Destroyed—Disappeared—Lost—Never Were 9780271093758

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Destroyed—Disappeared—Lost—Never Were

ICMA BOOKS | VIEWPOINTS Copublished by the International Center of Medieval Art and Penn State University Press, the ICMA Books | Viewpoints series aims to engage with and instigate new conversations, debates, and perspectives not only about medieval art and visual-material culture but also in relation to the critical practices employed by medieval art historians. Books will typically be data-rich, issue-driven, and even polemical. The range of potential subjects is broad and varied, and each title will tackle a significant and timely problem in the field of medieval art and visual-material culture. The Viewpoints series is interdisciplinary and actively involved in providing a forum for current critical developments in art-historical methodology, the structure of scholarly writing, and/or the use of evidence.

Destroyed— Disappeared—Lost— Never Were

Edited by Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fricke, Beate, editor. | Kumler, Aden, editor. Title: Destroyed—disappeared—lost—never were / [edited by] Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2022] | Series: ICMA books—viewpoints | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “A collection of essays by art historians on works of art, artifacts, and monuments that are no longer extant, have disappeared, or perhaps never existed outside of language. Addresses destruction, loss, obscurity, and existential uncertainty within the history of art and the study of historical material and visual cultures”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021061838 | ISBN 9780271093284 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Lost works of art. | Art—Mutilation, defacement, etc. | Art—History—Philosophy. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC N9100 .D47 2022 | DDC 709—dc23/ eng/20220208 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021061838 Copyright © 2022 International Center for Medieval Art All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

Contents

List of Illustrations (vii) Acknowledgments (ix) Introduction: Destroyed—Disappeared— Lost—Never Were  (1) Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler

1. Jerusalem’s Loca Sancta and Their Perishable Frames (22) Michele Bacci

2. John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Lintel of Kabah (38) Claudia Brittenham

3. The Sanguine Art: Four Fragments (49) Sonja Drimmer

4. The Dreamwork of Positivism: Archaeological Art History and the Imaginative Restoration of the Lost (61) Jaś Elsner

5. Finding Delight in Gardens Lost (75) Danielle B. Joyner

6. Impermanence, Futurity, and Loss in Twelfth-Century Japan (87) Kristopher W. Kersey

7. Lonely Bones: Relics sans Reliquaries (100) Lena Liepe

8. The Manuscript Machine: Assemblages and Divisions in Jazarī’s Compendium (113) Meekyung MacMurdie

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9. Cave and Camera: Shades of Loss in the Library Cave of Dunhuang (129) Michelle McCoy

10. Mourning the Loss of Works / Praising Their Absence: A Response (143) Peter Geimer

List of Contributors (153)

Illustrations

1.1. View of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives (29) 1.2. Column marking the spot of Judas’s kiss near the Garden of Gethsemane, Jerusalem (34) 2.1. Frederick Catherwood, Kabah—Carved Beam of Sapote Wood, engraving by A. Jones, in John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1843), vol. 1, facing p. 405 (39) 3.1. The Tale of the Three Questions, in John Gower, Confessio Amantis, London, ca. 1470. The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, MS M.126, fol. 26v (51) 3.2. The Tale of the Three Questions, in John Gower, Confessio Amantis, London, ca. 1425–50. New College Library, Oxford, MS 266, fol. 33v (54) 4.1. Relief panel from the drum of the stupa at Amarāvatī in southeastern India, probably second or third century CE (67) 4.2. Relief panel, perhaps once part of a larger object, fifth to tenth centuries CE (68) 5.1. Plan of St. Gall, ninth century. St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 1092 (77) 5.2. Plan of St. Gall, detail of the orchard/cemetery and vegetable garden, ninth century. St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 1092 (78) 6.1. Ceramic case, engraved bronze container, and copies of the Lotus Sūtra excavated from near Kokawa (Wakayama, Japan), 1125 CE (92) 7.1. Skull of St. Lucius with the accession number BBa15 (101) 7.2. Display case with arm reliquary and relics in the Museum of National Antiquities, Stockholm (103) 7.3. The bust reliquary in its opened state, exposing the skull of St. Lucius. St. Ansgar Catholic Cathedral, Copenhagen (108) 8.1. Brass door created for the palace in Āmid (Diyarbakır), in Abū al-ʿizz ibn Ismaʾ īl ibn al-Razzāz al-Jazarī, al-Jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿilm wa’l-ʿamal al-nāfiʿ fī ṣināʿat al-ḥiyal (Compendium on the theory and useful practice in the mechanical arts), copied by Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf ibnʿUthman al-Ḥaṣkafī, northern Mesopotamia, 1206 (114) 8.2. Water clock in the shape of a castle with the signs of the Zodiac, in Abū al-ʿizz ibn Ismaʾ īl ibn al-Razzāz al-Jazarī, al-Jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿilm wa’lʿamal al-nāfiʿ fī ṣināʿat al-ḥiyal (Compendium on the theory and useful practice in the mechanical arts), copied by Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf ibn ʿUthman al-Ḥaṣkafī, northern Mesopotamia, 1206 (118)

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9.1. Paul Pelliot in the Library Cave (Cave 17), Mogao Grottoes, Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China. (130) 9.2. North (main) wall of Hongbian’s mortuary shrine (Cave 17), Mogao Grottoes, Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China, ca. 851–62 CE (133) 9.3. Reconstructed mortuary shrine of Hongbian (Cave 17), view from Cave 16, north corridor wall, Mogao Grottoes, Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China, ca. 851–62 CE (136) 9.4. Memorial shrine (sculpture not extant) in Cave 103, antechamber south wall, Mogao Grottoes, Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China. (139)

Acknowledgments

Without the help of many eyes, minds, and hands, we could not have brought the contributions to this volume together and to fruition. We would like to single out some of our supporters here, although many will remain unnamed but not forgotten. We thank Elizabeth Sears who invented the Viewpoints series and Ellie Goodman for her support of the series, her enthusiasm for this volume when it was a nascent idea, and her collegial guidance from start to finish. Our research assistants at the Universities of Basel and Bern—Simon Bühler, Vanessa Gonzalvez, Amélie Joller, Gregor von Kerssenbrock-von Krosigk, Mariko Mugwyler—contributed in many ways to our editorial efforts, as did Andrew Sears: we are grateful for their hard work. Thanks are also due to the European Research Council and to members of the research group Global Horizons in Pre-Modern Art, to the Universities of Basel and Bern in Switzerland, and, not least, to the ICMA for inaugurating the Viewpoints series and supporting it financially. Colleagues inside and outside the field of Western medieval art have been sources of intellectual inspiration and welcome critique: at Berkeley, Sugata Ray and Lisa Trever; and at Chicago, Persis Berlekamp, Patrick Crowley, Darby English, and the intellectual community of the Medieval Studies Workshop. The two anonymous peer reviewers for the press were generous and insightful interlocutors: we are grateful for the time, energy, and critical insights they gave to the manuscript. Our final thanks go to the colleagues who contributed essays to this volume: their collaboration has been an illuminating presence during a period of time profoundly marked by distance and loss.

Introduction Destroyed—Disappeared— Lost—Never Were

Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler This volume assembles a kaleidoscopic array of reflections on works of art, artifacts, and monuments that are no longer extant, have disappeared from view, or perhaps never existed outside of language in the first place. Composed of short essays by specialists working on a diverse range of world cultures during the period from 500 to 1500 CE, the volume explores the formative presence of destruction, loss, obscurity, and existential uncertainty within the history of art and the study of historical material and visual cultures. Since the 1980s, the influence of new historicism and the rise of visual studies and visual culture paradigms have increasingly expanded the scope of what could and should be encompassed by the project of historical reconstruction or recovery. More and more art historians, not least those focused on premodern periods, have questioned not only evidentiary lacunae—lost works, lost documentation, lost lived experience—but also the forms of occlusion worked by disciplinary definitions of what might count as an object for the art-historical gaze.1 As a consequence, art historians have turned our attention to previously excluded forms of visual representation, artifacts, and even unworked materials

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themselves—a move away from narrow conceptions of art history’s proper objects of study, already presaged in the work of scholars such as Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, and Ernst Gombrich.2 Indeed, since the late 1990s, the canon of art history has been significantly altered, revised, questioned, and expanded, and artifacts, object constellations, visual/material assemblages, and ensembles have progressively moved to the center of scholarly attention. At the same time, the rise of new conceptions of “global” or “world art history” have both challenged and significantly transformed the scope and priorities of disciplinary art history, decentering the place of Europe and North America within the art-historical landscape and focusing new critical attention on the historical and historiographical consequences of past and present forms of orientalism, colonialism, and racism.3 This foment of historical and methodological critique and creativity has, in many important ways, expanded the discipline and its collective corpora. And yet, amid this significant opening up of the definitions of what count as art-historical questions, methods, and objects of study, historians of premodern art must still confront the fact of loss, disappearance, and destruction. A more capacious, more inclusive canon, a more critical and cosmopolitan approach to history and historiography, an expanded methodological “tool kit”: none of these welcome developments in the discipline can restore the countless works from 500 to 1500 CE that no longer exist.

The Shapes of Absence If the destruction, disappearance, and loss of artworks, artifacts, and monuments are phenomena well known to all art historians, their effects within the study of premodern visual and material cultures are especially decisive, if still undertheorized, and, perhaps, impossible to adequately theorize. For every premodern work that survives into our present, countless others do not survive. This is at once an historical fact and an acute epistemological condition of our work. For art historians (indeed, for historians of all disciplinary stripes) committed to a philosophically positivist historicism, the fact of absence—and its immensurability—is often felt as a limiting condition. To employ a reductive analogy, if the past is a picture puzzle to

Introduction

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be reassembled piece by piece, missing pieces matter. Destroyed, disappeared, and lost works of art—known only in mediated forms or else not at all—remain blank spaces within the puzzle of the past. In some cases, they may indeed be crucial missing links, whose presence shaped the past and whose absence from our historiographies leaves them lacking. Furthermore, to extend the analogy, we cannot know how many pieces of the historical puzzle are missing, or how this might, or might not, matter to the pictures of the past we attempt to (re)assemble. This state of affairs, and its entailments for the historian, are well known; they have profoundly shaped not only the content of arguments about premodern art but also art-historical methodology itself. Consider, for example, the positing of lost copies in copy-chain accounts of the transmission and transformation of works of art. Practitioners of such stemmatic (or “genetic”) approaches to reconstructing the transmission of iconographic motifs and pictorial formulae have often resorted to hypothesizing lost works whose historical existence can be inferred, it is argued, from the presence of extant works of art. So too, the foundational work of building art-historical chronologies, assembling corpora, and making artistic attributions involves a constant reckoning with “missing data”: those works of art and archival sources that, if they were known, might yield a smooth developmental narrative or reveal a crucial turning point in the history of art’s making and makers. Even where works and archives have facilitated the creation of dense chronologies, secure attributions, and developmental accounts, the fragmentary state of many premodern corpora and archives has powerfully differentiated the habitus of premodernist Europeanist art historians from that of their colleagues working in later periods of European art. Similarly, if yet more perniciously, in subfields dedicated to the art history and archaeology of regions and cultures whose traditions of art making do not lend themselves to the construction of individual artistic oeuvres and whose historical archives do not resemble European textual archives, art history’s traditional approaches to the task of historical reconstruction have come up short or have not yet been thoroughly brought to bear. As Jaś Elsner notes in his essay in this volume, the uneven state of the groundwork in different fields has frustrated

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rigorously comparative work and, for too long, has created the appearance of the absence of archives where, in fact, the situation is one of archival difference. Historians of art made and disappeared or destroyed before 1500 CE must often labor intensely and inventively to amass evidence sufficient to render our historical speculations about the missing tesserae in the mosaic of the past’s remaining traces convincing.4 Galit Noga-Banai and Cheryl Glenn, among others, have suggested that visual evidence can fill gaps where primary textual sources are silent,5 a proposition that variously animated the proceedings of the Comité International d’Histoire de I’Art (CIHA) conference “Memory and Oblivion.”6 Nonetheless, just as the positing of lost works to account for the features of existing works (an approach characteristic of textual and art-historical stemmatic criticism) has been much criticized, so too the use of both texts and images as “documentation” for monuments, objects, and artistic practices otherwise inaccessible to the historian is a tricky business. If the unquantifiable scale of the destruction, loss, and disappearance of works leaves the historian of premodern art in a constant state of epistemological suspension, it must be acknowledged that art historians have continuously and inventively sought “work arounds” to cope with all that we can no longer perceive. Those compensatory methods have, in fact, been foundational for the study of premodern art, so much so that one could describe the history of the history of premodern art as decisively shaped by responses to the “negative spaces” of the historical picture, those known or hypothesized lacunae that are deemed to mark the spots once occupied by unknown and unknowable works of art, artifacts, monuments, and makers. As in a single work of art, negative space can be an active, constitutive, creative presence. And as in the analysis of works of art, attending to negative space can be illuminating. If art historians have often attempted to overcome or compensate for the dynamics of destruction, loss, and disappearance that have winnowed the record of premodern art to some incalculable fraction of what it “once was,” that quixotic project has yielded considerable methodological creativity and insight. A fragmentary archive, however, also has its advantages: premodernists are not confronted with the overwhelming profusion of

Introduction

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potentially relevant sources that colleagues working in later centuries must confront—or else willfully ignore. No doubt, the committed interdisciplinarity of so much premodern art-historical scholarship is, at least in part, due to the scale of our archives and their fragmentary conditions. Last, but not least, as the essays in this volume show, attending to absence itself can be intellectually productive, even liberating. The study and interpretation of works that survive as fragments of some putative lost bigger picture, of works that do not survive or cannot be examined, and of works that may, in fact, have never been realized as material presences, simply cannot be done in a state of epistemological nihilism or exhausted fatalism. It requires intellectual creativity and energy. It has the potential to liberate us from idealized standards of mastery and the tyranny of the definitive “proof” or argument. Pursued critically and with curiosity, it fosters a historical consciousness that apprehends the past’s positive forms and negative spaces in a dynamic, dialectic relation.

Absences: Phenomena and Effects Several modes of absence and their effects are examined by the essays in this volume. The destruction, disappearance, and loss of artworks, artifacts, and monuments are phenomena well known to art historians. From practices of iconoclasm and damnatio memoriae, to erasures effected by environmental disasters and degradation, to the recycling of materials, the destruction of works of art has a history as long as that of the making of art and artifacts. By destruction, in this volume, we envision both the planned and unplanned annihilation of works: actions and events that result in a thoroughgoing, substantial transformation of an object or monument, leaving an absence in place of a presence. Disappearance and loss are, in our conception, cognate yet distinct phenomena. A disappeared or lost work may yet exist, hidden from view. Works can disappear into the ground, buried under strata unless they are unearthed by geological processes or human effort. Works can disappear thanks to their very materials and facture, as well as by intention: temporary architectures, ephemeral performances, works made from perishable substances—even creations made to be

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ingested, consumed by fire, thrown into bodies of water. Such works made to be consumed, destroyed, or otherwise disappeared are abundantly attested in cultures across the globe and through time. Works can also disappear into the private art market, their last known sighting documented in an auction catalog, a former collection’s inventory, a beholder’s memory. Loss is an equally capacious designation that spans a spectrum reaching from the irreversible to the contingent and temporary. If, in the parlance of the insurance industry, a work is a “total loss” when it is deemed to be so substantially altered as to no longer have commercial value, other losses are complexly, contentiously conditional. Objects and sites can, in the course of time, lose their names, their function, their significance. Still extant, in whole or in part, such works endure incognito in a state of historical misrecognition or invisibility. The expropriation of artworks, objects, artifacts, and even monumental complexes by imperial, colonial, and academic actors reveal how gain can be predicated on loss, how presence and visibility can index theft, destruction, and violence. And so too, calls and demands for the repatriation of works and reparations for their loss or disappearance testify to the political, economic, cultural, and religious stakes of absence and reclamation. The blind spots of academic art history also produce losses. Art-historical canons, the myopia of Eurocentrism, the forgetting of older questions and insights as publications proliferate and scholarly interests alter, singly and collaboratively, have proven capable of making works disappear from intellectual view. Although we cannot unwrite prior historiography, and we must not ignore or underestimate its influence, we can collaborate in writing histories that compel us to critically confront how the writing of history always involves exclusions, absences, and privileged perspectives that occlude or obscure other works, other histories, and other analytic perspectives. In a radically changing world impacted by the actual loss of cultural heritage through war, the consequences of climate change, and the redefinition of shared societal values, we need to reflect together about what has been lost, what has disappeared, and what never was in order to collaboratively explore what the past, entangled in the present, might yet be.

Introduction

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“Never were” designates the fourth mode of absence animating this volume. Arguably, it is the mode of absence that has attracted the least reflection and commentary from art historians, and yet it was a vibrant phenomenon in the premodern past and one that art historians today would do well to take seriously. By works that “never were,” we have in mind objects, artifacts, monuments, architectural complexes—indeed even cities—that were only ever fabricated in the human imagination and in language. In some cases, these objects are the stuff of literature: conjured in verse and prose, they existed on the page, in oral performances and acts of listening, perhaps appearing in daydreams or sleep. In other cases, they were produced and preserved in the form of plans, models, drawings, and textual instructions for products and projects never brought to completion. Some works “never were” as they were reported; the stuff of rumor, traveler’s tales, exaggeration, even parody or satire, they circulated, acquired credibility, and became discursive artifacts that could never be verified by autopsy. Premodern imaginative literatures and other textual sources are peppered with such “never were” works. At times their fantastical character alerts us to their fictional substance. In other cases, however, distinguishing between the premodern past’s works of imagination and its realia is far from easy.

Ekphrasis and Uncertainty The rich tradition of premodern ekphrasis is a case in point. From antiquity through the medieval period, many world cultures produced verbal accounts rhetorically crafted to catalyze vivid, imaginative encounters with works of art, architecture, and artfully designed landscapes or environments. Although the famous ekphrases of Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid are often taken, pars pro toto, to stand for the rich tradition of premodern ekphrasis, medievalists have long known that ekphrastic writing flourished in the centuries spanning late antiquity to early modernity.7 To consider only European medieval and Byzantine writers, not only Dante—a well-known practitioner of ekphrasis—but also Venantius Fortunatus, Paul the Silentary, Theodulf of Orléans, Michael the Deacon, Constantine Rhodios, Baudri of Bourgeuil, Hugh of St. Victor, Suger of St. Denis, Nikolaus Mesarites, Wolfram of Eschenbach,

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Albrecht von Scharfenberg, Alanus ab Insulis, Jean de Meun, Christine de Pisan, Konrad Fleck, John Lydgate, William Chaucer, and many other well- and lesser-known medieval writers continued and reinvented the ekphrastic tradition.8 For good reason, late antique, Byzantine, and medieval European ekphrases have exerted an irresistible attraction upon scholars desiring to reconstruct lost works. Although ekphrasis in non-Western subfields of art history has received significantly less scholarly attention, there are rich written sources that merit art historians’ attention.9 But the attention we bring to ekphrases and the uses we make of them must involve historically sensitive, critical forms of reading and interpretation. As Lawrence Nees and Vincent Debiais have elucidated, some medieval works of art compellingly described by ekphrases only ever existed in textual form and in the imaginations of a text’s hearers or readers.10 Even when the subjects of late antique, Byzantine, and European medieval ekphrasis can be securely identified with once-existing or still-existing buildings and objects, these texts do not provide “objective,” impartial accounts of how works of art, architecture, landscape, or other constituents of past visual or material cultures were made, appeared, or were experienced. The varied aims and palpable artfulness of premodern ekphrases defy any naive scholarly attempt to reconstruct lost works or aesthetic experiences: premodern ekphrastic texts (and arguably this has not changed in subsequent centuries) always powerfully remediated works of art and architecture in the medium of language.11 As Avinoam Shalem points out, in Islamicate contexts, written sources “demonstrate the great esteem with which artefacts were held” through sophisticated, even lavish deployments of ekphrasis that defy binary conceptions of object and (human) subject.12 Contrasting Al-Qadi al-Rashid ibn al-Zubayr’s eleventh-century Book of Gifts and Rarities (Kitab al-Hadaya wa al-Tuhaf) with Western medieval inventories, Shalem observes how the text describes objects in a biographical mode, detailing not only their appearance but also their individual histories. The investing of objects with subjecthood by overtly ekphrastic means in Islamicate contexts reaches quite virtuosic levels, Shalem observes, in the widespread and rich tradition of inscribed objects in premodern

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Islamicate cultures.13 Many of the inscriptions worked into objects “when read out aloud give a voice to the objects, as if the objects themselves are speaking.”14 In certain objects we encounter what we might term “auto-ekphrasis”: prosopopoeia integrated in the very fabric of an object that not only grants it a voice but even addresses the beholder with the language of self-description. Although a vast corpus of premodern Islamicate inscribed objects survive, other object inscriptions are preserved only in the form of transcriptions integrated into (other) texts. For the interpreter of such documents of now lost or destroyed objects, encounters with their auto-ekphrases are tantalizing, like poignant encounters with “disembodied” voices from the past. More broadly, the Islamicate tradition of inscribed objects challenges inherited scholarly understandings of ekphrasis as a remediating project. When an object “speaks” its own (self-)description or interpretation, how should the art historian interpret that discourse? As an unassailable “first-person” testimony? As a proleptic instance of past reception? As an uncanny “voice” still audible despite the distance of time and culture? When ekphrases and their object-referents cross cultures and periodizations, the challenges to interpretation only ramify. Taking up a particularly complex case of ekphrastic remediation, Christina Han has examined differences between Western and Chinese scholarly interpretations of Yeats’s poem “Lapis Lazuli,” which concludes with an ekphrastic response to a Chinese Lapis Lazuli stone carved with a depiction of a mountain landscape, and a Chinese ekphrasis of that landscape titled “Visiting a Friend in Spring Mountain” (春山訪友).15 As Han elucidates, the actual carved stone in Yeats’s possession, in both its scenic representation and epigraphy, participates in a painted and poetic thematic tradition inaugurated in the eleventh century. Elucidating how the ekphrasis of the carved stone in Yeats’s poem has involved Western and Chinese scholars in an “ekphrastic clash,” Han argues that “Yeats’s carved rock presents a stumbling block to the poem.”16 She observes that the carved stone’s “iconic image, which evokes rich cultural memories filled with famous mountains and the poet recluses who lived in them, stands in the way of Chinese scholars when interpreting Yeats’s poem. Their interpretive act . . . is a transcultural as well as a transtextual exercise in which the ekphrastic description of

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the scenery by Yeats collides with the ekphrastic tradition of Chinese landscape arts.”17 As Han’s analysis of modern interpretive responses to Yeats’s creative reworking of a Chinese (possibly eleventh-century) carved stone reveals, the interpretation of ekphrasis (like the writing of ekphrasis) is always enmeshed in traditions of aesthetic production and reception. When ekphrasis reaches across cultures or travels transculturally (geographically, temporally, or both), “complex issues of hermeneutic authority” arise, and interpretive gains may be accompanied by contextualist losses.18 As Debiais has insightfully observed, ekphrastic accounts of works of art and architecture often presume and even require one or several productive gaps or intervals between their own vivid acts of rhetorical description and the object described or produced in language: “Many medieval forms of ekphrasis assume a distance: either a physical distance between the object and its viewer, which is necessary for sensory, visionary, or poetic experiences prior to literary composition; or, a distance between the object and the product of the ekphrastic process—a poem, a narrative, or other literary form.”19 Working from Debiais’s insight, we can recognize that for art historians reading premodern ekphrasis or other textual accounts of works of art, architecture, performance, or landscape—be they rhetorical descriptions of extant, no longer extant, or only verbally existing works—at least two other forms of “distance” come into play. There is the widely recognized (if also questioned and critiqued) experience of historical distance or alterity that separates historians from “history” and situates them in a present removed in any number of ways from the past they seek to analytically describe. But there is also the equally felt and intensely debated “distance” or difference between pictura and poesis, between things and words. It is in this Spannungsfeld (area of tension) that practitioners of art history, architectural history, archaeology, visual studies, and material culture work. And this work usually involves acts of ekphrasis: sometimes dazzling, often fumbling and incomplete, haunted by uncertainty and by any number of desires. In an essay published in 2010, Elsner (one of the contributors to this volume) provocatively lays bare the ekphrastic heart of disciplinary art history:

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Far from being a rigorous pursuit, art history . . . is nothing other than ekphrasis, or more precisely an extended argument built on ekphrasis. That is, it represents the tendentious application of rhetorical description to the work of art (or to several works or even to whole categories of art) for the purpose of making an argument of some kind to suit the author’s prior intent. Not everything that results from ekphrasis is art history, but that series of uses of interpretive description, which attempt to make a coherent argument on broadly historical or philosophical lines, is definitely art history.20 The tendentious character of art history as ekphrasis that Elsner identifies is, arguably, never so patent, so barefaced, as when we attempt to describe and then to make arguments about works that we could never have seen or can no longer see with our own eyes. Attempting to interpret works that have been destroyed, disappeared, lost, or that never existed as nontextual artifacts, our recourse to description—fabricated from second-order testimonies by means of rigorous, disciplined acts of imagination—is irreducibly tendentious. As this volume, we hope, demonstrates, it is tendentious in the expansive sense of the adjective’s premodern origin in the Latin verb tendeo, tendere, tetendi, tensum: 1 tendere [CL] 1 to extend outwards or upwards, to hold or stretch out, offer. b (goods for sale). c (transf.). d to point, direct, aim . . . 2 to stretch out to particular, greater, or full length or extent. b (geom.). c to spread out or over to full extent. d to extend or prolong in time . . . 3 to set (up) by stretching out a (tent, canopy, or sim.). b (hunting net, snare, or sim., also transf. or fig.) . . . 4 to exert strain on, pull tight. b to stretch back (bow or catapult), string (bow), tighten (strings of instrument). c to pull tight over a frame. d (? as form of repair). e (transf.) to strain (mentally) . . . 5 to stretch through fullness or expansion (from within), distend . . . 6 to direct (one’s steps, course, or sim.). b (sound) . . . 7 (intr.) to proceed, make one’s way. b (impers. pass.). c (transf., in conversation or discussion) . . . 8 (also trans. refl. or pass.) to extend or reach (to,

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towards, or as far as in a spec. direction). b (transf.) to pertain to, concern . . . 9 to progress or be on the way (to another stage or condition). b to verge on, amount to, reach . . . 10 to tend or lead towards (consequence, conclusion, or sim.) . . . 12 (w. dat., ad, or in & acc.) to aim or strive for, devote oneself to, be intent on, to have as one’s end. b (w. inf. or ut cl.) . . . 13 (p. ppl. f. as sb.) fathom (v. et. teisa) . . .21 To write about works that are no longer extant or otherwise cannot be sensually perceived involves considerable strain. Absent the object, we must stretch business-as-usual art-historical methods to, or even past, their breaking points. The destroyed or disappeared work does not simply elude the grasp of language; it is also withdrawn from our senses and from the camera’s reach. Straining toward it with analysis and imagination, we are confronted with the full expanse of what we cannot see, handle, and know. Despite these tensions—or, perhaps, thanks to them—in our attempts to say something persuasive and hopefully significant about such works, we inevitably become involved in a different kind of progress toward historical consciousness and knowledge. Not the positive knowledge that deals in likely certainties, or convinced and convincing accounts of how things once were, but rather a fathoming that tends to the dim, obscure edges and negative spaces that play crucial roles in shaping our apprehension of the past.

Premodern Art History’s Affects Despite a widespread commitment to interdisciplinarity, the study of premodern art and architecture today is as fixated upon historical objects and monuments as it ever was. Even with the “area studies” orientations of our formations and intellectual communities—we are Mesoamericanists, classicists, sinologists, Islamicists, Byzantinists, Europeanists, as well as art historians—we still retain a longing for objects, for encounters with the visual and material works made by and for cultures that are not in any immediate or simple way our own.

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Like all art historians, our work normatively starts and ends with made things that we want, in varied ways, to understand and elucidate. The art historian’s work—and the object relations that are at its center—has been described as pervaded by longing, by a desire to recover or “save” the past, by nostalgia, and by an uneasy, irresolvable drive to either repress or sublimate both psychological and metaphysical forms of loss. Exploring the affective dynamics of writing art history, Michael Ann Holly has observed: “The materiality, the very physicality, of the works of art with which we deal is a challenge to ever seeing the past as over and gone. They exist in the same space as their analysts, yet their sense of time is hardly congruent with ours—of that we are acutely aware. And so we work incessantly at familiarizing the unfamiliar. In the plaintive writing of art history, we have what Giorgio Agamben would call a ‘loss without a lost object.’”22 But the melancholic situation of the student of premodern art and material culture is, arguably, not quite as Holly describes. If our art-historical work is a melancholic project, it is one determined, from the start, by stark conditions of partiality. And partiality in several senses. We know that what survives into the present-tense of the historical cultures we study is a dramatically fractional material record: a mere subset of a far larger multitude of art works, monuments, things, and texts that once existed. And we are also acutely aware of how longue durée dynamics of religious, political, ideological, and aesthetic partiality—always historically conditioned—have shaped patterns of survival and loss in equal measure when it comes to the art-historical, archaeological, and material cultural traces of the premodern past, in all parts of the globe. If historians of modern and contemporary art and visual/material cultures routinely cope with a proverbial evidentiary iceberg by focusing upon its fractional tip, protruding above the surface of the vast modern archival sea, historians of premodern art and visual/material cultures must grapple with a quite different, and differently daunting, situation. Our historical icebergs have been subjected to powerful forces that have caused them to fracture, melt, and evaporate. The resulting floes have been carried by any number of currents; only very rarely can we reconstruct their travels or how their travels have changed them. We encounter these fragments far from their origin points, and from

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them we attempt to conjure—in our minds’ eyes, in our analyses, and in our words—what once lay below the surface of the water. Holly has proposed that the “disciplinary companion” of art history is “Melancholy. Or perhaps her twin sister, Mourning.”23 As historians of medieval art, however, we would suggest that two other personifications keep us company: Imaginatio and a quixotic form of Spes, which today might also be named Optimism. Given how much premodern architecture, art, and material culture has not survived and given the ways in which premodern works continue to disappear or be destroyed—both by human-made calamities and by the dynamics of the market—we must, of necessity, attend not only to the extant but also to the no-longer existent, to the inaccessible, and to works that were never materially fabricated beyond the written page. How imagination and optimism—in collaboration with melancholy, timidity, frustration, and even outrage— accompany our work inevitably shapes the questions we take up and those we avoid, the ways we see and marshal our evidence, and, not least, the rules of the art-historical game that we recognize and obey— or else reject, break, or bend.24

Confronting What Is Not There: An Invitation and Ten Responses It is striking how little art historians focused on the period from 500 to 1500 CE have explored how loss, oblivion, and disappearance condition and even, at times, enable our work. Although we are often acutely aware of the incomplete, fragmented, partially obliterated, and materially and intellectually reinvented state of our archive, we rarely explicitly reflect upon how these working conditions, and the physical conditions of the works we encounter, shape the historical questions we ask, the historical claims we advance, and the ways we make our arguments. How hope, melancholy, imagination, optimism, and even the compulsion to speculate condition our work in the “ruins” of past cultures is, all too often, explored in private conversations but banished from the printed page. In this volume, we invited art historians working in fields spanning the globe from late antiquity to the present to reflect upon the ways in which dynamics of loss, destruction, and nonexistence both haunt

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and animate their understanding of what they study, how they interpret it, and why they do the historical work they do. Our aim was to gather together a series of thoughtful reflections on how and why art historians find ways of perceiving and on the words they use to convey an understanding of objects, spaces, and practices that are profoundly shaped by the negative spaces of historical retrospection. The essays that follow offer varied responses to an open yet pressing series of questions: How do we deal with the loss of memory, the missing pieces in the chain of past evidence, the lost traces, all that we do not and cannot know? How do we embed the resurfacing of such traces within larger historiographic landscapes? How do we address the gaps in our vision of those past and yet present landscapes? How do we deal with the elements of fiction—both historical and historiographical—that inevitably creep into our vision and our arguments, thus blurring or clouding the often posited and desired historically reflective function we impute to objects, monuments, and works of art? If the art-historical archive is a mirror reduced to an incomplete, scattered number of tarnished or irreparably abraded shards, is the art historian condemned to play the part of a frustrated speculator or a bricoleur mosaicist? Or else, might it be that the historical conditions of loss, destruction, and even uncertainty that shape the premodern archive are the very conditions that enable our work and the experiences of discovery, excitement, and speculative pleasure found in beholding and writing about art from a past deemed “distant” and beyond historiographical “mastery”? Some contributors explore the melancholic, mournful, or outraged position of the art historian confronted with the fragmented, effaced, or falsified remnants of past works (Brittenham, Kersey, Liepe, McCoy). Select essays reflect upon the historian’s incomplete knowledge of, and desire for, works that are no longer extant or otherwise inaccessible (Brittenham, Drimmer, Liepe). The absence of works prompts other contributors to reflect on historiography as a practice, to explore the limits and freedom of ekphrasis and/or scholarly interpretation, or else to consider the challenges and pleasures proper to working with, or despite, historical lacunae, probing the contours of what once was or else may never have been (Elsner, Kersey, McCoy). Several essays

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explore the dynamics (both historical and contemporary) that lead to the loss of works or to their disappearance from view (Brittenham, Drimmer, McCoy). Other contributions focus on premodern imaginings of a lost past and how knowledge of the past was accessed, imagined, invented, and “re-stored” (Bacci, Joyner). Rather than focusing on the history of invention, one contribution pays special attention to the historical valuation of skill, knowledge preservation, and emotional affect (MacMurdie). In the response to the contributions of this volume, Peter Geimer elucidates “a basic structure of art-historical work: the interference of loss and writing, the peculiar tension between mourning the loss of so many works of art and praising (rather secretly) the productive effects of their absence.”25 As Geimer acutely observes, most art-historical work is done in the ambiguous and ambivalent space between the poles of absence and presence, between a sense of the past as irretrievably gone and an experience of its powerful, even menacing presence. Fittingly, he closes this volume with a call to resist fixities and to instead recognize how even those works that do survive “do not mean for us. They are telling, but they do not communicate.”26 This volume was conceived in the long wake of a series of art-historical and archaeological losses that were painfully contemporary: the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, the collapse and extensive water damage to the Cologne city archive, the loss of manuscripts from libraries in Timbuktu, the destruction of archaeological sites and monuments in China, Libya, Mali, Sudan, Syria, Turkey.27 And this list could go on because the progress of human-induced destruction seems unrelenting. The volume developed over a period of time in which persistent nationalistic, racist, and religiously intolerant revisionist fantasies about the past—not least the premodern past—played an increasingly overt role in the shaping of polemic, policy, and violence in the public sphere. Simultaneously, if belatedly, climate change—its role in the loss of cultural heritage, its threat to the stability of political systems and to national and international institutions charged with the stewardship or protection of artworks and monuments—has compelled us to reflect and respond in new ways, with a different sense of urgency. Most recently, the global COVID-19 pandemic has cast into new salience the profound challenge that the loss of access to museums, archives,

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sites, and objects; the loss of presumptions of “normalcy” and of forms of human contact; and, not least, the loss of lives pose both to our understanding of the present and to the work of examining the past. The occlusion, disappearance, and destruction of works of art, monuments, archives, and lived lives is, at once, always historically conditioned and also an enduring transhistorical phenomenon. And yet—as our contributors elucidate with intellectual acuity and feeling—in loss, all is not lost. If in our work we must critically accept the task of mourning, we are also capable of discerning the negative spaces between the positive forms of fragmentary survivals, of feats of rigorous imagination, of an optimism that does not retreat into false certitude but keeps looking and reaching for words adequate to what survives, what does not, and what never was.

Notes 1. We employ the adjective “premodern” in this essay to designate the chronological period from 500 to 1500 CE. In our use of this term, we explicitly do not endorse any account of the “modern” or “modernism”—elastic terms, covering a number of concepts, whose premises and entailments rightly continue to be contested, not least by colleagues working in fields other than European and North American art history. 2.Aby Warburg, “Luftschiff und Tauchboot in der mittelalterlichen Vorstellungswelt (1911),” reprinted in Aby Warburg: Von Michelangelo bis zu den Pueblo-Indianern; Mit Beiträgen von Ernst H. Gombrich (Warburg: Hermes, 1991), 79–86; Aby Warburg, “Italienische Kunst und internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifanoja zu Ferrara,” in L’Italia e l’arte straniera: Atti del X Congresso internazionale di storia dell’arte, Roma 1912 (Rome: Maglione & Strini, 1922), 179–93; Aby Warburg, “A Lecture on the Serpent Ritual,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 2 (1938/39): 277–92; Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955); Erwin Panofsky, Die ideologischen Vorläufer des Rolls-Royce-Kühlers & Stil und Medium im Film (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1993); Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1970); Ernst H. Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London: Phaidon, 1965); Horst Bredekamp, “Antikensehnsucht und Maschinenglauben,” in Forschungen zur Villa Albani, ed. Herbert Beck and Peter C. Bol (Berlin: Mann, 1982), 507–62; Horst Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft,” Critical Inquiry 29 (2003): 418–28; Peter Geimer, Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit: Fotografie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003); Andreas Beyer and Markus Lohoff,

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eds., Bild und Erkenntnis: Formen und Funktionen des Bildes in Wissenschaft und Technik (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2005). 3. See, for example, Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, “Körperbilder im Diskurs der Sklaverei,” Kunsthistoriker 11/12 (1994/95 [appeared in 1996]): 95–102; John Onians, “World Art Studies and the Need for a New Natural History of Art,” Art Bulletin 78 (1996): 206–9; Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, eds., Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999); Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, ed., Postkolonialismus (Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch, 2002); Irene Below and Beatrice von Bismarck, eds., Globalisierung/Hierarchisierung: Kulturelle Dominanzen in Kunst und Kunstgeschichte (Marburg: Jonas, 2004); James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? (New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2007), especially the contribution by Atreyee Gupta and Sugata Ray, “Is Art History Global? Responding from the Margins,” 348–57; David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2003); John Onians, ed., Compression Versus Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’s Art (Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2006); Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried Van Damme, eds., World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008); Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Ästhetik der Differenz: Postkoloniale Perspektiven vom 16. bis 21. Jahrhundert (Marburg: Jonas, 2010); Monica Juneja, “Global Art History and the ‘Burden of Representation,’” in Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture, ed. Hans Belting and Julia T. S. Binter (Ostfildern: Hatje & Cantz, 2011), 274–97; Monica Juneja, “Wanderndes Erbe und die Kräfte der Erinnerung: Mobile Heritage and the Powers of Memory,” in Das Erbe der Anderen—Denkmalpflegerisches Handeln im Zeichen der Globalisierung / The Heritage of the Other: Conservation Considerations in an Age of Globalization, ed. Gerhard Vinken (Bamberg: Bamberg University Press, 2015), 9–18; Susanne Leeb, Oona Lochner, Johannes Paul Raether, and Kerstin Stakemeier, eds., “Globalismus/Globalism,” special issue, Texte zur Kunst 23 [= no. 91] (2013); Susanne Leeb, Die Kunst der Anderen: “Weltkunst” und die anthropologische Konfiguration der Moderne (Berlin: b-books, 2015); Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Art History and the Global: Deconstructing the Latest Canonical Narrative,” Journal of Global History 14, no. 3 (2019): 413–35. 4. Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 5. Galit Noga-Banai, Sacred Stimulus: Jerusalem in the Visual Christianization of Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), and Cheryl Glenn, Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). 6. Wessel Reinink and Jeroen Stumpel, eds., Memory and Oblivion: Proceedings of the XXIXth International Congress of the History of Art Held in Amsterdam, 1–7 September 1996 (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1999). 7. The following studies provide particularly helpful points of entry into a much larger literature devoted to ekphrasis: Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Ruth Webb, “Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre,” Word and Image 15 (1999): 7–18; Don P. Fowler, “Narrate and Describe: The Problem

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of Ekphrasis,” Journal of Roman Studies 81 (1999): 25–35; James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and the essays in “Towards a Theory of Description,” special issue, Yale French Studies 61 (1981). 8. For a range of recent perspectives on medieval ekphrasis, with citations of antecedent bibliography, see Andrew James Johnston, Ethan Knapp, and Margitta Rouse, eds., The Art of Vision: Ekphrasis in Medieval Literature and Culture, Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015); Lydia Yaitsky Kertz, “Literal and Literary Ekphrasis: A Medieval Poetics,” Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s., 45 (2020): 75–99; Bruce Holsinger, “Lollard Ekphrasis: Situated Aesthetics and Literary History,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35, no. 1 (2005): 67–89; Signe Horn Fuglesang, “Ekphrasis and Surviving Imagery in Viking Scandinavia,” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 3 (2007): 186–224; Manuel Antonio Castiñeiras González, “Périégesis et ekphrasis: Les descriptions de la cathédrale de Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle entre la cité réelle et la cité idéale,” Cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxa 44 (2013): 141–55; Vincent Debiais, “La vue des autres: L’ekphrasis au risque de la littérature médiolatine,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 55 (2012): 393–404; Vladimír Vavrínek, Paolo Odorico, and Vlastimil Drbal, eds., Ekphrasis: La représentation des monuments dans les littératures byzantine et byzantino-slaves; Réalités et imaginaires, Byzantinoslavica 69:3 (Prague: Euroslavica, 2011); Raphael Rosenberg, “Inwiefern Ekphrasis keine Bildbeschreibung ist: Zur Geschichte eines missbrauchten Begriffs,” in Bildrhetorik, ed. Joachim Knape and Elisabeth Grüner (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 2007), 271– 84; Robert S. Nelson, “To Say and to See: Ekphrasis and Vision in Byzantium,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing As Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 143–68; Christine Ratkowitsch, ed., Die poetische Ekphrasis von Kunstwerken: Eine literarische Tradition der Grossdichtung in Antike, Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, Sitzungsberichte—Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse 735 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006); Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “Ekphrasis and Commentary in Walter of Chatillon’s Alexandreis,” Zeitsprünge 24 (2020): 122–38; Alicia Walker, “Middle Byzantine Aesthetics of Power and the Incomparability of Islamic Art: Architectural Ekphraseis of Nikolaos Mesarites,” Muqarnas 27 (2010): 79–101; Annette Hoffmann, Lisa Jordan, and Gerhard Wolf, eds., Parlare dell’arte nel Trecento: Kunstgeschichten und Kunstgespräch im 14. Jahrhundert in Italien (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2020). 9. Johann Christoph Bürgel, Die ekprastischen Epigramme des Abu Talib al-Ma’muni: Literaturkundliche Studie über einen arabischen Conceptisten (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1965); Alma Giese, Wasf bei Kusagim: Eine Studie zur beschreibenden Dichtkunst der Abbasidenzeit (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1981); Akiko Motoyoshi Sumi, Description in Classical Arabic Poetry: Wasf, Ekphrasis, and Interarts Theory (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Frederik H. Green, “Painted in Oil, Composed in Ink: Late Qing Ekphrastic Poetry and the Encounter with Western-Style Painting,” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, no. 4 (2015): 525–50.

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10. Lawrence Nees, A Tainted Mantle: Hercules and the Classical Tradition at the Carolingian Court (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), and Vincent Debiais, “The Poem of Baudri for Countess Adèle: A Starting Point for a Reading of Medieval Latin Ekphrasis,” Viator 44 (2013): 95–106. For an important account of “notional ekphrasis” (i.e., ekphrastic conjuration of works that do not exist outside of language), see John Hollander, “The Poetics of Ekphrasis,” Word and Image 4 (1988): 209–19. 11. See particularly Ruth Webb, “The Aesthetics of Sacred Space: Narrative, Metaphor, and Motion in ‘Ekphraseis’ of Church Buildings,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 53 (1999): 59–74, and Liz James and Ruth Webb, “‘To Understand Ultimate Things and Enter Secret Places’: Ekphrasis and Art in Byzantium,” Art History 14 (1991): 1–17. 12. Avinoam Shalem, “The Otherness in the Focus of Interest, or, If Only the Other Could Speak,” in Islamic Artefacts in the Mediterranean World: Trade, Gift Exchange, and Artistic Transfer, ed. Catarina Schmidt Arcangeli and Gerhard Wolf (Venice: Marsilio, 2010), 30. 13. Ibid., 31–34. 14. Ibid., 34. 15. Christina Han, “Ekphrasis as Transtextual and Transcultural Event: Revisiting ‘Lapis Lazuli,’” Yeats Journal of Korea 한국 예이츠 저널 51 (2016): 73–96. Yeats’s stone can be seen at the National Library of Ireland, on loan from the Yeats family. 16. Ibid., 92, 84, respectively. 17. Ibid., 85. 18. Ibid., 92. 19. Vincent Debiais, “Ekphrasis from the Inside: Notes on the Inscription of the Crown of Light in Bayeux,” English Language Notes 53 (2015): 45. 20. Jaś Elsner, “Art History as Ekphrasis,” Art History 33 (2010): 11 (emphasis added). 21. R. E. Latham, D. R. Howlett, and R. K. Ashdowne, eds., Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy, 1975–), s.v. “Tendere,” via the Database of Latin Dictionaries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015–), http://​www​.lib​.uchicago​.edu​/h​/dld. Since we are interested less in the acts and motivations leading to destruction, loss, or disappearance than in the acts, modes, and potentials of recovery and reconstruction, we do not elaborate further here on the premodern vocabulary of destruction/loss/disappearance, which is a complex tradition in its own right. 22. Michael Ann Holly, “The Melancholy Art,” Art Bulletin 89 (2007): 8. For further development of the reflections presented in this essay, see Michael Ann Holly, The Melancholy Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 23. Holly, “Melancholy Art,” 7. 24. On the “game” of interpretation, see Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Donald G. Marshall and Joel Weinsheimer (New York: Continuum, 2000).

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25. Peter Geimer, “Mourning the Loss of Works / Praising their Absence. A Response”, this volume, 143. 26. Ibid., 150. 27. Masanori Nagaoka, “The Future of the Bamiyan Buddha Statues—Evolving Conservation Ethics and Principles Concerning Intentionally Destructed Cultural Heritage,” in The Future of the Bamiyan Buddha Statues, ed. Masanori Nagaoka (Cham: Springer International, 2020); Finbarr Barry Flood, “Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum,” Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 641–59; Nach dem Einsturz: Das Historische Archiv der Stadt Köln seit dem 3. März 2009 (Berlin: Freunde des Historischen Archivs der Stadt Köln and Martin-Gropius-Bau, 2010); Lynn Meskell, A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Lynn Meskell, Global Heritage: A Reader (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015); Lynn Meskell, Archaeology Under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East (London: Routledge, 1998); Laura Kurgan, “Conflict Urbanism, Aleppo: Mapping Urban Damage,” Architectural Design (2017): 72–77; Lucia Allais, Design of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Marina Lostal, International Cultural Heritage Law in Armed Conflict: Case-Studies of Syria, Libya, Mali, the Invasion of Iraq, and the Buddhas of Bamiyan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Chapter 1

Jerusalem’s Loca Sancta and Their Perishable Frames

Michele Bacci In 1187 Salah ad-Din reconquered Jerusalem and restored Islamic worship in the Haram es-Sharif, whose mosques had been converted into churches by the crusaders in the previous decades. On that occasion, questions were raised as to whether the built structures marking the Christian loca sancta, especially the Holy Sepulchre, were to be demolished or not. Some of the Ayyubid ruler’s counselors were convinced that a thorough destruction would, once and for all, discourage the Franks from their holy war for the liberation of their holy sites. But the majority of those present rebutted that it would just be a waste of time: worship would not come to an end, since, as reported by an Arab historian, “what they [the infidels] adore is the site of the cross and the tomb, not the visible appearance of the building. The Christian people will not stop going there even if its soil were reduced to dust rising to heaven.”1 Such arguments sounded convincing and were followed by the sultan, who was perfectly aware that destructions proved useful only if they managed not only to neutralize the iconic appeal and symbolic aura of impressive architectures but also to fully eradicate the social

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practices and identity-defining rituals whose experience was informed and oriented by the spatial structure of buildings. He was not interested in preventing Christians, including Latins, from performing their liturgies, nor did he ever think that al-Quds was to be transformed into an exclusively Islamic city. Rather he wondered, in a quite pragmatic way, whether the internationally renowned loca sancta, once deprived of their sumptuous monumental frame, might lose their importance in the eyes of his Frankish enemies. The answer to this question was quickly reached. It was easy to remark that in Palestine, albeit in different ways and from different viewpoints, all religious traditions shared the belief in Jerusalem’s distinctively site-bound holiness. Its most prominent cultic foci were unmovable stones, portions of ground, and segments of natural landscape, which were meant to be contemplated, touched, kissed, washed, anointed with oil, and honored with veils, lamps, candles, ex-votos, and graffiti. They were described as material indicators of prominent events of sacred history. They were to be considered as worship-worthy since they were invested with memorial qualities and could be used by visitors as visual supports for their meditations on the mysteries of faith, which not infrequently implied a mental reconstruction of, and an associated feeling of personal involvement in, the scenarios of the holy narratives. But, at the same time, it was hard to dissociate such practices from the tendency to perceive those same sites as imbued with some supernatural dynamis allowing a more direct and intimate— not liturgically or socially mediated—approach to the divine sphere. The distinctive, extraordinary status attributed to the Palestinian loca sancta largely stemmed from how they were experienced as metonymical surrogates of the holy people with whom they were associated. They were deemed to be hallowed since they bore the traces of the latter’s bodies, whose outlines were sometimes said to be actually detectable on the surfaces of stones and columns. In a sense, they generally shared the sensorial dimension of both relic- and image-worship, but they were exceptional because that sensorial dynamic was inscribed in the landscape of the city and the mutual interrelation of the sacred sites. Architecture could positively contribute to promoting, displaying, and enhancing their dignity, venerability, and memorial

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identity, but it was in no way indispensable: worship could also be directed to open-air objects, such as caves, trees, fountains, or rocks, in the absence of any built structures. When the built structures were used, their purpose was usually to serve as monumental frames around the hallowed spots and/or as congregational spaces enabling the performance of collective rituals close to the venerated sites. In Jerusalem’s history, destructions were frequently motivated by political strategies that, unlike Salah ad-Din’s decisions, did not take the functional shift between performative and locative forms of experiencing the sacred into due account. In 1009, Caliph al-Hakim’s demolition of the city’s non-Muslim shrines largely proved unproductive.2 His wish that no sign of the Anastasis would survive was frustrated, as the Christian Arab author Yahya ibn Sa‘id of Antioch remarked, by the presence of “some things whose removal was extremely difficult”: he was clearly hinting at the tomb-cave and the rock of Golgotha, which, unlike walls and ornaments, proved hard to destroy.3 Pious visitors to such hallowed spots certainly preferred to contemplate them standing in a context that corresponded to shared standards of aesthetic and religious decorum, but, if this was not possible, their ruinous state was not regarded as an obstacle to their veneration. Eminent pilgrims, such as Count Fulk Nerra, traveled to Jerusalem several times in the first half of the eleventh century and were proud of their appropriation of the stones of the Anastasis Rotunda as relics, deemed to have been hallowed by their proximity to the spots where Christ’s Crucifixion and Entombment were memorialized.4 In a sense, it was easier to control the flows of pilgrims to an architecturally developed shrine than to an open-air holy site, as is shown by how Nerra was able to escape the vigilance of Fatimid soldiers. Attempts at dismantling the monumental frames of the loca sancta proved to be not only unprofitable but even self-defeating: al-Hakim’s demolition lasted only until the Byzantine emperor was authorized to include the site of the Passion within a built structure, achieved in 1048. Furthermore, the enduring echo of al-Hakim’s attack was among the arguments exploited by the crusaders to back their claims on the Holy Land at the end of the century. The caliph’s unsuccessful initiative was largely the outcome of his failure to understand the inherent tension

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between “locative” and ritual/performative forms of experiencing the supernatural dimension that underlay not only Christian but also Jewish and Islamic holy places in Jerusalem.5 And his failure was certainly not isolated: indeed, the city’s centuries-old history was marked, at regular intervals, by frequent and decidedly unsuccessful attempts to eradicate its site-bound sanctity. At first glance, it might be said that Constantine’s destructions in the fourth century were exceptions to this rule. The temple of Jupiter that stood in the city’s central forum was the most illustrious victim of his general reshaping of the city as a Christian center. According to Eusebius of Caesarea, the emperor not only demolished the building but even ordered that the rubble and the underlaying soil be excavated and transported far away since this material was contaminated by the pagans’ impious sacrifices.6 The architectural matter of the cultic space and even its natural setting could be radically altered and easily obliterated since the Roman temple was not invested with any site-specific meaning: it was an aesthetically impressive, huge building that, like many others, served as a spatial context for the ritual enactment of the mutual relationship between a deity and a human group. Its primary distinction was its location, elevated above Jerusalem’s ancient core on the Temple Mount. Constantine’s predecessor, Hadrian, had attempted to refute the idea that the divine dimension may be specifically and exclusively associated with a geographically determined place on the earth’s surface. In a text deemed to have been written in 392, Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis—a native of Palestine—imagined that Hadrian’s decision to reconstruct Jerusalem and transform it into a Roman colonial “non-lieu” was formed in 130 CE, after he had viewed the town, devastated by Titus sixty years earlier, from the height of its southwestern hill.7 Indeed, the emperor was concerned with finding a solution to something unprecedented in Roman history: namely, the failed assimilation of the Jewish people, due to the impossibility of finding an uncontroversial compromise between the exclusive worship of one God and the acknowledgment of the ruler’s power as stemming from his divine or semidivine status. As a cultivated man, Hadrian may have been aware that past destructions or desecrations of the Temple inescapably led not only to revolts

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and political turmoil but also to a reinforced revival of Jewish belief in the site-boundedness of divine presence. When, in 168 BCE, the Seleucid king Antiochus IV had pillaged Jerusalem and installed a statue of Zeus in the Temple, the rebellion led by Judas Maccabaeus had culminated with the establishment of the new Hasmonaean rulership, the purification of the Temple, and the renewal of sacrifice. Even earlier, the worship of the one God had emerged fortified and more sharply defined in its monotheistic uniqueness after the demolition of the House of the Lord by the Assyrian army of King Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BCE, the Babylonian exile, and the reconstruction authorized by the Persian king Cyrus in 536 BCE.8 In keeping with other religious traditions of the ancient world, Jewish rituals staged a privileged relationship with the divine sphere, manifested in the performance of sacrifice. What other peoples could hardly understand was that worship could be addressed exclusively to one divinity, in one sole temple, served by one sole clergy. Even if it seemed perfectly obvious to other peoples that yhwh, on account of his celestial attributes, could be easily identified with Jupiter, the Jews were accused of arrogance and misanthropy since they refused to share their deity with the Gentiles: their attitude contrasted with the Romans’ traditional politics of religious inclusion, consisting of a somewhat mechanical assimilation of foreign gods, and could therefore be perceived as a threat to the empire’s social and political order. When the Temple priests refused to perform sacrifices for the emperor in 70 CE, the repression of Jewish riots culminated in the devastation of the building.9 According to Sulpicius Severus, whose chronicle (ca. 400) depends upon Tacitus, Titus intended, through this destruction, “to fully eradicate the religion of Jews and Christians.”10 Following this line of reasoning, the destruction of an exclusive God’s exclusive cult building came to be understood as a radical and definitive solution. All requests for the rebuilding of the House of the Lord were denied, and the tax previously used to finance its activities was diverted to the Temple of Jupiter on the Roman Capitol. Nevertheless, local governors had to face new rebellions, and it can be assumed that some form of worship persisted despite the material devastation of the ancient cultic center. This situation is largely plausible since the

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Temple’s holiness was associated not only with its role as the space reserved for the performance of ritualized meetings with God but also with its perception as a distinctive place, a material reminder of the site where the Ark of the Covenant—yhwh’s chair and footstool—had been located and a portion of earth was hallowed by the Lord’s cloud of glory (kavod). Furthermore, the Temple’s special status was corroborated by its identification with the “Land of Moriah” associated with the episode of ʿaqedah: the binding of Isaac that manifested Abraham’s total obedience to God’s will.11 Hadrian may have understood that in order to eradicate the very roots of the Jews’ self-understanding as privileged interlocutors of their unique, unshareable God, it was not enough to destroy the Temple: the Romans had to thoroughly subvert the urban form of Jerusalem, distort its appearance, and finally change its identity to such an extent that it looked like one of the many Roman towns in the empire’s provinces. Accordingly, he decided to shift the town center to the northwestern hill; give the city a clear-cut structure with forum, cardo and two main decumani; and rename it Aelia Capitolina. Hadrian’s transformation of Jerusalem gave rise to the rebellion of Bar Kochba (133–35 CE), led by the “Son of the Star,” who, invested with messianic expectations, used the destroyed Temple as a symbol of his fight for the restoration of Jewish worship.12 The insurgents were defeated, and the Temple was never reconstructed. The Jews were banned from Aelia, and their sacrificial practices were replaced by an increasingly spiritualized form of worship, based on the reading and interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. The ancient Temple building could only be evoked in figurative and metaphorical terms: its façade and its furnishings appeared in the decoration of synagogues, and its symbolism was partly associated with the most venerable part of each synagogue, the niche housing the Torah scrolls.13 At the same time, however, Rabbinic literature worked out a reinforced description of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount as a locus of site-bound holiness, enduringly blessed by God’s presence (shekinah). The area was increasingly described as the navel of the world, and yhwh was deemed to still reside in the only extant remnant of the old building, the west wall, until its probable destruction in 363 under Emperor Julian, a loss that

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encouraged worshippers to locate the shekinah in the west wall of the Temple esplanade. At the same time, the destruction worked by the Romans exposed a huge rock that gradually came to be regarded as the earliest matter of creation: the stone of ʿaqedah, marking the very place where the Ark had stood within the Holy of Holies.14 Questions have been raised as to whether the Romans erected any structure on the Temple esplanade; apparently, they limited themselves to raising honorific statues of Hadrian and Jupiter. The cultic and urban focus was instead displaced to the northwestern hill, where a huge temple in honor of Rome’s main divinity, Jupiter Capitolinus, was erected. Fourth-century Christian authors wrote that this choice aimed to both humiliate the Jews and erase the memory of the site of the Passion (namely, the hill of Golgotha, located in Jesus’s times in a suburban space just outside the Herodian walls).15 Melito of Sardis’s assertion (ca. 165 CE) that Christ had been crucified “in the middle of a square in the center of the town” indicates that Christian believers soon became accustomed to think that the major event of their faith had taken place in a location corresponding to the Roman forum of Aelia.16 This latter identification was corroborated by the “archaeological” proofs provided by Constantine’s excavations. As the sites bearing witness to the Son of God’s death and Resurrection were dug up, evidence suddenly appeared as miraculous signs. Subsequently, it was decided to erect a sumptuous complex of buildings to enclose these rediscovered loca sancta. The resulting solemn mise-en-scène combined a huge ritual space, the Martyrium, with monumental frames delimiting the holy spots themselves: the Tomb of Christ, erected within a spectacular domed mausoleum (the Anastasis), and the Rock of Golgotha, displayed in a corner of the intermediary three-aisled porch, whose prominent slim, vertically elevated silhouette presented a mountainlike appearance. As in the old Jewish Temple, this complex internal articulation obliged visitors to make a gradual, kinetic approach that moved from the profane realm to the consecrated space of liturgical performance, and, ascending from there, to the holy sites stricto sensu.17 The Constantinian basilica not only manifested the triumph of Christianity but also worked as a material indicator, transcribed into the town landscape, of the displacement of sanctity from the Temple

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Mount to the western hill (fig. 1.1). The Rock of Golgotha soon appropriated some of the latter’s attributes: it was identified as the real Moriah (the site of Abraham’s sacrifice) and the navel of the world. As Eusebius wrote, “The new Jerusalem was founded in the Martyrium, in front of the old, celebrated one that, being guilty for the murder of the Lord, had fallen into the deepest desolation and was thus punished for the sins of its impious inhabitants.”18 In order to make this comparison even more obvious, the old esplanade was left empty and in a ruinous state; according to Jerome, in the late fourth century, it had been transformed into a dump.19 Those looking at the townscape from the height of the Mount of Olives (itself marked with the huge structures of another Constantinian foundation, the Eleona Church), could immediately perceive the striking contrast between the splendor of the Anastasis and the desolation of the Temple Mount. There could be no better witness to Christ’s prophecy about the destruction of the House of God (Mark 13:2) and its reconstruction in three Fig. 1.1 View of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. Photo: author.

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days in his own resurrected body (John 2:19), which Christians—the new Israel—glorified in his empty tomb.20 A number of miraculous events further emphasized this opposition: on May 7, 351, a luminous cross was seen in the sky of Jerusalem, moving from Golgotha to the Mount of Olives and bypassing the esplanade. A similar apparition occurred again in 363, during Julian’s attempts at reconstructing the old Jewish Temple: a great fire devastated the building site and revealed an underground grotto, where God had concealed a manuscript of John’s gospel since times immemorial.21 It can, perhaps, be assumed that such events were symptomatic of lingering dissension concerning the locus of sanctity among Jews, Christians, and those Christians who were maintaining Jewish practices. On the one hand, the shekinah was said to have disappeared from the Holy of Holies in the very moment of Christ’s death on the cross, when the veil concealing it was supernaturally torn off (Matthew 27:51; Mark 15:38; Luke 23:45) and the Savior’s body had become the Temple of the New Alliance. On the other hand, a tradition mentioned in the Tosefta, according to which the veil (parokhet), struck by Titus with his sword, had shed blood, clearly described God’s persisting presence in terms evocative of Christ’s Passion.22 At the end of the fourth century, Christian hegemony was undisputed in Palestine, as in the rest of the empire. The final triumph of the displaced sanctity in the new town was achieved with the monumentalization of the southwestern hill; it was here that Christians located the Biblical Mount Zion, which they understood, on the authority of an odd reading of Micah 4:2 and Joel 3:1–5, as a place contiguous to but distinct from Jerusalem. On the southwestern hill, an enormous fiveaisled basilica was erected upon the site of an earlier, much smaller building and dedicated to the “Holy Zion” (Hagia Sion). Whereas the loca sancta in the Anastasis complex, with their emphasis on Christ’s body, acted as surrogates for the “locative” or site-bound approach to the divine sphere that Jews described in terms of shekinah, the new church replaced the Temple in its function as a space reserved for the performance of ritual activities, where the sacrifice of animals on behalf of humans was replaced by the liturgical reenactment of the Son of God’s self-sacrifice in order to redeem humanity.23

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The Holy Zion Church was thought to mark the site of the Jerusalemite house where the apostles had lived and the episodes of the Last Supper, the Washing of the Feet, Pentecost, and the Dormition of the Virgin had taken place. As the site of the first eucharistic rite, this house could be rightly understood as the very earliest church and an archetype of all Christian sacred spaces. In his homily for the Holy Zion Church, delivered on September 15, 394 CE (corresponding to the most solemn Jewish feast, Yom Kippur), Bishop John II strongly emphasized the church as a reflection of the Heavenly Jerusalem, an heir to the Sinai tabernacle, and the rightful successor of Solomon’s Temple.24 In the fifth century, the building came to be described as the “mother of all churches,” and subsequently it was evoked and ideally reproduced in a number of buildings, mostly of longitudinal type, that bore an analogous dedication. In sixth-century Lycia, a monk named Nicholas managed to evangelize the villages in the countryside by fostering worship of a local “Holy Zion,” identified both with a mountain peak and the church erected on it.25 Similar developments can be observed in the Caucasian region, where both the Armenian and the Georgian churches adopted the Jerusalemite rite. As first witnessed in the oldest part of the collection of chronicles known as K’art’li cxovreba (Juansher’s ninth-century Life of Vakthang Gorgasali), the cathedral of Svetitskhoveli in the ancient Georgian capital of Mtskheta was celebrated as both a new “Holy of Holies” and a “Great Zion”: that such epithets did not only generically evoke Jerusalem and its multilayered symbolism but more precisely reference the Holy Zion Church is indicated by the cathedral’s dedication to the Twelve Apostles.26 Svetitskhoveli was regarded as the New Temple and the mother of all Georgian churches in the same way as the Jerusalem Holy Zion Church was described as the archetypal consecrated space; and, like the latter, the cathedral constituted one of two major cultic foci in the town’s sacred landscape, the other being the “Mount of the Cross” on the Jvari hill, Mtskheta’s Golgotha. In this way, the two major buildings dominating the cityscape typified two different—ritual and locative—approaches to the divine and stood out for their distinctive longitudinal and centralized architectural appearance. Accordingly, most Georgian churches repeating the Zion (Sioni)

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dedication were large basilicas, and the personification of the “Holy Zion” in the tenth-century mural paintings of Otkhta Eklesia, in the region of Tao-Klardjeti, holds a miniature basilican church as her attribute.27 The prestigious title of “mother of all churches”—evoked in the ninth century by Bishop John of Bolnisi (whose cathedral was a Sioni church) and explicitly associated with the foundation of the Jerusalem church by Christ’s disciples28—came to be associated with buildings that embodied apostolic authority. Thus, to take one major example, as of the eleventh century, the basilica Lateranense in Rome claimed to be the earliest consecrated church and the true successor to the ancient Jerusalem Temple, whose furnishings were even said to be concealed under the Roman basilica’s main altar.29 Such developments were partly enhanced by the decay or destruction of the Jerusalem loca sancta. Both the Holy Sepulchre and the Holy Zion were strongly damaged during the Persian incursion of 614 CE and the subsequent Islamic conquest of the holy city led to the reshaping of its sacred topography. No longer did the Christian holy sites exclusively materialize God’s presence in the cityscape; the old Temple esplanade, in the late seventh century at the very latest, was again transformed into a cultic focus, with a large congregational space (the al-Aqsa Mosque) and an octagonal building encircling the rock of ʿaqedah, whose holiness was gradually reformulated in relation to the Prophet Muhammad’s isra (his night journey from Mecca to the “faraway mosque”; Qur’an 17:1) and miraj (his Ascension to Heaven; Qur’an 53:1–18 and 81:19–25), as well as with the memory of the old House of God and with eschatological associations.30 The seventh-century combination of a centrally planned domed structure with a solemn longitudinal building clearly rivaled the prior Anastasis-Martyrium complex and the latter’s visual alignment with the Holy Zion on the western hills. Both complexes combined a monumental indicator of hallowed ground with a sumptuous space for the performance of prayer and ritual activities close to sites deemed to be the successors, in their functions and forms, to the ancient “House of the Lord,” the hierophanic space where the “face-to-face” meeting of humankind’s intermediators with God had once been made possible. Despite the magnificence of the Islamic buildings, the Christian ones

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benefited from their more elevated location. Al-Hakim’s 1009 attack on the Holy Sepulchre (and most likely also upon the Zion Church) should therefore also be understood as an attempt at neutralizing the older building’s visual prominence; a prominence that crusaders in the following century further enhanced by integrating this major Christian shrine into a much wider network of sites marking secondary Gospel events.31 To sum up, by the twelfth-century reign of Salah ad-Din, it had become clear that architecture could powerfully signal and properly glorify places deemed to be distinctively holy. At the same time, all groups sharing Jerusalem’s tiny space were also aware that the hallowed status of the portions of ground that were at the core of their devotions—sites that frequently overlapped—would not, and indeed had not, disappeared with the destruction of their monumental frames. As subsequent events made even more clear, the presence of such built framing structures was not essential: in the aftermath of the Khwarismian invasion in 1244 CE, many churches in Jerusalem were not reconstructed, but this was no obstacle to the multiplication of the city’s Christian holy sites in the Mamluk and Ottoman periods.32 Worship came increasingly to address objects in the open air (such as ruins, stones, wells, or even trees) deemed to mark Gospel events. To take one example, a column sited in the Garden of Gethsemane—the only remnant of the crusader basilica of Gethsemane—was revered in the sixteenth century as marking the very spot where Judas had kissed Christ to signal his presence to the Sanhedrin’s soldiers (fig. 1.2).33 Once again the ground, not the marble architectural element itself, was deemed worthy of veneration. If architecture is always perishable, site-bound holiness was—and is—indestructible, when supported by memory.

Fig. 1.2 Column marking the spot of Judas’s kiss near the Garden of Gethsemane, Jerusalem. Photo: author.

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Notes

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1. Imad al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī, Al-fatḥ al-Qussī fī l-fatḥ al-Qudsī [The conquest of Syria and Palestine], trans. and ed. Henri Massé, Conquête de la Syrie et de la Palestine par Saladin (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1972), 59. 2. Bianca Kühnel, “Productive Destruction: The Holy Sepulchre After 1009,” in Konflikt und Bewältigung: Die Zerstörung der Grabeskirche zu Jerusalem im Jahre 1009, ed. Thomas Pratsch (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 35–55. 3. Yahya ibn Sa’id al-Antaki, History, ed. Ignace Kratchkovsky and Alexander Vasiliev, Patrologia Orientalis 18, fasc. 5 (Paris: Didot-Firman, 1924), 101–4. 4. Bernard S. Bachrach, Fulk Nerra, the Neo-Roman Consul, 987–1040: A Political Biography of the Angevin Count (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 246–48. 5. On this tension, see Michele Bacci, “Materiality and Liminality: Nonmimetic Evocations of Jerusalem Along the Venetian Sea Routes to the Holy Land,” in Natural Materials of the Holy Land and the Visual Translation of Place, 500–1500, ed. Renana Bartal, Neta Bodner, and Bianca Kühnel (London: Routledge, 2017), 127– 53; and, on a more theoretical ground, Michele Bacci, “Sacred Spaces Versus Holy Sites: On the Limits and Advantages of a Hierotopic Approach,” in Icons of Spaces: Advances in Hierotopy, ed. Jelena Bogdanović (London: Routledge, 2021), 15–28. 6. Eusebius of Caesarea, Vita Constantini 3.26–29, trans. Averil Cameron, Life of Constantine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 132–33. 7. Epiphanius of Salamis, Treatise on Weights and Measures, ed. James Elmer Dean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935), 30. On the reshaping of Jerusalem in Roman and Byzantine times, see Katharina Heyden and Maria Lissek, eds., Jerusalem II: Jerusalem in Roman-Byzantine Times (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), especially the essays in part 1. 8. The best surveys of the history of the Temple Mount through the centuries are Yaron Z. Eliav, God’s Mountain: The Temple Mount in Time, Place, and Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), and Oleg Grabar and Benjamin Z. Kedar, eds., Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), see especially the essays by Victor A. Hurowitz and Joseph Patrick on the destructions and desecrations in early times. 9. See, in general, Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (London: Penguin, 2008), 397–444. 10. Sulpicius Severus, Chronica 2.30, ed. Piergiorgio Parroni (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 89. On this passage and its meaning, see Hugh Montefiore, “Sulpicius Severus and Titus’ Council of War,” Historia 11, no. 2 (1962): 156–70. 11. Isaac Kalimi, “The Land of Moriah, Mount Moriah, and the Site of Solomon’s Temple in Biblical Historiography,” Harvard Theological Review 83, no. 4 (1990): 345–62. 12. See, in general, Yoram Tsafrir, “70–638: The Temple-less Mountain,” in Grabar and Kedar, Where Heaven and Earth Meet, 75–83; and the recent survey by Shlomit Weksler-Bdolah, “Aelia Capitolina,” in Routledge Handbook of Jerusalem, ed. Suleiman A. Mourad, Naomi Koltun-Fromm, and Bedross Der Matossian (London: Routledge, 2019), 47–63.

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13. Steven Fine, This Holy Place: On the Sanctity of the Synagogue During the Greco-Roman Period (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). 14. Peter Schäfer, Studien zur Geschichte und Theologie des rabbinischen Judentums (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 122–33; see also Yaron Z. Eliav, “The Temple Mount, the Rabbis, and the Poetics of Memory,” Hebrew Union College Annual 74 (2003): 49–113; Max Küchler, “Die dritten Tempel von Jerusalem: Projekte und Realisationen im Laufe der Jahrhunderte,” Evangelische Theologie 70, no. 3 (2010): 179–97. 15. See Nicole Belayche, Iudaea-Palaestina: The Pagan Cults in Roman Palestine (Second to Fourth Century) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001); and the survey in Jodi Magness, The Archaeology of the Holy Land from the Destruction of Solomon’s Temple to the Muslim Conquest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 271–85. 16. Melito of Sardis, Peri Pascha 94, ed. S. G. Hall, Melito of Sardis: On Pascha and Fragments (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 53–55. Urban C. von Wahlde, “The References to the Time and Place of the Crucifixion in the ‘Peri Pascha’ of Melito of Sardis,” Journal of Theological Studies 60, no. 2 (2009): 556–69. 17. On the early history of the Anastasis complex, see especially Virginio Corbo, Il Santo Sepolcro di Gerusalemme (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1981–82); Shimon Gibson and Joan E. Taylor, Beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: The Archaeology and Early History of Traditional Golgotha (London: Palestine Exploration Fund, 1994); Martin Biddle et al., The Church of the Holy Sepulchre (New York: Rizzoli, 2000); Achim Arbeiter, “Die Jerusalemer Grabeskirche vor 1009,” in Pratsch, Konflikt und Bewältigung, 7–33; Roberto Sabelli, Simonetta Fiamminghi, and Osvaldo Garbarino, “Gerusalemme: La collina del Golgota prima della costruzione delle fabbriche cristiane,” Archäologische Anzeiger 2 (2013): 43–77. 18. Eusebius of Caesarea, Vita Constantini 3:25-40, trans. Cameron, 132–37. 19. Jerome, Commentarium in Isaiam 17.14, in Jacques-Paul Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus: Series latina, vol. 24 (Paris: apud Migne, 1844–64), col. 626. 20. On the shaping of the Holy Sepulchre’s sanctity in its association and rivalry with the Temple, see especially Heribert Busse and Georg Kretschmar, Jerusalemer Heiligtumstraditionen in altkirchlicher und frühislamischer Zeit (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1987). 21. Josef Vogt, “Berichte über Kreuzeserscheinungen aus dem 4. Jahrhundert n. Chr.,” Annuaire de l’Institut de philologie et d’histoire orientales et slaves 9 (1949): 593–606; Ernest Bihain, “L’épître de Cyrille de Jérusalem à Constance sur la vision de la croix (BHG 413),” Byzantion 43 (1973): 264–96. 22. See Zev Vilnay, Legends of Jerusalem (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973), 124. 23. See the survey of the site’s history and its different interpretations in David Christian Clausen, The Upper Room and the Tomb of David: The History, Art and Archaeology of the Cenacle on Mount Zion (Jefferson: McFarland, 2016). 24. See Michel Van Esbroeck, “Jean II de Jérusalem et les cultes de S. Étienne, de la Sainte-Sion et de la croix,” Analecta Bollandiana 102 (1984): 99–134. 25. Vincenzo Ruggieri, “Apologia della mimesis: La Santa Sion,” in Aethiopia fortitudo ejus: Studi in onore di Monsignor Osvaldo Raineri in occasione del suo 80°

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compleanno, ed. Rafał Zaryeczny (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 2015), 391–404. 26. Tamila Mgaloblishvili, New Jerusalems in Georgia (Tbilisi: Centre for the Exploration of Georgian Antiquities, 2013), 89. 27. Zaza Sxirtlaże, Ot‘xt‘a Eklesiis p‘reskebi [The frescoes of Otkhta Eklesia] (Tbilisi: Sak‘art‘velos Sapatriark‘os saeklesio xelovnebis kvlevis c‘entri, 2009), 107–78, 332–41. 28. John of Bolnisi, Homélies des dimanches de Carême suivant la tradition de Jérusalem et autres homélies (I–XIV), ed. and trans. Stéphane Verhelst, Sources chrétiennes 580 (Paris: Cerf, 2015), 508–9. 29. Michele Bacci, “The Mise-en-Scène of the Holy in the Lateran Church in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in Romanesque Cathedrals in Mediterranean Europe: Architecture, Ritual and Urban Context, ed. Gerardo Boto Varela and Justin E. A. Kroesen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 187–203. 30. For a thorough examination of all traditions connected to the Haram, see Andreas Kaplony, The Ḥaram of Jerusalem, 324–1099: Temple, Friday Mosque, Area of Spiritual Power (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2002). 31. On this phenomenon, see especially Sylvia Schein, Gateway to the Heavenly City: Crusader Jerusalem and the Catholic West (1099–1187) (London: Routledge, 2005), 63–90. 32. For a survey of Holy Land pilgrimage and the role of the Franciscans in the early modern period, see Kathryn Blair Moore, The Architecture of the Christian Holy Land: Reception from Late Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 117–63, and Michele Campopiano, Writing the Holy Land: The Franciscans of Mount Zion and the Construction of a Cultural Memory, 1300–1500 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). 33. Max Küchler, Jerusalem: Ein Handbuch und Studienreiseführer zur Heiligen Stadt, 2nd rev. ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 824.

Chapter 2

John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Lintel of Kabah

Claudia Brittenham On July 31, 1842, the Broadway Panorama burned to the ground in New York City.1 The fire consumed Frederick Catherwood’s panoramic paintings of Jerusalem, Thebes, and other cities, as well as most of his drawings and notes from two journeys to Mexico and Central America with writer John Lloyd Stephens. The fire also destroyed numerous ancient Maya objects that Stephens and Catherwood had collected during their travels, which were being stored at the Broadway Panorama in anticipation of future display. The New York Herald described the losses as “curiosities, pieces of the ruins, specimens, drawings, plans,” and Stephens enumerated the destruction of “vases, figures, idols, and other relics.”2 Of all the Maya things that burned, we have an image of only one: Catherwood’s drawing of a wooden lintel from the city of Kabah, on the Yucatan Peninsula, which had flourished circa 750 to 1000 CE. It was reproduced as an engraving in Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, first published in 1843 (fig. 2.1). Catherwood had been the first to notice the lintel at Kabah, placed above a doorway in a building now known as Structure 1A1, a twostory elite residence in the northwestern part of the abandoned city.3 Upon seeing the carved beams of the lintel, Stephens writes that he

Fig. 2.1 Frederick Catherwood, Kabah—Carved Beam of Sapote Wood, engraving by A. Jones, in John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1843), vol. 1, facing p. 405. Photo © Charles Rhyne Estate; courtesy Visual Resources Center, Eric V. Hauser Memorial Library, Reed College, Portland, Oregon.

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“determined immediately, at any trouble or cost, to carry them home with me.”4 Stephens hired workers from the neighboring community of Nohcacab to pry the lintel out of the doorway with crowbars and then to package the beams and carry them to Mérida, so that they might travel by ship to New York. Questions of legality and national patrimony did not trouble Stephens. Nor were his ambitions simply limited to objects: on his earlier journey, he had, at various moments, tried to buy the ancient cities of Copan, Quirigua, and Palenque.5 When these schemes failed and his attempts to remove objects from the sites were also met with opposition, he instead sought to take plaster casts of sculptures back to the United States with him. That project, too, was unsuccessful. It is important to stress that Stephens was well aware of the Mexican national patrimony laws that he was attempting to contravene; he notes in his first travelogue that “the Mexican Congress had passed a law forbidding any stranger not formally authorized to make researches or to remove objects of art from the country.”6 On his second expedition from 1841 to 1842, it seems that Stephens took advantage of the distraction of the nascent Republic of Yucatan, which had just seceded from Mexico, to build a collection.7 Stephens intended the casts and objects to form the collection of a National Museum of American Antiquities, which he proposed to found either in New York or in Washington, DC.8 Whether he would sell or donate the objects to this hypothetical institution remains unstated, but beyond questions of profit, placing the United States on an international stage was a large part of Stephens’s motivation: “England and France, whose formidable competition has already been set up, as it were in terrorem, by one proprietor, having their capitals enriched by the remains of art collected throughout the Old World, will respect the rights of nations and discovery, and leave the field of American antiquities to us; that they will not deprive a destitute country of its only chance of contributing to the cause of science, but rather encourage it in the work of bringing together, from remote and almost inaccessible places, and retaining on its own soil, the architectural remains of its aboriginal inhabitants.”9 Stephens apparently believed that a monumental past was a prerequisite of imperial greatness and, moreover,

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that such a past could be acquired outside his own country’s borders, much as Britain or France had done: “The casts of the Parthenon are regarded as precious memorials in the British Museum, and casts of Copan would be the same in New-York.”10 Stephens’s vision appropriated the entire continent’s history to the expansionist United States, disregarding considerations of territorial sovereignty: “They [the ruins of Copan] belonged of right to us, and, though we did not know how soon we might be kicked out ourselves, I resolved that they should be.”11 Building a collection was, for Stephens, a matter of nationalist pride. Stephens is something of a hero to many Mesoamerican scholars. He was one of the first to recognize that Maya art was made by Indigenous people and to acknowledge connections between Mesoamerica and Native North America. This is a refreshing contrast to competing nineteenth-century theories that attributed ancient Mesoamerican achievements to the lost tribes of Israel or, as in the case of Augustus Le Plongeon, connected the Maya city of Chichen Itza with both Atlantis and ancient Egypt.12 Catherwood’s accompanying illustrations also surpassed the contemporary state of the art, recording Mesoamerican sculpture and architecture with precision and romantic splendor. In arguing for the indigeneity of American antiquities, Stephens saw, and advocated for, the cultural achievements of the Native peoples of the Americas. But Stephens also asserted that these achievements lay only in the past. In equating Mesoamerican antiquity with the classical past, Stephens built a claim to American antiquity beyond his nation’s borders at the same time as traces of the Indigenous past within the United States were being systematically erased.13 As they moved west, white settlers destroyed monumental Indigenous architecture, enabling a mythology of the United States as a tabula rasa onto which Manifest Destiny could be projected, a process that unfortunately continues to this day.14 The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced the dispossession and resettlement of tens of thousands of Native Americans along the southeastern seaboard. Between 1831 and 1839, thousands of Cherokee, Muscogee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and other Indigenous people died during forced marches to barren territories west of the Mississippi River, an infamous episode now known as the Trail of Tears.15 Stephens was an ardent supporter of President Andrew Jackson and his genocidal

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policies.16 Rather than advocating against the dispossession of American Indians, Stephens perpetuated the myth that they were already vanished, equating the Native American subjects of portraits by his contemporary George Catlin with the builders of Mesoamerican cities nearly a millennium earlier: “It was the hope . . . with the monuments of Quirigua, casts from Copan and Palenque, or the tablets themselves, and other objects from other places within their reach, to lay the foundation of a Museum of American Antiquities which might deserve the countenance of the General Government, and draw to it Catlin’s Indian Gallery, and every other memorial of the aboriginal races, whose history within our own borders has already become almost a romance and fable.”17 Stephens’s discovery of a Mesoamerican past coincided precisely with the attempted erasure of the Native American present. Mesoamerican antiquity had larger geopolitical implications as well. The presence of antiquities in Mexico and Central America only served to reinforce the alleged backwardness of these regions and, thus, to justify the United States’ interference in their politics. During his first journey of 1838 to 1841, Stephens was appointed special ambassador to Central America by President Martin Van Buren, though his unsuccessful attempts to find a government with which to negotiate seem barely to have distracted him from his project of exploration. Stephens’s books were bestsellers at a moment when the borders of the United States were expanding: the United States voted to annex the Republic of Texas in 1845, and at the end of the Mexican-American War three years later, Mexico ceded lands comprising modern-day Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.18 The discovery of Mesoamerican antiquity was from its inception an imperialist project. A lost object requires a particular set of conditions to come into (non) being: someone has to have noticed the object before it disappeared in order to register its loss, and that knowledge has to have endured where the object did not. Only a little more than 160 carved lintels survive from the Maya world, and, of them, only a dozen are made out of wood (the rest are of more durable stone).19 Presumably, there were once many more carved lintels, especially wooden ones, which vanished

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during the millennium between the abandonment of the Classic Maya cities and the beginnings of modern inquiry about the ancient Maya. Surely many others were destroyed by war, fire, or age during the Classic Maya period (250–900 CE).20 We feel these losses, too, but more abstractly, since we cannot know what it is that we have lost. Stephens removed yet another wooden lintel from the Palace of the Governor at the ancient Maya city of Uxmal. He offers little detail about the lintel beyond describing it as a “sculptured beam of hieroglyphics”; it also burned in the Panorama fire.21 In some ways, its loss seems easier to quantify: a hieroglyphic text raises the possibility of graphemes or collocations that would aid in the ongoing decipherment of Maya writing; the text might also offer concrete historical data about the patron of the building, the date of its dedication, and the political landscape in which it was created. What we have lost when the Kabah lintel burned is harder to describe, but Stephens knew it well: “The only way to give a true idea of the character of this carving was the production of the beams themselves.”22 The engraving of Catherwood’s drawing presents the lintel already abstracted from its architectural context, propped up against the rubble of the partially collapsed building. Fragments of fallen architectural sculpture in the foreground contribute to the sense of ruin and decay. The carving is displayed vertically like a painting or stela, though it was originally oriented horizontally overhead, visible only when passing through the doorway. (The corbel-vaulted void next to the lintel is not the doorway that it originally spanned.) Even as illustrated, the lintel is partial; as Meghan Rubenstein observes, there was likely another half-beam to the right, filled with a hieroglyphic inscription, which is now destroyed.23 It is always risky to practice art history from drawings, even those by as meticulous an artist as Catherwood. Still, according to this imperfect source, the Kabah lintel appears to be not quite like any other known lintel, while nonetheless fitting comfortably into the bounds of Maya tradition. The portion of the lintel pictured in the image seems to represent a standing figure, probably the site’s ruler, dressed in garments and a headdress so elaborate that they nearly obscure the body beneath them. These depictions of flourishing featherwork, heavy jade jewelry, and finely woven textiles find parallels in other media, especially in the stone stelae that ornamented the plazas of many Maya cities, and that

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would have conditioned viewers to interpret this image even as it was presented at an oblique angle in a shadowed doorway. Yet there are hints of less expected features as well. Catherwood depicts the king standing on a serpent rather than on the more usual crouching captive, and the textured body of the snake rhymes with the crosshatched fringe of the incense bag that the ruler grasps in his left hand. On the central section of the incense bag, Catherwood sketches out another figure, standing in the same position with body frontal and face in profile, hinting at an endless recursion of representation, a mise en abyme. From all indications, the lintel was not an object that would radically reshape our narratives of Maya art or even of the history of Kabah, but it still demonstrates a creative engagement with the bounds of tradition. Catherwood’s image was sufficient for Tatiana Proskouriakoff to include the lintel in her study of the stylistic development of Maya sculpture; based on Stephens’s textual accounts alone, I can add both the Uxmal and Kabah beams to my growing tally of carved Maya lintels.24 But other kinds of questions are now impossible to answer. We do not know how the lintel was positioned above the doorway: did the ruler face out, surveying those who entered, or into the darkened interior of the room? Indeed, we do not even know which doorway in Structure 1A1 the lintel spanned.25 We cannot know what kind of wood the lintel was made of (Stephens suggests sapote, Manilkara zapota, which seems quite plausible), or how old the tree was when it was cut down: at Tikal, David Lentz and colleagues have used wooden lintels to study forest management practices and the ecological history of the ancient Maya; others have used carbon-14 dating to date lintels and to test correlations between the Maya and Gregorian calendars.26 But notice how much easier it is to imagine the losses to science and epigraphy than it is to characterize the loss to art history. Who knows what other future questions might remain unasked in the lintel’s absence? Describing the condition of the lintel, Stephens writes that “the face was scratched, worn, and obliterated.”27 Catherwood’s image does not allow us to tell if this was the result of centuries of abandonment, of Stephens’s forcible extraction, or of an act of deliberate iconoclasm centuries ago. We do know, however, that the faces of Maya images were often attacked in ancient times, although such damage is more

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common in easily accessible stelae and paintings than lintels, high up and difficult to reach. Such treatment, often focused only on the eyes and nose of a figure, destroying its ability to see or breathe, hints at Maya beliefs about the vitality of images.28 The removal of the lintel, too, is an uncanny echo of ancient Maya practice, where lintels were often pulled down or destroyed to cause buildings to collapse, acts of termination that could have reverential or purely destructive aims.29 We do not know what would have happened to the lintel at Kabah had Stephens not removed it. Perhaps it would have been destroyed by termites or by the elements in the intervening years. Perhaps it might have been burned for firewood or wantonly vandalized, as we know was the case for wooden lintels at Tikal, Guatemala.30 Perhaps it would have survived these nineteenth-century terrors only to have been clandestinely removed for sale on the international art market, as was the case with the stone lintels of Laxtunich.31 But perhaps it would have survived more or less unscathed to the present, when it could have been documented and investigated by archaeologists from the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia of Mexico. Perhaps the lintel might then have left Kabah, sent to Mexico City to be displayed in the Museo Nacional de Antropología, or sent to the regional archaeological museum in Mérida.32 We can never know. Advocates of collecting place much stress on the argument that institutions can better care for objects than their communities of origin. But sometimes, these storehouses burn. In addition to the fire in Catherwood’s Panorama, one might also mention—during the preperation of this essay alone—the destruction of the Museu Nacional of Brazil, which burned on September 2, 2018, or the fire that destroyed the University of Cape Town library’s special collections on April 19, 2021.33 The people of Nohcacab might tell a different version of Stephens’s story. Indeed, even in Stephens’s carefully framed travelogue, hints of another perspective emerge. The local curate had helped Stephens engage workers from the village of Nohcacab to extract the lintel from its doorway. At the time, Yucatan was on the verge of a catastrophic drought, and the prospect of even Stephens’s meager compensation was irresistible to at least some people in the community. Maybe they did not care about the lintel or its eventual fate. But there are also signs

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of resistance. The lintel was left outside in the rain—by accident?—and had to be unpacked and dried before leaving Nohcacab. As the beams of the lintel stood in the local convent, the people of Nohcacab came to bear witness. Stephens writes: “The first morning one or two hundred Indians at work at the noria came up in a body to look at them. It was several days before I could get them away, but, to my great relief, they at length left the village on the shoulders of Indians.”34 This act of witnessing suggests that many in the local community cared deeply about the lintel. For them, the engraving of Catherwood’s drawing may have been no consolation at all. As the New York Herald put it, reporting on the fire, “These thing[s] are a great loss; no money can replace them.”35

Notes

1. “The Fire at Catherwood’s,” New York Herald, August 1, 1842, 2; cited and discussed in R. Tripp Evans, Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820–1915 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 72–75, and Victor Wolfgang von Hagen, Frederick Catherwood, Archt. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 82–84. 2. “Fire at Catherwood’s,” 2, and John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 2 vols. (1843; repr., New York: Dover, 1963), 1:103. 3. Meghan Lee Rubenstein, “Animate Architecture at Kabah: Terminal Classic Art and Politics in the Puuc Region of Yucatán, Mexico” (PhD diss., University of Texas, 2015), 101–13. A carved jamb in one of the doors of the building describes it as a xook nah (a counting or reading house). The name of the owner, originally part of the inscription, is now undecipherable (112). The building is also known as the Manos Rojas (Red Hands) for the red handprints on its interior walls. 4. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 1:249. 5. John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, 2 vols. (1841; repr. New York: Dover, 1969), 1:115, 126–28; 2:123–24, 361–65, 469–74, discussed in Evans, Romancing the Maya, 54–57. 6. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, 2:297; he also describes his attempts to circumvent these laws when he visited Palenque (2:251–52). 7. Between 1841 and 1848, Yucatan, where Kabah and Uxmal are located, seceded from Mexico to form the short-lived Second Republic of Yucatan; the status of the new republic’s patrimony laws is unclear. 8. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, 1:115; Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 1:103. 9. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, 2:474. 10. Ibid., 1:115. On the colonial and imperial ambitions of European museums, see Fiona Rose-Greenland, “The Parthenon Marbles as Icons of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Nations and Nationalism 19, no. 4 (2013): 654–73; Yannis Hamilakis, The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination

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in Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Christopher Hitchens, ed., The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification (London: Verso, 2008); Christina Riggs, Unwrapping Ancient Egypt (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London: Pluto, 2020). 11. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, 1:115–16. 12. For a summary, see Victor Wolfgang von Hagen, Maya Explorer: John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Cities of Central America and Yucatán (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947), 74–78. One example of Augustus Le Plongeon’s work is Queen Móo and the Egyptian Sphinx (New York: published by the author, 1896); for discussion, see Lawrence Desmond and Phyllis Messenger, A Dream of Maya: Augustus and Alice Le Plongeon in Nineteenth-Century Yucatan (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), and Evans, Romancing the Maya, 126–52. 13. On the expansionist aspects of Stephens’s agenda, see Evans, Romancing the Maya, 54–64, 83–85; Jennifer Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference: Robert Smithson and John Lloyd Stephens in Yucatán,” Art Bulletin 82, no. 3 (2000): 545–51; and Miguel Cabañas, “Putting the World in Order: John Lloyd Stephens’ Narration of America,” Norteamérica 1, no. 2 (2006): 11–36. 14. See, for example, Véronique Lacapra, “Ancient Suburb Near St. Louis Could Be Lost Forever,” NPR, May 25, 2012, https://w ​ ww.​ npr.​ org/​ 2012/​ 06/​ 02/​ 153699883​ /ancient​-suburb​-near​-st​-louis​-could​-be​-lost​-forever. 15. Daniel Blake Smith, An American Betrayal: Cherokee Patriots and the Trail of Tears (New York: Henry Holt, 2011), and Amy H. Sturgis, The Trail of Tears and Indian Removal (Westport: Greenwood, 2007). 16. Hagen, Maya Explorer, 65. 17. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, 2:473–74. For Catlin, see George Gurney and Therese Thau Heyman, George Catlin and His Indian Gallery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), and Benita Eisler, Red Man’s Bones: George Catlin, Artist and Showman (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). See also Evans, Romancing the Maya, 71–72. 18. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), and Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 19. There are seven carved wooden lintels from Tikal, one from El Zotz, one from Dzibanche, and two from Chichen Itza. For further discussion and citation, see Claudia Brittenham, Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica (Austin: University of Texas Press, forthcoming 2023). 20. Note the polemical resonances of the term “Classic” to denote the period during which Maya rulers erected stelae—another analogizing term, with its own particularly pedantic spelling in the Mesoamerican context. 21. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 1:102–3; the lintel is also described in Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, 2:432–33. 22. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 1:252. 23. Rubenstein, “Animate Architecture,” 106. 24. Tatiana Proskouriakoff, A Study of Classic Maya Sculpture, Publication 593 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1950), 167, and Brittenham, Unseen Art. 25. Rubenstein, “Animate Architecture,” 105.

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26. David L. Lentz and Brian Hockaday, “Tikal Timbers and Temples: Ancient Maya Agroforestry and the End of Time,” Journal of Archaeological Science 36, no. 7 (2009): 1342–53, and Douglas J. Kennett et al., “Correlating the Ancient Maya and Modern European Calendars with High-Precision AMS 14C Dating,” Nature: Scientific Reports 3, no. 1597 (2013), https:/ ​doi.org​/10.1038​/srep01597. 27. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 1:250. 28. Stephen D. Houston and David Stuart, “The Ancient Maya Self: Personhood and Portraiture in the Classic Period,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 33 (1998): 88; Stephen D. Houston and Karl A. Taube, “An Archaeology of the Senses: Perception and Cultural Expression in Ancient Mesoamerica,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10, no. 2 (2000): 283; Bryan Just, “Modifications of Ancient Maya Sculpture,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 48 (2005): 78; Stephen D. Houston, David Stuart, and Karl A. Taube, The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience Among the Classic Maya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 100; Mary Ellen Miller and Claudia Brittenham, The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 167; Megan O’Neil, “Marked Faces, Displaced Bodies: Monument Breakage and Reuse Among the Classic-Period Maya,” in Striking Images: Iconoclasms Past and Present, ed. Stacy Boldrick, Leslie Brubaker, and Richard Clay (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 47–64. 29. Eleanor Harrison-Buck, “Killing the ‘Kings of Stone’: The Defacement of Classic Maya Monuments,” in Ritual, Violence, and the Fall of the Classic Maya Kings, ed. Gyles Iannone, Brett A. Houk, and Sonja A. Schwake (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016), 63, 68–69, 72, 74, 78, 87–88. 30. William R. Coe and Edwin M. Shook, The Carved Wooden Lintels of Tikal, Tikal Report No. 6 (Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 1961); see also James Meierhoff and Jeff Buechler, “Tikal’s Missing Carved Wooden Lintel (That Nobody Knows Is Gone . . .)” (paper presented at the 43rd Midwest Conference on Mesoamerican Archaeology and Ethnohistory, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, 2020). 31. Stephen D. Houston, ed. A Maya Universe in Stone (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2021). 32. For tension between local and national patrimony claims, see Sandra Rozental, “In the Wake of Mexican Patrimonio: Material Ecologies in San Miguel Coatlinchan,” Anthropological Quarterly 89, no. 1 (2016): 181–220. 33. Michael Greshko, “Fire Devastates Brazil’s Oldest Science Museum,” National Geographic News, September 6, 2018, https://​w ww​.nationalgeographic​ .com​/science​/article​/news​-museu​-nacional​-fire​-rio​-de​-janeiro​-natural​-history; Nora McGreevy, “Why the Cape Town Fire Is a Devastating Loss for South African Cultural Heritage,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 20, 2021, https://​w ww​.smithso​ nianmag​.com​/smart​-news​/cultural​-heritage​-historic​-library​-destroyed​-south​ -africa​-blaze​-180977539. 34. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 1:252. 35. “Fire at Catherwood’s,” 2.

Chapter 3

The Sanguine Art Four Fragments

Sonja Drimmer November 1926 A letter landed on the desk of Belle Da Costa Greene, then the director of the Morgan Library. The letter, from an agent at the rare books dealer Maggs Brothers, reads: Madam, We are sending to you, under separate cover a catalogue of Sotheby’s Sale, December 13th to 15th. We notice one item which we think will interest you very much, i.e:Lot 379–9 miniatures from gower’s confessio amantis. It is stated in the catalogue that the MS. from which the miniatures were cut, is in your possession. We shall be very happy to undertake a bid for you if desired. Yours very truly, Maggs Bros.1 Maggs was right. The manuscript from which the miniatures had been cut was on a shelf in the Morgan Library, where it had been since 1903.2

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Although a record of Greene’s reply does not survive, she must have responded in the affirmative to Maggs’s note, maybe efficiently, maybe even wittily.3 And when she got home from work that evening, maybe exhausted, maybe she put her feet up and thought, Good day at the office.4 Not long after Maggs undertook a bid for the nine cuttings, the miniatures were returned to their original home in Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.126, a late fifteenth-century copy of John Gower’s massive English poem, the Confessio Amantis.5 Like some of its restored companions, one of these miniatures only barely registers the scars of its mutilation: a faint rift follows the contours of its frame, just the visual gist of a conservator’s ministrations and the transatlantic transaction between dealer and director that precipitated them (fig. 3.1). Over the course of its life, which probably began around 1470, the Morgan Confessio Amantis had its contents pilfered a number of times: fourteen of its original 108 miniatures were wrested from its pages at various points, and a lopsided gash scars the opening page to the book, the site where some looter removed what was probably the original owner’s coat of arms.6 Remarkably, all but one of the plundered pictures were recovered and restored to the book over the years. An empty box of space on one of its folios is the only lingering remnant of these losses.7 Maybe one day it, too, will be filled.

Some Time in the 1770s A chemist living in the east of England dragged a chair up to a sturdy table, sat down, steadied himself, and began what John Ruskin would later call the “hard work” of cutting up a manuscript.8 Spreading open the tome on the surface, he located his targets, pushed the point of his knife into the flesh of the parchment, harder and harder, till it gave into the pressure and a puncture appeared. Then he sliced. Three more times around the rectangular frame of the miniature he did this. Slice. Slice. Slice. He repeated the ritual several more times. Perhaps, when he tired of the piercing and the slitting, he laid the rectangles in a grid on the table before him, enjoying the pictures unburdened of text. Little is known of this chemist, Thomas Worth, but around 1771, he bought a manuscript of the Confessio Amantis and before the decade

Fig. 3.1 The Tale of the Three Questions, in John Gower, Confessio Amantis, London, ca. 1470. The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, MS M.126, fol. 26v. Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), 1903. Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

was out, he had put sharp edge to book and excerpted at least nine miniatures from its pages. These he sold to Sir John Fenn, “a Smatterer in antiquity, but a very good sort of man.”9 Perhaps Fenn and Worth were friends. Perhaps, while enjoying a visit to Worth’s shop or his home, Fenn asked to see the manuscript that had only recently made it into Worth’s hands and, intrigued by the pictures that “very curiously describe the Dresses of the times,” ventured to ask if he might have

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some for himself.10 Maybe he was coy about it at first. Or maybe he had been bold. Like so many of his gentleman contemporaries, Fenn made a habit of poaching pictures from books and arranging them in albums that disclose his antiquarian affections.11 Some of these, now returned to the Morgan Confessio, bear the wounds of Fenn’s enthusiasm, with creases running ruts down a king’s face or the flank of a horse, abraded paint revealing the underdrawing no one was meant to see. Other miniatures now have tawny reverses from the glue that once adhered them to the pages of Fenn’s scrapbooks. As for the rest of the manuscript of the Confessio Amantis: Worth went on to sell it—minus the cut miniatures—to a member of the Fountaine family of Norfolk, one of whose members inscribed his name, “Sir Andrew Fountaine, 1792, age 20,” on its pages.12 Acting as Fenn’s counterpart, Fountaine did what so many of his generation were apt to do: leave a piece of themselves in the past rather than excising pieces from it.13 Adding to the artifact, subtracting from it: perhaps it amounts to the same thing.

Shortly Before 1393 John Gower slid the slanted tablet over the arms of his chair and resumed drafting what he would eventually call the Confessio Amantis, his magnum opus in English. The poem was vast and growing vaster, while the body that was composing it was deteriorating with each passing day. The poet was falling apart. Today he would append an explanatory note to his poem: “Here he declares particularly how, because of reverence of the most serene prince, his lord king of England Richard II, his own and humble John Gower, although long wearied in many ways by grave illness, did not refuse to take up the labors of this little work, but instead has most zealously compiled the present little book from various chronicles, histories, and sayings of poets and philosophers, like a honeycomb gathered from various flowers, to the extent that his infirmity allowed him.”14 Like a bee he flitted from book to book, culling the choicest morsels to collect in the expanding edifice of his poem.15 The imagery was sweet. Just a few decades later, John Lydgate would describe his own poetic labor in far more aggressive terms, comparing his composition to the destructions of a potter who smashes old

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vessels and makes something new of their cobbled shards.16 The metaphors differed but the idea was the same. Textual artifacts are quarries. Excavate them for gems; mount their fragments in new settings. Break them apart; put them together in new ways. Poetic composition in the later Middle Ages was a morbid affair. Evocative though it is, the imagery was not summoned from beyond material reality. Gower and Lydgate were writing in an environment that was lush with broken and fractured books that were used and enjoyed and abused and repaired.17 These were books whose slipshod seams were often in view, books that sometimes wore the stitches and scars they endured in the process of their very making; books that were always already an assemblage of fragments. Parish churches in late medieval London regularly paid stationers to minister to their injuries. The accounts that linger sketch frail but telling outlines of books’ vitiated forms. Take Saint Dunstan’s in the East: “Item paide to John Barber Stacioner for amendyng of the bokes of the chirche swych [such] as were fawty [faulty] as it apperith be hys bill.”18 Take Saint Mary’s at Hill: “Also for amendyng of bokys”19 and “payd to sir Iohn tyllesle for mendyng of the portos [breviaries], with othere bokes.”20 Take Saint Margaret’s Westminster: “Item paied for mendyng of iiii Grayelles [Graduals].”21 Or St. Nicholas Shambles: “for reparacions of diuerse books . . . ffirst for mendyng of a masse booke that was all to toryn rent and brokyn for newe renewyng and glewyng of the same” and later “for newe mendyng of an olde portos [breviary] that was alle to rent and amendyd in writyng in diuerse places and was newe glewed ageyn and newe bownde.”22 Not all books were fixed. In 1485, Saint Margaret’s Southwark listed among its possessions “another broken antiphoner.”23 Defective books were everywhere. Damage was the norm.24

August 6, 2014 I tried hard to look demure while dabbing sweat from my forehead and depositing an armful of laptop, charger, notebook, pencil, and camera at a carrel in the library of New College, Oxford. The manuscript I had come to see was brought out swiftly, but I would need a beat for my body temperature to drop before taking it into my hands. Another

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copy of the Confessio Amantis, this one, MS 266, had suffered far more zealous thieves than the Morgan Library’s copy.25 The entire book is ravaged: gaps in the page where miniatures once were; flaking paint; murky blotches where spilled liquid has dried; scrapes and scratches and gashes and cockling and cracking. Some of the miniatures that remain are almost entirely effaced. Who did this? Perhaps all this destruction is cause for mourning, but one page made me smile. Near the bottom of folio 33 verso is the aftermath of some tragic triage (fig. 3.2). Here, a miniature, whose pigment has been rubbed almost to oblivion, was once riven from its place. But now, a ropey thread zigs and zags at awkward angles between the page and the picture, tacking the two together but just barely. It is a terrible suture, yet I see a person in it. I see the knot someone tied to keep the thread from slipping. I see, in the peaks and valleys of the filament, the rhythms of their good intentions. I see more than if the page had forever remained intact. What I am looking at, I think, is marvelous.

Fig. 3.2 The Tale of the Three Questions, in John Gower, Confessio Amantis, London, ca. 1425–50. New College Library, Oxford, MS 266, fol. 33v. Photo: author. © Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford.

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Sanguine Reflections As Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler mention in the introduction, our discipline has been christened the “Melancholy Art.”26 We gaze on the objects of our focus with yearning and a mournfulness born of that frustrated desire to resuscitate the dead works with which we live, victims of loss no matter how intact they remain. They provoke us with their presence, yet the words we conjure to revive them let them die as soon as letters land on the page. Sometimes we even manage to kill them by capturing them in a desiccated web of text. But, if nothing else, there is a prestige to our efforts for in this lugubrious undertaking, we join a vaunted cortège, sharing in our despair with the prodigies who have pictured it and thought it. We are with Dürer, with Freud, with Riegl, with Benjamin, with them all. My confession is that I do not belong in this procession. It is embarrassing to admit something so ingenuous, but I am sanguine about what I do. I have never winced at my inability to brook the chasm between me and the work, have never bristled at its dismissal of me, have never quailed at my failure to restore its lost world. Perhaps this is because manuscripts—the objects to which I have devoted most of my professional labor—are not distant at all. When we look at books, we consume them, no matter how gingerly we handle their forms. Even worse, every time we leave a library we abscond with fragments of its artifacts under our fingernails, only to wash them down the sink before dinner. But it is because of this proximity that I cannot grieve over them. They do not seem to have ever wanted me to make them whole in any case: they were born as fragments to begin with, have lived their lives as fragments, and remain as fragments now. Both medieval manuscripts and the slender records of their biographies tell me that integrity is anomalous, an impossibility. To aspire to exegetical unanimity with the object, to perfection as their spokeswoman, is a self-absorption my own ego can ill afford, never mind my body sustain. At least Gower—advocate of the sanguine humor, best suited to love—would approve.27 It would be callous to look blithely on loss. Damage is distributed inequitably, and the physical testimony of entire cultures has been obliterated by colonization, imperialism, genocide, environmental catastrophe, and the wanton predations of accident and time. But

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perhaps there is also something hegemonic in fetishizing wholeness, in presuming the piecemeal to be less than ideal, and in thinking that an object was ever wholly present, ever whole in the first place.28 If I crackle with the thrill of locating the losses beneath layers of palimpsest, my enthusiasm is tempered by the knowledge of joy’s disproportionate allocation. The silences that I hear are really only the caesuras of an already cacophonous archive, preserved as the property of institutions founded on lopsided logics of selective retention. Hardly flotsam, the fragments I encounter have always and already been bound to others by the writings of those who cobbled them together, collected them, and ensured their exaltation over the years. If the condition of melancholy means standing in wonder before the object’s deficiency, then perhaps sanguinity is to be dazzled by its plenitude. Perhaps it is to delight in the privilege of joining the staggered congregation that has assembled around it for centuries, from the poet Gower to the chemist Worth, from the antiquarian Fenn to the library director Greene—and then to me, at a desk, with hope and with pencil in hand. Gaps in the pages, unfortunate repair jobs, they are all tangible traces of the people who came here before me to hold this object just as I am doing now. This damage is reassuring. It promises me that not everything is destined to expire behind glass. Notes

1. Maggs Brothers to Belle Da Costa Greene, November 15, 1926, curatorial file for Morgan Library & Museum MS M.126, New York. 2. In 1903, J. P. Morgan purchased the volume from the antiquarian bookseller Bernard Quaritch, who had sent Morgan a letter advising him of its imminent availability in advance of its notice in his own catalogue of July 1902. Quaritch bought the manuscript for £1550 at auction, from the Fountaine Sale of July 11–14, 1902. From the late eighteenth century, the manuscript had been in the possession of the Fountaine family of Norfolk. The Fountaine family had purchased the volume from the chemist, Thomas Worth, and he, in turn, had purchased it (among many other items, such as the Paston Letters), from Thomas Martin (1697–1771), executor to Peter Le Neve (1661–1729) and recipient of the manuscript from Le Neve upon his death. Le Neve purchased the book from Richard Mauleverer (d. 1713), who in 1693 inscribed his name in the manuscript. The ownership of the manuscript between the seventeenth and fifteenth centuries is uncertain, but evidence internal to the manuscript suggests strongly that it was produced for King Edward IV of England and his queen consort, Elizabeth Woodville, after 1470. For more

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details regarding the manuscript’s provenance, see Sonja Drimmer, “The Visual Language of Vernacular Manuscript Illumination: John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Morgan Library MS M.126)” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2011), 167–73, 349–50; and A. S. G. Edwards, “Buying Gower’s Confessio Amantis in Modern Times,” in John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception, ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2014), 282, 287–88. 3. Records of Greene’s correspondence are held at the Morgan Library & Museum, under call number ARC 1310. A search at the item level has not unearthed a copy of her response to the Maggs letter. The Maggs archive of correspondence is now held at the British Library. Laura Walker, Lead Curator of Modern Archives and Manuscripts, kindly checked the archives for me when COVID-related restrictions prevented me from traveling to London, and she reported that there is no record of Greene’s response to this query in the archive, although they do have other correspondence from her during this period relating to other sales. 4. For a biography of Belle da Costa Greene, see Heidi Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege (New York: Norton, 2007). And for touching tributes to her, along with information about her work as librarian and then director of the Morgan, see Lawrence C. Roth, “A Tribute to the Library and Its First Director,” in The First Quarter Century of the Pierpont Morgan Library: A Retrospective Exhibition in Honor of Belle da Costa Greene; With a Tribute to the Library and Its First Director by Lawrence C. Wroth; New York, April 5 Through July 23, 1949 (New York: Spiral, 1949), 9–29; and Dorothy Miner, foreword to Studies in Art and Literature for Belle da Costa Greene, ed. Dorothy Miner (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1954), ix–xiii. For an examination of the politics of white supremacy underpinning the growing manuscript and rare book collections of early twentieth-century industrialists and Greene’s “multiaxis situatedness in relation to her racial, gendered, and sexuality status” while working for such a collection, see Dorothy Kim, “Belle da Costa Greene, Book History, Race, and Medieval Studies,” Quimbandas 1, no. 1 (2020): 43–61. 5. On this manuscript, see Kate Harris, “Ownership and Readership: Studies in the Provenance of the Manuscripts of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” (PhD diss., University of York, 1993), 116−19; Martha Driver, “Printing the Confessio Amantis: Caxton’s Edition in Context,” in Re-Visioning Gower, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Asheville: Pegasus, 1998), 269–304; Patricia Eberle, “Miniatures as Evidence of Reading in a Manuscript of the Confessio Amantis,” in John Gower: Recent Readings; Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989), 311–64; Martha Driver, “Women Readers and Pierpont Morgan MS M.126,” in John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers and Contexts, ed. Malte Urban and Georgiana Donavin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 71–107; Martha Dana Rust, Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 117−64; Sonja Drimmer, The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403–1476 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 189–223. 6. The Morgan Library owns three separate copies of this poem: MSS M.126, the subject of this essay; M.125; and M.690.

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7. The gap remains on Morgan MS M.126, fol. 48v, and the miniature would have illustrated the tale of Sylvester and Constantine. 8. The line is cited frequently: “Cut up missal in evening—hard work” from January 3, 1853; John Ruskin, The Diaries of John Ruskin, vol. 2, 1848–1873, ed. J. Evans and J. H. Whitehouse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), 486–88. For studies of the antiquarian reception of medieval manuscripts, and the mutilation it often entailed, see A. N. L. Munby, Connoisseurs and Medieval Miniatures, 1750–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972); Rowan Watson, Vandals and Enthusiasts: Views of Illuminating in the Nineteenth Century (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1995); Christopher De Hamel, Cutting up Manuscripts for Pleasure and Profit: The 1995 Sol. M. Malkin Lecture (Charlottesville: Book Arts Press, 1996); Roger S. Wieck, “Folia Fugitiva: The Pursuit of the Illuminated Manuscript Leaf,” in “Essays in Honor of Lilian M. C. Randall,” special issue, Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 54 (1996): 233–54; Sandra Hindman et al., Manuscript Illumination in the Modern Age: Recovery and Reconstruction (Evanston: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 2001). 9. John Venn and J. A. Venn, eds., Alumni Cantabrigienses: A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), 2.2:479. 10. The quote, interestingly—and probably not coincidentally—comes from Fenn’s own catalog description of the very manuscript from which these miniatures were cut (British Library, Additional MS 22931, fol. 38r). In 1777, Fenn compiled this catalogue of manuscripts belonging to Briggs Price Fountaine. Number 37 in the catalogue is the Morgan Confessio, which describes the manuscript and notes the subject matter of all the miniatures (fols. 38r–41r). In this description, Fenn makes no mention of the miniatures that were cut from the manuscript nor even that the folios were missing miniatures. 11. For example, the British Library holds an album (Additional MS 40742) that he compiled in 1779 of heraldic badges, which he had cut from a medieval manuscript and pasted into this collection, as a reference text. 12. Morgan MS M.126, fol. 203v. 13. See, for example, Sonja Drimmer, “A Medieval Psalter ‘Perfected’: Eighteenth-Century Conservationism and an Early (Female) Restorer of Rare Books and Manuscripts,” British Library Journal (2013): 1–38. 14. “Hic declarat in primis qualiter ob reuerenciam serenissimi principis domini sui Regis Anglie Ricardi secundi totus suus humilis Iohannes Gower, licet graui infirmitate a diu multipliciter fatigatus, huius opusculi labores suscipere non recusauit, sed tanquam fauum ex variis floribus recollectum, presentem libellum ex variis cronicis, historiis, poetarum philosophorumque dictis, quatenus sibi infirmitas permisit, studiosissime compilauit.” John Gower, Confessio Amantis, prologue.34–35, ed. Russell Peck and trans. Andrew Galloway, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo: TEAMS and Medieval Institute Publications, 2000−2004), vol. 1, https://​d​ .lib​.rochester​.edu​/teams​/publication​/peck​-confessio​-amantis​-volume​-1. 15. Mary Carruthers has discussed this imagery at length and explored how, as a memorial metaphor, it assimilates the storage of information in the loci of

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memory to the placement of nectar in the cella of the honeycomb: The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 35, 191–92. 16. John Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 1.prologue.9–23, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols., Early English Text Society, extra series, 121−24 (London: Oxford University Press, 1924−27), 1:1. Lydgate’s verses translate directly from his source, Laurent de Premierfait’s Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes. 17. For a rich account of the mutual interchanges between literary and material fragmentation and compilational production in late medieval English poetic culture, see Arthur Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). And for devotional manuscripts, see Kathryn M. Rudy, Piety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized Their Manuscripts (Cambridge: Open Book, 2016). 18. London Metropolitan Archives P69/DUN1/B/001/MS04887, fol. 8v. 19. Henry Littlehales, ed., The Medieval Records of a London City Church—St Mary at Hill, 1420–1559 (London: Centre for Metropolitan History, 1905), http://​w ww​ .british​-history​.ac​.uk​/report​.aspx​?compid​=​65699. 20. Ibid. 21. Churchwardens’ Accounts, St. Margaret’s Westminster, City of Westminster Archives Centre, SMW/E/1/1, p. 115. 22. Inventory and Churchwardens’ Accounts, St. Nicholas Shambles, London St. Bartholomew’s Archives, SNC/1, fol. 102r. 23. Churchwardens’ Accounts, St. Margaret’s Southwark, London Metropolitan Archives, P92/SAV/024, p. 11. 24. William Tronzo has made the trenchant point that “it is the fragment and the fragmentary state that are the enduring and normative conditions; conversely, it is the whole that is ephemeral, and the state of wholeness that is transitory.” He goes so far as to call the whole “poignant.” See William Tronzo, introduction to The Fragment: An Incomplete History, ed. William Tronzo (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2009), 4. 25. On this manuscript, see Peter C. Braeger, “The Illustrations in New College MS 266 for Gower’s Conversion Tales,” in Yeager, John Gower, 275–310. 26. Michael Ann Holly, The Melancholy Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). See also Mitchell Merback, Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s “Melancholia I” (New York: Zone, 2017). 27. Gower, Confessio Amantis 7.421–28, 455–58, 466–75, ed. Peck and trans. Galloway, vol. 3, https://​d​.lib​.rochester​.edu​/teams​/publication​/peck​-confession​ -amantis​-volume​-3. 28. A parallel line of thinking about memory and oblivion has received ample commentary from critical archival studies; I am thinking in particular of J. J. Ghaddar’s remarks regarding the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Independent Assessment Process in Canada: “Small wonder that at least some survivors were reluctant to yet again trust the government with information or records pertaining to them: better the destruction of the IAP [Independent Assessment Process] records and obscurity than the risks and dangers of trusting a settler state that apologizes in this manner” (“The Spectre in the Archive:

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Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Archival Memory,”Archivaria 82 [2016]: 18). An instance of what we might think of as recuperative destruction—and what Eva Frojmovic, following Hamid Naficy, terms an “accented mode of representation”—occurred in a Hebrew manuscript of biblical commentaries (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. Heb. 5), illuminated by a Christian artist and strategically defaced perhaps by the same artist in order to make amends for contravening the proscription against portraying the face of God as well as human facial features. See Eva Frojmovic, “Jewish Scribes and Christian Illuminators: Interstitial Encounters and Cultural Negotiation,” in Between Judaism and Christianity: Art Historical Essays in Honor of Elisheva (Elisabeth) Revel-Neher, ed. Katrin Kogman-Appel and Mati Meyer (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 293–95. And for thought-provoking and powerfully creative approaches to fragments, see Kathleen Bickford Berzock, ed., Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange Across Medieval Saharan Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

Chapter 4

The Dreamwork of Positivism Archaeological Art History and the Imaginative Restoration of the Lost

Jaś Elsner In the famous closing words of the book that invented the discipline of the history of art as one concerned not with artists but with the ways objects could evoke a meaningful sense of history, Johann Joachim Winckelmann lamented the sense of loss on which the field has been founded: Like someone who, in writing the history of his native land, must touch upon the destruction that he himself has witnessed, I could not keep myself from gazing after the fate of works of art as far as my eye could see. Just as a beloved stands on the seashore and follows with tearful eyes her departing sweetheart, with no hope of seeing him again, and believes she can glimpse even in the distant sail the image of her lover—so we, like the beloved, have as it were only a shadowy outline of the subject of our desires remaining. But this arouses so much

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the greater longing for what is lost, and we examine the copies we have with greater attention than we would if we were in full possession of the originals. In this, we often are like individuals who wish to converse with spirits and believe they can see something where nothing exists. The word antiquity has become a prejudice, but even this bias is not without its uses. One always imagines that there is so much to find, so one searches much to catch sight of something . . . we turn over every stone, and by drawing inferences from many tiny details, we at least arrive at a probable assertion that can be more instructive than the accounts left by the ancients, which, except for a few moments of insight, are merely historical. One must not hesitate to seek the truth, even to the detriment of one’s reputation; a few must err, so that many may find the right way.1 Among the many issues raised by this passage are the questions of empiricism and sober archaeology (the turning of every stone and the inference from the tiny detail) in relation to empathetic and subjective investment (those tearful eyes), as well as the relationship of pure fantasy (seeing something where nothing exists) to probable assertion. Winckelmann brilliantly genders his observer—indeed his “I”—as female watching the beloved sailing away and instantly generalizes this longing figure to a collective “our.” He evokes the problems of animation (both in history and in art) in bringing the past to life—conversing with spirits and believing we can see what is not there. And finally, he confronts the problem of the textual supplement—of writing an art history that is inevitably dependent on texts, the accounts left by the ancients, which are rarely insightful but “merely historical.” One interesting aspect of the conundrum he presents—in many ways, the crux of the matrices that govern most of what we do when we study the art-historical and archaeological past—is that it applies in equal measure globally. There are many areas in which, because the depth of scholarship is different (especially when fields are perhaps two hundred years old in the West but much younger elsewhere), it is very difficult to do comparative work.2 But around the questions of loss

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and of objects that can be reconstituted only in the kind of tiny details found through salvaging broken stones, there is a kind of multicultural leveling in which we are all equal—subjects only of the adequacy of our archaeology, the vividness of our imaginations, and the rigor of the scholarly methods we may apply to prevent those imaginations going wild. The problem is particularly profound in the rich archaeology of cultural worlds that have been long abandoned: for instance, the art and archaeology of Buddhism in India and on the Silk Road, in contexts where that faith was extirpated many hundreds of years ago, or the art and archaeology of the pagan polytheistic world in the Mediterranean or pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, so much of which (in both contexts) was eliminated as well as repurposed by triumphalist Christianity. In cultures that have been in continual existence for many centuries, the opposite may be the case but with surprisingly similar results. The constant continuity of worship within what is claimed as the same ritual and religious tradition in a major Hindu or Christian site for thousands of years (let us say, St. Peter’s in Rome) brings with it an endless meddling in the material culture. This interference obliterates as much as it preserves, reconfigures what it believes itself to be respectfully conserving, and is, in any case, governed by the changing but always current needs of ritual and belief rather than any kind of sober observation or the drawing of inferences from tiny details. In the case of pre-Christian antiquity, despite the extraordinarily rich corpus of survivals, it is impossible—even with the aid of the textual supplements to which Winckelmann refers—to get behind the tinted glass wall of a Christian understanding in order to grasp empathetically and emicly a colorful world that is both ancestral to us and entirely lost. I take up two case studies here, one from ancient India and one from Byzantium, to explore the problems of reconstruction from fragments insufficient to give a full account of the original monument. Both concern objects that were probably constructed for sacred purposes to house relics. In both cases, in apparently different fields and in relation to culturally very different materials, a “synecdochic” strategy has been employed by scholarship, whereby the fragmentary—and indeed the use of iconographic detail from within archaeological fragments, we may say the “fragmentalized” within the fragment—is made

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to reconstruct our sense of the whole. That sense of the whole, itself subject to a form of circularity since it is generated by assumptions arising from the part we can observe, is then used to explain and situate the meanings of the object that has survived. The great Buddhist stupa of Amarāvatī—whose dates for the most extensive architectural and structural work are elusive but most likely lie between the second century BCE and the third century CE—was rediscovered by the British at the end of the eighteenth century and excavated through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.3 The site was effectively cleared, with deeply inadequate stratigraphy and archaeological methods by modern standards, and its sculptural remains were dismembered to end up divided across a number of museums— primarily the British Museum, the Government Museum in Chennai, and the Archaeological Museum on the site at Amarāvatī. No one has estimated what percentage of the original sculpture (whether from the spectacular refurbishment of the second or third centuries CE or from its earlier incarnation) has survived, but it is, in any case, too little to attempt anything more than a generic reconstitution of the forms of its drum, dome, and the railings that encircle the entire site.4 One interesting aspect of the reworking in the second or third centuries is its obsession with creating what have been called “meta-stupas” in the sculpture set around the drum: a vast and varied series of images of stupas and of devotional activity around them carved in relief in the local limestone, which use all the same forms (drum, dome, railing, pillars, and pilasters) and the same kinds of structural choices (medallions with relief narratives, square or oblong historiated panels, statues of lions, and so forth), represented in exquisite miniature, that we find in the remains of the monument.5 In the light of this imagery, it is inevitable that when the form of the lost monument as a whole is envisaged, reference is made to these meta-stupas in order to generate our visualization.6 This is a very interesting strategy. It is methodologically invalid, to be sure, since we cannot know whether the images did replicate the main stupa (they are, in fact, rather varied, which complicates the replication argument) and, even if they did accurately reflect its appearance, whether this was recognized as such by viewers. But this strategy encapsulates art

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history’s need to “search much to catch sight of something” among the “tiny details” and to “draw inferences” from them. It is driven by the longing for what is lost and its imaginative recuperation, the “shadowy outline” of images in relief functioning as copies from which we attempt a subjective process of imagining their prototype. It is worth noting that stupa-shaped reliquaries in ivory and crystal, along with their contents, have been found beneath the main stupa,7 while excavations in the early twentieth century in the remains of a small stupa outside the south gate revealed a globular pottery relic casket, inside which was a gold reliquary in the form of a miniature stupa (8.75 centimeters high) with an umbrella that contained six gold flowers and a small piece of bone.8 These finds, too, have been used to help with visualizing the original main stupa.9 One example must stand for many—but note that none of the stupas in these drum slabs looks precisely like any of the others, and some have much less decoration.10 The finely worked limestone drum slab in the British Museum (1880,0709.70) portrays gods and dwarfs flying about the top of a heavily decorated stupa (fig. 4.1).11 It is surrounded with a high railing at the bottom with lotus roundels in the uprights and a coping at the top carved with men riding and fighting beasts (some fantastic but including an elephant), outside which various figures are standing. The gateway is framed by two pairs of statues of seated lions, and inside, at the center, stands the Buddha surrounded by worshippers. It is impossible to guess whether this is a statue or a relief from a narrative scene or whether the Buddha is imagined to be present, like the deities above and the figures outside the railing. Inside the railing but in front of the main stupa, two columns can be seen on either side of the gate rising to stepped capitals on which small stupas with multiple umbrellas stand.12 The upper section of the drum, visible above the railing, has a series of larger and smaller frieze panels, most of which can be identified from narratives of the Buddha’s life or his previous lives (the Jātaka tales), as can the sculpted roundels in the dome.13 The elaborately framed central panel immediately above the Buddha extends from the main drum as a kind of balcony, the so-called āyaka platform, on which is a relief of the Bodhisattva (as the Buddha is known before he became enlightened and in his previous incarnations)

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being exhorted by deities to take his final rebirth. Above it stand 5 āyaka pillars, beneath which is written an inscription in Brahmi naming the donors. The impossibility of separating what is intended as sculptural representation of relief sculpture from sculptural representation of animated beings (especially in the case of the central scene of the Buddha in juxtaposition with the relief of himself on the āyaka platform) is of course a useful warning about the dangers of literalist reconstructions of reality from imagery created with this amount of visual intelligence and sophistication. I want to set the conundrum side by side with a small but spectacular ivory panel (13.1 by 26.1 centimeters), perhaps made in Constantinople (but with various claims for elsewhere, including Egypt) and surviving now in the Cathedral Treasury at Trier (fig. 4.2). Quite as contested in its dating as the Amarāvatī stupa, the Trier ivory has been placed between the fifth and the tenth centuries CE, with no clear resolution or killer argument.14 No one is in serious doubt that the panel shows— in stunning detail and executed with virtuoso technique, deep-cut into the ivory—a procession with prelates on a carriage drawn by horses or mules, on the left, bringing a box with relics to a newly built church on which the finishing touches are being put, at the right.15 A series of dignitaries attend the emperor and the empress carrying a cross, who stand before the church. The populace looks on, arranged in arcades, balconies, and windows, a number swinging censers in the tier below the top. The carriage bearing the priests and the relic casket has a fine relief with three figures on its side, and the bust of Christ is placed in the tympanum of the building beneath which the reliquary passes.16 As with the meta-stupas that decorate the Amarāvatī stupa, so too the form of the unadorned casket carried by the clerics has determined the decision of the majority of scholars that the Trier ivory itself was once a panel of an ivory reliquary, like the one it depicts.17 That would make it the only surviving fragment of a lost whole, whose material substance (bone) and synecdochic evocation of a lost totality emulates the bone fragments that probably constituted the relics in the casket held by the prelates in the carving. Actually, we might say, the casket is unlike the rest of the panel since it has no decoration whereas the rest of the imagery participates in a form of horror vacui aesthetics. In that sense,

Fig. 4.1 Relief panel from the drum of the stupa at Amarāvatī in southeastern India, probably second or third century CE. Limestone, 136.6 × 86.2 cm. London, British Museum, 1880,0709.70. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Fig. 4.2 Relief panel, perhaps once part of a larger object, fifth to tenth centuries CE. Ivory, 13.1 ×26.1 cm. Trier, Cathedral Treasury. Photo: AKG images.

the apparent mise en abyme is anything but a reflection of the larger relief, though the casket’s form and its triangular-pedimented lid may be said to emulate, in a simplified way, the church to which it is being brought with its triangular pediments. But again, whatever other issues are in play in the extensive scholarly discussions, the miniature iconography of the fragment generates the visualization of how the lost whole once appeared and hence the interpretative frame for placing the ivory leaf itself as one of a reliquary’s long sides or possibly (if situated at an angle) one long side of a sloping rooflike lid. One feature shared by both objects is a fascination for relief detail, exquisitely rendered. This has the effect of demolishing the distinction between the carvings of sculpted reliefs of people and the carvings of imagined real people. While the figures outside the stupa’s railings and the deities flying about its top are presumably meant to be seen as living beings and the majority of its relief decoration is meant to signify the miniature rendering of large-scale sculpture, it is impossible to tell which level of representation is meant for the standing Buddha in the gateway. In the ivory plaque, only the cruciform halo around the bust of the onlooking Jesus in an arched niche above the carriage distinguishes him from the upper torsos of the many living onlookers, including, in the third tier down, a number of busts placed in arches, as if they were sculptural riffs on the Christ image at the panel’s top left. At stake here,

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visually and across media, we might say, are carved ivory images of living people, an image of what is probably intended to be a flat mosaic portrait, and a play with the model of the sculpted marble bust. Here Jesus is obviously an image, but that raises the question—potent before, during, and after the period of Iconoclasm in Byzantium—as to whether (and to what extent) the icon of Christ is a living presence to whom worship should be offered. In both cases—Buddhist and Christian—issues of the theological status of the religion’s founder and savior figure are in play. I have compared two objects of radically different scales and from profoundly different cultures, equally subjected to art-historical and archaeological investigation in the tradition created by Winckelmann. Apart from size, they have some striking similarities. The original forms of both works are impossible to reconstruct from the surviving materials; the specific dates of their making are shrouded in uncertainty (and much scholarly disagreement). Both are monuments characterized by a virtuosity of miniature relief and focused on relics within different regimes of religion that nonetheless share a synecdochic model by which a relic (despite being a small fragment) relates to the whole body of the venerated figure.18 In both cases, in the absence of other evidence, a strange and unexplained synecdochic strategy has been borrowed from the relic-logic of ancient religion to aid the scholarly reconstruction of a lost whole: the complete three-dimensional stupa is reconstructed from the relief mini-stupas that once adorned it; the putative complete casket in three dimensions is imaginatively generated from the tiny reliquary box carried by the clerics carved in the imagery of the Trier ivory. We may say that the process of cultural mourning for the lost past so vividly described by Winckelmann gives rise, in the students of these objects within archaeologically inflected art history, to a process of reparation through fantasy that is considerably more optimistic than the shadowy outlines over which the founder of the discipline shed his tears. Let me end with another purple passage reflecting on archaeological loss. In Civilization and Its Discontents, the aged Sigmund Freud—long obsessed with antiquity and its remains—turned to an archaeological fantasy to explain psychoanalysis:

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Now let us by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation, but a psychical entity with a similarly long and varied past—an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away, and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one. This would mean that in Rome the palace of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine; and that the Castle of St. Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the siege by the Goths, and so on. But more than this. In the space occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand—without the Palazzo having to be removed, the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terra-cotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero’s Golden House; on the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of today as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but on the same site, the original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, and the old temple over which it was built.19 Later in the same text, Freud writes of sublimation as a kind of “finer and higher” satisfaction—“as an artist’s joy in creating, in giving his phantasies body, or a researcher’s in solving problems or discovering truths.”20 The artist’s sublimation of suffering gives creative body to his or her fantasies, as Freud’s own fantasy of psychoanalysis recuperates all the losses of the material past in a meta-archaeological completeness, a plenitude that transgresses the constraints of time.21 The extent to which Winckelmann’s comments at the end of his foundational work may have been at the back of Freud’s mind in his vision of Rome is less significant here than the fact that Freud voices the possibilities for reparative recuperation. It is these that we have seen in action in the strange game of reinventing lost

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monuments from images found among their fragments. The difference is that Freud speaks explicitly of “spinning a phantasy . . . [that] leads to things that are unimaginable and even absurd,”22 while the archaeologists and the art historians, whose accounts of early Buddhist art and Byzantine ivories we have been examining, have conducted a project of reconstitution that is entirely unjustified by method (or footnote) but is presented as likely probability (or what Winckelmann calls “probable assertion”). If Freud used archaeology as the dream of psychoanalysis, then the archaeologists of Amarāvatī and the Trier ivory have performed the dreamwork of positivism as their response to the challenge of Winckelmann’s despair.23

Notes

1. See Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006), 351. On this passage, see, for example, Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 47–50; Whitney Davis, “Winckelmann Divided: Mourning the Death of Art History,” in Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History, ed. Whitney Davis (New York: Haworth, 1994), 141–60; Constanze Güthenke, “The Potter’s Daughter’s Sons: German Classical Scholarship and the Language of Love Circa 1800,” Representations 109, no. 1 (2010): 123–26; Katherine Harloe, “Pausanias as Historian in Winckelmann’s History,” Classical Receptions Journal 2, no. 2 (2010): 181–83; Katherine Harloe, Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity: History and Aesthetics in the Age of Altertumswissenschaft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 123–27; Shane Butler, Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 54–57. 2. For some sketches toward a comparative art history and its many methodological problems, see Jeremy Tanner, “Portraits and Politics in Classical Greece and Early Imperial China: An Institutional Approach to Comparative Art,” Art History 39, no. 1 (2016): 10–39; the essays in Jaś Elsner, ed., Comparativism in Art History (New York: Routledge, 2017); Claudia Brittenham, ed., Vessels: The Object as Container (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Richard Neer, ed., Conditions of Visibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Jaś Elsner, ed., Figurines: Figuration and the Sense of Scale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Jaś Elsner, ed., Landscape and Space: Comparative Perspectives from Chinese, Mesoamerican, Ancient Greek and Roman Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022); Jaś Elsner, Eurocentric and Beyond: Art History, the Global Turn and the Possibilities of Comparison (Beijing: OCAT, 2022). 3. For the history of excavation, see Robert Knox, Amaravati: Buddhist Sculpture from the Great Stūpa (London: British Museum Press, 1992), 1–16; Akira Shimada, Early Buddhist Architecture in Context: The Great Stūpa at Amarāvatī (ca. 300 BCE–300

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CE) (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 1–24; Akira Shimada, “Discovery of the Amaravati Stūpa: Early Excavations and Interpretations,” in Amaravati: The Art of an Early Buddhist Monument in Context, ed. Akira Shimada and Michael D. Willis (London: British Museum, 2016), 1–11. On the “sadness” of the “denuded” site, see Catherine Becker, Shifting Stones, Shaping the Past: Sculpture from the Buddhist Stūpas of Andhra Pradesh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3–5. 4. The diameter was about 50 meters, and the height of the monument perhaps 18 meters: see Knox, Amaravati, 28–29 5. For “meta-stupas,” see Becker, Shifting Stones, 23–77. 6. See, for instance, Percy Brown, Indian Architecture (Buddhist and Hindu Period) (Bombay: Taraporevala, 1942), 37–38 and plates XXXV–XXXVI, and Knox, Amaravati, 12, 28. Douglas Barrett (following Alexander Rea, “Excavations at Amaravati,” Annual Reports, Archaeological Survey of India, 1905–6 [Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1909], 119) opines that the meta-stupas represent the main stupa (Sculptures from Amaravati in the British Museum [London: British Museum Press, 1954], 29). Anamika Roy states, “The stupa motifs carved on the drum slabs can, to some extent, be taken as a guide for the reconstruction of the design of the stupa” (Amarāvatī Stūpa, vol. 1, A Critical Comparison of Epigraphic, Architectural and Sculptural Evidence [Delhi: Agam Kala Prakashan, 1994], 91; and see also 94, 113–15). For the strategy and further egregious instances (including a discussion of the meta-stupas as “photographs”), see Becker, Shifting Stones, 43–46. 7. See Bandaru Subrahmanyam, Buddhist Relic Caskets in South India (Delhi: Bharatiya Kala Prakashan, 1998), 61–71, and Shyam Sharan Gupta, Sculptures and Antiquities in the Archaeological Museum, Amarāvatī (New Delhi: D. K. Printworld, 2008), nos. Q 936–1017. 8. See Alexander Rea, “Excavations at Amaravati,” Annual Reports, Archaeological Survey of India, 1908–9 (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1912): 88–91, esp. plate XVII a–d. 9. Knox, Amaravati, 41–42. 10. See, for instance, ibid., 142–44, no. 74. 11. See ibid., 131–33, no. 69, which measures 136.6 centimeters high by 86.2 centimeters wide. 12. Knox assumed a narrative interpretation when he claims it is the story of the Buddha at the Nairanjana River (ibid., 131). 13. See ibid., 131–32. 14. The literature is vast. See Richard Delbrück, Die Consulardiptychen und verwandte Denkmäler, 2 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1929), 1:261–70; Balthasar Fischer, “Die Elfenbeintafel des Trierer Domschatzes: Zu ihrer jüngsten Deutung durch Stylianos Pelekanidis 1952,” Kurtrierisches Jahrbuch 9 (1969): 5–19; Wolfgang Volbach, Elfenbeinarbeiten der Spätantike und des frühen Mittelalters, 3rd ed. (Mainz: von Zabern, 1976), 95–96, no. 143; Suzanne Spain, “The Translation of Relics Ivory, Trier,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 31 (1977): 279–304; Kenneth G. Holum and Gary Vikan, “The Trier Ivory, ‘Adventus’ Ceremonial, and the Relics of St. Stephen,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 33 (1979): 113–33; Winfried Weber, “Die Reliquienprozession auf der Elfenbeintafel des Trierer Domschatzes und das kaiserliche

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Hofzeremoniell,” Trierer Zeitschrift 42 (1979): 135–51; John T. Wortley, “The Trier Ivory Reconsidered,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 21 (1980): 381–94; Laurie J. Wilson, “The Trier Procession Ivory: A New Interpretation,” Byzantion 54, no. 2 (1984): 602–14; Paul Speck, “Weitere Überlegungen und Untersuchungen über die Ursprünge der Byzantinischen Renaissance, mit einem Nachtrag: Der Trierer Elfenbein und andere Unklarheiten,” Varia 2 (1987): 253–83; Leslie Brubaker, “The Chalke Gate, the Construction of the Past, and the Trier Ivory,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 23, no. 1 (1999): 258–85; Paroma Chatterjee, “Iconoclasm’s Legacy: Interpreting the Trier Ivory,” Art Bulletin 100, no. 3 (2018): 28–47. 15. The ivory plaque is 2.3 centimeters in depth, and the relief is at times as much as 2 centimeters deep; it features exceptional workmanship; see, for example, Delbrück, Die Consulardiptychen, 1:261; Spain, “Translation of Relics Ivory,” 287; Brubaker, “Chalke Gate,” 274. 16. On this “vertical axis,” see Chatterjee, “Iconoclasm’s Legacy,” 38–41. 17. See, for example, Delbrück, Die Consulardiptychen, 1:262; Volbach, Elfenbeinarbeiten, 95; Fischer, “Die Elfenbeintafel des Trierer Domschatzes,” 7; Holum and Vikan, “Trier Ivory,” 133; Brubaker, “Chalke Gate,” 277. 18. The question of comparative relics in different religions (or indeed in different strands of one religion, as in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity) is complicated. The only deep theorization comes from Roman Catholic thinking; for literature, see Jaś Elsner, “Relic, Icon, and Architecture: The Material Articulation of the Holy in East Christian Art,” in Saints and Sacred Matter, ed. Cynthia Hahn and Holger A. Klein (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2015), 17 n. 28. On the Buddha’s relics as “expressions and extensions of the Buddha’s biographical process,” see John S. Strong, Relics of the Buddha (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 5–20. For comparative reflections, see John S. Strong, “Buddhist Relics in Comparative Perspective: Beyond the Parallels,” in Embodying the Dharma: Buddhist Relic Veneration in Asia, ed. David Germano and Kevin Trainor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 24–50. 19. Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents (1930),” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, 1927–1931, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1961): 70. On this passage, see John Forrester, “Mille e Tre: Freud and Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. Jaś Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 225–26; Adrian Rifkin, “Benjamin’s Paris, Freud’s Rome: Whose London?,” Art History 22 (1999): 620–21; Alain M. Gowing, “Remembering Rome,” in Empire and Memory: The Representation of the Roman Republic in Imperial Culture, ed. Alain M. Gowing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 156; Ellen Oliensis, Freud’s Rome: Psychoanalysis and Latin Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 133–35; Mary Jacobus, “Freud’s Roman Holiday: Dismembering Civilization and Its Discontents,” Psychoanalysis and History 20, no. 2 (2018): 139–52. 20. Freud, “Civilization,” 79 (adapted). The word I render here as “researcher” is Forscher, which is too narrowly translated as “scientist” in the Standard Edition; it means the person conducting any kind of scholarly investigation.

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21. Note the German word rendered as “imagination” in the Standard Edition is phantastische, and Freud describes the whole vision of Rome as a phantasy (Phantasie) (ibid., 70). The term for the artist’s act of creation is Phantasiegebilde. 22. Ibid. 23. I borrow the phrase “dreamwork of positivism” from a brilliant essay by Norman Bryson on Karl Lehman’s reading of Philostratus: “Philostratus and the Imaginary Museum,” in Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture, ed. Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 283.

Chapter 5

Finding Delight in Gardens Lost

Danielle B. Joyner As the air warms on an early June day, the morning sun casts golden light onto a rectangular plot of land guarded from curious and nibbling creatures by a sturdy fence. In this protected space, eighteen raised beds form two parallel rows. Their wooden boards, bleached by years in the sun, contain manure-enriched soil that coaxes forth a bountiful harvest of vegetables and herbs. Here, delicate yet fragrant wisps of dill (anetum) and fennel (gitto) accompany crisp lettuce leaves (lactuca) and the emerald-hued greens that signal a growing crop of zesty radishes (radices). Darting between the beds, several robins eagerly plunge their beaks into the soft ground in search of a tasty insectile breakfast. The well-tended garden soil is still damp from an overnight rain, and drops of water sparkle as a soft breeze ruffles the variously shaped leaves. A latched gate in the center of the western fence leads toward a good-sized hut with accommodations for the gardener and helpers as well as storage space for seeds and tools. A walk westward along a path, passing by refectory walls on one side and a granary and workshops for craftsmen on the other, leads to a kitchen, where the garden’s produce becomes meals for this monastic community. Along the east border of the complex, a walk past varied trees growing in

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a combined orchard-cemetery reaches the northern corner, where a second smaller garden grows. These raised beds, also protected by a fence, contain sage (salvia), rue (ruta), iris (gladiola), lovage (lubestico) , and other plants that contribute to medicinal drafts and curatives produced in the neighboring physician’s house and infirmary. Both gardens proclaim the resplendently fecund and botanically diverse possibilities that arise when the hand of artifice, with a proverbial green thumb, expertly collaborates with the surrounding environment.1 Yet these details of color and light, texture and scent, fertilizer and fauna, are enjoyed only as imagined sensations conjured by the mind since the gardens themselves exist as mere red lines and brown inscriptions drawn on the parchment of what is now referred to as the Plan of St. Gall (fig. 5.1).2 In the upper portion of this early ninth-century bird’seye-view of an idealized monastic foundation, long red rectangles form two neat columns inside their rectangular border. Brown capital letters spelling out hortus are spaced around the beds within the fence line, and the same brown ink inscribes each bed with the name of its assigned plant. The visual clarity and spartan appearance of this carefully limned garden suggests tidy control over its immediate environment. Rather than depicting stem, leaf, or blossom, the scribal artist here emphasizes the human labor required to build beds, erect a fence, and nurture the many vegetables and herbs (fig. 5.2).3 My sensate-laden description of the garden imagined might seem too far removed from the drawing’s practical rendering were it not for an inscription written up the garden’s center aisle: Hic plantata holerum pulchre nascentia vernant (Here, having been planted, the sprouting vegetables beautifully flourish / spring to life).4 Seeding the otherwise sparse ground, this hexameter line alludes both to botanical characteristics and to a temporality not visually evident in the drawing. The rhythmic line of verse brings movement to an otherwise still space, and its final three words infuse the ink beds with budding vegetal delights. The grammatical play between plantata, which implies the sowing of seeds in the past, and nascentia, which evokes youthful shoots responding to vernal warmth, enfolds seasonal cycles into the static, rectangular garden. This simple drawing and its redolent verse provide an occasion to consider what responses gardens, an especially ephemeral art

Fig. 5.1 Plan of St. Gall, ninth century. St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 1092. Photo: Stiftsbibliothek Sankt Gallen.

Fig. 5.2 Plan of St. Gall, detail of the orchard/cemetery and vegetable garden, ninth century. St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 1092. Photo: Stiftsbibliothek Sankt Gallen.

form, elicited from ninth-century admirers and to observe how their loss impacts twenty-first-century scholarship. Historians have made the case that medieval gardens, even practical kitchen and herb gardens, afforded various pleasures to their audiences.5 True, the ninth-century gardens drawn in the Plan of St. Gall include neither glistening pools nor automata-lined walkways, such as those created in the tenth century at Madīnat al-Zahrā or recorded in archives from the fourteenth-century estates at Hesdin.6 And granted, within the layout of the monastery, both gardens are too far removed from the abbot’s house or dormitory to provide enjoyable views and sightlines. Nevertheless, an undeniable pleasure in the essence of a

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fecund garden resounds in the hexameter verse, and that pleasure entangles with varied evocations of loss in ninth-century literature. Subtle allusions to the garden of paradise exist in the eastern placement of the vegetable and herb gardens in this drawn monastic complex, in the variety of flora inscribed on their beds (a variety that disregards regional and seasonal preferences), and in the reference to springtime beauty. According to Genesis 2:4–9, God made Adam from the slime of the earth, the limo terrae, and placed him amid a garden with a great diversity of plants, herbs, and trees.7 Adam, therefore, is not only an occupant of the prelapsarian garden; he is fundamentally connected with the land itself. Ninth-century science reiterates this basal relationship between humanity and the earth with its acceptance of the ancient elemental theory that some combination of the four elements—earth, water, air, fire—constituted all physical matter, including flesh, blood, and bone.8 Given this elemental kinship, a visceral ache perhaps inflects the many lamentations provoked by Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden. Alcuin’s elegiac poem on his life at Aachen speaks to these sentiments.9 After bidding farewell to his monastic cell, he devotes ten lines to the sylvan beauty of its locus amoenus.10 In this luscious setting, where branches resonate and fields bloom with medicinal herbs, where flowers grow along the banks of a river flush with fish, and where birds sing praise to God, Alcuin studied books of wisdom, poetry, and epic adventure. His joy turns to sorrow, though, with the dawning realization that everything must change and that even the most beautiful flower will fade and perish as night follows day and winter overtakes summer. What began as enchantment with a lovely garden setting withers into disappointed melancholy as Alcuin laments, “Why do we wretches love you, fugitive world? / You always fly headlong from us.”11 Alcuin exhorts his reader to turn to Christ as the only remedy for this woeful state, in which blossoming flowers recall primal connections between humanity and the earthen garden but also foretell an inescapable death. Neither the plan’s drawing nor its verse convey a similar angst, though shadows of Alcuin’s turmoil arguably dapple the combined orchard and cemetery space. Drawn beside the vegetable garden and similarly enclosed by a rectangular border with a western gate, inscriptions in

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this large space name fourteen different fruit and nut trees.12 Long red rectangles here likely represent burial beds arranged around a square framing a cross in the center of the space.13 Just as the hexameter inscription imbues the vegetable garden with beauty and temporality, elegiac couplets written in the four quadrants around the cross and on either side of its frame emphasize a tangible physicality in this dual-use space. The first line of the couplet inside the frame juxtaposes the divinity of the cross with its original stature and material as a tree/wood in the ground/earth, and the second line maintains a somatic sensibility with reference to the fragrance emitted by the fruits of salvation: Inter ligna soli haec semper sanctissima crux est / in qua perpetuae—Poma salutis olent (Among the trees always the most sacred of the soil is the Cross / On which the fruits of eternal health are fragrant). The couplet outside of the frame reads: Hanc circum iaceant defuncta cadauera fratrum / Qua radiante iterum—Regna poli accipiant (Around let lie the dead bodies of the brothers / And through its radiance they may attain the realm of heaven.) The reference to the dead (cadauera fratrum) in the first line asserts the physical presence of the deceased community members laid to rest in the ground. This earthen interment plays intriguingly against a hopeful future residence in the heavens, described poetically in the second line, translated literally, as the “kingdom of the pole,” that is, the axis around which the world turns. In their first hexameter lines, both couplets present a heightened tactility that builds toward a salvific, yet still tangible, release in the following pentameter lines. Redolent, earthy, palpable, and ultimately divine, the haptic insistence of these couplets stands in contradistinction to the scribal artist’s decision to draw thirteen vivid red vines rather than trees in the orchard-cemetery. Their frontal representation defies the bird’seye perspective of the plan, and the bold repetition of their tendrils plants symbolic meaning into this ground. That the curling vines are likely grape vines rightfully implicates Eucharistic themes, especially in conjunction with the drawn cross. Without losing or lingering on those implications, though, I want to consider how the orchard-cemetery, with its haptic inscriptions alongside the vegetable garden and its beautiful sprouts, might evoke other sentiments, such as those articulated by Walafrid Strabo.

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In his charming poem “Hortulus,” the Benedictine monk Walafrid grafts themes of education and learning onto horticultural beauty, as Alcuin did, but to a different end.14 Whereas Alcuin parallels cyclical seasons with a shift from a pleasurable locus amoenus to contemptu mundi themes, Walafrid acknowledges the difficulties of winter but remains steadfastly among the delights and ameliorants of spring and summertime. Learned classical references dovetail with elaborate descriptions of physical gardening in the first section of this poem. For example, Walafrid cites Paestum and Priapus in the opening lines and then lists varied soil types, from graveled and barren to loamy and fertile.15 The monk explains that he has gleaned the following helpful information from common opinion, old books, and also his own experience. Though he lingers on the arduous tasks necessary to create a garden, detailing the toils of digging out nettles, destroying mole tunnels, and building raised beds, a cheerful “can do!” attitude inflects the verses and seems to reflect his sincere and admitted joy in gardening. Walafrid concludes his introduction by describing the care he takes to adequately water the seeds and cuttings planted in the newly built, eastern-facing raised beds. The second part of the poem functions as an herbal, rhythmically presenting the characteristics and medicinal qualities of various plants. Sometimes Walafrid incorporates classical allusions in his descriptions, as with the poppy,16 and other times he evokes religious themes, as with the rose.17 It is his description of a melon, however, that layers botanical insights with sensual pleasures and a memento mori allusion. Comparing the shape of a melon to a soap bubble, Walafrid writes, —Or like a soap bubble. You know how it is When you hold up a cake of soap: it gleams in your upraised hands As the slippery wetness runs over its surface, until by pouring More water on it you wash the fresh froth off. But when the fingers work on it, kneading and rubbing purposefully This way and that, it softens; and then, with your hands together

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And only a crack between, if you blow through narrowed lips Gently, gently, your breath will make the hollow suds Swell like blown glass, and the curve of the vaulted skin Meets to form a slippery center at the bubble’s base.18 It seems likely that this well-read monk was aware of poetic analogies between a bubble and a person’s life, though here Walafrid inverts the trope.19 Rather than lamenting the brevity of a bubble’s existence, he imbues its creation with such evocative language that the enjoyment of the analogous melon flesh seems far removed from an ideally enclosed monastic life.20 In Alcuin’s verse, all pleasures associated with the garden fade and only Christ eternal can soften the ache of their loss. In Walafrid’s muddy then sudsy hands, the delights of working the land and enjoying the fruits of one’s labor are strong enough to hold at bay any melancholy triggered by mundane transience—or popping bubbles. Set beside each other on the eastern end of the St. Gall Plan’s paradigmatic monastic complex, the vegetable garden and orchard-cemetery yield savory possibilities to the monks who would have studied the inscribed drawing.21 In John 15:1 and 15:5, Christ states, “I am the true vine; and my Father is the husbandman,” and “I am the vine: you the branches: he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit: for without me you can do nothing.” Sustenance for both the body and the soul requires physical toil; produce from the vegetable garden—like salvation, symbolized by the cross and vines in the orchard-cemetery—requires spiritual toil and labor in the world. Walafrid’s cheerful poem embraces the joys of laboring and toiling, and rather than mourning winter’s impending death, he eagerly awaits spring’s triumphant return. The plan’s drawings and Walafrid’s poem do not ignore a garden’s ephemerality; they instead focus on its cyclical, tangible pleasures. And why should they not? To see oneself or one’s own nature reflected in the greater world need not inspire sadness. True, Genesis 3:19 states, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth, out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return.” Yet Ecclesiastes 3:12–13 might have inspired Walafrid’s chipper attitude with its encouragement: “And I

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have known that there was no better thing than to rejoice, and to do well in this life. For every man that eateth and drinketh, and seeth good of his labour, this is the gift of God.” And Psalm 50:11, after dwelling on life’s impermanence, ascribes to God the phrase, “I know all the fowls of the air: and with me is the beauty of the field.” Belying their simple red lines, the gardens and orchard-cemetery in the Plan of St. Gall yield as much sustenance for the soul as their reallife equivalents provided for actual bodies. Their poetic insistence on the rich textures and fragrances of the physical world suggests a joy in the mundane that balances any melancholy provoked by terrestrial impermanence. The beauty of a vegetable garden accords with the beauty of the fields, and both proclaim the value of life’s brief pleasures. These imagined sites and their real-world referents may not entirely allay the sense of loss prompted by Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden, but their fecund abundance surely portends happy returns. In this short essay, I have cultivated a rose-colored approach to ninth-century monastic gardens, and, following Walafrid’s charming example, I have unrepentantly elevated tangible delectations alongside spiritual and poetic lamentations. The ache accompanying impermanence has not entirely disappeared, though; a great deal of melancholy courses through contemporary scholarship on medieval gardens. Unlike the many buildings, manuscripts, metalworks, and tapestries that remarkably survive from this era, medieval gardens were never intended to endure. Our desire to understand the contents and purposes of these fleeting sites, to perceive not just their metaphorical impressions on medieval art and literature but also their perceptible impact on lives and lands, necessarily relies on intermediary studies and reconstructions.22 Analysis of the schematic St. Gall Plan alongside Alcuin’s and Walafrid’s poetry sparks imagined forays between raised beds, but it will never entirely divulge a ninth-century garden’s secrets. In a similar fashion, when archaeobotanists sift through soil samples in search of chaff, pollen, and pits, they uncover tantalizing remains that can only suggest, rather than reveal, an original bloom.23 No matter the depths of our longing or the accuracy of the interpretive tools we apply to these long-lost gardens, where labor, artistry, and nature so compellingly converged, they remain forever beyond our reach—locked away

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by seasons and centuries just as surely as if a sword-bearing angel were guarding their gates.

Notes

I would like to dedicate this short essay on the beauty and impermanence of gardens to my father, Dr. David E. Joyner († October, 2020), who sowed scientific precision and unrepentant joy into his rock and alpine gardens. 1. John Dixon Hunt describes gardens as “perfected forms of place-making” that, uniquely among the arts, combine artificial and natural elements (Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000], 14–15). 2. St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 1092. See Walter William Horn and Ernest Born, The Plan of St. Gall: A Study of the Architecture and Economy of and Life in a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Ernst Tremp, Der St. Galler Klosterplan: Faksimile, Begleittext, Beischriften und Übersetzung (St. Gall: Verlag am Klosterhof, 2014); and the website, “Carolingian Culture at Reichenau and St. Gall,” http://​w ww​.stgallplan​.org​/en​/index ​_ plan​ .html. 3. An excellent overview of the diversity of medieval gardens appears in the essays in Michael Leslie, ed., A Cultural History of Gardens in the Medieval Age, vol. 2 of A Cultural History of Gardens (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). 4. All transcriptions and translations from the plan, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the website “Carolingian Culture at Reichenau and St. Gall,” where the translation reads: “Here the planted vegetables flourish in beauty.” The translation above is mine and includes helpful suggestions from Dr. Adriana Brook, formerly of the Department of Classics at Lawrence University, who pointed out parallels between verb tenses and seasonal cycles. 5. For example, see Paul Meyvaert, “The Medieval Monastic Garden,” in Medieval Gardens, ed. Elisabeth B. MacDougall (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Trustees for Harvard University, 1986), 23–54; Oliver H. Creighton, Designs Upon the Land: Elite Landscapes of the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009), 7; and Laura L. Howes, “Use and Reception,” in Leslie, Cultural History of Gardens, 2:75–100. 6. D. Fairchild Ruggles, Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 53–85; Anne Hagopian van Burn, “Reality and Literary Romance in the Park of Hesdin,” in MacDougall, Medieval Gardens, 115–34; Elly R. Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 122– 40; Sharon Farmer, “Aristocratic Power and the ‘Natural’ Landscape: The Garden Park at Hesdin, ca. 1291–1302,” Speculum 88 (2013): 644–80; and William Tronzo, “Gold and Fleece: The Park at Hesdin,” in Petrarch’s Two Gardens: Landscape and the Image of Movement (New York: Italica, 2013), 99–142.

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7. All biblical quotations in Latin are taken from Robert Weber, ed., Biblia Sacra, Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, 4th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994). English translations are from Bishop Richard Challoner, ed., The Holy Bible, Douay Rheims Version (Rockford: Tan Books, 2000). 8. For different approaches to the concept of the microcosm, see Isidore of Seville, On the Nature of Things 11.1–3, trans. Calvin B. Kendall and Faith Wallis (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 130–32 and 197–203, as well as Barbara Obrist, “Le diagramme Isidorien des saisons, son contenu physique et les représentations figuratives,” Mélanges de L’Ecole Française de Rome 108 (1996): 95–164. 9. Alcuin, “Elegy on His Life in Aachen.” A facing Latin transcription and English translation of this poem appears in Peter Godman, ed. and trans., Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 124–27. 10. Still relevant is the discussion of the locus amoenus in Ernst Robert Curtius, “The Ideal Landscape,” in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 183–202. 11. Alcuin, “Elegy on His Life in Aachen,” trans. Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, 124–25. 12. For different interpretations of this space, see Lynda L. Coon, “Gendering the Plan of Saint Gall,” in Dark Age Bodies: Gender and Monastic Practice in the Early Medieval West (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2011), 199–204, and Samuel W. Collins, The Carolingian Debate over Sacred Space (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 68–81. 13. Bonnie Effros, Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology and the Making of the Early Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 14. For a facing-page English translation, see Walafrid Strabo, Hortulus, trans. Raef Pyne (Pittsburgh: Hunt Botanical Library, 1966). 15. Paestum was an ancient Grecian city, and Priapus was a god of fertility for both ancient Greeks and Romans. 16. “Here in this tale of trifles let me speak of Ceres’ poppy—/ Hers it is because, mourning the loss of her stolen daughter, / She is said to have eaten poppy to drown her sorrow, deep / Beyond measure—to forget, as she longed to forget, her grief of mind.” Walafrid Strabo, Hortulus, lines 262–65, trans. Pyne, 49. 17. “For in this flower / Shines Chastity, strong in her sacred honor.” Ibid., lines 410–11, trans. Pyne, 63. 18. Ibid., lines 163–73, trans. Pyne, 39. 19. Lucian of Samosata (ca. 120–80 CE) referred to the brief life of bubbles in The Dependent Scholar and Harmonides, in H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler, trans., The Works of Lucian of Samosata: Complete with Exceptions Specified in the Preface, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 2:1–26 and 99–102, respectively; accessed through Project Gutenberg Ebooks, http://​www​.gutenberg​.org​/cache​/epub​/6585​ /pg6585​-images​.html. Also, Varro (116–27 BCE) opens his De re rustica with “My dear Fundania, if I had leisure I would give a better form to this treatise. As I have not, I will do what a man may who has to bear in mind the need of haste. Man is a bubble, they say; in which case the proverb must be the more true of

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an old man” (On Farming, M. Terenti Varronis Rerum Rusticarum Libri Tres, trans. Lloyd Storr-Best [London: G. Bell and Sons, 1912], 1, available online through the Biodiversity Heritage Library, https://​w ww​.biodiversitylibrary​.org​/item​/96263​ #page​/7​/mode​/1up). 20. For recognition of the sheer sensuality of this passage, I must thank the undergraduates at Southern Methodist University, who took my class “Medieval Ecologies: Nature as World, Flesh, and Spirit.” 21. I agree with Lawrence Nees’s assessment that the plan offered a contemplative, intellectual exercise (Early Medieval Art [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], 133); see also Danielle B. Joyner, “A Savin Bush in the Cloister: Art and Nature in the Plan of St. Gall,” Studies in Iconography 38 (2017): 55–106. 22. One well-known reconstruction grows at the Cloisters Museum in Manhattan; see Tania Bayard, Sweet Herbs and Sundry Flowers: Medieval Gardens and the Gardens of the Cloisters (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985). Among the many literary and art-historical studies that serve as intermediaries, see, for example, Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto, “Writing the Garden in the Age of Humanism,” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 23, no. 3 (2003): 231–57; Rachel Fulton, “The Virgin in the Garden, or Why Flowers Make Better Prayers,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 4, no. 1 (2004): 1–23; and Marco Masseti, “In the Gardens of Norman Palermo, Sicily (Twelfth Century A.D.),” Anthropozoologica 44, no. 2 (2009): 7–34. 23. There is a significant bibliography on archaeobotanical studies. For a small selection, see Manfred Rösch, “New Aspects of Agriculture and Diet of the Early Medieval Period in Central Europe: Waterlogged Plant Material from Sites in South-Western Germany,” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 17 (2008): 225–38; Marijke Van der Veen, “The Archaeobotany of Medieval Britain (c AD 450–1500): Identifying Research Priorities for the 21st Century,” Medieval Archaeology 57 (2013): 151–82; and Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo, “Agrarian Archaeology in Early Medieval Europe,” in Agrarian Archaeology in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo, Quaternary International 346 (2014): 1–6.

Chapter 6

Impermanence, Futurity, and Loss in Twelfth-Century Japan

Kristopher W. Kersey Shirayuki no Aware mo fukashi Furukoto no Ato sae yoyo ni Tsumoru miyako wa Even the moving power Of the white snow is deep: The capital, where even the traces Of ancient things Pile up generation after generation. —Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801)

One does not broach the topic of loss in premodern Japan without some trepidation. For nearly a century, it has been axiomatic that the Buddhist notion of impermanence (Japanese mujō; Sanskrit anitya) should

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lie at the heart of a specifically Japanese aesthetic sensibility.1 Whereas most cultures resist loss, so such arguments go, the Japanese embrace it. Such formulations commonly evoke the attendant notion of (mono no) aware (the pathos [of things]), a bittersweet feeling of poignancy, pause, or plaintiveness that is similarly often cited as a key principle in the Japanese artistic tradition. Yet as Michael Marra, among others, has shown, mujō and aware—like many other emic Japanese aesthetic terms—were not as historically determining and universal as they now seem.2 Mujō was not fully theorized as an aesthetic worldview (mujōkan), he argues, until the thirteenth century, in the thought of the Sōtō Zen patriarch Dōgen (1200–1253).3 Likewise, the landmark literary text on impermanence is doubtless the Tsurezuregusa (Essays in idleness; ca. 1330–31) of Yoshida Kenkō (ca. 1283–), yet, as Linda H. Chance argues, it would be a mistake to treat this text as illustrative of a blanket medieval Japanese aesthetic paradigm.4 Similarly, it would not be until several centuries later, in the hands of early modern National Learning (Kokugaku) scholars, prime among them Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), that aware would take on such cardinal aesthetic weight.5 The prewar philosophers Ōnishi Yoshinori (1888–1959) and Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) elaborated upon Norinaga’s aware philosophies, and, by the time of the Pacific War, the nationalist ideology placed aware at the core of a purely Japanese subjectivity. Hence the iconography of Japanese midcentury militarism, where the delicate cherry blossom—arguably the most common aware trope—was the unlikely emblem of masculine martial sacrifice.6 To say that “loss” has a fraught relationship with Japanese aesthetics is an understatement. Following the Pacific War, such rhetoric persisted in both Japanese—and English-Language scholarship.7 This was often driven by a desire to reify and praise an alternative to the European tradition that might embrace disappearance, see beauty in ephemerality, and find peace with mortality. While impermanence and aware are doubtless important, historically substantiated, and widely influential concepts in the Japanese arts, their oversize modern prominence risks distorting the historical situation.8 As Donald Keene, the postwar American doyen of Japanese studies, once cautioned: “Almost any general statement made about Japanese aesthetics can easily be disputed and even

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disproved by citing well-known contrary examples.”9 The task of this short essay is to do just that. Most scholarship on the relationship of Japanese “aesthetics” to transience rests on texts. And while the artifactual and textual archives are indeed imbricated, they are not coextensive. Artifacts sometimes tell a different story. A chief paradox of loss is that any perceptible absence requires a remnant; in other words, it is only through that which persists that loss becomes legible: the shard, the trace, the frame, the copy, and so on. Such are the piles and piles of traces that endlessly accrue in the epigraph to this essay. That which persists, moreover, has the potential to evoke a lost integrity that might exceed its referent, hence making loss a counterintuitively magnifying and catalytic historical agent. Take, for instance, the celebrated example of kintsugi, broken ceramic vessels that are mended with gold and lacquer such that the traces of rupture and repair are highlighted to aesthetic effect.10 Such objects do not partake of impermanence so much as endurance; they index time, making the history of the object and the rejection of transience apparent in visible terms. Indeed, this paradox is but one of several ironies in the way in which impermanence and loss are discussed in Japanese studies. Likewise, even deeper in the archive, the poets of the Heian period credited with having generated and perpetuated an aesthetics of ephemerality were fully aware that by giving enduring linguistic form to fleeting sentiments, they were securing their own poetic immortality. Needless to say, impermanence/permanence is a false binary, as neither exists without evoking the other in degrees.11 In historiographical terms, the twentieth-century emphasis on ephemerality runs counter to the late nineteenth-century discourse that framed Japan as an archive distinguished by its very lack of loss. For prominent nineteenth-century orientalists and antimodernists, “the medieval” had survived in Japan.12 Okakura Kakuzō (1862–1913), arguably the most influential voice in Japanese aesthetics of his day, famously harnessed such Euro-American absurdity to christen Japan the “museum of Asia,” the Asian nation that had best preserved the archive of the so-called East. Hence the nation with the special relationship to ephemerality was somehow simultaneously the one most committed

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to preservation.13 Such nineteenth-century anxieties surrounding the modern erasure of the past persisted well into the following century. As Marilyn Ivy underscores: “Recurrent yet elusive forms of absence . . . haunt the historical present of the place called Japan,” where “the vanishing” is “fetishized . . . kept hovering, with anxiety and dread, on the edge of absence.”14 What binds the premodern and modern notions of ephemerality in Japan are the fact that both were keyed to moments of dramatic archival and political rupture. A case in point: Kenkō’s Tsurezuregusa is customarily linked to the political upheavals of his day.15 Yet by far the more prominent rupture was the collapse of the Heian imperial order more than a century earlier. Following two midcentury disturbances in the capital, the full-scale Genpei War (1180–85) marked the start of nearly seven centuries of military rule. The tumult of the fall of Heian was encapsulated in the epic narrative Heike monogatari (Tale of the Heike), which, in its standardized (mid-fourteenth-century) form, opened with the famous image of a ringing temple bell that “echoes the impermanence of all things.”16 Long the locus classicus for demonstrating the role of mujō in Japanese culture, impermanence was thus cited as both a historiographical engine as well as a subtending principle. Without doubt, the subsequent romanticization of the Heian period, especially the way it came to be keyed to the national identity in the twentieth century, only served to underscore the massive weight given impermanence in modern scholarship. From the perspective of the twelfth-century subject, the political unrest seemed to corroborate the belief that following the year 1052 CE, the world had entered into the “Terminal Dharma,” or “Latter days of the Law” (mappō), an era commencing two thousand years after the death of the historical Buddha, at which point the entropy of transmission would preclude the possibility of properly learning the Buddha’s teachings.17 According to modern writing on Japanese aesthetics, one might expect that this situation of soteriological diminution and political unrest would spark bittersweet reflection and disengaged contemplation. Indeed, for some, it did.18 But in the remainder of this essay, I would like to introduce two types of contemporaneous artifacts—both in scroll format—that rejected rather than embraced such transience.

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Mappō thought is traditionally deemed to have been a motivating factor behind the fascinating phenomenon known as interred sūtras or sūtra mounds (maikyō, kyōzuka): subterranean caches of transcriptions of canonical Buddhist scriptures (sūtras).19 At such sites, one or more sūtras (commonly the Lotus Sūtra) would be transcribed onto handscrolls that were then encased in metal, ceramic, or stone containers before being ensconced in a shallow pit (sometimes with charcoal added as a preservative), covered with earth, and capped with a stone marker (fig. 6.1).20 In rare instances, the interred sūtra text might be incised into the surface of metal plates or—even more durably—fired as incisions into ceramic tiles (in fact, the earliest dated example is of this latter type). Such undertakings were fueled, in the words of D. Max Moerman, by the hope for the “postmortem salvation of both the religion and the religionist.”21 For the religionist, the creation of the deposits generated karmic merit that would be useful for propitious rebirth; for the religion, the deposit itself served to preserve the teachings of the Buddha for the future, perhaps even until the coming of the next Buddha, Miroku (S. Maitreya), in 5.6 billion years.22 Recent scholarship by Heather Blair, however, suggests that the motivation for such burials may have had less to do with mappō and more to do with a desire to use the indexicality of the holographic trace as a means to produce a “textual body-double that could be emplaced for perpetuity.”23 By her logic, “Buddha and copyist, trace and text could fuse into a relic-like object,” thus it follows that sūtra burial was a ritual means not only to preserve the dharma and accrue karmic merit but also to counter the mortal transience of the inscribers themselves.24 The practice of sūtra burial spans nearly a millennium, from the midHeian period to modernity, yet it seems to have been at its peak during the mid-twelfth century.25 Given that the Mahāyāna tradition, from which this practice stems, was pervasive throughout East Asia, one would expect to find the practice of sūtra burial widely distributed, yet it seems to have flourished in this form only in Japan.26 Clearly, this was not a society that universally found transience something to be coolly appreciated and aesthetically embraced. Despite the eschatological and political state of affairs, the late Heian period—especially the latter half of the twelfth century—was a

Fig. 6.1 Ceramic case, engraved bronze container, and copies of the Lotus Sūtra excavated from near Kokawa (Wakayama, Japan), 1125 CE. From the Collection of the Nara National Museum. Photo © Nara National Museum.

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time of extraordinary cultural efflorescence. In this context, the most lamented if legendary “loss” would surely be the Rengeōin Treasury, a subtemple repository that housed the collection of pictorial scrolls in the possession of Go-Shirakawa (1127–1192), the major imperial power-holder at the close of the Heian era. Despite the celebrated status of the Rengeōin Treasury, very few extant works can be traced back to it with any degree of certainty.27 In fact, only two extant pictorial manuscripts can be tied definitively to the emperor.28 Of the two, one stands out for its explicit and extended engagement with loss and preservation: the Nenjū gyōji e (Annual observances in pictures).29 Scholars often shy away from its study since the originals were lost in a seventeenth-century palace fire, yet a third to a half of the original can be reconstructed through various lineages of copies made in the intervening centuries. Such reconstructions suggest that the original was perhaps the largest Heian handscroll project ever undertaken, comprising sixty scrolls by upper estimates, each some 50 centimeters in height.30 Whereas the interred sūtras sought physical permanence in the technology of the scroll, the Observances employed the same medium in pursuit of permanence by virtual means. The scrolls were a pictorial compendium that recorded, in chronological order, the numerous rituals, holidays, festivities, and other events that punctuated the capital’s annual calendar. Note that this was not just the court calendar, for various annual events, irrespective of class, were included. As Yung-hee Kim notes, given that Go-Shirakawa was known to have been fascinated by the popular culture of his capital, famously serving as the patron and editor of an unprecedented imperial anthology of popular songs (imayō), the inclusion of extracourtly affairs is not surprising.31 Painstaking tabulation by scholars has revealed that in no one year did all of these events ever take place; the Observances is, rather, an idealized, amalgamated composite of various calendric years.32 A thirteenth-century collection of stories, the Kokonchomonjū, avers that the emperor had the Observances examined and corrected by the courtier Fujiwara no Motofusa (ca. 1145–1231), a scenario that would strengthen the putative documentary tenor of the project. Then again, if the Observances scrolls were indeed intended to document, it is not necessarily the events themselves that the scrolls best record. In fact,

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“observances” comprise only a portion of the represented material, for the imagery is replete with eye-catching depictions of marginal and extradiegetic scenes of crowd control, bystanders, comedic vignettes, and unruly children.33 Its intimate scale and restricted viewership meant that only a few persons at a time, in close proximity to the paper, would have been able to make out the highly detailed images. In such a viewing, one would have the impression of going on an aerial tour of the mid-twelfth-century capital: most of the pictures employ the bird’s-eye perspective characteristic of premodern narrative painting in Japan.34 The power of such a surveilling aristocratic gaze should not be taken lightly, especially when one considers that period class distinctions would have made it unlikely that any one person could have ever been party to all of the depicted events. As Take’i Akio aptly phrases it, this massive handscroll archive contains the “[human] ecosystem of all classes of late-Heian Kyoto society.”35 Indeed, the Observances exceed the lived experience of any one class-marked subject. Despite its title, the Observances was no prosaic record of court ceremonial. Archival debates aside, the scholar Minamoto Toyomune notes the Observances’ unusual temporality.36 We often associate late Heian narrative handscrolls with a sophisticated repertoire of techniques devised to demonstrate the passage of time: the diagonal compositional principles that pull the eye to the left, the jarring supernatural movement of characters to the right and against the flow of time, the time-lapse technique of ijidōzu, and the skillful partitioning of long narratives into compositionally cohesive extracts that might be pictorialized and set between complementary calligraphic passages. In the Observances, however, with its frontal, modular, and monoscenic approach, we are not met with a focalized narrative that seems to progress. Instead, it is only calendric time that gives unity to the work as it skips and jumps from event to event like a chronicle, irrespective of the passage of time within a scene or the desire to show transition; it is, in Ōishi Yoshiki’s words, “the calendric image of aristocratic culture.”37 Contra the presumption of pure documentation, it would appear the Observances was the product of robust archival research. Under Go-Shirakawa’s leadership, the court was actively involved in restoring its own grandeur, rebuilding palaces, reviving past rituals, and capitalizing on its

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aura.38 Yet it would be too easy to see the Observances as merely a representation and celebration of courtly might. The focus on extracourtly affairs in the work is far too prominent, leading Kim to see in the Observances a “manifestation of Go-Shirakawa’s acceptance of the diversity of his own society.”39 Moreover, the inclusion of a fuller cross-section of society might itself be read as a political act. For if the Observances was meant to demonstrate the glory of Go-Shirakawa’s just reign, it seems to promote his imperium as a distributed phenomenon: a world where the aristocratic gaze and courtly calendar provide a subtending structure to all happenings within the realm. No matter how one frames it—documentary, fantasy, neoclassicism, surveillance, or propaganda—the Observances nevertheless remains a staggeringly rich archive of the Heian world. This fullness makes the Observances a fitting iconic rival to the Tale of Genji, the novel that has served for more than a millennium as a cardinal repository—albeit fictive—of the Heian imaginary. In contrast to the Genji, the Observances dispenses with prosimetrical narrative, psychological interiority, and even fictionality itself, presenting instead a sort of structural image of the year in its happenings and material culture, defined solely by that which is exceptional, unusual, and visual. There is a complete absence of the everyday in the Observances, as the everyday is, by definition, the ground against which the festive and ceremonial become legible. As is well known, a peculiarity of the Genji is the way in which the final chapters transpose the focus from Genji to the next generation. Compare this shift to the Observances, which becomes truly endless since it indexes the circularity of calendrical and not biographical time, a sequence without narrative. In fact, as handscrolls, the Observances’ circularity extends to the level of the single scroll whose uptake is mediated by the turn of the dowel. Likewise, if the original set indeed consisted of sixty scrolls, that would be the same number as a complete cycle of the East Asian sexagenary calendar, hence suggesting a looping dynamic on a third level. Most crucial, when one begins the cycle again, nothing has changed in the pictorial field of the Observances, making it a powerful image of social and political conservativism. If the sūtra mounds sought material durability, the Observances sought a virtual durability, using pictorial technology to mitigate any

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and all varieties of material and social loss. The two phenomena have in common their shared faith in the power of the scroll as a key vehicle for the inscription and transmission of highly curated fragments of the world. Evanescence, perishability, and transience were certainly important and long-lived tropes across various fields of cultural production in twelfth-century Japan, but as these two examples demonstrate, a response to loss can be both accepting and countervailing at once. The same twelfth-century agent might find the melancholy of a falling blossom beautiful in the world of their poetic practice while still expending tremendous resources on technologies of soteriological and institutional permanence. Loss can be both aesthetically pleasing and terrifying at once, and we ought to allow premodern subjects the rich subjectivity of such inconsistency.

Notes

Epigraph: Motoori Norinaga, selection from “Suzunoya-shū,” trans. and ed. Michael Marra, The Poetics of Motoori Norinaga: A Hermeneutical Journey (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 98. 1. The prolific and influential scholar Donald Keene once called perishability “perhaps the most distinctively Japanese aesthetic ideal” (“Japanese Aesthetics,” Philosophy East and West 19, no. 3 [1969]: 304). The literature on this topic is vast. For two recent treatments, see Charles Shirō Inouye, Evanescence and Form: An Introduction to Japanese Culture (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), and Melinda Takeuchi, “The Art of the Ephemeral,” in The Art of Impermanence: Japanese Works from the John C. Weber Collection and Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection, ed. Amy Proser (New York: Asia Society, 2020), 14–42. For the bleed or bond between the religious and the aesthetic vis-à-vis mujō, see Linda H. Chance, Formless in Form: Kenkō, “Tsurezuregusa,” and the Rhetoric of Japanese Fragmentary Prose (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 191–92, 196. 2. Michele Marra, “Ōnishi Yoshinori and the Category of the Aesthetic,” in Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), 115–40. For the most thorough historiographical analyses of mujō, see Michael F. Marra, “The Aesthetics of Tradition: Making the Past Present,” in Asian Aesthetics, ed. Ken’ichi Sasaki (Singapore: NUS Press, 2010), 45–50; and Mark Meli, “Motoori Norinaga’s Hermeneutic of Mono no Aware: The Link Between Ideal and Tradition,” in Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation, ed. Michael F. Marra (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 60–75. 3. Marra, “Aesthetics of Tradition,” 44. To take but a single example, if one looks to the early eleventh-century Wakan rōeishū, a compendium of the most famous Chinese and Japanese poetic excerpts organized by topic, mujō appears as but one topic among many. “Impermanence” was the explicit topic of only

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eight poems: fewer than one percent of the total (nor were these eight all from Japan). For a translation and study of this text, see J. Thomas Rimer and Jonathan Chaves, trans. and eds., Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing: The Wakan rōeishū (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 4. “Its [Tsurezuregusa’s] ideas are not those of the culture at large, necessarily, but of an intertextual network that is all we have left of the culture, mediated through a literate court and Buddhist class.” Chance, Formless in Form, 196. 5. Meli, “Motoori Norinaga’s Hermeneutic,” 60–65, and Marra, Poetics of Motoori Norinaga. 6. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 7. In English, perhaps the most widely read commentaries on Japanese aesthetics were those of Wm. Theodore de Bary, which appeared in his Sources of Japanese Tradition, a compendium that long served as the definitive textbook for preliminary coursework on Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958). See also the roughly contemporaneous writings of Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, published in English translation as The Vocabulary of Japanese Aesthetics (Tokyo: Center for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1963). Hisamatsu’s discussion of aware reveals a term so protean that it seems almost bereft of meaning. 8. Meli, “Motoori Norinaga’s Hermeneutic,” 74. 9. Keene, “Japanese Aesthetics,” 293. 10. Ibid., 305. See the essays by Christy Bartlett and Charly Iten in FlickWerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics (Münster: Museum für Lackkunst, 2008). 11. Chance links transience and fragmentation to the Buddhist notions of impermanence, codependent origination, and emptiness. For more on the paradox of permanence/impermanence, see Chance, Formless in Form, esp. chapter 6. 12. Rutherford Alcock saw twelfth-century England in Japan; see Christopher Reed, Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 14–15. 13. As Marra argues, the modern Japanese aestheticization of the material past was an important factor in such preservationist rhetoric (“Aesthetics of Tradition,” 27). For more on the museum trope, see Karatani Kōjin, “History as Museum: Okakura Kakuzō and Ernest Fenollosa,” in Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud, trans. Jonathan E. Abel, Darwin H. Tsen, and Hiroki Yoshikuni (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 65–78. Okakura’s contemporary Kuki Ryūichi likened the nation to a “treasure house of Oriental art.” See Inaga Shigemi, “Cognitive Gaps in the Recognition of Masters and Masterpieces in the Formative Years of Japanese Art History, 1880–1900: Historiography in Conflict,” in Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation, ed. Michael F. Marra (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 121–23. Indeed, as Inaga demonstrates, the birth of art history in Japan goes hand in hand with archival surveying and conservation. 14. Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1995), 242.

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15. Chance, Formless in Form, 196–201. 16. The Tale of the Heike, trans. Helen Craig McCullough (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 23. 17. See Mimi Yiengpruskawan, “Countdown to 1051: Some Preliminary Thoughts on the Periodization of the Buddhist Eschaton in Heian and Liao,” in Texts and Transformations: Essays in Honor of the 75th Birthday of Victor H. Mair, ed. Haun Saussy (Amherst: Cambria, 2018), 369–434, and Michele Marra, “The Development of Mappō Thought in Japan (I),” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 15, no. 1 (1998): 25–54. 18. The cardinal example here would be the Hōjōki; see Thomas Blenman Hare, “Reading Kamo No Chōmei,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49, no. 1 (1989): 173–228. 19. For more on this phenomenon, see Seki Hideo, Kyōzuka to sono ibutsu, Nihon no bijutsu 292 (Tokyo: Shibundō, 1990); D. Max Moerman, “The Archeology of Anxiety: An Underground History of Heian Religion,” in Centers and Peripheries in Heian Japan, ed. Mikael Adolphson and Edward Kamens (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 245–71; D. Max Moerman, “The Death of the Dharma: Sutra Burials in Early Medieval Japan,” in The Death of Sacred Texts: Ritual Disposal and Renovation of Texts in the World Religions, ed. Kristina Myrvold (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 71–90; Melanie Trede, ed., Arts of Japan: The John C. Weber Collection (Berlin: Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 2006), 44; and Proser, Art of Impermanence, 78–79. For an extended analysis of a single cache, see Sherry Fowler, “Containers of Sacred Text and Image at Twelfth-Century Chōanji in Kyushu,” Artibus Asiae 74, no. 1 (2014): 43–73. For the most recent and extensive analysis, see Heather Blair, Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), 81–84, 291, and chapters 5 and 6. 20. Moerman, “Archaeology of Anxiety,” 248. For close readings of the ritual aspects of three separate interments, see Blair, Real and Imagined, chapters 5 and 6. 21. Moerman, “Archaeology of Anxiety,” 267. 22. Ibid., 260. 23. Blair, Real and Imagined, 177, see also 81–84, 160–63, and 185–87. 24. Ibid., 184. 25. Moerman, “Archaeology of Anxiety,” 253, and Seki, Kyōzuka to sono ibutsu, 17. 26. Blair, Real and Imagined, 81–82, and Seki, Kyōzuka to sono ibutsu, 17. For a recent discussion of a Chinese analogue, see Sonya S. Lee, “Transmitting Buddhism to a Future Age: The Leiyin Cave at Fangshan and Cave-Temples with Stone Scriptures in Sixth-Century China,” Archives of Asian Art 60 (2010): 43–78. One estimate places the number of such burials above a thousand; see Naniwada Tōru, “Treasures from Sutra Mounds in the Kyoto National Museum Collection,” in Kyōto Kokuritsu Hakubutusukanzō kyōzuka ihō (Kyoto: Kyoto National Museum, 1986), iii. 27. Fukuyama Toshio, “nenjū gyōji emaki,” in Nenjū gyōji emaki, Shinshū Nihon emakimono zenshū 24 (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1978), 2; Fukuyama Toshio, “Nenjū gyōji emaki ni tsuite,” in Nenjū gyōji emaki, Shinshū Nihon emakimono zenshū 24 (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1978), 6.

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28. Take’i Akio, “Go-Shirakawa-in to emaki,” in Go-Shirakawa-in: Dōranki no tennō (Tokyo: Kichikawa kōbunkan, 1993), 449–51. For a similar inventory attempt, in English, see Yung-Hee Kim, Songs to Make the Dust Dance: The “Ryōjin hishō” of Twelfth-Century Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 28–31. 29. For an overview of the Observances in English, see Fukuyama, “nenjū gyōji emaki,” 1–11; Peter Glum, “The Ban Dainagon Ekotoba, the Kibi Daijin Nitto Emaki, and the Nenju Gyoji Emaki: A Reassessment of the Evidence for the Work of Tokiwa Mitsunaga Embodied in Two Japanese Narrative Scroll Paintings of the Twelfth Century, and One Presumably Close Copy” (PhD diss., New York University, 1981), 142–206 and passim; Kim, Songs to Make the Dust Dance, 28–32. Japanese studies include Fukuyama, “Nenjū gyōji emaki ni tsuite”; Komatsu Shigemi, “Nenjū gyōji emaki: Seiritsu e no michi,” in Nenjū gyōji emaki, Nihon no emaki 8 (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1987); Yamanaka Yutaka, “Heian jidai no nenjūgyōji to emaki,” in Nenjū gyōji emaki, Shinshū Nihon emakimono zenshū 24 (Tokyo, Kadokawa shoten, 1978); and Yamanaka Yutaka, “Goshirakawa tennō jidai no nenjū gyōji,” in Go-Shirakawa-in, 346. 30. Fukuyama, “nenjū gyōji emaki,” 2–3. This estimate would have been about a third larger than most illustrated scrolls. 31. Kim, Songs to Make the Dust Dance, 30–31. 32. Komatsu dates the Observances to the late 1170s (“Nenjū gyōji emaki,” 123); Fukuyama places them earlier, between 1158 and 1165 (“nenjū gyōji emaki,” 2); and John Tadao Teramoto assigns them to before 1179 or between 1184 and 1192 (“The ‘Yamai no sōshi’: A Critical Reevaluation of its Importance to Japanese Secular Painting of the Twelfth Century” [PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1994], 270). For an overview of competing dates, see Glum, “Ban Dainagon Ekotoba,” 146–48. 33. As Ōishi Yoshiki notes, these inclusions make the ostensibly courtly scrolls important documents of the material culture of the extracourtly (“Kyūtei no gyōgi ni tuite,” in Nenjū gyōji emaki, Shinshū Nihon emakimono zenshū 24 [Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1978], 38). 34. Komatsu compared the set to a documentary photo album, film, or television series (“Nenjū gyōji emaki,” 118). 35. Take’i, “Go-Shirakawa-in to emaki,” 452. 36. Minamoto Toyomune, “Nenjū gyōji emaki no emakiteki seikaku ni tuite,” Bigaku 12, no. 1 (1961): 1–6. Glum also touches on some of these issues in “Ban Dainagon Ekotoba,” 151–53. 37. Ōishi, “Kyūtei no gyōgi ni tuite,” 24. 38. Fukuyama, “Nenjū gyōji emaki ni tsuite,” 4; Yamanaka Yutaka, “Heian jidai no nenjūgyōji to emaki,” 46; Komatsu, “Nenjū gyōji emaki,” 117–19; Ōishi, “Kyūtei no gyōgi ni tuite,” 24; Kim, Songs to Make the Dust Dance, 30; Glum, “Ban Dainagon Ekotoba,” 143–45. 39. Kim, Songs to Make the Dust Dance, 31.

Chapter 7

Lonely Bones Relics sans Reliquaries

Lena Liepe A jawless skull with the inscription BBa15 is today an anonymous human fragment but was once known and venerated as the head relic of St. Lucius, patron saint of Roskilde Cathedral (fig. 7.1).1 The skull was brought to Denmark sometime in the late eleventh or twelfth centuries and constituted the crown jewel of the cathedral’s medieval relic collection. In 1665, it was handed over to the Royal Kunstkammer together with a cover, a fourteenth-century cap made from yellow silk brocade. The accession number BBa15 stems from when the skull was transferred from the Kunstkammer to the newly established Royal Art Museum in 1825.2 In an inventory of the collections of the Kunstkammer made in 1737, it is registered as follows: “The Cranium of The Pope Lucius who, as a holy Martyr, was brought from Rome, in order to make a Ghost disappear who has made great Trouble staying at Isefiord, afterwards the Cranium was kept as a great Relic in Roskilde Cathedral and from there entered the Royal Kunstkammer.”3 In the Middle Ages, such a relic would rarely, if ever, have been visible to the average devotee. As a rule, relics were, first, enveloped in precious textiles and, second, contained in reliquaries.4 The ritual display of relics on feast days or other special occasions was effectively a

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Fig. 7.1 Skull of St. Lucius with the accession number BBa15. Photo: National Museum, Copenhagen.

display of reliquaries, not of their contents. If an especially prominent person was granted the privilege of personally venerating or even holding the actual relic, it remained shielded from direct touch by a protective layer of textile, at minimum.5 Today, the situation is reversed. The skull inventoried as BBa15 is a visible, material testimony to the existence of a now long-lost reliquary. In a letter written in 1534, the St. Lucius head is described as being encased in a cover made from thin foils of gilded silver (“beatissimi Lucii Martyris . . . testam, argentea sed tenui

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quidem bractea, verumtamen inaurata, circumdatam”).6 This description suggests a head or bust reliquary, a supposition that gains support from the fact that the thirteenth-century seal ad causas of the Roskilde diocese shows a bust of a bishop, surrounded by the inscription “capvt S(an)c(t)I Lvcii” (head of St. Lucius).7 The word caput in medieval sources applies to bust reliquaries as well as actual heads. On the Roskilde seal, the likely reference is to the reliquary rather than the relic since only the former can have looked anything like the visual representation; perhaps, however, it is more correct to say that the notions of relic and reliquary merge in the image, both mental and real, of the bishop’s head. For an art historian with an interest in reliquaries, the skull, the seal, and the mention in the 1534 letter are pointers to an empty space: the vacancy once occupied by the no-longer-extant reliquary. The precious container was in all probability confiscated in order to raise funds for the civil war—the so-called Counts’ Feud—in favor of the deposed Danish king Christian II.8 Its shape can be ascertained only indirectly and insufficiently, and assumptions regarding its construction and use can, of necessity, be made only by analogy with preserved reliquaries. The St. Lucius skull has not only been deprived of its shelter with the disappearance of the gilded silver cover; the skull has also been robbed of its identity as a sacred substance. Exactly why it remained in the custody of the cathedral after the Reformation is not known, nor are the circumstances of where and how it was kept. By the time it was passed on to the Royal Kunstkammer, however, it had metamorphosed from an object of veneration into a historical curiosity of antiquarian rather than spiritual interest. The marking of the skull with the accession number confirms the transformation of the relic from living saintly matter into museum object. A relic exposed outside of its reliquary, whether extant or not, is a lonely bone. If, as in one of the galleries of the Historical Museum in Stockholm, a skeletal fragment of a saint is laid out bare and naked in the vitrine, it becomes a piece of once-sacred matter in a dissected and unenchanted state (fig. 7.2). The drama that is staged before the eyes of the museum visitor in Stockholm is very different from the one a medieval devotee hoped to witness before a shrine or a reliquary: namely, the potentially transcendental experience of sanctity revealed,

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Fig. 7.2 Display case with arm reliquary and relics in the Museum of National Antiquities, Stockholm. Photo: Per Backstrom.

although veiled or shielded from view, and glorified. Instead, the idea of the museum as an institution dedicated to science, education, and enlightenment is detectable behind a curatorial choice that apparently aims to lay bare the ideological machinery underpinning medieval belief in relics as mediators of divine power. Not only does the accompanying text point out the previously mistaken identity of the displayed bone as a relic from the Swedish mystic St. Birgitta, but the visitor is also invited to marvel at a “false” relic put on display to the left in the

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showcase: a hind paw from a seal that was discovered in the altar of a church in Skåne and donated to the museum in 1853. The attitude taken in the Stockholm display is not necessarily representative of how museums generally exhibit relics and human remains. In 2008, the conservators of the British Museum made a discovery about the contents a twelfth-century German portable altar from Hildesheim. The cavity beneath the altar slab contained relics from forty saints, each neatly swaddled in cloth, tied up, and labeled with a parchment cedula (identification label). The relic packages were duly registered but otherwise left intact and reinserted into the altar that was then put back in its vitrine. In Religious Objects in Museums, Crispin Paine quotes the curator’s affirmation of the relics’ continued status as sacred matter: “We are treating them not as artworks, [in contrast to, presumably, the altar] but as devotional objects, alongside other objects related to liturgy or to the power of prayer. If people want to engage with them spiritually, they can. These objects are still part of a functioning belief system. We are very sympathetic to this.”9 At the Treasures of Heaven exhibition held at the British Museum in 2011, the relics were again extracted and put on display, in front of the reliquary, within a vitrine.10 They remained swathed, however, and it would be wrong to assert that their status as devotional objects was fundamentally compromised by this treatment. In the later Middle Ages, relics, well covered in silk and linen wrappings, were frequently put on display in transparent reliquaries. The swaddling and tying of the holy fragments shielded them from direct view and created a symbolic distance between the relic and the lay devotee.11 Nonetheless, the exposure of the relic bundles in the 2011 exhibition indicates that the parameters of display were largely determined by the museum context in which it took place. Yet another option is demonstrated at the National Museum in Copenhagen, where a vitrine holds a wooden arm reliquary with its content still in place: a tibia or shank bone, wrapped in a cover of yellowish silk that leaves the ends of the bone bare. The bone is labeled with a cedula stating, “Hic habet(ur) b(ra)chi(um) vnius militis de x milia milit(um)” (This is the arm of one of the ten thousand soldiers).12 The lid or grille once covering the opening of the relic chamber is missing,

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and the reliquary is turned so that the beholder sees into the chamber containing the bone. A number of other relic shrines are exhibited nearby, although their lids remain in place, and the relics, where they still exist, are concealed within. If display decisions were left to the museum’s visitors, however, the relics would be taken out of their containers and put on display. This, at least, is the conclusion drawn by the museum’s technical conservators who have observed the public’s pronounced interest in seeing the relics.13 In other contexts where human bodies, or fragments thereof, form part of museum collections, the sentiments of the public have also proven less delicate than those of museum authorities when it comes to the ethics of displaying human remains.14 In an essay on museum exhibitions of bog bodies (mummified remains extracted from peat bogs), Jody Joy cites questionnaires that reveal that museumgoers in general are largely supportive of the display of the dead. In the mid1980s, when the so-called Lindow Man was recovered from a bog in Wilmslow, Cheshire, in northwestern England, the ensuing debate concerned not the propriety of exhibiting the conserved body in public but whether the remains rightly belonged in London or in Manchester.15 In 2008, the Manchester Museum staged a special exhibition featuring the Lindow Man and in that context sought to highlight the sensitivities surrounding the display of human remains by wrapping some of the museum’s other mummies, normally exhibited in an unwrapped state, in modern cloth. The reactions of local visitors and amateur Egyptology groups were so hostile that the wrappings were removed after a few weeks.16 Interestingly, Christina Riggs in her book on the wrappings of mummies and other Egyptian objects, shows that practices concerning the exhibiting of mummies in wrapped or unwrapped states vary both by country and by type of museum. In the United States, museums of archaeology and natural history are likely to include unwrapped bodies in their displays, whereas art museums opt to exhibit wrapped exemplars. In the United Kingdom, mummies are exhibited whole or in part, wrapped and unwrapped. In contrast, in German museums, mummified bodies in fragmentary or unwrapped states are rarely shown in public, with the exception of special exhibitions.17

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When museums possess, handle, and exhibit human remains, the recurring mantra is that this must be done in a respectful manner. For instance, guidelines issued by both the British Museum and the British Department of Culture, Media and Sports state that museum installations should be designed so as to encourage visitors to view human remains respectfully.18 Balancing the demands of respect, on the one hand, and the often intense interest taken by the general public in seeing human remains, on the other, is not always easily accomplished. Furthermore, as Joy observes, respect is a variable concept with widely divergent definitions determined by the interests of the person or group involved.19 Hence, a scientist, an average museumgoer, and a member of the cultural group or faith community to which the deceased individual once belonged may each hold a quite different opinion regarding what it means to handle human remains in a respectful manner. Back in Stockholm, the naked bone, displayed within the vitrine in all its desacralized matter-of-factness, retains the potential to move and affect on a fundamentally human level. In a study of the values, formal regulations, and interests conditioning the conservation of human remains as cultural heritage in museums, art historian and technical conservator Laure Cadot points to museums as virtually the only location today where the contemporary individual can make contact with the dead, as she puts it, “en chair et en os” (in flesh and bone).20 To come across a piece of human skeleton in a display cabinet is to encounter the past in material form. The dead body in the museum constitutes a crossroad, an intersection between two temporal states: the “still here” and the “nevermore here.”21 The meaning of the bone resides in its materiality; it is not a representational sign that stands for something else, it is the body that it refers to. It exists in a one-toone relation to the reality of the past that it was once part of and now brings into the present. Ancient human remains, says Cadot, constitute “une parenthèse du passé dans le présent” (a parenthesis of the past in the present).22 In 2010, a special issue of the anthropological Journal of Material Culture was dedicated to human bones as seen through the eyes of anthropologists.23 The aim was to probe what the editors described as the emotive materiality and affective presence of human bones.

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In the preface, the editors asked: “What do bones do to people?” and “What do bones enable, afford, provoke, constrain, or allow?”24 One of the answers discussed in the volume is that bones serve to connect the living with the long dead, the present with the deep past.25 Bones are among the most concrete and durable elements of bodies: they are capable of stable longevity and thus speak to us not only about death and disappearance but paradoxically also about the overcoming of decay. Whole bodies, in contrast, if they are not embalmed or conserved by some other technique, do not transcend time; left untreated, the soft tissues of the body decay and transform from solid to liquid, becoming repugnantly inhuman in the end. Bones, on the other hand, remain firm and dry and contained.26 In a widely read essay on Christian materiality, medieval historian Caroline Walker Bynum describes the “bodily matter” held by medieval reliquaries as “hard, decay-resistant body-stuff (bones and ashes, not flesh).”27 The rigid, jewellike hardness of the bones represented continuity and, to Christians, held the promise of resurrection to eternal life.28 Bones, moreover, even when they are anonymous and unconnected to a known individual, still transmit a sense of humanness. They remain recognizable in death; even in fragments, they stand for the whole person.29 In this, our innate response to human bones aligns with the Christian notion of the saint being fully present in each and every bit, no matter how minuscule, of his or her body: “Ubi est aliquid ibi totum est” (Wherever there is anything, there is the whole).30 Ancient bones on display in anthropological and archaeological museums represent human presence across time, tangible and real enough to evoke recognition but at the same time old and depersonalized enough to secure a degree of detachment.31 To encounter a piece of bone in the midst of an exhibit of medieval crafted artifacts is, however, a slightly different matter (see fig. 7.2). The golden arm that towers over the human remains connects to a mental universe that existed long ago, separated from our own time not only by half a millennium or more but also by major shifts in how the world is understood. The collision with the “here and now” experience conveyed by the bones is bewildering, not least because it underlines the paradoxical state of a dead body or part of a body, such as a bone, as being both person and object. Along

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Fig. 7.3 The bust reliquary in its opened state, exposing the skull of St. Lucius. St. Ansgar Catholic Cathedral, Copenhagen. Photo: Roberto Fortuna, National Museum, Copenhagen.

with the presentness of the deceased individual in his or her remains, a bone has the undeniable appearance of being a tangible, material entity: a thing.32 More than anything else, the exhibit of a skeletal fragment in a display case, as a thing among other things, is a testimony to the museum as an apparatus of modernity, with disenchantment, in the tradition of the Enlightenment, as one of its main missions.33 The St. Lucius skull of Roskilde Cathedral did not end up in the display case of a museum. In 1908 it was transferred to St. Ansgar, Copenhagen’s Catholic cathedral, and in 1910, a bust reliquary was fabricated for it by the goldsmith Alois Kreiten of Cologne. Today, the reliquary with its content resides on a shelf on the north wall of the nave. For the art historian, the disappearance of the silver head that encased the relic in the Middle Ages is, of course, a source of grievance, but in other respects, the losses I have addressed above have

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been mended. The relic has regained its status as a potential mediator of spiritual power in a hallowed space. When the tiara of the present bust reliquary is removed, the raw surface of the cranium becomes visible, in stark contrast to the polished silver of the bust’s face and the interior’s deep red velvet lining (fig. 7.3). The exposition of the naked skull, although at odds with the medieval custom of enveloping relics in protective covers in order to shield them from direct view, aligns with Catholic post-Reformation practice.34 With reference to the temporal states of bones identified by Cadot, the “still here” has gotten the better of the “nevermore here.” To the sympathetic beholder, the sight of the skull does not signify absence and loss but rather an abiding presence of humanness, whether saintly or not.35 Notes

1. According to the results of a carbon-14 dating made in 2014, the skull is from a person who lived in the period 332–430 CE. This means that it cannot be St. Lucius, who is supposed to have died in 254 CE. See Jette Arneborg et al., “Kranier på afveje,” Nationalmuseets arbejdsmark 2015 (2015): 148. For a fuller account of the history of the St. Lucius head relic, see Lena Liepe, “Holy Heads: Pope Lucius’ Skull in Roskilde and the Role of Relics in Medieval Spirituality,” in Materiality and Religious Practice in Medieval Denmark, ed. Sarah Croix and Mads Heilskov (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021), with references, 123–46. 2. When the skull and the cap became part of the collections of the Danish Museum for Nordic Antiquities (today’s National Museum of Denmark) in 1845, both objects were registered under their present accession number 9086: Arneborg et al., “Kranier på afveje,” 145. 3. Bente Gundestrup, Det kongelige danske Kunstkammer 1737 / The Royal Danish Kunstkammer 1737 (Copenhagen: Nationalmuseet; Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck, 1991), 2:212. On the legend’s account of how water, poured through the skull of St. Lucius, was used to defeat an ogre in the Store Bælt strait, see Liepe, “Holy Heads.” 4. On the wrapping of relics, see Martina Bagnoli, “Dressing the Relics: Some Thoughts on the Custom of Relic Wrapping in Medieval Christianity,” in Matter of Faith: An Interdisciplinary Study of Relics and Relic Veneration in the Medieval Period, ed. James Robinson, Lloyd de Beer, and Anna Harnden, Research Publication 195 (London: British Museum, 2014), 100–109; Hedwig Röckelein, “‘1 alter hölzerner Kasten voller Reliquien als alten schmutzigen Zeugflicken jeder Farbe und alte Knochen’: Über unansehnliche und verborgene Reliquienschätze des Mittelalters,” in Vielfalt und Aktualität des Mittelalters: Festschrift für Wolfgang Petke zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Sabine Arend et al., Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Historische Landesforschung der Universität Göttingen 48 (Bielefeld: Verlag für

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Regionalgeschichte, 2007), 393–94; Hedwig Röckelein, “Des ‘saints cachés’: Les reliques dans les sépultures d’autel; Quleques problèmes de recherche,” in Ad libros! Mélanges d’études médiévales offerts à Denise Angers et Joseph-Claude Poulin, ed. Jean-François Cottier, Martin Gravel, and Sébastien Rossignol (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2010), 23–26. 5. Bagnoli, “Dressing the Relics.” 6. Letter reprinted in Nye Danske Magasin, indeholdende Allehaande Smaa-Stykker og Anmærkninger til Historiens og Sprogets Oplysning 2, no. 5 (1827): 142–43. The letter in question was written by Poul Helgensen, a Danish Carmelite monk and theologian, to Count Christopher of Oldenburg. Helgensen wrote on behalf of the chapter of Roskilde Cathedral in answer to the count’s demand that the chapter part with everything in the cathedral’s treasury made from gold and silver. Helgesen pleaded that the chapter should be allowed to keep the venerable relic of St. Lucius, a request that seems to have been received favorably, to the extent that the skull still exists. 7. Henry Petersen, “En relikvie af Roskilde domkirkes skytshelgen, den hellige pave Lucius,” Aarbøger for nordisk oldkyndighed og historie 9 (1874): 440; Henry Petersen, Danske gejstlige sigiller fra middelalderen (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1886), 17. 8. See Liepe, “Holy Heads,” and Petersen, “En relikvie af Roskilde,” 429–31. 9. Crispin Paine, Religious Objects in Museums: Private Lives and Public Duties (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 60. 10. Martina Bagnoli et al., eds., Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe (London: British Museum Press, 2014), 127, cat. no. 66. The exhibiton was a collaboration between the British Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. 11. Bagnoli, “Dressing the Relics.” 12. Sofia Lahti, who has published the Copenhagen arm reliquary, tentatively explains the discrepancy between the label’s statement and the factual nature of the bone to which it refers as a case of the power of words and images. She suggests that the combined evidence, or argument, of the shape of the reliquary and the text of the cedula overrules the bone’s actual appearance in the eyes of the believers. Hence, when the relic has been defined as an arm both verbally (on the label), and visually (through the shape of the reliquary), it becomes an arm from the point of view of relic veneration (“Helig hand med världslig prestige: Ett martyrsrelikvarium med ett donatorsvapen,” Tahiti: Taidehistoria tieteenä; Konsthistorien som vetenskap 5, no. 2 [2015], http://​tahiti​.fi​/02​-2015​/tieteelliset​ -artikkelit​/helig​-hand​-med​-varldslig​-prestige​-ett​-martyrsrelikvarium​-med​-ett​ -donatorsvapen). 13. Marie Thorstrup Laursen, e-mail to author, August 22, 2016. 14. Margaret Clegg, Human Remains: Curation, Reburial, and Repatriation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 88. 15. Jody Joy, “Looking Death in the Face: Different Attitudes Towards Bog Bodies and Their Display with a Focus on Lindow Man,” in Regarding the Dead: Human

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Remains in the British Museum, ed. Alexandra Fletcher, Daniel Antoine, and J. D. Hill, Research Publication 197 (London: British Museum, 2014), 16–18. 16. Christina Riggs, Unwrapping Ancient Egypt (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 206. 17. Ibid., 202. 18. Joy, “Looking Death in the Face,” 12; see also Riggs, Unwrapping Ancient Egypt, 203. 19. Joy, “Looking Death in the Face,” 12. 20. Laure Cadot, En chair et en os: Le cadavre au musée; Valeurs, statuts et enjeux de la conservation des dépouilles humaines patrimonialisées (Paris: Ecole de Louvre, 2009), 89. 21. Ibid., 19. 22. Ibid., 34. 23. Cara Krmpotich, Joost Fontein, and John Harries, “The Substance of Bones: The Emotive Materiality and Affective Presence of Human Remains,” Journal of Material Culture 15 (2010): 371. 24. Ibid., 373. 25. Elizabeth Hallam, “Articulating Bones: An Epilogue,” Journal of Material Culture 15 (2010): 466. 26. Krmpotich, Fontein, and Harries, “Substance of Bones,” 378. 27. Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late-Medieval Europe (New York: Zone, 2011), 70. 28. Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 108. 29. Krmpotich, Fontein, and Harries, “Substance of Bones,” 377. 30. Jacques Mulders, S.J., and Roland Demeulenaere, eds., Victricii rotomagensis: De laude sanctorum, Corpus Christanorum Series Latina 64 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1985), 85. On the relic as a manifestation of the saint’s praesentia, see Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, Haskell Lectures on History of Religions, n.s., 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 86–105. 31. Cadot underscores how, for human remains to be acceptable as museum exhibits, remoteness in time, space, and/or from a sociocultural point of view is a necessary prerequisite (En chair et en os, 84–85). A survey conducted among British museum visitors on the display of archaeological finds of human bodies revealed, not surprisingly, a clear distinction between the acceptability of prehistoric human remains versus twentieth-century remains and between dry bones versus flesh: see Claire Rumsey, “Human Remains: Are the Existing Ethical Guidelines for Excavation, Museum Storage, Research and Display Adequate?” (MA thesis, University of Southampton, 2001); see also Mary M. Brooks and Claire Rumsey, “‘Who Knows the Fate of His Bones?’: Rethinking the Body on Display; Object, Art or Human Remains?,” in Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed, ed. Simon J. Knell, Suzanne MacLeod, and Sheila Watson (London: Routledge, 2007), 344. 32. Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2010), 134; Howard Williams, “Death Warmed Up: The Agency of

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Bodies and Bones in Early Anglo-Saxon Cremation Rites,” Journal of Material Culture 9 (2004): 266–67. 33. Cf. Christina Riggs on the museal uncovering of Egyptian mummified bodies and artifacts for display: “Archaeology and museums both depend on revelation, and have been blind to the immateriality that wrapping once engendered” (Unwrapping Ancient Egypt, 216). 34. Anton Legner, Reliquien in Kunst und Kult zwischen Antike und Aufklärung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995), 293–315, and Andrea de Meo Arbore, “Change and Continuity in the Display of Relics in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The English Catholic Community in a Broader Context,” in Robinson, De Beer, and Harnden, Matter of Faith, 183–89. In 2014, the skull was removed from the bust reliquary in order to undergo carbon-14 dating (see n. 1 above). While the skull was removed for testing, burglars broke into the church and stole the empty reliquary. It was found dumped just outside the church with the tiara missing. The tiara has since been replaced, and the reliquary, with the relic, is back in the church. For safety reasons, however, it is bolted down and can no longer be opened or taken down from the shelf to be carried in processions. 35. I sincerely thank Sofia Lahti, Åbo Akademi University, for allowing me to use the title “Lonely Bones,” which she originally contrived for an unpublished paper on how to reconstruct the visuality of lost or greatly altered reliquaries.

Chapter 8

The Manuscript Machine Assemblages and Divisions in Jazarī’s Compendium

Meekyung MacMurdie “Truly, it is the pearl; incomparable; a priceless precious thing.”1 With this description, Abū al-ʿizz ibn Ismaʾ īl ibn al-Razzāz al-Jazarī (d. 1206 CE) immortalized a pair of cast-brass doors that he created for the palace in Āmid (Diyarbakır) (see fig. 8.1). A respected man of learning and chief engineer at the Artuqid court, Jazarī is remembered largely thanks to his Al-Jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿilm wa’l-ʿamal al-nāfiʿ fī ṣināʿat al-ḥiyal (Compendium on the theory and useful practice in the mechanical arts).2 Extant copies of the Compendium make up the largest remaining corpus of medieval Islamic manuscripts in the genre of ḥiyal, an Arabic word meaning trick or ruse that is also the term for mechanics.3 As the name suggests, these books are dedicated to the construction of devices that purport to trick the senses through the use of ingenious technological achievement. Jazarī’s Compendium catalogs inventions produced over the course of the engineer’s lifetime. His oeuvre is marked by wondrous objects: clocks with painted peacocks, automated musicians, a ship that propels itself through the water. In the Compendium, however, only the cast

Fig. 8.1 Brass door created for the palace in Āmid (Diyarbakır), in Abū al-ʿizz ibn Ismaʾ īl ibn al-Razzāz al-Jazarī, al-Jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿilm wa’l-ʿamal al-nāfiʿ fī ṣināʿat al-ḥiyal (Compendium on the theory and useful practice in the mechanical arts), copied by Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf ibnʿUthman al-Ḥaṣkafī, northern Mesopotamia, 1206. Istanbul, Topkapı Sarayı Library MS A.3472, fols. 165b–66a.

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doors elicit an ekphrasis couched in superlatives and distinguished by Arabic rhymed prose (sajʿ).4 The doors were Jazarī’s crowning achievement, so marvelous that people journeyed to Āmid to view them.5 Located at the entrance of the palace, the brass doors would presumably have been visible from the streets; Jazarī’s other creations may have been limited to exclusive conditions of court ceremonial.6 Time has treated all of Jazarī’s handiwork equally. None survive. Instead, the Compendium has come to occupy a central place in the history of medieval science and technology, but “from an engineering point of view, it is usually the activating mechanisms, rather than the displays themselves, that embody the most interesting ideas.”7 This kind of thinking risks reducing the ḥiyal genre to a teleological narrative, part of the progression of robotics, cybernetics, and future advances in biomimicry culminating in the reproduction of the human brain.8 Meanwhile, art historians have parsed out stylistic qualities in surviving Compendium manuscripts in order to discuss the milieu of Artuqid art production.9 The scholarly bifurcation of technical information and artistic value loses sight of the ways in which the Compendium conveys the finished appearance of three-dimensional objects, as well as how their parts were manufactured, assembled, and interconnected. With the book in hand, we can form an image of Jazarī and his lost machines. The Compendium forefronts medieval values of superlative skill, knowledge preservation, and cognition. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century scientific books addressed theories of knowledge, theories of practice, and, sometimes, the benefits of knowledge alone, not its proofs and definitions.10 Jazarī’s book is almost unique in that it preserves an account of craftsmanship by someone whose livelihood depended upon successful manufacturing.11 Although familiar with engineering texts and mathematical methods, Jazarī insisted that the only way to produce functioning machines was by means of trial and error. The Compendium provides a glimpse into what the production of books offered artisans invested in knowledge as sensed experience, those makers usually placed outside the world of literacy and letters. How were books made to work for them? Embedding traces of facture shared and distinguished by engineer and book artist, the Compendium

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memorializes Jazarī’s material process and challenges readers’ imaginative faculties: a collaboration capable of bringing inanimate material to life. According to his own words, Jazarī’s education began with the contemplation of written demonstrations (maqālāt burhāniyya).12 Earlier scholars and sages had described devices of their own making, but many of these devices were flawed because the theoretical knowledge of their construction had not been verified in practice (kull ʿilm sināʿī lā yatahaqqaq b’il ʿamal).13 Confronting gaps in the written tradition, Jazarī found no alternative other than practical work and experimentation. His scientific pursuits synthesized disparate sources and built upon those that were correct, resulting in specimens that worked splendidly and surpassed previous dead ends. When it came time to reflect on his hard-earned achievements, Jazarī agonized that the fruits of his diligence, his skill, would disappear with him. He desired to produce a record of his works by means of dictating instructions to a scribe (man ʿayyantu bi-nashr adīmihi).14 Jazarī initially abandoned the idea out of humility and fear of criticism, but his patron saw through the charade: “I [Jazarī] was in his [Nāṣir al-Dīn’s] presence one day and had brought him something which he had ordered me to make. He looked at me and he looked at what I had made and thought about it, without my noticing. He guessed what I had been thinking about, and unveiled unerringly what I had concealed.”15 The perceptive ruler deduced Jazarī’s secret desires just as easily as he unraveled the marvels of inventions. Nāṣir al-Dīn commanded Jazarī to compose a book that brought together all of his creations and included individual examples and pictures. The book would ensure Jazarī’s (and Nāṣir al-Dīn’s) legacy by hedging against the inevitable loss of earthly materials. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, the construction of automata was well-established in Islamicate courts. Their popularity as gifts effectively scattered an engineer’s achievements and made his ingenious creations unavailable to viewers at home.16 As expressions of wealth and political power, automata were located in palaces, state audience halls, and audience chambers of the urban elite, but nothing and no one could escape

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fickle, fatal time (dahr).17 Because the affective power of trick devices demanded novelty, it is also possible that many of Jazarī’s machines were designed to be ephemeral. Materials and parts could be recycled for new designs. We detect in Jazarī’s account a preoccupation with transmitting not the physical objects but the sign, trace, or impression (athar) of the work: he worries that his endeavors will pass away unnoticed (ijtihādī adrāja al-riyāḥ).18 What is often overlooked, though, is that another person was involved in the production of the Compendium: the unnamed scribe tasked with putting down in words and pictures that which Jazarī dictated. The Compendium is the result of deliberate collaboration between these differently skilled makers, not to mention all those subsequent copyists whose pens ensured Jazarī’s memory survived in perpetuity. Recording Jazarī’s verbal ekphrasis, scribes preserved the inventor’s process of making; by representing Jazarī’s objects visually, artists materialized his machines (that were themselves designed to mimic living beings and may or may not have existed in the world) for new audiences. Both the Compendium’s words and pictures would have generated immaterial, mental images in the minds of viewers. The first machine included in the Compendium is a water clock shaped like a castle, showing the twelve signs of the zodiac. As the audience enjoyed sensory delights produced through music and movement, the clock’s timekeeping functions marked the passage of time by means of terrestrial and celestial signs: the path of a crescent moon, the opening and closing of doors, animated human and animal figures (fig. 8.2).19 Jazarī introduces the castle-shaped water clock with an account of his working methods. Jazarī’s philosophy of craft knowledge unfolded from the failures of tradition and demonstration. To build the clock, he began by reconstructing three instruments that distributed the signs of the Zodiac over a semicircle. Two of the instruments derived from Archimedes, while the other’s maker was unknown to Jazarī. None of them worked correctly so he abandoned antiquarianism and turned to his own cogitation ( fikr).20 He devised a plan that fused mathematical proof with material object: circle as metal plate, diameter as equator, equal divisions

Fig. 8.2 Water clock in the shape of a castle with the signs of the Zodiac, in Abū al-ʿizz ibn Ismaʾ īl ibn al-Razzāz al-Jazarī, al-Jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿilm wa’l-ʿamal al-nāfiʿ fī ṣināʿat al-ḥiyal (Compendium on the theory and useful practice in the mechanical arts), copied by Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf ibn ʿUthman al-Ḥaṣkafī, northern Mesopotamia, 1206. Istanbul, Topkapı Sarayı Library MS A. 3472, fol. 5b.

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representing inclinations of the ecliptic.21 But this invention did not function correctly either. Faced with a choice between a sound proof and a functioning machine, Jazarī chose the functioning machine, and the only path forward was through the observation of practice and methodic experience (ittibāʿ al-ʿamal wa al-tajriba).22 Jazarī’s textual account of the castle clock’s construction reenacts the engineer’s embodied labors: hammering beaten copper, soldering pieces together, drilling holes, marking divisions. Even so, in the explication of his process, Jazarī constantly negotiates between revealing and concealing. When he describes how the clock must be reset every twelve hours, the series of actions involved is so complex that it seems likely that the servant (al-khādim) responsible must have been instructed in person.23 Over and over, Jazarī presents essential components of the clock only to place complete knowledge of it out of reach. Donald Hill put it this way: “The text exemplifies admirably the main characteristics of al-Jazarī’s descriptive abilities: on the one hand a careful description of the processes of manufacture, emphasizing the really significant points, and a clear presentation of the functioning of the individual items, both singly and in relationship to one another; on the other hand, carelessness about the transmission of dimensions, and confusion in the presentation of mathematical data.”24 If, however, we divest ourselves of modern expectations, we may instead grant to Jazarī what he himself most valued in the Compendium’s textual account; that is, facture and function. I would suggest that Jazarī’s didactic narrative was invested, above all, in preserving and reproducing a way of knowing that was precisely the purview of artisans: material and imaginary world building.25 The picture that accompanies Jazarī’s description captures a moment in the castle clock’s progression (fig. 8.2). A small figure can be seen emerging from the door on the upper level. Four pillars support the archway, and a vegetal motif covers the surface of the spandrel. Below we see a quintet of trumpeters, drummers, and cymbal players. An inscription on the first of the doors on the lower level indicates that the first hour of the day has just ended. In the rendering of the castle clock, the artist has fleshed out the written account and produced a scene filled with pattern and color.

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The picture is not accurate in any mathematical sense, but the effect is, nonetheless, one of vibrant animation. Without the textual framework, it would be impossible to tell whether the image depicts a clock that looks like the front of a building or an actual building.26 Does the half circle at the top of the structure revolve with the passing of hours, or does it depict a dome decorated with the constellations? According to Jazarī, the musicians play their instruments on the sixth, ninth, and twelfth hours of the day and evening, but their stances in the image suggest a continuously noisy presence. At some point in the reception history of the Topkapı Sarayı Library manuscript, the faces of figures were rubbed out, an iconoclastic act usually reserved for depictions of living creatures. Did the artist succeed in the trick of bringing the machine to life in the reader’s imagination? Image making, whether in the imagination or in the material world, was understood in the medieval Islamicate world as a creative, self-reflective practice that revealed artists’ sophistication even while testing viewers’ perception. Classical philosophers such as Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī (ca. 801‒873) and Abū Naṣr Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Fārābī (d. 961) linked image making and the imagination to the sensible world. The imaginative faculty retained, reproduced, and manipulated the trace or impression of sensed objects (rusūm al-maḥsūsāt).27 Fārābī highlighted imagination as image forming (takhayyul) and explored the active potential of imagination and how it motivated human action.28 Where philosophers had associated imagination with phantasia, Fārābī argued that image making was unconcerned with certitude. In so doing, he legitimized imagination as a way of knowing not necessarily opposed to reason and intellect but functioning in its own creative, cognitive realm.29 Medieval proponents of image making endorsed the practice of visual representation “by underscoring the didactic and affective potential of images.”30 Muḥammad ibn Maḥmūd ibn Aḥmād al-Ṭūsī (twelfth century) suggested that God created human beings so that their ingenuity would enable the production of artistic works and that the visual wonders would in turn testify to the power and glory of God’s will.31 On the very left of Jazarī’s castle clock, the first door of the lower row has been turned over to reveal the words “Dominion is God’s.” The same

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sentiment echoes in the calligraphic band on the painting of the brass door (see fig. 8.1). The relationship of monumental sculpture, marvelous machines, and metalworking to the production of wonder has been well-documented by historians.32 In the Islamic tradition, the discursive practice of wondrous devices extends back to Suleymān’s palace.33 The Compendium may have inspired skilled artisans and engineers expanding this tradition, but the book was surely appreciated outside of a technical context as well, along with other writings on the wonders of creation.34 The manuscript itself would have been regarded as a work of wonder and prestige, whether or not Jazarī’s inventions existed in three dimensions. For most readers, Jazarī’s Compendium did not occasion physical productions of ḥiyal devices. Instead, it challenged their skills of imaginative image making. Examining the Compendium manuscript, we move between reading and seeing; we store, assemble, and manipulate immaterial machines in our imagination. Even if we finally grasp a part of the information presented within the book, eventually a complex figure or an unclear text disorients us. We retrace our mental steps, wondering: How much have we forgotten? Might a model help? Is this why Jazarī abandoned theory for fabrication? In their theorizations of cognition, medieval Islamic philosophers often ranked imagination below intellection. Ibn Sīnā, for example, based his theory of the senses on a hierarchy of abstraction. The internal senses, imagination included, made possible the movement from particulars to universals by stripping a sensible object of its matter “so that finally, the next closest thing to a pure universal may emerge as the substrate for intellectual cognition.”35 There are moments in the Compendium where the rhetorical forms of intellectual practice become faintly visible—for example, views of assembled parts labeled and drawn as if to approach a geometric proof—but, on the whole, the text is remarkable for its sustained engagement with the imagination of particular materials.36 As Jazarī discovered, an artisan trained their internal senses so that they could build with the sensible world. For Jazarī, the construction of the brass doors for the palace in Āmid was analogous to the production of clocks, trick vases, pitchers, fountains,

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and perpetually playing flutes: in each of these works, the prestige of their facture depended on the effective synthesis of disparate material parts. In certain respects, however, the doors seem exceptional. The majority of Jazarī’s machines are dressed with human and animal figures; the doors’ patterning instead makes skilled use of geometry, vegetation, and calligraphy. The doors produced no clever sounds, made no overtures of self-animation, staged no pretenses. What was their trick? At the center of the brass doors Jazarī built a latticework: a composite of hexagonal and octagonal stars along with filler pieces. For each star and quadrilateral unit, Jazarī first prepared a wooden pattern from which he cast the geometric figures in closed mold boxes using green sand. Bars joined the interlocking shapes by means of tongues and grooves.37 After completing the geometric composition, Jazarī fitted it with borders of brass and red copper. Although third-person and passive voices intermingle elsewhere in the Compendium, the procedure for making the brass doors is distinctly couched in the first person. The Compendium’s project of “gazing at machines” here becomes an experience of gazing at Jazarī, turning the reader-viewer’s attention from the presence of devices to their maker’s process.38 The tenth-century Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (Brethren of purity) would have referred to Jazarī’s practice as one of sensible geometry (al-handasa al-ḥissiyya).39 Sensible geometry dealt with the magnitudes of lines, surfaces, and solids, and the way geometric figures could be assembled and divided. (Remember, the outlines and bodies of Jazarī’s geometries were cast separately and put together.) Intellective geometry (al-handasa al-ʿaqliyya), on the other hand, was abstracted from bodies in the world because intellectual knowledge of descriptions of length, width, and breadth do not rely on the presence of physical objects.40 Although geometric construction was central to the work of both geometers and practitioners of ornamental geometry, these two groups’ standards of certainty and cognition diverged. The mathematician and astronomer Abū’l Wafāʾ al-Būzjānī (ca. 940‒998) juxtaposed constructions demonstrated by linear proofs—derived from a line (yastakhriju khaṭṭan)—with forms and representations assembled in the physical world through artisanal methods of dividing and assembling parts.41 While the artisanal approach might seem suitable for tilework, for

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example, it was not always mathematically correct. Abū’l Wafāʾ claimed that a form (ṣūra) so constructed exists “in the imagination (al-takhayyul).”42 According to Abū’l Wafāʾ, how one arrived at knowledge was of utmost importance. Geometers prided themselves on their strict geometrical reasonings and demonstrations (burhān), whereas artisans relied on sense and observation.43 Not all artists and artisans, however, worked the same way. Objects in relief could be tested, altered, broken down, and assembled in ways the painted page could not.44 The question is whether the book artists who perpetuated the presence of Jazarī’s doors on the page would have found their two-dimensional medium limiting. How did they draw and erase, tinker and tool? Did their working methods fundamentally differ from those of artisans working in brass, copper, and wood? What limited evidence survives suggests that the construction of geometric patterning on paper began with proportional modules, such as the golden mean and other special rectangles whose divisions, subdivisions, and subsequent tessellation resulted in fantastic constructions.45 The picture of the brass doors in Topkapı Sarayı Library ms a. 3472 elides the architectonics of built space with that of the folio surface, a visual-formal pun found elsewhere in arts of the book (see fig. 8.1). The artist has preserved the general proportions of the door (although, following Jazarī’s instructions, only the upper half of one door has been represented), and it is likely that the artist generated the remaining components from this frame. The trick of much of medieval Islamicate geometric patterning was that it disguised foundational grids. Only a beholder with specialized knowledge and a keen eye might discern what lay beneath or before the visible forms of geometric pattern. To put it in terms used by the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, intellectual considerations of planar and solid geometry preceded an artists’ manipulation of materials. On the other hand, sensible geometry might elevate an artisan or beholder’s thinking, leading to the comprehension of intellective geometry.46 We might read the book artists’ images as an investment in this dialectic. We expect a moving machine with human figures, bells, and whistles to evoke wonder and engage our imaginations. For Jazarī, a work

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of ornamental geometry served the same affective and cognitive purpose. Geometry remained, throughout the medieval period, a site of discursive high stakes in terms of ways of knowing and states of being. That Jazarī refused to treat the imagination of the sensory world as a stepping stone on the way to abstraction or to devise practices from theory—even when making geometric figures—is a historical marvel. Construction with wood, metal, and pigments, precisely that which is material, transitory, unenduring, this was “the pearl; incomparable; a priceless precious thing.”

Notes

1. Ismaʾ īl ibn al-Razzāz al-Jazarī, Al-Jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿilm wa’l-ʿamal al-nāfiʿ fī ṣināʿat al-ḥiyal [A compendium on the theory and practice of the mechanical arts], ed. Aḥmad Yūsuf al-Ḥasan (Aleppo: Maʿhad al-Turāth al-ʿIlmī al-ʿArabī, Jamiʿat Ḥalab, 1979), 469. The second superlative, al-yatīma, literally translates to “orphan,” that which is alone and unique of its kind. 2. During the medieval period, Diyār Bakr referred to the northernmost province of al-Jazīra (upper Mesopotamia), which is part of modern-day Turkey. The little that is known about Jazarī’s life has been gleaned from the Compendium’s preface. In it, Jazarī informs his readers that the book was composed while he was in the service of Nāṣir al-Dīn Maḥmūd ibn Muḥammad (597–619 H/1200–1222 CE). Jazarī had previously been employed by Nāṣir al-Dīn’s father and brother so that the total length of his attachment to the family equaled twenty-five years at the time of the book’s composition. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Graves 27 records that Jazarī completed the book on the fourth day of Jumāda al-thānī h (January 16, 1206 CE), but calculations based on other manuscripts suggest a time between 595 H/1198 CE and 597 H/1200 CE. See Jazarī, Al-Jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿilm wa’lʿamal al-nāfiʿ fī ṣināʿat al-ḥiyal, 4–5; Jazarī, Al-Jāmi‘ bayna al-‘ilm wa-al-‘amal al-nāfi‘ fī ṣinā‘at al-ḥiyal, facsimile (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 1990), fol. 2a; and Rachel Ward, “Evidence for a School of Painting at the Artuqid Court,” in The Art of Syria and the Jazīra, 1100–1250, ed. Julian Raby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 74. 3. Fifteen copies survive from the early thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries, with at least two other copies produced around the same time as Istanbul, Topkapı Sarayı Library, MS A. 3472. A full list can be found in Laura Lee Schmidt, “Islamic Automata in the Absence of Wonder” (MS thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2010), 156–58. 4. For a general introduction to sajʿ, see Devin J. Stewart, “Rhymed Prose,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2002), https://​referenceworks​.brillonline​.com​/entries​/encyclopaedia​-of​-the​-quran​ /*-EQSIM ​_00359.

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5. Jazarī, Al-Jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿilm wa’l-ʿamal al-nāfiʿ fī ṣināʿat al-ḥiyal, 469. 6. Period records particularly mention public access to clocks, for example at the Jayrūn gate in Damascus. It is possible that one or more of Jazarī’s clocks were displayed as city monuments, but the current absence of evidence renders Jazarī’s pride in the prominence of the brass doors all the more striking. For a summary of medieval Islamic clocks, see Donald R. Hill, A History of Engineering in Classical and Medieval Times (London: Routledge, 2016), 232–41. 7. Ibid., 200. 8. On the historiography of ḥiyal devices, see Schmidt, “Islamic Automata.” 9. For example, Lauren Korn, “Art and Architecture of the Artuqid Courts,” in Court Cultures in the Muslim World: Seventh to Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Albrecht Fuess and Jan-Peter Hartung (New York: Routledge, 2011), 385–408; Julian Raby, ed., The Art of Syria and the Jazīra, 1100–1250 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); David J. Roxburgh, ed., Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years (London: Royal Academy of the Arts, 2005). 10. Of course, an individual might pursue each of these, although perhaps in different measure. A case in point: Ibn Sīnā’s interest in medicine extended not so much to actually treating patients (although he likely did) but to its theory and theory of practice. For a medical work that advertised only the useful fruits of the art, see Al-Mukhtār ibn al-Ḥasan ibn Buṭlān, Taqwīm al-ṣiḥḥa in Le “Taqwīm al-Ṣiḥḥa” (Tacuini Sanitatis) d’Ibn Buṭlān: Un traité medical du XIe siècle), ed. and trans. Hosam Elkhadem (Louvain: Peeters, 1990), 71. 11. Common assumptions hold that medieval artisans failed to leave textual records because they were illiterate or because they preferred to keep their knowledge secret. It is worth remembering, however, that authors had strong (and not at all harmonious) opinions on what kinds of knowledge books could make available. 12. Jazarī, Al-Jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿilm wa’l-ʿamal al-nāfiʿ fī ṣināʿat al-ḥiyal, 3. Jazarī was certainly aware of Archimedes and likely accessed Arabic versions of Philo’s Pneumatics and Hero’s Pneumatics and Automata, as well as a more recent addition to the tradition of fine technology, The Book of Ingenious Devices (Kitāb al-Ḥiyal) by the Banū Mūsā bin Shākir. See Banū Mūsā bin Shākir, The Book of Ingenious Devices (Kitāb al-Ḥiyal), trans. and annotated by Donald R. Hill (Boston: D. Reidel, 1979), 23, as well as Atilla Bır, The Book “Kitāb al-Ḥiyal” of Banū Mūsā bin Shākir, Interpreted in Sense of Modern System and Control Engineering (Istanbul: Research Center for Islamic History, Art, and Culture, 1990). 13. Jazarī, Al-Jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿilm wa’l-ʿamal al-nāfiʿ fī ṣināʿat al-ḥiyal, 4. 14. Ibid. 15. Jazarī, Al-Jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿilm wa’l-ʿamal al-nāfiʿ fī ṣināʿat al-ḥiyal, 5, trans. Donald Hill, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (Dordrecht; Boston: Reidel, 1974), 15. 16. D. Fairchild Ruggles, Islamic Gardens and Landscapes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 111–12, and T. M. P. Duggan, “Diplomatic Shock and Awe: Moving, Sometimes Speaking, Islamic Sculptures,” Al-Masaq 21, no. 3 (2009): 230.

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17. For an introduction to dahr, see Ahmad Pakatchi and Janis Esots, “Dahr (in the Qurʾān),” in Encyclopaedia Islamica, ed. Wilferd Madelung and Farhad Daftary (Leiden: Brill, 2021), http://​dx​.doi​.org​/10​.1163​/1875​-9831​_isla​_ SIM​_05000105. 18. Jazarī, Al-Jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿilm wa’l-ʿamal al-nāfiʿ fī ṣināʿat al-ḥiyal, 4. 19. Ibid., 13–15. Although a screen of wood or bronze sealed off the central doorway at the front of the structure, hiding the inner workings of the machine, modern recreations leave the back of the clock visible. 20. Ibid., 11. 21. According to Hill, these attempts reveal “the dominance of attitudes of mind conditioned by astronomical ideas. All these instruments, including the one finally adopted by al-Jazarī, resemble astrolabes, and the assumption was made that there must be a direct mathematical correlation between the solar clockwork and the instrument measuring it” (Jazarī, Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, 241). 22. Jazarī, Al-Jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿilm wa’l-ʿamal al-nāfiʿ fī ṣināʿat al-ḥiyal, 13. Tajriba might be understood as a test, practice, or experience, but Jazarī’s description of his process here evokes Ibn Sīnā’s use of tajriba to mean methodic experience, whereby, through the repeated observation of forms and intentions, one may distinguish regularities from chance; see Abū ʿAlī ibn Sīnā, Kiṭāb al-najāt min al-gharq fī bahr al-ḍalālāt, ed. M. T. Dāneshpazhūh (Tehrān: Mu’assasa intishārat va-chāb Dāneshgah-e Tehrān, 1985): 169‒170; Jules L. Janssens, “‘Experience’ (tajriba) in Classical Arabic Philosophy (al-Fārābī—Avicenna),” Quaestio 4 (2004): 53; and Dimitri Gutas, “The Empiricism of Avicenna,” Oriens 40, no. 2 (2012): 399. 23. Jazarī, Al-Jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿilm wa’l-ʿamal al-nāfiʿ fī ṣināʿat al-ḥiyal, 74. 24. Jazarī, Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, 242. 25. Margaret Graves has quite rightly advocated for the ways in which models and metaphors of craftsmanship engaged with philosophy and theology; see especially “The Intellect of the Hand,” in Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 26–58. Given the complexity of epistemological, cognitive, and physiological models put forth in the medieval Islamic world, and Jazarī’s move away from fikr (cogitation, but often associated with discursive thought), it is worth exploring how he valued the internal and external senses in relation to his craft. 26. Of this slippage, Lamia Belafrej has noted that the “image mixes two distinct viewpoints and experiences: the viewpoint of the designer who must learn to build a machine and the viewpoint of the courtly spectator who is not supposed to know the ropes or they wouldn’t be able to enjoy the water and juice spectacle of the automated slave” (“On Slavery and the Archive in Medieval Islam” [presentation at “Early History of Africa Symposium: New Narratives for a History of Connections and Brokers,” UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, January 30, 2020, available at https://​w ww​.youtube​.com​/watch​ ?v= ​ x​ 8ZAJo0r45o]). The Compendium, however, also suggests that a single person might oscillate between these two views. The question of imitative distance was also of philosophical interest. Fārābī, for example, describes how some representations might be closer to what is represented, while others further away,

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just as seeing an image of a statue is closer to seeing a human being than seeing an image of the statue in water (Alfarabi, The Political Writings: “Selected Aphorisms” and Other Texts, trans. Charles E. Butterworth [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015], 2:40). For the Arabic edition, see Abū Naṣr Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Fārābī, Kiṭāb al-Siyāsa al-Madaniyya, al-Mulaqqab bi-Mabādiʾ al-Mawjūdāt, ed. Fauzi M. Najjar (Beirut: al-Maṭbaʿa Majlis Dā’ irat al-Maʿārif al-ʿŪthmāniyya, 1927), 85. 27. Abū Naṣr Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Fārābī, Fuṣūl al-madanī: Aphorisms of the statesman, ed. with an English trans., introduction and notes by D. M. Dunlop (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 107. Ibn Sīnā divided these activities so that different psychological faculties, mapped in different ventricles of the brain, carried out distinct functions. Ibn Sīnā postulated that the intellect, in contrast, was completely disembodied; its capability was a question of habit and disposition, not one of psychology or physiology. For a concise summary of the faculties of the soul and the inner senses in the Arabic tradition, see Taneli Kukkonen, “Faculties in Arabic Philosophy,” in The Faculties: A History, ed. Dominik Perler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 66‒96. Further work would be necessary to determine whether Jazarī was also familiar with Suhrawardī’s “suspended images.” 28. On takhayyul and other terms used by Fārābī, see Nabil Matar, “Alfārābī on Imagination: With a Translation of His ‘Treatise on Poetry,’” College Literature 23, no. 1 (1996): 101–2. 29. Salim Kemal, The Poetics of Alfarabi and Avicenna (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 122‒25. 30. Oya Pancaroğlu, “Signs in the Horizon: Concepts of Image and Boundary in a Medieval Persian Cosmography,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 43 (2003): 32. 31. Ibid., 34. Jazarī also notes that his machines could be created without exterior façades; the human figures were suitable for palaces but not for mosques: Jazarī, Al-Jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿilm wa’l-ʿamal al-nāfiʿ fī ṣināʿat al-ḥiyal, 32. 32. For discussion of wonder and automata in a medieval European context, see E. R. Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), and Ittai Weinryb, The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). I would like to thank Ittai Weinryb in particular for enriching discussions on Jazarī. 33. The Qur’an records that Heaven sent down certain jinn to Suleymān so that they would work for him, creating “basins like wells and boilers built into the ground” (34:12–13). 34. One of the most important volumes in this genre is Qazwini’s The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existence. The author includes automata in the book and defines wonder (ʿajab) as “the sense of bewilderment a person feels because of his inability to understand the cause of a thing” (quoted in Persis Berlekamp, Wonder, Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011], 23). 35. Kukkonen, “Faculties in Arabic Philosophy,” 81.

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36. Perhaps the multivalence and mixed modes of representation are the product of the manuscript’s artist, or, perhaps, Jazarī was inspired by mathematician-engineers such as Hero; see Karin Tybjerg, “Hero of Alexandria’s Mechanical Geometry,” Apeiron 37, no. 4 (2004): 29–56. 37. Jazarī, Al-Jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿilm wa’l-ʿamal al-nāfiʿ fī ṣināʿat al-ḥiyal, 469–74. Jazarī’s description of the making of the doors is also valuable for the glimpse it provides into historical terminology for odd polygonal shapes, in this case comparing them to almonds and saddles. 38. Ibid., 475. For “gazing at machines,” see Weinryb, Bronze Object in the Middle Ages, esp. 169. 39. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʼ , The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity on Arithmetic and Geometry: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistles 1 and 2, trans. and ed. Nader el-Bizri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 77 (Arabic). 40. Ibid., 105‒6 (English), 77 (Arabic). 41. Abū’l Wafāʾ Būzjānī, Kitāb fī mā yaḥtāju ilayhi al-ṣāniʿ min ʿilm al-handasa [Book on the geometrical constructions necessary for the artisan], ed. Ṣāliḥ Aḥmad al-ʿAlī (Baghdad: Jāmiʿat Baghdād, Markaz Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿIlmā al-ʿArabī, 1979), 152. Wasma’a Khalid Chorbachi brought this work to the attention of art historians in “Beyond the Symmetries of Islamic Geometrical Patterns: The Science of Practical Geometry and the Process of Islamic Design” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1989). See also Elaheh Kheirandish, “An Early Tradition in Practical Geometry: The Telling Lines of Unique Arabic and Persian Sources,” in The Arts of Ornamental Geometry: A Persian Compendium on Similar and Complementary Interlocking Figures, ed. Gülru Necipoğlu (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 120‒22. 42. Abū’l Wafāʾ Būzjānī, Mā yaḥtāju ilayhi al-ṣānīʿ min ʿilm al-handasa, 146. 43. Ibid., 144. 44. Jazarī, Al-Jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿilm wa’l-ʿamal al-nāfiʿ fī ṣināʿat al-ḥiyal, 470, 472. See also Gülru Necipoğlu’s discussion of Jazarī’s Compendium in relation to the arts of ornamental geometry in The Topkapi Scroll—Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture (Santa Monica: Getty Research Center, 1995), 150–52. 45. The presence of pin points or compass marks would demonstrate that indeed this is the way the lattice work was built. For a summary of her findings in medieval account of geometric construction, see Chorbachi, “Beyond the Symmetries,” 255–304, esp. 285. 46. Ikhwān al-Ṣafā, Epistles of the Brethren, 119‒120 (English).

Chapter 9

Cave and Camera Shades of Loss in the Library Cave of Dunhuang

Michelle McCoy

An Ambivalent Icon A photograph taken in 1908 has long emblematized the so-called Library Cave of Dunhuang 敦煌,1 a hidden cache of medieval documents and artworks in modern northwest China whose unsealing around 1900 continues to transform our understanding of Eurasian history to this day (fig. 9.1).2 In the photograph, a European man dressed in a corduroy suit crouches intently over a document lit, rather alarmingly, by an open flame. Stacks and bundles of manuscripts tower overhead, partially blocking a mural painted on the wall behind them. The two treetops visible in this wall painting, with their carefully articulated branches and leaves, contrast sharply with the mass of documents settled into one another behind the crouching man. These painted trees hint that the space had been repurposed as a storage facility in some era prior to the photograph’s making. According to popular lore, the facts of the photograph would seem to be straightforward. Produced by Charles Nouette (1869–1910), the

Fig. 9.1 Paul Pelliot in the Library Cave (Cave 17), Mogao Grottoes, Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China. Photo: Charles Nouette, 1908. From Paul Pelliot, Les grottes de Touenhouang: Peintures et sculptures bouddhiques des epoques des Wei, des T’ang et des Song (Paris: Librairie Paul Geuthner, 1920), 2: plate 368.

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photographer on the 1906 French expedition to Central Asia, it shows this great collection in its location of discovery, roughly nine centuries after it had been sealed and before its contents were dispersed around the world. The man in the photograph is Paul Pelliot (1878– 1945), a young sinologist and the expedition leader. He is scrutinizing the materials he would soon remove by the thousands, thereby giving France possession of one of the world’s most celebrated Silk Road collections. Though the French team were not the first foreigners to arrive at Dunhuang to pursue archaeological research and acquire cultural relics, they were the first to document the grottoes extensively with a camera. This photograph is part of that effort. Complications emerge, however, when we consider the physical and historical conditions of Nouette’s photograph. The Library Cave (Cave 17 in the current numbering system) is one of many hundreds of Buddhist cave shrines carved into the cliff at Mogao 莫高 between approximately the fourth and fourteenth centuries CE. The Library Cave was carved not directly into the east-facing cliff like most of the other grottoes but rather as a small, roughly 8.5-by-8-foot side chamber on the north wall of another much larger grotto (Cave 16), meaning that it receives indirect natural light.3 These conditions would have made the scene of Pelliot reading in the Library Cave difficult if not impossible to capture without careful staging.4 The photograph was produced in at least two versions, both of which suggest that the single open flame served as Pelliot’s reading light for the intensive survey he carried out over multiple weeks within the cramped space.5 Moreover, the photograph’s documentary, archaeological value is limited by the fact that the Library Cave contents had already been disturbed by the time of Pelliot’s 1908 visit. They were moved shortly after their discovery by the Daoist priest Wang 王道士 (ca. 1850–1931) and again during a 1907 visit by Aurel Stein’s British expedition team, which was the first to leave Dunhuang with large quantities of documents and paintings.6 Despite these issues, the photograph gained broad currency shortly after the French expedition concluded. It has remained an icon not only of the Library Cave and Dunhuang but also of the Great Game and the Silk Road, generally. Why is this so? Perhaps it is because the photograph, rather than presenting documentary truth, mobilizes

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opposing and firmly held views on this consequential era with multivalent efficacy: it catches in the act either a state-sponsored bandit or a sharp-witted savant; it either advances the interests of empire or prefigures the loss of national cultural heritage. To this way of thinking, the photograph’s power lies in its position at the intersection of discovery with destruction and transformation. While this interpretation may characterize international reception of the photograph over the decades, it does not sufficiently address its visual aspect: that is, what it does as a picture. To begin to examine the photograph as a picture, I turn to the deeper history of loss into which the French expedition team stepped when Pelliot was photographed within what had once been a Buddhist memorial chapel. What emerges is the shadow, revealing an unlikely link between camera and cave.

Hongbian’s Shadow Image Long before the Library Cave, having been filled with documents and artworks, was sealed in approximately the early eleventh century, the original chamber served as a memorial shrine and reliquary for the high-ranking monastic official known as Hongbian 洪辯 (d.862). We know this in part because a stele commemorating the conferral of the office of Dusengtong 都僧統 upon Hongbian by the Tang-dynasty government in 851 was still installed in the chamber’s west wall when the Library Cave was reopened. Research eventually revealed that Hongbian had sponsored Cave 16, the vast devotional grotto within which the shrine is situated.7 The design of the chamber helps us further understand its function as a memorial shrine for a high-ranking monk. The full composition of the wall painting partly visible in the photograph of Pelliot includes two attendant figures gesturing toward the center of the tableau: a young laywoman in masculine attire, holding cloth and a staff, and a Buddhist nun bearing a large round painted fan (fig. 9.2).8 A water vessel and shoulder bag hang from stubby lower branches of the trees. The trees themselves bend inward as they reach upward, leaving an arched blank space in the center of the composition. An earthen platform centering

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on the painted tableau extends onto the chamber floor. One side of the platform is painted with of a pair of monk’s shoes, indicating that this platform is where Hongbian’s sculpted icon would have originally been installed in a posture of seated meditation.9 A monk seated under trees in meditation is one of the most common visual formulas for representing the Buddha, recalling his moment of awakening under the Bodhi Tree.10 Instead of the assembly of disciples and deities one would expect to see flanking a scene of the Buddha, however, here we encounter attendants in period dress. Instead of the Buddha’s supramundane lotus throne and jeweled canopy, the personal effects of a medieval Chinese monk feature prominently. Thus, while

Fig. 9.2 North (main) wall of Hongbian’s mortuary shrine (Cave 17), Mogao Grottoes, Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China, ca. 851–62 CE. Photo: James Lo, 1943–1944. Lo Archive 017-1&2, as designed in Visualizing Dunhuang (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 6:281. Lo Archive images © Trustees of Princeton University.

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the shrine’s setting (seated meditation under trees) invokes the epochal moment of the Buddha’s awakening, the details (personal attendants and objects) simultaneously pull us into historical time. Although extant memorial shrine grottoes at Dunhuang are relatively few, evidence indicates that they consistently feature this kind of layering of the epochal and the historical, demonstrating the importance of this temporal device for “enlivening” the icon.11 Important information about the medieval conceptualization of mortuary shrines also emerges from issues of naming. In the modern classification system, such shrines at Dunhuang are known as yingku 影窟 (literally, shadow cave).12 “Shadow” here refers to a painted or sculpted portrait icon, various terms for which contain the graph for shadow (ying 影; also translated as reflection), such as “shadow image” (yingxiang 影像). A range of other terms was used for Buddhist mortuary images, both painted and sculpted, and while they are interchangeably translated as image, portrait, or icon, the distinct mode of perception invoked by the shadow is significant.13 The likening of a mortuary icon to a shadow speaks to a history of merging pictorial representation with optical phenomena. A legendary shadow image, generated when the Buddha himself leapt into the wall of a cave in Nagarahāra, near modern Jalalabad, Afghanistan, counts among the tradition’s many miraculous icons.14 Here, the shadow was treated as a type of naturally or spontaneously occurring representation that would not exist without specific, often supramundane conditions and/or powers of discernment. The shadow’s character as authentic but contingent exemplifies foundational Buddhist teachings on impermanence, mutual dependency, and the illusory nature of reality.15 These teachings, rather than leading to an eschewal of images, run parallel to the ceaseless profusion of Buddhist pictorial art. Constituting both representation and physical trace, the miraculous shadow image of the Buddha was reproduced widely, including in various caves at Dunhuang, where this ephemeral, apparitional image was fixed and conventionalized in period-specific form.16 The perhaps seemingly contradictory situation presented by the shadow image—the promotion of truthful representation within a religion that regards all representation as illusory—may help us understand

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the design of the Dunhuang monastic mortuary shrines, including Cave 17. On the one hand, encomia to statues and paintings representing the deceased (which frequently indicate that such icons were meant to be viewed) emphasize the skill of the artisan in producing a faithful likeness.17 On the other hand, archaeological and contextual evidence suggests that the overall design of Dunhuang’s shadow caves was intended to produce a certain optical destabilization. We read in an early written description of the Library Cave’s discovery that “at midnight, the Daoist priest Wang, together with a certain Yang 楊 [an assistant], opened up the wall and found a door that was shorter than a person and had been sealed off with mud bricks.” Breaking through the bricks, they discovered a small cave filled with “countless bundles [of documents] wrapped in white cloth.”18 This original “door” to the memorial shine (Cave 17) is positioned several feet above the ground level of Cave 16. This corresponds with the shrine’s elevated floor, which itself echoes the elevation of the sculpted Buddha assembly in the main chamber of Cave 16. The rectangular opening into Hongbian’s shrine would have originally centered on the seated sculptural icon, framed by its leafy painted backdrop. Unlike most decorated grottoes at Dunhuang, the shrine does not contain painting all over. It is instead limited to the sculpted icon, the wall behind it, and portions of the meditation platform. This limited decoration, visible from a frontal perspective outside the cave, emphasizes the function of the opening as a framing device rather than a physical passageway (fig. 9.3). In its original configuration, Hongbian’s shrine seems to have adopted a set of design constraints similar to those discussed by Eugene Y. Wang for roughly contemporaneous sculptural icons of the Buddha that also feature architectural frames. In addition to the enforced frontal standpoint, these contraints include a narrowed visual field and controlled distance between icon and beholder. Such effects, Wang argues, “[subordinate] the plasticity of sculpture,” rendering it an “illusory, apparitional, and provisional” image further destabilized by variable light conditions.19 The question of how and whether Dunhuang art was lit (and viewed) is a matter of ongoing scholarly debate.20 But any form of illumination for Hongbian’s shrine would have been, by modern

Fig. 9.3 Reconstructed mortuary shrine of Hongbian (Cave 17), view from Cave 16, north corridor wall, Mogao Grottoes, Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China, ca. 851–62 CE. Photo: Dunhuang Academy.

standards, irregular, inconstant, and dim. Gazing through the shrine’s precisely framed opening into a multimedia tableau, a ninth-century viewer would encounter a dynamic interplay between flatness and depth, presence and illusion, produced, to a significant degree, by the presence and movement of actual shadows. In broad terms, the form of the Dunhuang shadow caves indicates that the mechanics of enlivening a mortuary icon depended not only on ritual practice, personal faith, or even pictorial resemblance but also on a few deceptively simple staging devices. Accordingly, recognizing the role of these staging devices asks us to make an analytic shift from the discrete, stable, or solid volumes that often condition discussions of premodern sculpture toward considerations of framing, distancing,

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and light effects. Shifting our focus from sculptural volumes to staging and installation helps account for the fact that the shadow cave designates multimedia works that encompass both two- and three-dimensional formats. It also brings us back to photography, a medium equally concerned with framing, distancing, and lighting. When Pelliot visited Dunhuang, photographic technology had been present in China for more than half a century. Buddhist-related pictorial terms were applied to the medium, including “shadow image” itself, and Chinese Buddhists by the 1940s were employing photography in the making of mortuary and deathbed icons.21 That a carefully, even solemnly staged photograph of an explorer in a onetime Buddhist memorial shrine attained emblematic status is, perhaps, no accident, given their shared stake in the representational possibilities of the shadow and the cave as a space for its manipulation.

Entangled Encavements In 1965, long after the Library Cave’s contents were fully dispersed and the site had come under the management of a domestic agency, a statue in another cave was identified as Hongbian’s mortuary icon and returned to its putative original position (fig. 9.3).22 Since then, Cave 17 has become a key stop on any visit to the Mogao grottoes, now a major tourist destination. Today, the shrine reconstructs for multitudes of visitors a vision of the cave before two consequential moments of disruption: the transformation of a medieval mortuary shrine into a storehouse for documents and artworks due to reasons that are still uncertain and the infamous modern dispersal of those materials. Positioned once again between his painted attendants, modest possessions hanging from the painted trees, Hongbian’s icon reactivates the original temporal structure of the shrine, layering the epochal with the historical. Thus reactivated, this compound structure is now entangled with another age, that of the explorers, scholars, and Daoist priest who, for a consequential moment, occupied the long-deceased monk’s once-and-future domain. Echoing medieval encomia, present-day commentators frequently praise the realism of the finely sculpted polychrome earthen statue,

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which presents Hongbian in a seemingly suspended state of animation. Of course, such praise is not exclusively, or perhaps even primarily, provoked by the medieval staging techniques considered above; the global circulation of various official photographs of the shrine—new, largely secular emblems of a well-stewarded cultural heritage site—conditions how it is perceived today. For example, portrait-style photographs of Hongbian magnify the refinement of the sculpture and the shrine’s affective qualities through the use of high-contrast lighting or close-up, three-quarters viewpoints. Operating in a radically different mode, a recent virtual-reality model allows anyone with internet access to “enter” the shrine themselves and inspect it inch by inch. Its mechanical, swiveling views and ultra-uniform lighting present a very different experience than that of the original physical space.23 Photographic mediation of how the Library Cave is perceived was, arguably, inaugurated by the 1908 photograph of Pelliot bent over a burning candle. As its own kind of “shadow image,” Nouette’s photograph prompts reflection on the relationship it also presents between authenticity and contingency. For example, the uneven vertical contour of its shaded right third simultaneously establishes a tightly enclosed space, hints at the possible presence of the photographer, and even, for those with sufficient knowledge of the site, locates Pelliot at the north side of an east-facing grotto at a particular time of day. Such observations, drawn from the light and shadow captured within this small desert cave, might distract from questions surrounding the existence of the photograph in multiple versions and the techniques by which they were produced. Or perhaps these concerns simply do not matter very much: the scene itself was sufficient to ensure its own success. It is tempting to imagine how Pelliot and his team would have staged the photograph in the Library Cave had they known about its ninth-century installation and staging. Would they have responded to its goals and techniques or seen them as relevant in any way to their own? During the consequential weeks of the French expedition to Dunhuang in 1908, Nouette, in fact, photographed what was likely a mortuary shrine for an unidentified monk whose icon has since been lost (fig. 9.4).24 Much smaller than Hongbian’s shrine, it was captioned in the catalogue of Nouette’s Dunhuang photographs as simply “statue in niche to the left

Fig. 9.4 Memorial shrine (sculpture not extant) in Cave 103, antechamber south wall, Mogao Grottoes, Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China. Photo: Charles Nouette, 1908. From Paul Pelliot, Les grottes de Touen-houang: Peintures et sculptures bouddhiques des epoques des Wei, des T’ang et des Song (Paris: Librairie Paul Geuthner, 1920), 2: plate 97.

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[i.e., south], at the grotto entrance.”The soft multilayered juxtaposition of light and dark in the picture of this since-dismantled shrine captures some of the optical drama that we might now expect both from Nouette as a photographer and from the Dunhuang shadow cave as a form. On the surface, the connection between the photograph of Pelliot and the reconstructed Hongbian shrine—emblems of two distinct moments in the ramified history of a small desert grotto—would seem to be straightforward: the photograph documents what became of the shrine. In terms of medium and historical function, they would seem to be fully distinct: the photograph is a documentary record, while the shrine is a sacred memorial. But, as this essay has shown, nudging them out of their stable art-historical categories and taking a transhistorical view allows us to examine, in new ways, how each works as a representation, revealing unlikely points of connection. We see how each work sits at the intersection of competing values—truth and illusion, discovery and loss—and exploits the unique representational possibilities of the shadow and the cave to fix or reproduce such qualities as authenticity and intimacy. Produced in a medium that the modern viewer might link more readily with the shadow, the Pelliot photograph invites us to think of Buddhist grotto shrines in terms of scenography and optical effect. The Hongbian icon, in turn, reveals the power of the Chinese Buddhist “shadow image” to represent the truth of the lie in all representation, whether statue or photograph. Notes

I am grateful to volume editors Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler; to Patricia Berger, Josh Ellenbogen, Robert Sharf, Michelle H. Wang, and Alan Yeung; and to two anonymous reviewers for their comments and critique on drafts of this essay. I thank Marine Cabos-Brullé and Paul Copp for their advice, and Dora C. Y. Ching, He Hongjun, and He Yulei for generous assistance with images. Any errors remain mine. 1. In modern usage, Dunhuang refers to both the city, which was established in the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE), and to multiple Buddhist grotto sites throughout the Hexi Corridor at present stewarded by the Dunhuang Academy. This essay focuses exclusively on Mogao 莫高, by far the largest and longest-active site, situated some fifteen kilometers southeast of the city. 2. Debate persists about the date of and reasons for the sealing of the Library Cave. For recent proposals, see Rong Xinjiang, Eighteen Lectures on Dunhuang,

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trans. Imre Galambos (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 109–76, and Imaeda Yoshiro, “The Provenance and Character of the Dunhuang Documents,” Memoirs of the Toyo Bunko 66 (2008): 81–102. 3. Aurel Stein remarks on the “very poor” lighting in the Library Cave in Marc Aurel Stein, Serindia: Detailed Report of Explorations in Central Asia and Westernmost China (Oxford: Clarendon, 1921), 2:821; archived by the National Institute of Informatics, Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books, http://​dsr​.nii​.ac​.jp​/toyo​ bunko​/VIII​-5​-B2​-9​/V​-2​/page​/0307​.html​.en. 4. On Nouette’s photographic practice at Dunhuang, see Marine Cabos, “Seeing Through Landscape: French Photographic Archives of China (1840s–1930s)” (PhD diss., SOAS University of London, 2016), 164–211, and Sun Zhijun 孫志軍, “1907–1949 nian de Mogao ku sheying” 1907–1949年的莫高窟攝影, Dunhuang yanjiu 敦煌研究 2 (2017): 36–38. The only other photograph in circulation of the Library Cave contents in situ was produced by Stein’s team after heavy manipulation. See Susan Whitfield, “Aurel Stein at Dunhuang,” Silk Road Digressions, March 1, 2021, https://​silkroaddigressions​.com​/2021​/03​/01​/aurel​-stein​-at​-dunhuang. 5. The large-scale removal of materials by Stein’s team would have made it at least physically possible to examine the Library Cave collection within the niche itself. In his expedition diary, Paul Pelliot writes of doing so but does not discuss the physical process in detail (Carnets de route, 1906–1908 [Paris: Les Indes savants, 2008], 278). 6. See Stein, Serindia, 2:813. On the initial dispersals of the Library Cave’s contents, see Rong, Eighteen Lectures on Dunhuang, 79–108. 7. That the stele constituted part of the original shrine was not understood until later. Stein, for example, reasoned that the cave’s small size, along with its poor lighting, made it unlikely that such a monument was originally meant to be installed there (Serindia, 2:821). On Hongbian, see Ma Shichang 馬世長, “Guanyu Dunhuang Cangjing dong de jige wenti” 關於敦煌藏經洞的幾個問題, Wenwu 文 物 12 (1978): 21–33. 8. On these figures, see Ma, “Guanyu Dunhuang Cangjing dong,” 23. 9. Ibid., 23. 10. Trees also feature in scenes of the Buddha’s physical death and entry into final nirvana, although in such scenes he is depicted lying down. 11. On the “living” Buddhist icon in China and Japan, see Bernard Faure, “The Buddhist Icon and the Modern Gaze,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 768–813; on mortuary icons, see Griffith Foulk and Robert H. Sharf, “On the Ritual Use of Ch’an Portraiture in Medieval China,” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 7 (1993): 149–219, and Robert H. Sharf, “The Idolization of Enlightenment: On the Mummification of Ch’an Masters in Medieval China,” History of Religions 32, no. 1 (1992): 1–31. 12. The term yingku relates to yingtang 影堂 (shadow hall), a common medieval term for mortuary structures. On Hongbian’s shrine as a yingku, see Ma, “Guanyu Dunhuang cangjing dong.” For a survey of the cave type at Dunhuang, see Zhang Jingfeng 張景峰, “Dunhuang Mogaoku de yingku ji yingxiang: You xin faxian de di 476 ku tanqi,” 敦煌莫高窟的影窟及影像: 由新發現的第476窟談 起, Dunhuang xue jikan 敦煌學輯刊 3 (2006): 107–15.

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13. On the importance of mirroring, shadowing, and related phenomena in Chinese Buddhist art, see Eugene Y. Wang, Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 238– 316. For other terms used in Dunhuang encomia for mortuary icons, see Zheng Binglin 鄭炳林, “Dunhuang xieben miaozhen zan suojian zhentang ji qi xiangguan wenti yanjiu” 敦煌寫本邈真贊所見真堂及其相關問題研究, Dunhuang yanjiu 敦煌研究 6 (2006), 64–73. 14. See Eugene Wang, “The Shadow Image in the Cave: Discourse on Icons,” in Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook, ed. Wendy Swartz et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 405–27. 15. See Wang, “Shadow Image in the Cave.” 16. For a recent study, see Zhang Xiaogang 張小剛, Dunhuang Fojiao gantong hua yanjiu 敦煌佛教感通畫研究 (Lanzhou: Gansu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2015), 35–38, 72–74, 219–23. 17. See Zheng, “Dunhuang xieben miaozhen zan.” 18. Postdating the Library Cave’s unsealing by more than four decades, this account is based on local folklore: Xie Zhiliu 謝稚柳, “Dunhuang shishi ji” 敦煌 石室記 (1949). Translation modified from Rong, Eighteen Lectures on Dunhuang, 83. 19. Wang, Shaping the Lotus Sutra, 279. 20. For a skeptical take, See Robert Sharf, “Art in the Dark: The Ritual Context of Buddhist Caves in Western China,” in The Art of Merit: Studies in Buddhist Art and Its Conservation, ed. David Park, Kuenga Wangmo, and Sharon Cather (London: Archetype, 2013) 38–65. 21. For a preliminary study of the role of Buddhism in the history of photography in China, with consideration of photographic icons, see Francesca Tarocco, “The Wailing Arhats: Buddhism, Photography, and Resistance in Modern China,” in Park, Wangmo, and Cather, Art of Merit, 113–23. For a history of photographic terms in Chinese, see Yi Gu, “What’s in a Name? Photography and the Reinvention of Visual Truth in China, 1840–1911,” Art Bulletin 95, no. 1 (2013): 120–38. 22. On this process of reidentification and reinstallation, during which sacred relics were found inside the icon identified as that of Hongbian, see Ma, “Guanyu Dunhuang Cangjing dong,” 27–28. 23. Digital Dunhuang, Cave 17, E-Dunhuang (2015–present), https://​w ww​.e​ -dunhuang​.com​/cave​/10​.0001​/0001​.0001​.0017. 24. For brief discussion, see Sha Wutian 沙武田, “Bo Xihe Dunhuang tulu tuban shuoming, di 2 juan, tu 97,” ‘伯希和敦煌圖錄’圖版說明第2卷圖 97, Silu yanjiu ziliao ji 絲路研究資料集, http://​dsr​.nii​.ac​.jp​/reference​/pelliot​/entry​/2​-097​.html​.zh.

Chapter 10

Mourning the Loss of Works / Praising Their Absence A Response

Peter Geimer The past is unobservable. We have heard about it, read about it, remember it, or deal with its surviving legacies. But none of these forms of remembrance and imagination restores the past in its totality. What we face of history remains fragmentary, blurred, unfinished. It is, therefore, no coincidence that Jaś Elsner in his essay on the “dreamwork of positivism” reminds us of the famous last pages of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity (1764)—a farewell scene. In the following considerations, I would like to stay with Winckelmann for a while, for his History of the Art of Antiquity—certainly one of the pioneering texts of our discipline—reveals a basic structure of art-historical work: the interference of loss and writing, the peculiar tension between mourning the loss of so many works of art and praising (rather secretly) the productive effects of their absence.

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On the last pages of his major work Winckelmann takes leave of the artifacts of antiquity, whose fate he had followed until their final decay: “Just as a beloved stands on the seashore and follows with tearful eyes her departing sweetheart, with no hope of seeing him again, and believes she can glimpse even in the distant sail the image of her lover—so we, like the beloved, have as it were only a shadowy outline of the subject of our desires remaining.”1 The scene recalls the famous history of Dibutade: Pliny says that she invented the art of drawing when, before the departure of her lover, she carved his silhouette in the stone of a wall. For even the distant sail shows the last image of the vanishing person as a “shadowy outline of the subject of our desires.” The farewell of 1764, however, is not about the invention of drawing but about the later invention of art history. Instead of producing a piece of art, the art historian fixes a silhouette that she “believes she can glimpse” in the distance. “Aus den übrig gebliebenen Werken” (By reference to the remaining works of antiquity), Winckelmann wanted to develop the history of art, “den Ursprung, das Wachsthum, die Veränderung und den Fall derselben” (the origin, growth, change, and fall of art).2 And he knew that such a history of art could only be written as a ghost story: “In this, we often are like individuals who wish to converse with spirits and believe they can see something where nothing exists.”3 Winkelmann’s sophisticated scale of loss also includes the last category the editors of this volume recall—next to destroyed, disappeared, and lost, the most irritating one: never were. “What is no more,” Winckelmann notes in his Sendschreiben von der Reise eines Liebhabers der Künste, “is as if it had never been.”4 And even this state of nonexistence is uncertain: the ultimate degree of unrecognizability is reached when not even disappearance can be proven. As Claudia Brittenham puts it very aptly: “A lost object requires a particular set of conditions to come into (non) being: someone has to have noticed the object before it disappeared in order to register its loss, and that knowledge has to have endured where the object did not.”5 Where neither visible traces nor written testimonials of these traces have been preserved, it is impossible to decide what has disappeared and what has never existed. Winckelmann suggests a vivid metaphor for this state of complete oblivion: less of those works remains in the memory “than the trace of a ship in

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the water.”6 In Winckelmann’s foundational text, we encounter what Brittenham calls the “the loss to art history”—works disappeared from the world and sometimes even disappeared from language, into a historiographic vacuum in which even our imagining of ghosts does not find much to do.7 In his apology of loss, Winckelmann went even further, for the destruction of antiquity effects not only disappeared works of art, not only physically damaged torsi or ruins, but also the presence of supposedly intact objects. In Winckelmann’s eyes, the ideal of art had disappeared from the world and could not be easily revived, even when looking at surviving and well-preserved works.8 When he described that farewell on the seashore, art, according to his own calculations, had been gone for more than 1500 years. The famous idea of imitating ancient works—programmatically formulated in his Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works (1756)—is no longer mentioned in the History of the Art of Antiquity. Art historians are “wie schlecht abgefundene Erben” (are like badly compensated heirs).9 To his famous praise of the Laocoön, Winckelmann adds the assurance that such art was no longer possible in 1764: “Wir wissen, daß man dieses Werk schon im Alterthume allen Gemälden und Statuen vorziehen wollte, und also verdienet es bey der niedrigern Nachwelt, die nichts in der Kunst demselben zu vergleichen hervorgebracht hat, um desto größere Aufmerksamkeit und Bewunderung” (Even in antiquity this work was preferred above all paintings and statues and accordingly it merits from lesser posterity, which has produced nothing comparable to it in art, all the more attention and admiration).10 Yet it was precisely in its integrity that the statue of the Laocoön testified to the degree of loss for, as Winckelmann points out, the sculpture was only preserved to remind us of the absence of all those works that had been mutilated and destroyed. Mourning loss is, however, only one aspect of art history. In their introductory statement, Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler recall a momentous dialectic: the “dynamics of loss, destruction, and nonexistence both haunt and animate” our understanding of art history.11 Loss, as Kristopher Kersey puts it, “can be both aesthetically pleasing and terrifying at once.”12 Moreover, there are artifacts whose future loss was obvious to their producers from the beginning, as Danielle B. Joyner

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demonstrates using the example of medieval gardens, which were “fleeting sites” that “were never intended to endure.”13 In Winckelmann’s case, the idea itself suggests that the loss of works, so vividly lamented by the author, was less an obstacle to their art-historical description than it was their positive condition. It is true: Winckelmann’s text ends in the spirit of mourning. But it is the mourning of an author, whom the irreplaceable loss of his subject had just made an author. It was the passing away of art that created both the necessity and the conditions for its description. Twenty years after Winckelmann, the German writer, historian, and philosopher Johann Gottlieb Herder recalls this dialectic with astonishing frankness: “It is sad and eternally irreplaceable, but perhaps good that the barbarians destroyed much of them [the art works of antiquity]. The quantity could drive us mad and oppress us.”14 Thus, Winckelmann’s basic work conjures an origin of art that was withdrawn forever and to which, for this very reason, the text could refer incessantly. Consequently, his History of the Art of Antiquity could become a model for two quite opposite ways of dealing with the past: in Elsner’s words, “empiricism and sober archeology,” on the one hand, and the unleashing of “pure fantasy” and the “vividness of our imaginations,” on the other.15 But let us make the picture even more complex. The loss of works is only one aspect of art-historical practice. “In loss, all is not lost,” Fricke and Kumler rightly note.16 Something survives. Architecture, for example, is perishable, as Michele Bacci states, “but site-bound holiness was—and is—indestructible, when supported by memory.”17 And besides the memory of lost objects, there are, of course, also the physical remains of the objects themselves. Lena Liepe gives us the vivid example of St. Lucius’s skull in Roskilde Cathedral: “The meaning of the bone resides in its materiality; it is not a representational sign that stands for something else, it is the body that it refers to.”18 The mere physical persistence of those objects makes them appear as testimonials of another time in the present. As such, they are present and absent, near and far at the same time. The relic is a good example of the persistence but also of the unstable status of historical objects. They resist, but it is not easy to decide

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who or what exactly lives on in them. In Liepe’s example of the skull of St. Lucius, it makes a significant difference whether the object is believed to actually be the skull of the saint or if it is the skull of an arbitrary, anonymous person since only the relic recognized as authentic promises a connection to the afterworld and the possibility of wonders. This difference between relic and anonymous corporeal remnant, however, is not immediately visible; it requires an additional act of identification and authentication. The undeniable physical presence of such relics thus corresponds simultaneously to the extremely unstable status of their meaning. They are equally intrusive and enigmatic, undeniable as remains and, at the same time, ambiguous. In his essay “Resonance and Wonder,” Stephen Greenblatt discusses this connection using a hat belonging to Cardinal Wolsey as an example.19 The hat is displayed in a small glass case in the library of Christ Church College in Oxford. Greenblatt writes: “The peregrinations of Wolsey’s hat suggest that cultural artifacts do not stay still, that they exist in time, and that they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.”20 Greenblatt then, however, proceeds to describe the hat as “a trivial relic,” as only a tiny element in a complex symbolic construction that originally marked the transformation of Wolsey from a butcher’s son to a prince of the Church. . . . Tiny indeed—it may already seem that I have made much more of this trivial relic than it deserves. But I am fascinated by transmigrations of the kind I have sketched here—from theatricalized rituals to the stage to the university library or museum—because they seem to reveal something critically important about the textual relics with which my profession is obsessed. They enable us to glimpse the social process through which objects, gestures, rituals, and phrases are fashioned and moved from one zone of display to another. The display cases with which I am most involved—books—characteristically conceal this process, so that we have a misleading impression of fixity and little sense of the historical transactions through which the great texts we study have been fashioned.21

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Greenblatt begins with an object, “a bit of red cloth stitched together,” but then quickly turns to written sources, to “great texts,” documents familiar to his own profession.22 What interests Greenblatt is the cascade of attributions, the ways in which an object changes its meaning in the light of its changing attributes. But what could we say about the object itself? Is it “nothing”? Simply a hollow shell that molds itself as required to the shape of every conceivable content? The aura of relics is neither in the things nor in the sum of their changing attributions. Rather, its sphere is a space of the imagination that mediates between the object and its attributions. Of course, dealing with historical works and objects requires “symbolic constructions.” But something about the objects escapes from this construction, be it only in their mute existence as material remains. Lamentations about the irretrievable loss of the past are joined by voices that conjure up the exact opposite dynamic: the superabundance and obtrusiveness of our historic legacy. A century after Winckelmann, Friedrich Nietzsche’s attention was directed not to the lack of preserved testimonies but to their excess; the insistence of a past that does not want to disappear for, according to Nietzsche, the past does not necessarily have to be searched for; it also appears unasked and troubles our present as a ghost: “It is astonishing: the moment, here in a wink, gone in a wink, nothing before and nothing after, returns nevertheless as a spectre to disturb the calm of a later moment.”23 Interestingly, Nietzsche uses the same word as Winckelmann: Gespenst (spirit, specter). But while Winckelmann thinks of the ghostly image that the (art) historian believes they see in the distance, Nietzsche refers to a past that returns of its own accord. Where Winckelmann realizes that the past is becoming increasingly distant, Nietzsche reminds us of an equally unassailable truth: that one cannot get rid of the past. Water—recall Winckelmann’s metaphor of fluidity that cannot be imprinted with a permanent trace—now appears as a source of excessive flooding: “Historical knowledge floods in ever anew from inexhaustible springs, the alien and disconnected throngs about, memory opens all its gates and is still not opened wide enough.”24 Even more, Nietzsche reminds us that the excess of the past is not a phenomenon that we endure passively;

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in our practice as historians, we constantly produce this excess and keep it going. Life is threatened by the danger of being destroyed by history. According to Nietzsche, the only thing that helps against the past’s menace is the power of forgetting. Too little—too much; complete oblivion—intrusive presence; antiquarian loss—antiquarian excess. The essays in this volume, each in its own way, demonstrate that these poles address only the extremes of historical reconstruction work. As a rule, (art) historians deal with sources, artifacts, relics that threaten neither to disappear without trace nor to flood the present as an excessive surplus. Most procedures of historical reconstruction oscillate between these poles; they work on the appropriation of the past and, at the same time, manifest the experience of its unavailability. Ghosts are the trademark of art history. The objects dealt with in the contributions to this volume demonstrate this double determination: a wooden lintel from the city of Kabah that burned but survives in the shape of a drawing (Brittenham); Buddhist mortuary portraits in medieval China as shadows that reveal the Buddha in his absence (McCoy); a manuscript from which miniatures were cut out and later returned (Drimmer); a relic that survives outside its reliquary (Liepe); the fragmented Buddhist stupa of Amaravati and a number of meta-stupas that might (or might not) have replicated it (Elsner); the destruction and indestructability of the Temple in Jerusalem (Bacci); the loss of ninth-century gardens and their survival in the shape of lines and inscriptions drawn on parchment (Joyner); the lost mechanical creations of Abū al-ʿizz ibn Ismaʾ īl ibn al-Razzāz al-Jazarī and their descriptions and depictions in The Compendium on the Theory and Practice of the Mechanical Arts (MacMurdie). What Georges Didi-Huberman wrote about the dual purpose of the trace seems to me to be characteristic for all these surviving artifacts. The trace is driven by a constant oscillation between presence and absence, proximity and distance: Le processus d’empreinte est-il contact de l’origine ou bien perte de l’origine? Manifeste-t-il l’authenticité de la présence (comme processus de contact) ou bien, au contraire, la perte d’unicité qu’entraîne sa possibilité de reproduction ? Produit-il l’unique

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ou le disséminé? L’auratique ou le sériel? Le ressemblant ou bien le dissemblable? . . . La décision ou le hasard? Is the process of imprinting the contact of the origin or is it a loss of origin? Does it manifest the authenticity of something present (as a process of contact) or, on the contrary, the loss of uniqueness that corresponds to the possibility of reproduction? Does it produce the unique or the disseminated? The auratic or the serial? The resemblance or the dissimilarity? . . . Intention and decision or chance?25 As I see it, the challenge of doing art history is to preserve the unrest that results from this constant oscillation, that is, to prevent any fixation, be it the fixation of absence and loss or the fixation of presence and liveliness. Yes, it is true: medieval manuscripts “are not distant at all,” they occur to us in a certain “proximity.”26 But at the same their proximity is ambiguous since they are the remains of a time that is not ours. Yes, it is true: historical documents are “capable of bringing inanimate material to life.”27 But at the same time this “life” is ambivalent, rather more “undead” than “alive.” Yes, it is true: objects (like bones) persist. But do they “speak to us”?28 Are they not equally meaningful and mute? The works survive but they do not mean for us. They are telling, but they do not communicate.

Notes

1. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, The History of the Art of Antiquity, trans. Henry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006), 351. 2. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterhums (Dresden: Walther, 1764), x; trans. Mallgrave, History of the Art of Antiquity, 71. 3. Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, 351. 4. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Sendschreiben von der Reise eines Liebhabers der Künste nach Rom an Herrn Baron von Riedesel, in Briefe, ed. Walter Rehm, vol. 4 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1957), 31 (translation mine). 5. Claudia Brittenham, “John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Lintel of Kabah,” this volume, 42. 6. Winckelmann, Sendschreiben, 31. 7. Claudia Brittenham, “John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Lintel of Kabah,” this volume, 44.

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8. On this point, Martin Heidegger later followed Winckelmann. According to Heidegger, in his essay “Origin of the Work of Art,” even well-preserved works of antiquity “are no longer what they were. They themselves are the ones we encounter, but they themselves are the ones who have been” (Die Werke sind nicht mehr die, die sie waren. Sie selbst sind es zwar, die uns da begegnen, aber sie selbst sind die gewesenen): “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks,” in Holzwege [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950], 26 [translation mine]. 9. Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, 431, trans. Mallgrave, History of the Art of Antiquity, 369 (some adjustment to translation). 10. Ibid., 347–48; trans. Mallgrave, 313. 11. Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler “Introduction. Destroyed—Disappeared— Lost—Never Were,” this volume, 14. 12. Kristopher W. Kersey, “Impermanence, Futurity, and Loss in Twelfth-Century Japan,” this volume, 96. 13. Danielle B. Joyner, “Finding Delight in Gardens Lost,” this volume, 83. 14. Johann Gottlieb Herder, Plastik: Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Träume (Riga: Hartknoch, 1778), 58 (translation mine). 15. Jaś Elsner, “The Dreamwork of Postivism. Archaeological Art History and the Imaginative Restoration of the Lost,” this volume, 62, 63. 16. Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler “Introduction. Destroyed—Disappeared— Lost—Never Were,” this volume, 17. 17. Michele Bacci, “Jerusalem’s Loca Sancta and Their Perishable Frames,” this volume, 33. 18. Lena Liepe, “Lonely Bones. Relics sans Reliquaries,” this volume, 106. 19. Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 43, no. 4 (1990): 11–34. 20. Ibid., 11. 21. Ibid., 11, 13. 22. Ibid., 11. 23. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 8. 24. Ibid., 23. 25. Georges Didi-Huberman, L’empreinte (Paris: Éditions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997), 19 (translation mine). 26. Sonja Drimmer, “The Sanguine Art. Four Fragments,” this volume, 55. 27. Meekyung MacMurdie, “The Manuscript Machine. Assemblages and Divisions in Jazarī’s Compendium,” this volume, 116. 28. Lena Liepe, “Lonely Bones. Relics sans Reliquaries,” this volume, 107.

Contributors

Michele Bacci is Professor of Medieval Art at the University of Fribourg. His recent publications include The Many Faces of Christ (2014), The Mystic Cave (2017), and Veneto-Byzantine Interactions in Icon Painting (2021). In his research, Bacci has examined art-historical contacts between East and West in the broader context of their cultural and religious relationship (with a special emphasis on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) and the history of cult objects and holy sites from a phenomenological-comparative viewpoint. Claudia Brittenham is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. Her recent publications include The Murals of Cacaxtla: The Power of Painting in Ancient Central Mexico (2015) and Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica (forthcoming 2023). Brittenham’s research focuses on the art of Mesoamerica, especially Central Mexico and the Maya area, with a special interest in issues of the materiality of art and the politics of style. Her next book project examines the interconnected Mesoamerican world. Sonja Drimmer is Associate Professor of Medieval Art at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her recent publications include The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403–1476 (2018) and “Connoisseurship, Art History, and the Paleographical Impasse in Middle English Studies,” which will appear in Speculum (2022). Drimmer’s research is largely concerned with premodern notions of authorship and authority in the Middle Ages, media theory, and the aesthetics and material culture of politics in late medieval England. She maintains a strong interest in historiography, with a particular focus upon how reproduction and restoration shape the reception of objects over time. Jaś Elsner is Professor of Late Antique Art at Oxford University and Visiting Professor of Art and Religion at the University of Chicago. His

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recent publications include the edited volume Landscape and Space: Comparative Perspectives from Chinese, Mesoamerican, Ancient Greek, and Roman Art (2022) and the monograph Eurocentric and Beyond: Art History, the Global Turn, and the Possibilities of Comparativism (2022). Elsner works on all areas of ancient Mediterranean and early Christian art and their receptions, in particular on questions of art and text, the historiography and methodologies of the study of art in the European tradition, and problems of comparative art history across Eurasia. Beate Fricke is Professor of Medieval Art at the Universität Bern. Her recent publications include Fallen Idols, Risen Saints: Sainte Foy of Conques and the Revival of Monumental Sculpture in Medieval Art (2015). Fricke’s research focuses on the history of sculpture, image theory, and the veneration of relics and images in the Middle Ages as well as objects as archives of a history of applied arts, materiality, knowledge transfer, and trade in the global “Middle Ages.” Peter Geimer is Professor of Art History at the Freie Universität Berlin. His most recent book is Inadvertent Images: A History of Photographic Apparitions (2018). Geimer’s research and writing encompass the history and theory of photography, visualizations of history (in painting, photography, and film), and the history of science. Danielle B. Joyner is Associate Professor of Art History at Lawrence University. Her recent publications include Painting the “Hortus deliciarum”: Medieval Women, Wisdom, and Time (2016) and “Birds of Defiance: Jewelled Resistance to Modern Abstractions,” in Abstraction in Medieval Art: Beyond the Ornament, edited by Elina Gertsman (2020). Joyner’s current research explores ecocritical questions such as how interactions between people and birds in life and in the arts evolved from the late antique to the early medieval period, how images of animals in Anglo-Saxon arts evoke a variety of functions for animals in that society, and how representations of terra contribute to sacred ecologies across the Middle Ages. Kristopher W. Kersey is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His recent publications include “The

Contributors

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Afterlife of the Western Canon: Archive and Eschatology in Contemporary Japan,” Art Bulletin 102 (December 2020). Kersey’s research focuses on the intersecting histories of Japanese art, design, and aesthetics. Aden Kumler is Professor of Ältere Kunstgeschichte at the Universität Basel. Her recent publications include “The Way We Live Now,” in Jill Magid: Tender: Balance, edited by Karsten Lund (2022); “Abstraction’s Gothic Grounds,” in Abstraction in Medieval Art: Beyond the Ornament, edited by Elina Gertsman (2021); “Periculum and Peritia: Aesthetics and Affects in the Medieval ‘Ars Market,’” Codex Aquilarensis 35 (2019); and “Counterfeiting the Eucharist in Late Medieval Life and Art,” in Quid est sacramentum? Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1700, edited by Walter Melion, Elizabeth Pastan, and Lee Wandel (2019). Her research interests span European medieval visual and material culture, with particular emphasis on medieval practices and theories of singularity, multiplicity, and value, the role of objects in medieval liturgy, and manuscript studies. Lena Liepe is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies in the Department of Music and Art, Linnaeus University, Vaxjoe, Sweden. Her recent publications include “Holy Heads: Pope Lucius’ Skull in Roskilde and the Role of Relics in Medieval Spirituality,” in Materiality and Religious Practice in Medieval Denmark, edited by Sarah Croix and Mads Heilskov (2021), and “The Crown of Thorns and the Royal Office in Thirteenthand Fourteenth-Century Scandinavia,” in the first volume of Tracing the Jerusalem Code, edited by Kristin B. Aavitsland and Line M. Bonde (2021). A specialist in medieval art and architecture of the Nordic region, Liepe’s research interests encompass illuminated manuscripts, relics, the historiography of medieval art history, theory and method in the study of medieval art, museum and exhibition history, and teaching medieval art history to multicultural audiences. Meekyung MacMurdie is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Utah. Forthcoming publications include an essay, “Proven Recipes: Geometry and the Art of Arabic Medicine,” in The Diagram as Paradigm: Cross-Cultural Approaches, edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger, David

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Contributors

J. Roxburgh, and Linda Safran (2022). Her research focuses on medieval Islamic manuscripts, with a special interest in the intersection of aesthetics, artistic process, and information technology. Michelle McCoy is Assistant Professor of the Art of China in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh, and Visiting Scholar with the Global Horizons in Premodern Art research project at the University of Bern. Her recent publications include the co-edited volume Water Moon Reflections: Essays in Honor of Patricia Berger (2021). Her research is centered on the relationship between art and divination, Buddhist and Daoist image theories, and transcultural exchange.