter dem Gewand, die rechte ist ausgestreckt und hält einen Stab auf den Kopf einer weiteren Figur (Lazarus) links im Bild. Diese ist in Leichenbinden gewickelt, die wieder aus Silberfolie gefertigt sind. Sie wurden über den gesamten Körper sorgfältig mehrfach gekreuzt angeordnet. Nur der Kopf der Wickel­ leiche ist in Goldfolie gearbeitet. Diese liegt auf sieben Stufen eines gemauerten Gebäudes mit kuppelförmigem Dach, welches runden Dekor aufweist. Der Eingang ist ohne Tür und lässt in 24 Siehe Myla Perraymond, „L’emorroissa e la cananea nell’arte paleocristiana“, Bessarione, v (1986), s. 147–174. 25 Siehe unsere [Abb. 28–38]. 26 Bei The Gold-Glass Collection (Anm. 2), s. 18, Nr. 72. 27 Hierzu vgl. Renate J. Pillinger, „Der Stern als messiani­ sches Symbol in der frühchristlichen Kunst“, in Festschrift für R. Bratož, Alenka Cedilnik, Milan Lovenjak (Hrsg.), [in Druck]. 28 Bei The Gold-Glass Collection (Anm. 2), s. 40, Nr. 223 und Taf. 24. 29 Zu ihr siehe Lucina Vattuone, „L’iconografia della Risur­ rezzione di Lazzaro nei vetri antichi“, in Vetri di ogni tempo. Scoperte, produzione, commercio, iconografia, Atti della v Gior­ nata Nazionale di Studio Comitato Nazionale aihv (Massa Martana – Perugia, 30 ottobre 1999), Mailand 2001, s. 43–49 und Robert Darmstädter, Die Auferweckung des Lazarus in der altchristlichen und byzantinischen Kunst, Bern 1955. 30 Bei The Gold-Glass Collection (Anm. 2), s. 9, Nr. 31.

17 / Brotvermehrung, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Panfilokatakombe (Rom)

18 / Brotwunder, Detail eines Sarkophags, 4. Jh. / Museo Pio Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 173

19 / Auferweckung des Lazarus, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Museo Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 60705

147

20 / Auferweckung des Lazarus, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Museo Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 60752

21 / Auferweckung des Lazarus, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Museo Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 60726

22 / Lazarus im Grab, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Museo 148 Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 60673 148

23 / Auferweckung des Lazarus, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Museo Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 60679

24 / Lazarus im Grab, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / British Museum (London), Reg. no. bep 1854,0722.14

das dunkle Innere blicken. Hinter dem Dach ragen noch die Äste eines Baumes hervor. Über ihnen beginnt auch eine Inschrift: ze svs cristvs. Ein weiterer Gefäßboden im Museo Cristi­ ano unter Inv.-Nr. 60752 [Abb. 20] aus grünem Glas mit 7.7 cm Durchmesser ist wieder rund­ um bebrochen, aber mit intaktem Standring31. In einem quadratischen Rahmen aus Halbkreisen und reziprokem Zackenmuster steht abermals ein bartloser kurzhaariger Mann (Christus), diesmal allerdings mit Nimbus, in Tunika und Pallium, in das die Linke greift, nach rechts gewendet mit einem Stab in der Rechten auf den Kopf des Lazarus zeigend, der in Binden gewickelt mit verhülltem Haupt in einem Grabhäuschen (einer Ädikula) mit zwei Säulen steht. Links davon gibt es noch einen Kreis. Wiederum im Museo Cristiano unter Inv.Nr. 60777 ist der bereits [Abb. 2] besprochene zweigeteilter Glasboden aufbewahrt. Im oberen Bildfeld steht rechts, wie vorher, nach links ge­ wendet eine bartlose kurzhaarige männliche Ge­ stalt in Tunika und Pallium. Die linke Hand ist in Letzteres eingehüllt, die rechte ist vorgestreckt und hält einen Stab, der den Kopf einer weite­ ren Figur berührt, die kurzhaarig, bartlos und in Leichentücher gehüllt, diesmal bibelkonform an einem Felsen lehnt. Der Kopf und das Gesicht der Wickelleiche wurden freigelassen. Zwischen und hinter den Figuren erscheinen Blätter und Punkte als Füllelemente. Eine ähnliche Darstellung trägt ein weiteres Zwischengoldglas im Museo Cristiano unter Inv.Nr. 60726 [Abb. 21]32. Dabei handelt es sich um einen weißlichen Glasboden mit 8.4 cm Durch­ messer, der rundum und auch sonst gebrochen ist, wobei teilweise sogar die Deckschicht fehlt und Irisation gegeben ist. Wieder steht eine bartlose kurzhaarige Gestalt (Christus) in Dreiviertelan­ sicht nach links in Tunika und Pallium, das von der Linken gehalten wird, während die Rechte mit einem Stab über den unverhüllten Kopf des bibelkonform an einen Felsen gelehnten Lazarus weist. Dazwischen gibt es drei große Blätter und Punkte. Die umlaufende Inschrift lautet pie.zeses. Innerhalb eines Bibelzyklus gibt es die Auf­ erweckung des Lazarus auf dem bereits [Abb. 7] beschriebenen Zwischengoldglasboden unter der

Inv.-Nr. an 2007.35 im Ashmolean Museum. Zwi­ schen der Heilung des Paralytischen und dem Sündenfall erscheint dort Lazarus als Wickellei­ che, wobei Gesicht und Beine freigelassen wurden. Auch die Brust ist frei von Binden, doch kreuzen diese sich im Bereich des Oberkörpers. Die Leiche selbst ist wieder bibelkonform aufrecht an einen Felsen gelehnt und rechts vor ihr steht Jesus als Wundertäter, d. h. mit Stab. Auf einer blauen Nuppe mit 2.5 cm Durch­ messer im Museo Cristiano unter Inv.-Nr. 60673 [Abb. 22] steht in kreisförmigem Rahmen das Grab des Lazarus als Ädikula mit zwei korinthischen Säulen und Akroteren am Giebeldach sowie vier Stufen33. Zwischen den offenen Türflügeln erscheint der in Binden gewickelte Lazarus mit unverhülltem Kopf. Möglicherweise gab es dazu noch eine zweite Nuppe mit einem Virgatus (sie­ he unsere [Abb. 28–38]). Auf einer weiteren grü­ nen Nuppe mit 2.7 cm Durchmesser im Museo Cristiano unter Inv.-Nr. 60679 [Abb. 23] gibt es im kreisförmigen nur mehr teilweise (links und oben) erhaltenen Rahmen eine kurzhaarige und bartlose Figur (Christus) in weitärmeliger Tu­ nika und Pallium, das die Linke hält, während die Rechte mit einem Stab über den Kopf des in Binden gewickelten Lazarus zeigt. Rechts steht noch eine Pflanze, links oben ein Kreis34. Eine ebensolche blaue Nuppe mit 2.7 cm Durchmesser befindet sich u. a. im British Museum unter Reg. no. bep 1854,0722.14 [Abb. 24]35. Sie wurde 1854 aus der Sammlung Bunsen angekauft und zeigt im kreisförmigen Rahmen wieder nur die Ädikula mit Lazarus. Möglicherweise gab es dazu noch eine zweite Nuppe mit einem Virgatus (siehe un­ sere [Abb. 28–38]).

chronicles & debates

Bei allen besprochenen Beispielen haben wir es mit Jesus als Wundertäter bei der Auferweckung des Lazarus nach Jo 11, 38–44 zu tun. Abwei­ chend vom Bibeltext sind auf den Darstellungen: die Kleidung Jesu (Tunika und Pallium), oft das 31 Bei The Gold-Glass Collection (Anm. 2), s. 19, Nr. 77. 32 Ibidem, s. 11f., Nr. 44. 33 Ibidem, s. 32f., Nr. 158. 34 Ibidem, s. 32, Nr. 157. 35 Ibidem, s. 56, Nr. 330 und Howells, A Catalogue (Anm. 2), s. 109f., Nr. 26.

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Grabhäuschen anstelle des Felsgrabes, der freie Kopf, die geöffneten Augen des (schon aufer­ weckten?) Lazarus und der (Wunder)Stab Jesu36. Letzterer kommt wahrscheinlich aus dem Ersten (Alten) Testament, wo Mose alle seine Wunder (Durchzug, Mara, Quellwunder usw.) mit einem solchen vollzog. Ebenso gibt es ihn beim apokry­ phen Quellwunder Petri37. Vergleichbare Darstel­ lungen liefern wieder Katakomben ([Abb. 25] – wo wir ein Christogramm als Gewandzeichen am Pallium sehen) und Sarkophage, z. B. im Museo Pio Cristiano mit dem Gesicht des Verstorbenen unter Inv.-Nr. 31352 [Abb. 26], bis hin zu den Mosaiken in S. Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna ([Abb. 27], wo übrigens wieder ein weißgewandter Zeuge auftritt).

25 / Auferweckung des Lazarus, SS. Marcellino e Pietro, Rom, 4. Jh. 26 / Auferweckung des Lazarus, Detail eines Sarkophags, 4. Jh. / Museo Pio Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 31352 27 / Auferweckung des Lazarus, S. Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, 6. Jh.

Die Aussage von Text und Bild lautet: Jesus ist die Auferstehung und das Leben. Wer an ihn glaubt, wird leben38, weshalb einige Forscher meinen, dass das Grab des Lazarus auf dem erst­ besprochenen Glas [Abb. 19] nach der Anastasisro­ tunde in Jerusalem gebildet ist. Dazu würde auch der Baum als Symbol für das Leben passen. Virgati Diese finden sich alle auf Nuppen, u. a. vier da­ von im Museo Cristiano des Vatikan. Die erste mit Inv.-Nr. 60686 [Abb. 28] hat 2.6 cm Durchmes­ ser und zeigt in einem achteckigen Rahmen den Stabträger nach links mit beschädigtem Kopf39. Die zweite Nuppe mit Inv.-Nr. 60642 ebendort

28 / Virgatus, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Museo Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 60686 29 / Virgatus, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Museo Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 60642

[Abb. 29] ist grün mit 3.7 cm Durchmesser und in einem achteckigen Rahmen der Virgatus nach 36 Vasiliki Tsamakda, „Eine ungewöhnliche Darstellung der Heilung des Paralytischen in der Domitilla-Katakombe: Zur Verwendung des Wunderstabes in der frühchristlichen Kunst“, Mitteilungen zur Christlichen Archäologie, xv (2009), s. 25–46. 37 Zu dem auf Pseudo-Linus zu verweisen wäre, der allerdings weit jünger als die Monumente ist, weshalb er keine unmit­ telbare Bezugsquelle sein kann, sondern auf älteres Material zurückgehen muss. Außerdem benutzt Petrus in diesem Text keinen Stab für sein Wunder, sondern bedient sich des Kreuzzeichens. Als Lokalität des Geschehens wir der Mamertinische Kerker genannt. Siehe: Acts of Pseudo-Linus, Andrew Eastbourne übers., Open-Source-Veröffentlichung Roger Pearse, https://archive.org/details/ActsOfPseudo-li­ nus/mode/2up, [letzter Zugriff 18.11.2022]. 38 Vgl. hierzu Jacob Kremer, Die Geschichte einer Auferstehung. Text, Wirkungsgeschichte und Botschaft von Jo 11, 1–46, Stuttgart 1985. 39 The Gold-Glass Collection (Anm. 2), s. 33, Nr. 161.

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30 / Virgatus, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Museo Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 60668 31 / Virgatus, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Museo Cristiano (Vatikan), Inv.-Nr. 60679

links sowie vier Blättern im Hintergrund40. Zwei weitere Beispiele im Museo Cristiano ergänzen dieses Panorama [Abb. 30–31]41. Ein weiteres Stück besitzt das Rheinische Landesmuseum in Bonn unter der Inv.-Nr. a139 [Abb. 32]42. Noch drei solche Nuppen gibt es im British Museum, eine unter Reg. no. bep 1881,0624.1 [Abb. 33]43 und zwar auf einer Schale [Abb. 34]44, die 1884 in einem Grab von St. Severin in Köln gefunden wurde. Sie befand sich einst in der Sammlung Disch und wurde spä­ ter von Franks gekauft. Der maximale Durchmes­ ser beträgt 21 cm und trägt auf farblosem Grund jeweils grüne und blaue Nuppen, die von außen aufgebracht sind. Die zweite Nuppe ebendort trägt die Reg. no. bep 1863,027.15 [Abb. 35]45. Sie stammt aus der Sammlung Matarozzi und wurde 1863 von Mosca gekauft. Sie hat einen Durchmes­ ser von 2.4 cm und zeigt in einem oktogonalen Rahmen einen Virgatus. Das dritte Beispiel unter Reg. no. bep 1863,0727.16 [Abb. 36] befand sich einst ebenfalls in der Sammlung Matarozzi und wurde auch 1863 von Mosca angekauft46. Sein Durchmes­ ser beträgt 2.1 cm. Wieder steht im achteckigen Rahmen ein Virgatus nach links. Ein weiterer Virgatus ist in Oxford, Ashmolean Museum unter Inv.-Nr. an 2007.22 [Abb. 37] und einer schließlich im Metropolitan Museum von New York unter Inv.-Nr. 18.148.8 [Abb. 38] zu finden. 32 / Virgatus, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Rheinisches Landesmuseum (Bonn), Inv.-Nr. A139 33 / Virgatus, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / British Museum (London), Reg. no. BEP 1881,0624.1 152

40 41 42 43 44 45 46

The Gold-Glass Collection (Anm. 2), s. 33, Nr. 162. Ibidem, s. 33, Nr. 163 und Nr. 164, Taf. 21. Zuletzt bei Howells, A Catalogue (Anm. 2), s. 92, Pl. 58. Ibidem, s. 93, Pl. 63. Zu ihr vgl. ibidem, s. 90–101, Nr. 16. Ibidem, s. 111f., Pl. 93. Ibidem, s. 112, Pl. 94.

34 /  Schale von St. Severin (Köln), 360–400 / British Museum (London), Reg. no. BEP 1881,0624.1 35 /  Virgatus, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / British Museum (London), Reg. no. BEP 1863,0727.15

36 /  Virgatus, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / British Museum (London), Reg. no. BEP 1863,0727.16

37 / Virgatus, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Ashmolean Museum (Oxford), AN 2007.22

38 /  Virgatus, Zwischengoldglas, 350– 400 / The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Inv.-Nr. 18.148.8

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39 /  Fisch unter der Kürbislaube, Zwischengoldglas, 350–400 / Corning Museum of Glass (New York), Inv.-Nr. 66.1.205

Prinzipiell ist davon auszugehen, dass es dazu jeweils eine zweite Nuppe mit einer knieenden Frau oder Lazarus z. B. gegeben hat. Außerdem konnten wir bei alttestamentlichen Bildern, etwa unseren [Abb. 5] bei den Jünglingen im Feuerofen oder beim Sündenfall [Abb. 7] ebenfalls solche Vir­ gati feststellen. Diese lassen sich wohl nur über das Phänomen der Typologie erklären47. Dies ist eine besonders in frühchristlicher Zeit beliebte Auslegungsart der Bibel, bei der es um die Erfül­ lung des Alten im Neuen Testament und speziell um Jesus geht. Ein wunderschönes Beispiel dazu liefert die Inv.-Nr. 66.1.205 des Corning Museum of Glass in New York [Abb. 39] mit einem Fisch (als Symbol für Christus) unter der Kürbislaube statt des Propheten Jona48. Abschließend lässt sich noch festhalten, dass Jesus auf den Zwischengold­ gläsern beinahe alle Wunder mit Stab wirkt. Schlusswort

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Insgesamt handelt es sich bei allen besprochenen Objekten um Nobelgeschirr, weshalb es erstaunt, dass etwa die noch in situ befindlichen Glasböden in der Panfilokatakombe in Rom durchwegs an

Loculus-, sogenannten Armengräbern ange­ bracht sind. Erst in Zweitverwendung gelang­ ten sie in oder an die Gräber. Ursprünglich dienten sie wohl als Geschenke zu besonderen Anlässen wie etwa einer Hochzeit im Falle des Weinwunders.49 Die Datierung ist mangels meist nicht vor­ handenem Fundkontext sehr schwierig, meist aber in das vierte Jahrhundert n. Chr. gesetzt, womit es sich um typisch spätantike Produk­ te handelt. 47 Hier siehe u. a. Leonhard Goppelt, Typos. Die typologische Deutung des Alten Testaments im Neuen, Darmstadt 1990 [Gütersloh 1939]; Kenneth J. Woollcombe, „The Biblical Origins and Patristic Development of Typology“, in Essays on Typology, Geoffrey W. H. Lampe, Kenneth J. Woollcombe (Hrsg.), London 1957; Sabine Schrenk, Typos und Antitypos in der frühchristlichen Kunst, Münster 1995 und Catherine Brown Tkacz, The Key of the Brescia Casket: Typology and the Early Christian Imagination, Paris 2001. 48 Bei Howells, A Catalogue (Anm. 2), s. 100, Pl. 76. 49 Siehe, jüngst: Monica Hellström, „Baptism and Roman Gold-Glasses: Salvation and Social Dynamics“, in A Globalised Visual Culture? Towards a Geography of Late Antique Art, Fabio Guidetti, Katharina Meinecke (Hrsg.), Oxford 2020, pp. 179–210; Chiara Croci, „Reused from Banquet to Grave: Gold Glass, a ‚Popular‘ Medium in Late Antiquity?“, Eikón/Imago, xi (2022), s. 47–55.

summary

chronicles & debates

Ježíšovy zázraky na vybraných (římských) skleněných nádobách

Termínem „Zwischengoldgläser“ se označu­ je velmi zvláštní typ skleněných nádob s obrazy, které vznikly nanesením zlaté fólie nebo přímou malbou zlatem obvykle mezi dvěma vrstvami skla. Proto se jim také v angličtině říká „sendvičové sklo“. V současné době známe více než 800 tako­ výchto artefaktů. Jejich výroba byla velmi složi­ tá, a proto probíhala téměř výhradně v Římě. Tyto nádoby byly navíc – nejen v důsledku použití zlaté fólie – velmi drahé, a tak je můžeme označit za luxusní zboží. Tím spíše je překvapivé, že se nachá­ zejí například v katakombách sv. Panfila v Římě na tzv. chudinských hrobech. Přímo do hrobů nebo na hroby se ovšem umisťovaly pouze druhotně. Vzhledem k většinou neznámému kontextu jed­ notlivých nálezů je velmi obtížné i datování těchto artefaktů, obvykle se uvádí 4. stol. n. l. Z mnoha Ježíšových zázraků se na římských zlatých nádobách nachází pouze pět – proměnění vody ve víno, uzdravení ochrnutého, pravděpo­ dobně uzdravení ženy trpící krvotokem, rozmno­ žení chleba a vzkříšení Lazara. K článku je přiložen výběr jednotlivých vyobra­ zení Krista na těchto skleněných nádobách, z nichž každé pravděpodobně doprovázelo ještě další zná­ zornění. Příležitostně se tyto výjevy objevují i ve starozákonních a novozákonních obrazových cyk­ lech, kde je lze vysvětlit na základě tzv. typologie.

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photographic credits

I. FOLETTI, M. OKÁČOVÁ & A. PALLADINO – Fig. 1, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Düsseldorf); Fig. 2, from Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Princeton/Oxford 2017; Fig. 3, from Nos contemporains chez eux, Photographies Paul François Arnold Cardon, dit Dornac / Gallica; Fig. 4, from Alois Riegl, Die spätrömische KunstIndustrie nach den Funden in Österreich-Ungarn, Vienna 1901; Fig. 5, from Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie, Munich 1908; Fig. 6, from André Grabar, Les origines de l’esthétique médiévale, Paris 1992 [1945]. I. FOLETTI & M. OKÁČOVÁ – Figs 1–8, 11–14, Centre for Early Medieval Studies; Figs  9–10, from Morphogrammata / The Lettered Art of Optatian: Figuring Cultural Transformations in the Age of Constantine, Michael Squire, Johannes Wienand

Copyright rules K autorským právům In the matter of copyright, every author is responsible for the illustrations published. In general, Convivium follows § 31 of the law no. 121/2000 Coll. (Copyright Act), where paragraph 1 c explicitly states: “Copyright is not infringed by anybody who uses the work while teaching for illustration purposes or during scientific research, without seeking to achieve direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage and without exceeding the extent adequate to the given purpose; however, if possible, the name of the author, unless the work is an anonymous work, or the name of the person under whose name the work is being introduced in public and the title of the work and source, shall always be indicated.” Ve věci autorských práv ilustrací je každý autor odpovědný za publikované ilustrace. Obecně se ale Convivium řídí ust. § 31 zákona č. 121/2000 Sb. (autorský zákon), kde je v odst. 1, písm. c) výslovně řečeno: „Do práva autorského nezasahuje ten, kdo užije dílo při vyučování pro ilustrační účel nebo při vědeckém výzkumu, jejichž účelem není dosažení přímého nebo nepřímého hospodářského nebo obchodního prospěchu, a nepřesáhne rozsah odpovídající sledovanému účelu; vždy je však nutno uvést, je-li to možné, jméno autora, nejde-li o dílo anonymní, nebo jméno osoby, pod jejímž jménem se dílo uvádí na veřejnost, a dále název díla a pramen.“

eds, Paderborn 2017, pp. 42, 49. J. MIKULOVÁ – Figs 1–2, Jana Mikulová. C. CROCI – Fig. 1, from Repertorium der christlichantiken Sarkophage, vol. ii: Italien. Mit einem Nachtrag: Rom und Ostia, Dalmatien, Museen der Welt, Jutta Dresken-Weiland ed., Mainz 1998, no. 242 = Rep. ii, 242; Fig. 2, from Fabrizio Bisconti, Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, Roms Christliche Katakomben. Geschichte – Bilderwelt – Inschriften, Regensburg 1998, fig. 15; Fig. 3, Johannes G. Deckers, Die Katakombe Anonima di Via Anapo. Tafelband, Vatican City 1991, col. pl. 8; Figs 4–6, 9, from Joseph Wilpert, Die Malereien der Katakomben Roms, Freiburg i. B. 1903, pls 41b, 16, 239, 212; Fig. 7, 16, from Repertorium der christlich-antiken Sarkophage, vol. i: Rom und Ostia, Friedrich W. Deichmann ed., Wiesbaden 1967, no. 40 = Rep. i, 40, no. 145 = Rep. i, 145; Fig. 8, from Saints and Salvation: The Wilshere Collection of GoldGlass, Sarcophagi and Inscriptions from Rome and Southern Italy. Ashmolean Museum, Susan Walker ed., Oxford 2017, p. 131; Fig. 10, from Stefanie Nagel, “Die Schale von Podgorica. Bemerkungen zu einem außergewöhnlichen christlichen Glas der Spätantike”, Bonner Jahrbücher, ccxiii (2013), pp. 165–198, fig. 1; Fig. 11, from Catacombe di Domitilla. Restauri nel tempo, Fabrizio Bisconti ed., Vatican City 2017, p. 189; Fig. 12, from Sebastian Ristow, Frühes Christentum im Rheinland. Die Zeugnisse der archäologischen und historischen Quellen an Rhein, Maas und Mosel, Cologne 2007,

pl. 35a; Fig. 13, from Charles R. Morey, The Gold-Glass Collection

Birmingham 2020, pl. 16; Fig. 14, Bede Museum, Jarrow Hall;

of the Vatican Library, Guy Ferrari ed, Vatican City 1959, no. 138;

Fig. 15, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, inv. 56.324; Fig. 16,

Fig. 14, from Daniel T. Howells, A Catalogue of the Late Antique

ArtHistoryBrussels, Inv. B000787-007; Fig. 17–18, Wikimedia

Gold Glass in the British Museum, Liz James, Chris Entwistle

Commons. K. MEINECKE – Figs 1–2, 6, 9, 10, photo by Katharina

eds, London 2015, pl. 80; Fig. 15, Andrew Simsky; Fig. 17, from

Meinecke; Fig. 3, Sean Leatherbury/Manar al-Athar, http://www.

Catacombe sconosciute. Una pinacoteca del iv secolo sotto la via

manar-al-athar.ox.ac.uk, Resource id 80472; Fig. 4, from Martin

Latina, Florence 1990, fig. 68; Figs 18–19, Domenico Ventura.

Harrison, Ein Tempel für Byzanz. Die Entdeckung und Ausgrabung

A. VIRDIS – Figs 1–2, from Anna Brunetto et al., “L’intervento

von Anicia Julianas Palastkirche in Istanbul, Stuttgart/Zürich

conservativo sulle transenne in stucco gessoso e lapis specularis

1990, p. 115, fig. 149 (Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig [92-4-1926]);

della basilica di Santa Sabina a Roma: approccio metodologico,

Fig. 5, Eugen von Mercklin, Universität zu Köln, Forschungsarchiv

prassi operative e studio della tecnica esecutiva”, Hortus Artium

für Antike Plastik, arachne.dainst.org/entity/176999; Fig.  7,

Medievalium, xxvi (2020), pp. 60–72, sp. p. 66, fig. 7; Fig. 3, from

Dumbarton Oaks, Byzantine Collection, Washington, dc, acc.

Simona Pannuzi, Stefano Lugli, “Sistemi di chiusura degli spazi

no. BZ.1946.16; Fig. 8, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler

finestrati nell’Altomedioevo: transenne di finestra in pietra e in

Gallery Archives, Ernst Herzfeld Papers

stucco di gesso e lapis specularis”, in GeoArcheoGypsum2019.

Herzfeld, 1946,

Geologia e Archeologia del Gesso. Dal lapis specularis alla scagliola,

Museum, London; Fig. 12, Jürgen Vogel, lvr-LandesMuseum

Domenica Gullì et al. eds, Palermo 2018, pp. 237–261, sp. p. 241,

Bonn; Figs 13–14, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

fig. 2; Fig. 4, from Sylvie Balcon-Berry, “Origines et évolution du

www.metmuseum.org. M. AIMONE – Figs 1–16, photo by Marco

vitrail: l’apport de l’archéologie”, in Vitrail: ve–xxie siècle, Michel

Aimone. R. J. PILLINGER – Fig. 1, from Jean-Michel Spieser, “Von

Hérold, Véronique David eds, Paris 2014, pp. 21–30, sp. p. 27;

der Anonymität zur Herrlichkeit Christi, Der Aufstieg der Bilder in

Fig. 5, from Francesca Dell’Acqua, “Early History of Stained Glass”,

der frühchristlichen und byzantinischen Epoche (3.–15. Jh.)”, Welt

in Investigation in Medieval Stained Glass, Elizabeth Carson Pastan,

und Umwelt der Bibel, xiv (1999), p. 9; Fig. 2, from Dalla terra alle

Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz eds, Leiden/Boston 2019, pp. 23–35,

genti. La diffusione del cristianesimo nei primi secoli, Angela Donati

sp. p. 80, fig. 2.1; Fig. 6, from Patrice Wahlen, “À propos d’un verre

ed., Milan 1996, p. 244, no. 11; Figs 3–4, 6, 8–11, 14, 16, 18–23,

peint trouvé à Alesia”, in Vitrail, verre et archéologie entre le ve et le

26–31, photo by Renate J. Pillinger; Figs 5, 38, The Metropolitan

xiie siècle, Sylvie Balcon-Berry, Françoise Perrot, Christian Sapin

Museum of Art, New York, www.metmuseum.org; Figs 7, 37,

eds, Paris 2014, pp. 63–64, sp. p. 64, fig. 1; Figs 7–8, from Andrew

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Figs 12, 24, 32–33, 35–36, 39,

fsa. a.06, Gift of Ernst fsa a .06 05.0307; Fig. 11, Victoria and Albert

Oliver, “A Glass Opus Sectile Panel from Corinth”, Hesperia, lxx

from Daniel T. Howells, A Catalogue of the Late Antique Gold Glass

(2001), pp. 349–363, sp. p. 350, fig. 1, p. 357, fig. 7.; Figs 9, 11, from

in the British Museum, London 2015; Fig. 13, 25, from Johannes

Aurea Roma. Dalla città pagana alla città cristiana, Serena Ensoli,

G. Deckers, Hans R. Seeliger, Gabriele Mietke, Die Katakombe

Giulio La Rocca eds, Rome 2001, cover page; Fig. 10, Marco Prins;

“SS. Marcellino e Pietro”, 2 vols, Münster 1987, color pl. 43, color

Fig. 12, from Jean-Yves Langlois, “Vitrail mosaïque de l’église

pl. 65a; Fig. 15, photo by Adrien Palladino / Museo di Santa Giulia,

mérovingienne de Notre-Dame-de-Bondeville”, Vitrail, verre et

Brescia; Fig. 17, from Charles R. Morey, The Gold-Glass Collection

archéologie entre le ve et le xiie siècle, Sylvie Balcon-Berry, Françoise

of the Vatican Library, Guy Ferrari ed, Vatican City 1959, no. 223,

Perrot, Christian Sapin eds, Paris 2009, pp. 95–120, sp. p. 102,

pl. 24; Fig. 34, from Sebastian Ristow, Frühes Christentum im

fig. 4; Fig. 13, from Francesca Dell’Acqua, Iconophilia. Politics,

Rheinland. Die Zeugnisse der archäologischen und historischen

Religion, Preaching, and the Use of Images in Rome, c. 680–880,

Quellen an Rhein, Maas und Mosel, Cologne 2007, pl. 35a.

157

selected publications

of the Centre for Early Medieval Studies, Department of Art History, Masaryk University

All publications are available at www.viella.it & www.press.muni.cz

The Current State of Russian Folk Icon Painting Nikodim P. Kondakov Ivan Foletti, Adrien Palladino & Zuzana Urbanová eds, 2022 28€

Aux portes de la Jérusalem Céleste Le tympan sculpté de Conques Ivan Foletti & Cécile Voyer, 2022 4€

Saint Foy révelée La plus ancienne statue médiévale à Conques Ivan Foletti & Adrien Palladino, 2021 4€

158

Byzantium or Democracy? Kondakov's Legacy in Emigration: The Institutum Kondakovianum and André Grabar, 1925–1952 Ivan Foletti & Adrien Palladino, 2020 25€

Plotinus and the Origins of Medieval Aesthetics André Grabar / translation & introduction by Adrien Palladino, 2018 24€

Inventing Medieval Czechoslovakia 1918–1968 Between Slavs, Germans, and Totalitarian Regimes Ivan Foletti & Adrien Palladino eds, 2019 25€

Migrating Art Historians on the Sacred Ways Reconsidering Medieval French Art through the Pilgrim's Body Ivan Foletti, Katarína Kravčíková, Adrien Palladino, Sabina Rosenbergová eds, 2018 70€

From Kondakov to Hans Belting Library Emigration and Byzantium – Bridges between Worlds Ivan Foletti, Francesco Lovino, Veronika Tvrzníková eds, 2018 20€

The Mystic Cave A History of the Nativity Church in Bethlehem Michele Bacci, 2017 70€